Opening and Welcoming Words

GÉANT Community and Vietsch Awards

KEYNOTE: Safe and Secure Programming on the Edge

This talk presents the goals and current results of the project SAPORE, which aims to advance the state of scientific knowledge in the area of programming foundations for distributed applications – an area with long standing challenges. These challenges are amplified by the global distribution, the quest for decentralisation and the interactive, learning nature of applications under consideration.

SAPORE makes decentralisation a first-class programming principle. Computations on edge devices have their local view on data and execution (“they think locally”) but these views are composable by-design with guaranteed safety and security properties (“reliably act globally”) ensuring safe and secure programming on the edge.

Introducing Cloud Services for Teaching at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences

Moving teaching environments to a Cloud Service Provider is a challenging endeavour for a university. We will provide an overview of our SKILL cloud migration project at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences focussing on organisational aspects such as migration phases, risks, issues and our support model for teachers and students. Additionally, we will highlight future developments and our vision on our target architecture for a multi cloud environment at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences mixing services from self-hosted virtualisation platforms and commercial cloud providers.

Making Data Informed Decisions on the Use of Cloud Services

Institutions want to make data-informed decisions about the cloud. Whether that is benchmarking usage of services as it compares to peers, understanding usage patterns, or understanding compliance with various requirements, much of this data already exists in the research and education community. So too does a strong sense of collaboration across institutions. This talk will showcase Internet2 community efforts to make data about the use of cloud services available to community participants and provide details on various trends that are already being observed.

Greece in the Cloud

GRNET strategically wish to proceed and provide their continuity with the provision of hybrid cloud services, namely services which will be provided both by GRNET infrastructures as well as by the infrastructure of other commercial providers. GRNET would like to be able to assist the community both when they choose the GRNET-own cloud, as well as when they choose to use resources from commercial providers. In this session GRNET and GÉANT will present on the joint journey towards to the procurement and use of public as well as private Cloud Services.

Sciebo RDS - reducing friction of FAIR data handling for researchers

Research Data Services (RDS) is a self-hosted cross-platform interoperability layer which allows research data to be curated, prepared, and published directly from an EFSS solution. It reduces friction of FAIR data handling by seamlessly integrating into the academic workflow. Researchers can log on to their respective EFSS solutions, such as Sciebo (ownCloud) or Sunet Drive (Nextcloud) and will find Sciebo RDS directly in the EFSS main menu. It provides modular interoperability to external data repositories like the Open Science Framework (OSF), InvenioRDM (e.g., Zenodo), Harvard Dataverse, or Doris from the Swedish National Dataservice (SND), each including domain-specific customizations.

The Albanian Cultural Cloud, realities and dreams!

Preserving cultural data and making it easier to access is of crucial importance to humanity. Unfortunately, this is ongoing work as new methods of digitisation emerge, platforms age, and new ways of sharing are found. Albania, like many other countries, wish to ensure their cultural heritage is available to all and have started work on a new digital platform. The project is led by the Ministry of Culture along with its two subordinate institutions: The National Institute for the Cultural Heritage and the National Institute for the Registration of Cultural Heritage, in association with the National Agency of Information Society (AKSHI)

The presentation will cover what digital systems are currently in use, what has been learned from previous work and platforms, and their vision for the future!

NDS3 - National Data Storage the data-lake-like integrated data services for science and education

This presentation covers concepts, goals and technical architecture and components adopted in the National Data Storage project (NDS), conducted by PSNC together with 4 academic computing centres and 4 MAN centres in Poland, including Cracow, Gdańsk, Warsaw, Wrocław, Białystok, Częstochowa, Łódź and Kielce.

The main goal of the project is to provide a very well integrated and easy to use set of data storage, processing, sharing, access and presentation services providing functionality and features needed to conduct high-profile data-based research and education.

Global Network Advancement Today and Tomorrow

The Global Network Advancement Group (GNA-G) gathers network professionals from the Research & Education organisations to support and enhance continent-to-continent interconnectivity and global science collaboration. Organised in working groups, GNA-G work includes topics of multinational and multidomain interest and importance. Some of them include, but are not limited to Data Intensive Science, Routing, AutoGOLE/SENSE, GREN map and Network Automation. Network engineers from operational teams and research groups from several continents are contributing in these groups. This presentation provides an opportunity to hear more about GNA-G and its working groups, learn of those of interest, and how to join and contribute.

Managed Network Services for Large Data Transfers - SENSE Orchestration

Domain science workflow processes are forced to view the network as an opaque infrastructure into which they inject data and hope that it emerges at the destination with an acceptable Quality of Experience. This presentation will describe the integration work between the SENSE orchestration and Rucio data management systems. This solution integrates advanced wide area network traffic engineering, end site infrastructure awareness/control, and domain science workflow intelligence to improve the research results and planning abilities.

Network Development in the GÉANT Project

The GÉANT Project supports Europe’s research and education communities taking the network and its services one step beyond. To achieve this goal, the Network Development team in GN5-1 (WP6) is working on constantly improving production services -perfSONAR, PMP, NMaaS, WiFiMon, Argus, TimeMap, Network eAcademy-, doing research and development work -QKD, OTFN, RARE, GP4L-, creating an Incubator, working on TechLab and participating in the Global Network Advancement Group (GNA-G). This talk will give an insight of what each one of these acronyms mean, and the latest updates about the work in the areas of network technologies, services, monitoring and eAcademy.

Making Eduroam Safer - New Standards and Practices

This presentation will discuss past, present, and future issues with managing Eduroam networks. it will also discuss new standards being implemented by the IETF, and show how those standards make it easier to run Eduroam networks. It will now be possible to do "end to end" debugging of proxy chains. FreeRADIUS has also been updated to support these new standards, and to improve its RadSec functionality.

geteduroam, development for easy and secure onboarding of eduroam and other roaming networks

The geteduroam project created a series of Apps along with server-side options to provide for a simple and secure eduroam Wi-Fi configuration. The presentation will highlight the architecture and value of all geteduroam tools, but also the way it was organized and the challenges - highlights and lowlights - in its sustained development in past and future: both organizational and technical. Both ambitions and roadmap will be shared.

eduroam - scaling K12 deployments in the US

Internet2 and a growing community of state and regional R&E networks have been steadily increasing eduroam adoption in primary and secondary schools in the US at a statewide scale under the eduroam Support Organization program. Come and hear about how this growth has been accomplished at a technical and programatic level, some of the unique challenges posed by primary and secondary school populations, lessons learned by Internet2 and our Support Organization partners, and what comes next!

Services cost are high? Make providers fight for your money!

