Committee for Interaction with Alien Intelligences (CIAI) is a scientific group reponsible for discovering and contacting unknown alien civilizations.
By 2629 they had designed a wideband non-verbal greeting standard which is beamed by spaceships to unknown aliens.
They regularly launch unmanned probes containing translation and interpretation equipment to uncharted jump-spheres. This way they discovered the Double Helix in 2654.
It is perhaps a part of the World Science Federation.