This presentation is about an application running in the public cloud that had high costs, that is, above its planned budget. We had exhausted our technical solutions to refactor it and lower costs. As it didn't lock-in with any cloud technology and therefore could run on any provider, we invited all of them to a “battle for the workload”. Thus, each one of them had the task of proposing a migration and operation model for the application to stay with it for a predetermined period. All joined in and fought with their best resources to conquer this workload. Our presentation describes this success story and its results, showing that the organization does not always need to make an effort when it comes to reducing costs.

Standing on the shoulders of Argus

‘…sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always.’
The giant Argus in Greek mythology is just like Argus developed by Sikt. Argus is an alarm aggregator designed for managing alarms from different monitoring systems in one single dashboard. In this lightning talk we will show how Argus allows you to replace the clutter of many screens with one Argus screen to rule them all. Argus effortlessly facilitates easy alarm management and customizable alarm notifications.

Argus is an open-source software developed by Sikt, co-funded by GÉANT and in use with other NRENs. We will showcase why you need Argus and share our experiences after 3 years of depending on Argus to ensure our network and services are up and running well.

GDPR as a Service

GDPR has been part of our everyday lives for about five years now. Most related issues are currently solved either on a technical or administrative process level. Nevertheless, it is still a pain point for research infrastructures when they add a new service to their portfolio. GDPR and other policies are important topics for Life Science research infrastructures. Our goal here is to follow the necessary regulations but also do our best to lower barriers for services that want to be a part of the infrastructure. That leads us to an idea where we can use Life Science AAI not only to externalize authentication and authorization for services but also to provide a solution centralized at the infrastructure level for GDPR and other policy compliance. This talk describes how Life Science AAI can handle GDPR and other policies on behalf of other services. That significantly lowers barriers to integrating new services into the research infrastructure environment and the EOSC services space through EOSC AAI.

Vendor risk management – a challenging debate with tech companies on compliance

Since GDPR, followed by the Schrems Rulings, which led to Safe Harbour and the Privacy Shield being invalidated, institutions have become more and more aware that they are responsible for how vendors deal with their data and that they need the right agreements with their vendors to reduce privacy and security risks. If they do not have this in place it will lead to non-compliance, risk of fines, reputational damage and liability claims and ultimately raises the question if you are still allowed to work with the products. How do you negotiate with vendors? How do you get them to work with you on risk assessments as DPIA’s and DTIA’s? And how do you get them to adjust their software – not just for you, but for whole Europe? Sandy will address in this 5-minute lightning talks the ins and outs, what it takes for debating on the cutting edge with (big) tech parties, against tide deadlines and with the Data Protection Authority as a watch dog on your neck, and still get it done.

A new ingredient to federated cookies

Browsers gotta preserve privacy, they be crackin' down on cookies, we get it, now let us use our cookie across several domains - deal? A tale of FedCM.

The Algorithmic Design Sketchbook

When you picture an architect at work, how do you see him? Holding a pencil over a drawing board, maybe? How about the architects that designed the Morpheus Hotel in Macau, the Gherkin in London, or the Louvre in Abu Dhabi? Still imagining pencils? Architecture, like many other art forms, frequently mirrors the technological advancements of its time, and these are just some examples of the multitude of projects that have been reflecting the increasing integration of computer science in the architectural domain. Architects, today, have at their disposal tools that allow them to design and manage large-scale and non-conventional design solutions that would have been nearly impossible to conceive using traditional design methods. However, designing with algorithms requires programming, a concept with which practitioners often struggle. For architecture to benefit from computation at large, we still need to close the existing comprehension gap between algorithmic design programs and their behavior, making this representation method more akin to the traditional architectural practice. The *Algorithmic Design Sketchbook* proposal addresses this problem by coupling algorithmic design with complementary representation methods that are adequate for designing complex architectural projects and by supporting their synchronization with a design tool that architects feel comfortable using.

APK Falcon: empowering user’s privacy

APK Falcon is a tool to assist users in assessing the impact of mobile apps on privacy, improving their knowledge and empowering their decision-making in accordance with the values of the EU Next Generation Internet. APK Falcon will help users understand the permission system, leading to a better permission management, such as revoking highly intrusive permissions or being more careful and aware when being asked to grant a permission. This tool will be made in a user-centric way, so the impact on privacy can be understood by everyone.

Users will be able to access a web service where they can search for the name of an application and obtain a privacy score, as well as information to understand this score. APK Falcon can assist users in making more informed decisions about granting permissions and managing their privacy. By shedding light on the permission system, APK Falcon can empower users to take control of their privacy in a simple, open and transparent fashion.

Why your internet is bad !

During the covid crisis, I followed my course using Teams. In many cases the video/audio quality was really bad, and yet none of the speedtests I ran showed any abnormality. What happened ? At that time, all speedtest websides only measure throughput. They measure latency as well, but as idle latency (without load on it). However, when you attend a class/meeting there are always other apps/people using your network.

Therefore we need a way to measure working latency. The IETF has started to develop a new measurement technique called RPM to measure latency under working conditions. So our goal is to implement it in a browser such that every user can know why his connection is bad. Moreover, all current tests work with TCP connections. With TCP, it is possible to send a large amout of data, but it's very hard to accurately measure latency or packet losses. Meanwhile, many cloud providers are moving towards HTTP/3 with the QUIC protocol. Therefore, we are developing our measurement tool with QUIC.

Breaking Down AI to get Explanations

Research shows that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be an effective tool for automated cyber threat hunting; however, the lack of explainability still prevents its mass deployment into commercial-grade tools. Due to the AI complexity, it is hard to get reasons behind its output, which are crucial for cybersecurity incident handling and response. We thus bring new design principles of AI by dividing complex monolithic models into small components with defined functionality. By observing the outputs and interaction of these components, we can then get an insight into their internal behavior and provide explanations and reasoning behind their output. The lack of explainability originates from AI's enormous complexity, which people cannot comprehend. We thus divide the complex AI into a component-based system, each component designed separately, like in the actual brain. In our brain, there are parts responsible for vision and other parts ensuring hearing. We know which part is responsible for what, which dramatically increases our understanding of such a complex system.

Component-based models are solutions for AI model deployment in cybersecurity and other high-stakes areas where explanations are necessary. The division into components provides better control over the predictions and explains them. The improved explainability also reduces the chance of design errors, can improve model quality control, and increases the overall trust of its users. Moreover, we can use reasoning to filter out obvious mistakes and increase AI reliability.

Automating incident communication with AI

Incident communication is the process of alerting users that a service is experiencing some kind of unavailability or degraded performance. It is expected that most companies provide 24/7 availability. Poor and slow communication can lead to frustration, a longer time to resolve issues, and unhappy customers.
Incident communication is more complex than just sending an email. There are different audiences to consider and different response expectations. AI can help us solve this problem.
Technologies like ChatGPT can go a long way building an intelligible communication. Beyond clarifying language and cultural differences, its mission to create human-like responses can also help refine technical communications with non-technical stakeholders. IA can also automate messages to multiple channels like web status pages, email, SMS, instant communicators, and social media. This can be essential to bringing value and quick responses. More than that, automation can also help solve the incident by bringing the team together in an IM group chat. Using the correct input, ChatGPT can provide content in seconds, keeping the response team focused on the main problem while the AI is making the updates on behalf of everyone involved.

Higher Education Management Information System (HEMIS)

The Ethiopian Education and Research Network (EthERNet) was initiated in 2001 as a part of a national capacity-building program that included projects to provide connectivity and support the public higher education institutes in the way their data, research outputs are organized, preserved, discovered and disseminated to the audiences. HEMIS is one of the successful projects that is hosted at EthERNet.

HEMIS is a technology-aided system that enables data collection, reporting, and analysis. It analyses data and produces information that helps to guide evidence-based decision making in the education and training sectors. HEMIS is not only a system for collecting, analyzing, and managing data, it monitors performance (BSC and Ranking). It is designed to provide future projections by making trend analyses based on the current data.

Quantum Key Distribution in the GÉANT network, is it possible?

As widespread use of the internet continues to grow, the prevalence of security threats it faces follows suit. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) aims to make the internet a more secure system by providing the possibility to generate perfectly secure keys that can be applied to secure communication soundly. This lightning talk highlights the state of the art in standardisation of QKD equipment, which goes hand in hand with a set of experiments on the performance of QKD hardware that is commercially available. Two possible services GÉANT could offer are presented, and their feasibility is evaluated. It is found that the equipment is able to perform adequately in a test environment, however required hardware, software, and standardisation for management and operation of a QKD Network are lacking maturity for a production environment as of right now.

Promoting the work of African NRENs through the lenses of the United Nations

The SDGs have become a benchmark to strive towards a better world. Therefore, showcasing that NRENs carry out SDG-tailored activities is key to persuading policy and decision makers of their inherent value to support them in terms of funding and resourcing.

This lightning talk aims to unpack some of the key results of the work done by the AfricaConnect3 communications team on gathering concrete evidence of the direct and indirect contributions of African NRENs to the UN SDGs.

Vietsch Foundation collaboration on Innovation for R&E networking

Whilst there are established routes such as the European Horizon Programme for funding large multi-year projects such as GÉANT, EOSC, etc., sources of funding for small short-term projects can be difficult to find. The ability to fund small short-term projects is vital in an environment such as the Internet in order that new ideas, nascent technology & proof of concept can be explored quickly. The Vietsch Foundation has been operating a small short-term project funding scheme for several years, working with collaborative partners including GÉANT, EUNIS, NLnet and co-sponsors such as universities. The GÉANT Innovation Programme and the Vietsch Foundation grants scheme are complementary since the Vietsch Foundation objectives and eligibility criteria both overlap and differ. The presenter will mention projects including eduDNS, eduVPN that have been funded in this way.

Grants to support global higher education & scholarship

In February 2023, the inaugural cohort of grant recipients of ORCID’s Global Participation Fund was recognized. This fund is designed to promote accuracy and integrity and further collaboration in scientific research and scholarship, particularly in low- and lower-middle-income economies as categorized by the World Bank. NRENs have always played an important role in enabling research and education; several have been awarded ORCID grants. During this lightning talk, you’ll learn about the program and how NRENS and other regional organizations might participate in the upcoming call for proposals.

KEYNOTE: Forget love. Science is all around us!

Are you a scientist and you don’t communicate your work to general public? Sorry, you are not scientist of the 3rd millennium. Communicating science is essential for making a difference in the society. How to do it? How to choose what are you talking about? I’ll show you examples of good practise and sum up typical mistakes (made by scientists or research organisations) I have experienced in over a decade of science communication for the most significant TV group in The Czech Republic. I’ll describe how we (as Science Department of Czech TV) communicate and cooperate with scientists and research organisations.

KEYNOTE: The Manifesto for Teaching Online: critical and creative pedagogy for post-pandemic times

“The Manifesto for Teaching Online” is a series of research-based position statements co-authored by a team at the University of Edinburgh. Taking the form of twenty-one short provocations, the Manifesto is intended to articulate a pedagogy, politics and philosophy of teaching online, and stimulate discussion about the future of education. Highlighting specific statements, this talk will examine key challenges in the post pandemic era, with a particular focus on the growth of a powerful ‘ed tech’ industry and the proliferation of platforms driven by data and artificial intelligence. In conclusion, the need for critical and creative pedagogical approaches will be emphasised.

Addressing digital poverty (and other use cases) with 5G

For the past 2 years Jisc has been working with cellular technology providers to address important digital poverty issues across the UK, by providing eduroam via 4/5G to support learners without access to sufficient connectivity away from the University campus. This has led to the development of additional use cases such as disaster recovery, emergency provision, service resilience, and remote learning, all involving the provision of cellular connectivity rather than traditional fibre based services, with many of Jisc’s customers now benefitting from the services provided. As things stand the proof of concept has over 50 participants and will move to full service launch in June 2023. This lightning talk summarises the journey from initial concept, through technical design, proof of concept, and ultimately service launch, focusing on the wide variety of uses cases developed and the benefits delivered.

WiFiMon Probes for Digital Generations

WiFiMon Hardware Probes (WHP's) are vital for WiFiMon operation as they facilitate baseline comparisons with crowdsourced measurements collected from end users roaming the network. Feedback gathered by organisations, i.e. NREN's and Universities, utilising WHP's indicated significant shortcomings in their functionality. Specifically, administrators were required to follow error-prone, time-consuming and/or costly approaches to control and configure these probes. Therefore, the WiFiMon team has developed novel, user-friendly features to enable remote control and (re)configuration of WHP's distributed across the monitored networks from a centralised point. This lightning talk will present our newly introduced feature.

Log Management and Visualization of AMRES statistics using Open-source Tools

Log messages represent automatically documented events in the form of chronological records that contain various IT system and network information. Managing log messages is important for every organization, including the Academic Network of the Republic of Serbia - AMRES, and enables efficient and high-quality analysis of work and utilization of both, the service and the network. Elastic Stack software is a comprehensive open-source tool that enables the collection and search of a large number of log messages of different types, the creation of reports, and graphical representation of the desired results. This work explains the process of collecting and analyzing log messages of the AMRES eduroam service and gives examples of usage of the Grafana open-source tool in visualizing statistics and behavior of AMRES end users.

IPv6 as the pillar in the digital transformation in Colombia

Colombia has been undergoing a process of digital transformation which has generated the advancement and growth of new technologies that leverage education and research in HEIs within the country. One of the technologies that is growing day by day worldwide is the implementation of the IPv6 protocol, which, in Colombia, has positioned us as the fifth country with the highest traffic generated by IPv6 in Latin America. With the implementation of the IPv6 protocol, it has been possible to generate a high impact within the technological infrastructures of the entities, such as: 1. Generate good practices in the flow of information in both IPv4 and IPv6, 2. Easily publish new services without NAT techniques, 3. Independence in the publication of new services by having the wide availability of addressing within its own IPv6 network prefix, 4. Generating new security policies within entities aligned to current cybersecurity standards.

Move our Content to IPv6, please!

The force for change in favor of IPv6 has increased significantly since the exhaustion of IPv4 in the majority of the Regional Internet Registries in 2015. The need for IPv6 in academic networks is evident as the new IP address enables innovation and research through its support for new applications. While the global availability of IPv6 connectivity hovers around 40%, there is need to investigate the contribution of Universities and Academic Resource providers in enabling basic services on IPv6.

JetStream 2.0: A Multi-FPGA PCIe Infrastructure Supporting FPGA-to-FPGA Links

In recent years, there has been a major development in the field of cluster computing. These solutions often require many dedicated resources to communicate with each other and bind their abilities in a collaborative manner. There is also a requirement to allow multiple users to use a single cluster without affecting each others' computations. Nowadays, the FPGAs provide an excellent scalability and programmability for this purpose with the advantage of parallelism and achieved throughput. This talk introduces the design of a generalized streaming library for the PCI Express interface called JetStream 2.0. It is an enhancement of the previous generation able to run at the data rates of PCI Express Gen3 x16, that means reaching the transfer speeds of up to 100 Gbps. The architecture also supports sending data between two FPGA cards using a zero-copy mechanism which bypasses the classical buffering of data in RAM and sends them directly to the addressed device. This solution is proposed as vendor independent, thus FPGA cards both from Intel and AMD/Xilinx can be used and also mixed on the host.

It's people - or why we need an interdisciplinary approach to cybersecurity

In the recent years, we came to realise that cybersecurity not only requires technical measures but also cooperation on the part of the users, in order to make organisations more resilient against cyber-attacks. But changing user-behaviour requires more than just a one-time training and demands a different skillset than most experts on cybersecurity have. That's why the field is undergoing a transformation inviting professionals from other disciplines to support security. In my Master’s thesis I studied the collaboration of security awareness specialists with internal communications. The results from the interviews provide insight into how practiced interdisciplinarity can support security professionals in their daily work and thus make organisations more secure.

Powering the Future: The Value of Renewable Energy Communities in a Decarbonized World

The transition to renewable energy is critical to mitigate the effects of climate change and achieving a sustainable future. One promising approach to advance this transition is through the development of Renewable Energy Communities (RECs). These communities are formed by groups of people or organizations that come together to produce, consume and share renewable energy locally and they are designed to promote local ownership, collaboration, and innovation in the deployment of renewable energy technologies. To fully realize the potential of Renewable Energy Communities, assessing their value and impact is essential. This assessment will provide insights into the benefits and challenges associated with RECs and help identify best practices for their development and implementation. It will also evaluate the economic benefits of these communities, including the potential for job creation, increased economic activity, and cost savings for participants.

Data Fusion: The Key to Reliable Threat Detection

Secure computer networks rely on monitoring, threat detection, and security operators, who respond to automatically created alerts. Performance of current anomaly and threat detection methods is dependent on the network telemetry data they are developed on. However, network telemetry does not contain truthful information in some cases. An error can occur during transmission, or an attacker can spoof information, to confuse threat detectors. As a result, many attacks may remain undetected and false alerts might overwhelm security personnel. We are currently exploring an approach that utilizes a combination of several data sources to overcome their imperfections.

Many state-of-the-art detectors are based on Machine Learning (ML) technology, which can be easily confused. Attackers can alter traffic shape by sending additional data, which is unnecessary for communication. Malicious traffic can be completely hidden by this technique and missed by the ML — an outgoing attack might not be detected at all. Data incompleteness is another problem. For example, no blocklist can ever contain every malicious IP address. Moreover, these IP addresses can change over time. Therefore the output of some detectors might not reflect reality. Current techniques, when used separately, are suffering from many pitfalls.

Open API garnering Trust & Collaboration among NRENs

This talk aims to highlight the problem of a widening gap between system specifications and actual behaviour in production in the tech industry, which can cause confusion for developers and users. The use of Open API is introduced as a solution to this issue. Open API provides a framework for collaboration that narrows the gap between documentation and code, allowing API consumers to trust that published APIs will not be modified. Additionally, there are automation tools available to generate artifacts and automate documentation. The benefits of Open API in collaboration with beta testers and partner NRENs are discussed, emphasizing the importance of testing and avoiding potential mistakes. A mock spec is suggested to validate the design and test endpoints, saving time and making data migration more manageable. Postman and Glitch are tools that can assist in this process by creating redirect scripts and validating input from users.

Deploying a Pilot Spectrum Connection Service over GARR/GEANT: Lessons Learned

Several National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are currently implementing new generations of optical networks based on partially disaggregated designs. These systems have the capability to transparently transport any optical signal, which opens up the possibility of deploying Spectrum Connection Services (SCS) that can provide ultra high-capacity connections. GARR and GEANT have recently built a pilot SCS between the High Energy Physics Data Centre at CERN in Switzerland and the Italian Tier 1 at CNAF in Bologna. The service has been tested over a distance of 1000km and supports two wavelengths of 400G capacity, this is the first time such a multi-domain spectrum service has been provided to a big-science user.

In this presentation, we will discuss the results of this pilot project and highlight its underlying benefits. We will also share our architectural considerations, tips, and tricks for deploying this type of service. Specifically, we will discuss the potential for cost saving when deploying an SCS. Additionally, we will explore the lower latency that can be achieved through router and transponder bypass.

Sikt: sensing activities on optical fiber communication cable

The Submerse project has received substantial funding to utilize the GEANT community's submarine cables for seismology monitoring. The project aims to provide high-quality seismological data by leveraging existing submarine and terrestrial fibre-optic cables, which can act as sensors using a range of technologies, such as polarization monitoring and Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS). The objective is to deploy DAS technology on the same fibre-optic cables as Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) traffic with the Internet traffic. As part of the SUMBERSE project, SIKT is conducting lab testing to evaluate the co-existence of DAS technology with DWDM equipment.

The joys of open source (hyper)convergence

This is the story of a hyperconverged cluster based on Proxmox and Ceph. Our journey begins from the requirement of a new mail server, continues with a first 8 node cluster, ends with the current 16 nodes setup and a look in to the future. It will include: some initial pain, incomprehensible network bugs and a successfully running stable cluster.

Inter-federation Incidents and the eduGAIN Security Team

eduGAIN is a globally active organization focusing on the interconnection of identity federations commonly rooted in national research and education networks. Many of those networks operate an Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) in order to facilitate the utilization of services provided by the separate participating institutions to users of other institutions within the federations. The eduGAIN Security Team acts as a central contact and support point for security incidents eduGAIN. In the lightning talk, a member of the team will describe some of the incidents handled by the team and explain its jurisdiction and essential stages of the investigations. Attempting to foster the response capabilities, the team is also looking into exercises simulating selected aspects of incident response. The exercises are motivated by actual incidents to mediate real experiences for the attendee. The talk will sketch the concepts of the exercise and present plans for the near future.

The Instruments for Science

Scientific research in 21st century is radically different from what it used to be in the past. The great scientific breakthroughs of our age have happened thanks to the possibility of easily sharing ideas, information and knowledge, irrespective of geographic distances. This has contributed to make the network an integral and inseparable part of any large scientific endeavour. And not just for those collaborations that have a need for large-scale distributed computing. Access to online libraries and data repository, e-learning platforms, reliable videoconference systems, are all things that we, as NREN community, allow them to access and use seamlessly and securely. Thanks to our collective work, their ideas can become data, and data becomes knowledge. This LT will use evocative pictures and extracts from music pieces to elaborate on this concept.

We are connecting people to – what?

NRENs were established and designed to connect people, to connect them among themselves and to connect them to the knowledge sources. Our purpose has always been to help aggregate knowledge. We always wanted to enhance the existing connections among research communities and to create new ones. We have been connecting educators, those who help create and spread knowledge. They are capable of sharing existing knowledge with younger generations and bringing gifted young people into knowledge-based communities.
NRENs were designed for an online world that was a world of knowledge. Today's Internet is something completely different. It requires special skills to find and verify authentic content, and avoid the many dangers and deceptions. It requires special skills to gain insight into the wider world as shown to us by algorithms.
At NRENs we still mainly limit ourselves to the functions which were established in the early days of the Internet. But as the Internet itself has changed, perhaps our role should evolve to also spread the knowledge that we have about the vast online world that is lurking outside our academic online bubbles?

Cyber Threats of Shadow IT in Higher Education and Research

R&E’s diversity and culture of academic freedom, openness, and innovation gives rise to the phenomenon of shadow IT: “hardware, software, or services built, introduced, and/or used for the job without explicit approval or even knowledge of the organization”. At SURF, we conducted research on occurrences and cyber threats of shadow IT. In this session, we explore the role of shadow IT in the threat landscape of our institutions and provide guidance for prevention, but also recommend ways in which we can help institutions to responsibly allow and account for shadow IT.

Crisis exercises in the Swedish NREN: Success story

This is the Swedish NREN’s journey of creating an organisation for crisis exercises. 3 years ago the Swedish NREN did not have any sort of in-house facilitated crisis exercises. Now, we have conducted several exercises on site for a large part of our constituency. Even with access to very limited resources the exercises have really made an impact for testing the Swedish NREN constituencies’ crisis organisation and maturity. Together with the participants we have revealed and tested the relevance of their continuity plans. We will share our experiences from this journey and our future plans. From zero to hero!

Cut through the noise to deliver effective security awareness campaign

Presentation will focus on developing effective content strategies and tactics that can be implemented in cybersecurity awareness raising campaigns. Two most powerful sources of influence - personal motivation and personal ability, will be addressed and the practical examples of video production, shaping the right messages in non-technical language, choosing the human-interest topics and adapting them to different communication channels will be presented.

Error handling in a distributed federated ecosystem

In a distributed (full-mesh) federation, each federation member deploy and maintains its own technical components, and the role of the federation operator is mostly limited to metadata aggregation and publication. For final users, this is transparent, as long as everything works correctly. But when a problem happens, it is quite difficult to understand where, and who to contact to fix it. Most of the time, those users reach the first contact address they can find, often just the most visible, and ask for help, providing only context relevant to them, despite the fact they are actually talking to external helpdesk. This usually results in excessive processing time, useless support costs, and poor user experience. What can we do to instead redirects users toward the proper helpdesk, in the most automatic and the most efficient way ?

Experiences with federated access and reaching reasonable LoA in the Puhuri project

MyAccessID and Puhuri AAIs enable users to access European HPC resources, reducing the risks of unauthorised access. For this, users’ identities must have a sufficient level of assurance (LoA) regarding the identification of users. In 2022, Puhuri and GÉANT informed the identity federations of the EuroHPC LUMI consortia that LoA will become mandatory for users to continue access to LUMI resources in 2023. We will outline the journey from mid 2022 when no LoA was required, to the state of May 2023. We address the reactions of the IdPs, experiences of users and the concerns of the resource provider CSC.

Secure Zones for Sunet Drive

Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) solutions require the flexibility to choose between easy collaboration and increased protection of certain data. Secure Zones for Sunet Drive is an implementation of protected data zones in the EFSS system, guarded by step-up authentication. Access to protected data is granted to users that have been authenticated and help those users when handling the data so that they do not give further access to someone they should not. The EFSS is made aware whether a user has logged on using MFA and if certain data storage areas of the EFSS should be accessible or not.

Simulations in Education and Research: A Public Values Perspective

How do eXtended Reality (or XR) technologies impact public values in education and research? The answer may be discovered in concrete cases; that of virtual XR-based chemical laboratories and simulated presentations. This presentation engages the audience in an open-ended discussion regarding how XR technology use can be understood as shaping public values. The cases and values presented spark dialogue for educators, IT professionals and educational institutions to consider difficult discussions on how XR impacts the future of public values. Spectators will take home applicable tools and knowledge on how to consider the impact of technology in education and research.

Bridging the gap - from a society without internet to techno-natives

Presentation will show the transformation that CARNET's service portfolio has gone through in its 30 years of existence and the changes in generations of CARNET users and their needs. In this period, CARNET developed services on new emerging technologies to support our users, offering them innovative solutions. Early adopters accepted them, and the majority followed. Our services went through several innovation adoption lifecycles. Through this process, we provided support to our users in all of the phases through which our services went through. As a result, our continuing effort has changed the way our users work and today they couldn’t work as efficiently without the solutions we have developed.

Slovene educational network

We will share practices on what systems and tools we use to support the organization and implementation of trainings, how we use and develop plugins, what methodologies we use to develop MOOCs, and what we have learned over the years when we have trained thousands of teachers.

From Sitting to Energising. Where do you want to Be?

The Network eAcademy team in GÉANT has developed an Orchestration, Automation and Virtualisation (OAV) Maturity Model as a tool for the NRENs to self-asses their level in four dimensions: Architecture & Technology, Processes & Services, Vision & Strategy, and People & Organisation. Each one of the dimensions has six possible stages marked from the lowest to the most advanced stage as sit, crawl, walk, run, fly, and energise. This talk will present the OAV Maturity Model - a resource for the GÉANT and NREN community to accompany them in their journey from sitting to energising.

State of Automation in the Geant Network

GÉANT is building an automation framework with the intention of sharing practices, ideas, code and tools with the community and we want to give practical information about how we are designing, building, distributing and maintaining it. Both SURF and ESNet have successfully navigated this road with WFO and GÉANT is committed to contributing to this effort and lowering entry barriers. We will give a window into our current progress, and experiences both painful and successful,which we expect will be valuable for anyone involved in managing IP networks in the community.

Operations efficiency across IP and optical layers

Optical and IP networks Integration, with the introduction of 400ZR/400ZR+ pluggables, leads to the need for an operational model to enable efficient, seamless multilayer, cross-domain operations, bridging the gap, as much as possible, between operational expertise, often “silo-ed” into the IP layer and the optical layer.
This session will explore the main multilayer coordination use cases
• Topology discovery, Correlation across layers for cross-domains maintenance operations optimization
• Evolution of routing technology towards 800GE to scale traffic capacity in a more sustainable manner in existing resource footprint.
• Evolution of Coherent DSPs to enable >800Gbps transmission to scale network capacity in existing ROADM infrastructures and WDM channel plans.

The impact of the European Health Data Space and Data Governance Act on Biomedical Research

The important of secondary use of health data for clinical research, innovation, policy making and patient safety has been stressed by the European Commission in the European Strategy for Data. At the same time, processing health and genetic data, require appropriate legal bases, ethical protection and transparency. In this panel we aim to analyse the interplay between Data Governance Act and European Health Data Space with the principles of the GDPR, stressing out potential inconsistencies. Particular importance will be dedicated to the possibility to use synthetic data as an ethical and legally compliant solution.

Lessons learned by implementing telerehabilitation

Telerehabilitation can play an important role in the objective therapy of post-stroke or post-surgery patients. In this work, we present the pipeline of using the Virtual Glove, a touchless multisensory system for remote rehabilitation of the hand. We describe the interactions among the actors involved in telerehabilitation, therapists and patients, and an interactive application that provides the therapist with joint-wise quantitative data on the patient’s mobility. Finally, we propose a quantitative data handling format, a DICOM-based system, that allows data analysis, visualization, and exchange between therapists in order to provide a tool for objective analysis, comparison, and reproducibility.

Active and healthy ageing at a Safe-home

The ageing of societies has been one of the most discussed challenges in the recent years. Digital technologies are foreseen as the opportunity for the delivery of appropriate support and care services to the growing population of vulnerable older adults. The presentation will discuss the advantages of introducing ICT-based solutions for the support of the needs of older adults on the example of PSNC’s projects in the area of active and assisted living, including the most recent one: Safe-Home.

The future of encryption - what is next if governments get their way?

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) has become the gold standard for the security of data in transit and has increasingly been applied to consumer-facing products such as private messaging. Despite this, a number of governments around the world have proposed legislation that would restrict the use of E2EE in the hopes of solving societal ills experienced on the Internet. How will vendors secure their data in a world where strong encryption has been regulated against? This session challenges our assumptions about the future of encryption by exploring homomorphic encryption for data at rest as well as the viability of person-to-person encryption.

Using AI/ML for network-optimized DDoS mitigation

No two networks are alike, and a one-size-fits-all approach to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack mitigation is not adequate for most DDoS attacks today; they vary widely in type, volume, sophistication, and concurrency — making it crucial for network administrators to develop an approach that is tailored to their specific requirements, in an automated fashion. In this presentation, we will show why the IPHM/botnet origins of DDoS attack matter, and how we can leverage this knowledge of IoT devices and Internet infrastructure to automatically block attacks more efficiently.

Do you see what I see? IVRE at work

Numerous tools can be used to scan networks passively or actively for vulnerabilities. These port- and vulnerability scanners are often just a one-shot scan. Comparing or tracking changes is usually a challenge. Only few tools can ‘snapshot’ a network on for example active IP’s, open ports and banner changes. IVRE is such a tool and it deserves to be considered as a tool within the toolset when dealing with incidents.

The possible future of identity management using digital wallets

For decades we have been using federated identity management within the education and research community. Browser vendor changes and the push by the European Commission for digital wallets might however change how we work with digital identities going forward. But what is a digital wallet, how can we use them within our community and do we need to prepare now already for the future changes of identity management? Come and listen to this talk to get to know what the EU Digital Identity Wallet is all about!

Path to a European Digital Educational Infrastructure

The presentation will discuss topics such as how existing technology and underlying infrastructure could support a common European education infrastructure and the engagement from the European NRENs. Already a lot of challenges are identified that we would like to raise in our community and see how NRENs modularly can play a role to tackle them. One of the challenges are the relationship between NRENs and the EdTech industry in terms of the speed of technological development, ensuring interoperability, legal compliance and financial collaboration.

Verifiable credentials, sovereignty, decentralization and Lifelong Learning: a new paradigm for education

Do you want to know how Europe is building the vision of the Individual Learning Record (ILR)? How will citizens be digitally empowered to have effective control of their identity(s) and data? Don't miss this session to learn about the pillars that enable a new paradigm in education, effectively enabling individual learning records, personal learning pathways and lifelong learning. Educational digital credentials, as defined by the European Member States, worked on the four dimensions of interoperability, and applied to European cross-border services in education with real applications for identity, access control, accreditation of educational achievement, etc.

Networking at the WLCG: R&D activities

The objective is to give an overview of the R&D activities that we have been doing at CERN for the WLCG and the results from SC22. The first project is NOTED (Network Optimised Transfer of Experimental Data) to dynamically reconfigure network links to increase the effective bandwidth available for FTS-driven transfers by using dynamic circuit provisioning systems such as SENSE and AutoGOLE. The second one is about programmable switches with P4flow (Programmable switches for accounting scitags-based IPv6 packets) and MultiONE (Routing and forwarding of scitags-based IPv6 packets), where we are using the GP4lab for the implementation.

ESnet's In-Network Caching Pilot

In 2019, ESnet deployed its first caching node in Sunnyvale CA as part of a federated cache that included nodes at UCSD and Caltech in California, to explore some of the HL-LHC Data Lakes concepts. In 2022, two additional caching nodes were deployed in Boston MA, and Chicago IL., to work in conjunction with the caching infrastructure at MIT in Massachusetts, and UWMadison, Notre Dame, and Purdue in Illinoi respectively. This presentation will describe our operating experience for the last 3 years, as well as observations and takeaways on the cost and benefits in running these caches.

Connecting the stars

Chile has emerged as a capital for the study of astronomical phenomenon. The telescopes, true giants, are located in remote places and generate a large amount of data. REUNA is an organization that has been working with these projects to provide connectivity according to their needs. In this talk, future projects and the upcoming challenge will be discussed: implementing a point of presence for academic connectivity in the Chajnantor Valley, at more than 5,000 meters above sea level, which allows the numerous astronomical projects that are present in the area send data of the stars to the world.

World-class education? Interoperability is key! Enhancing education infrastructure and learner mobility through NRENs

NRENs play a vital role in developing digital infrastructure to improve education infrastructure, flexibility and mobility. However, the unsynchronised approach to digital transformation has slowed down innovation and given commercial suppliers more opportunities. Collaboration and standardisation across NRENs, sector bodies and organisations can align developments and define interoperability principles, creating a blueprint for education infrastructure and a framework for collaboration. This session will showcase the value of NRENs in education and present the first steps towards cooperation. Let's break down the silos of software for which learners, teachers and administrators pay the price. Join us to achieve greater interoperability together!

Sustainable access to commercial services through EOSC, an opportunity for the GEANT community?

Next to the T&I infrastructure, providing sustainable access to commercial services in EOSC has the potential to become a substantial, visible, long term and unique contribution of the GEANT community to EOSC. This presentation links the GEANT community’s work towards commercial cloud services over the years and the European Open Science Cloud. I will show the opportunity we have created for ourselves, explain how we can make it work and argue for why we should make it work. If nothing else, you’ll probably leave with a better understanding of this EOSC thing.

Driving collaboration & innovation between NRENs

How to initiate an international procurement collaboration. What are feasible goals, learnings and strengths to take into consideration. How we can achieve better outcomes for our institutions by working together. We will also discuss a practical example of a joint procurement project between HEAnet & SURF on video services.

Establishment of Identity Federations in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities

The identity federation space is relatively new in Africa due to contextual and technical challenges which include the identity dilemma, lack of concrete use cases to firm relevance and the expertise to establish and operate an identity federation. Further, countries that have established identity federations are mostly inactive as per the entity registration statistics. To overcome some of the challenges, the Africa Connect 3 project, the three RRENs in Africa and GEANT set up eduID.africa as a catch-all identity federation and directly supported 6 NRENs. This presentation will provide an update, challenges and the future of identity federations in Africa.

Identity Provider-as-a-Service - everyone's a winner

Identity provider (IdP)-as-a-Service resurfaced among the top priorities for federation operators in the 2021 REFEDS survey. The Australian Access Federation (AAF) first launched its cloud IdP platform (Rapid IdP) in 2018, with more than 70% of customers having adopted Rapid IdP since. This presentation will discuss:
- AAF's platform architecture and design decisions
- the benefits of this new generation delivery model for both customers and federation operators
- challenges and key lessons
- how the cloud approach leads to improved security, deeper understanding of the federation's value, and faster adoption of innovative features.

eduGAIN’s future is now

eduGAIN is the well known global trust fabric that lets millions of researchers and students access services with their institutional accounts. eduGAIN’s light technical and policy requirements contributed to a sustained growth, but it also led to shortcomings due to a wide set of different authentication and access services that do not also play well together. The eduGAIN community is working to model the future of the service, based on the REFEDS Identity Federations Baseline Expectations work, to introduce requirements for security, assurance and attribute release to meet users’ and services expectations and to update the service technical architecture.

Gamified Awareness – The Impressive Results of a New Approach

Information Security Campaigns are always a challenge for any institution. Elaborate content about technical area, many times besides being tricky, it is difficult to measure the final result. We would like to share the results of a project had the objective of changing the interaction strategy with the users. Traditional campaigns have hardly generated effective results with current generation users, for this reason, we have developed an Awareness project based in Gamification to engage users, where each content consumed generates points in a healthy and challenging competition, and at the end campaign, the best players are rewarded for their dedication.

Fighting the cyber people war – a focus on the challenges for talent facing NRENs

Attracting and retaining talent with cyber expertise is quoted as a recurring pain point globally including for NRENs with recent data stating Australia will be short 30,000 cyber roles in four years’ time. Within the purpose built and sector focused AARNet Security Operations Centre (SOC), we’re keen to share the experience, challenge and strategies of building and retaining a people capability from the ground up without being well known for security services in the local market, during the COVID-19 pandemic and as the labour market more broadly became increasingly tight with Australian unemployment hitting record lows of 3.5% in 2022.

Who will join us at TNC 2028?

Recruitment and collaborators retention are relevant problems for NRENs. In this talk we will present the GARR Academy: an immersive programme dedicated to high school and undergraduate students on technical, team-building and collaboration topics. In November 2022 the first training cycle was delivered focusing on state-of-the-art DevOps, orchestration and automation. Eventually, participants were hired as junior staff. We believe that sharing our experience can spot the light on a widespread need for NRENs with the chance of discussing a solution that could be replicated, sketching a common scheme that could be also supported in international collaborations.

A QKD Network Including Coexistence of Quantum and Classical Signals

In the presentation, we introduce the Paduan quantum network, the result of a joint development by the QuantumFuture research group of the University of Padua, the University’s VSIX and ASIT centers, and the GARR Consortium. We focus on a stable link between the VSIX and ASIT nodes, about 13 km apart, on which the coexistence of quantum and classical signals has been tested. We present the results of some field trials with the quantum and classical signal respectively in the C and O-band and a comparison with the swapped configuration.

First proof of concept for Long Distance QKD across the GÉANT Network

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is the first applicable quantum technology capable of distributing a common secret key to two distant parties that can be used for symmetric encryption schemes with guaranteed security regardless of the resources available to an attacker. QKD will constitute a key tool for delivering the necessary security in data services and network infrastructures to safeguard trust, comfort and privacy. This work reports on the world-first long-distance QKD results across a production optic network infrastructure, an OpenQKD OpenCall project initiated by GÉANT and Toshiba, with National Research and Education Partners.

Quantum Internet Activities in European NRENs

During 2022 many NRENs got involved in the EuroQCI projects either as a lead or a participating partner. By the time of TNC23, several NRENs will have made progress in their quantum activities and it can be beneficial for other organisations and individuals to share their updates and results. This talk will provide an overview of Quantum Internet-related activities, including the national scale deployments of quantum communications systems and networks in European NRENs and the GÉANT Network Development project, thus presenting an opportunity for participants to hear, meet and liaise with speakers in search of beneficial information and collaboration.

RENATER’s approach with Open-source software: ideology vs reality

Most of digital services operated by RENATER for its community are based on Open-Source Software. We will go through RENATER’s contribution to these Open-Source software and expose the advantages and difficulties faced since many years: financial, human resources, sustainability… Do we have a way as NRENs to support OSS, and help our communities to get back control of their data? Or is it a lost battle? Could NRENs work and collaborate together to keep an added value for their community by developing OSS?

Sustainable software development at NRENs: the example of the economics of eduVPN

eduVPN is being used by more 120 universities at their corporate VPN worldwide as well as by 17 NRENs as secure gateways to the public Internet. It aims to become the VPN standard for research and education. Who is paying for this? Is it good use of taxpayers' money? Given the price of commercial proprietary solutions for universities (around 40k EUR for a Danish university per year, for example), there is no doubt - by any calculation - that there is a benefit to continue developing a community solution. But what are the economics behind eduVPN as an open-source project?

But, but, but... Open Source!

NRENs’ top priority is to produce value for their universities and institutions respectively their staff, researchers, teachers and students. Smaller budgets, the rising importance of digital autonomy and increased demands on integration contribute to increased use of Open Source Software in the NREN community. Why then did SWITCH decide to switch to a commercial product for their Video Management System? In this presentation I will take you on our journey of the migration and explain our choice. I will also question some of the well-established truths regarding the use of OSS by NRENs

What can we learn about our planet using submarine optical cables

In last decades the massive use of telecommunications has driven the need to lay millions of kilometers of optical fiber cables across the entire planet, particularly our oceans. Recent developments in optical fiber sensing have revealed the possibility to transform all these cables into powerful geophysical sensing arrays, capable of measuring in a position-resolved way variables such as strain and temperature with high sensitivity and across tens of kilometers of distance. In this talk I will review the key technological aspects behind these systems with particular focus in the achievable performances in this applications needs.

Recent advances in earthquake monitoring in Albania

The Seismology Department is a basic research unit at the Institute of Geosciences (IGEO),part of Polytechnic University of Tirana (UPT), Albania, which has the task: to conduct scientific and applied studies in the field of seismology; to administer the Albanian Seismological Network (ASN), as the only national infrastructure for earthquake monitoringand development of scientific research in the field of seismology; and finally to continuously monitor 24/7 seismic activity in Albania and around it, as well as to inform in case of earthquakes the relevant governmental units and the public. The November 26, 2019 (Mw6.4) earthquake in Albania evidenced many problems related with the prompt reaction and processing capabilities of ASN. The sparse network influenced the detection and the quality of the solutions. Hence, as a result of a close collaboration with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and ADRIARRAY Team, our country counts nowadays 409 temporary monitoring seismic sensors targeting a more accurate regional and local seismicity analysis and body wave tomography. Alongside the RESEAL Project, 10 new permanent seismic stations have been constructed and equipped with the necessary infrastructure, ready to transmit seismic records in the coming months.

However, the western part of the country, being the most urbanized area with significant seismic hazard levels, prone to large earthquakes in the past, is not properly monitored from the seaside. Fiber-optic sensing techniques, including distributed acoustic sensing, can offer a powerful way of monitoring this environment. With improved software infrastructures and data processing techniques, this solution could intensely impact observational seismology.

Fiberoptic sensing in the Arctic - research, technology and opportunities

Recent years have shown a rapid development utilizing acousting sensing on already deployed fiber optic cables. This presentation will go through experiments and results obtained so far in the far north arctic, showing a variety of use cases including whale and wessel tracking, earthquake and distant storms registration etc. We will also take a brief look into new sensing techniques and and how to combine acoustic sensing with conventional optical network roll-out.

Tutoria – A Case of Success of the Reformulated RNP Working Groups Programme

RNP, the Brazilian NREN, has a 20-year-old RDI program known as Working Groups (WGs), whose main goal over the years has been to deliver technological solutions in collaboration with the Brazilian academic and research community. In an effort to deliver value to RNP customers faster, such a WGs program was revised in 2019 to include business development. One of the developed solutions is Tutoria, which is a platform for facilitating assessments and automating feedback from instructors. The Tutoria is a collaborative effort between RNP and UFPE.

AI in operations at SURF

AI has been having a clear impact on research and education, either direct or at least forcing communities to think about how the technology might impact their field. In this presentation, we will show how we’re investigating the potential use of AI to improve our operations and ultimately, that of our members. SURF is the NREN cooperative of the Netherlands, and we have been supporting our members using AI in their domain application for some years, but we have only started to consider the use of AI in running our operational infrastructure.

Digitalisation of the RDi Environment - University Evaluation Process with Impact on Researcher Development

An NREN, in its evolution path, must be adapted to the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) environment through digital transformation and must support its members by providing relevant services for the environment and useful tools for their development and transformation.
In this paper we focus on the evaluation of the research environment of the HEI members of CEDIA using technologies based on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, looking for knowledge that guides the design of services aligned with institution requirements and supporting their researcher’s growth, from early stages of research to the generation of their inventions with impact on the ecosystem.

The Strategic Future of the Science DMZ

This talk will explore the evolution of the Science DMZ design pattern, including new environments and applications and the value of strategic investments in science-focused high-performance network design. Examples will include Streaming DTNs, Zero Trust, Exascale HPC environments, and workflows which couple experimental and computing facilities together to achieve results otherwise unavailable to the scientist.

SciStream: Architecture and Toolkit for Data Streaming between Federated Science Instruments

Modern scientific instruments generate data at such high rates that online processing is needed for data reduction, feature detection, and experiment steering. These rates also demand memory-to-memory streaming from instrument to remote computer, because local computational capacity is limited and data transmissions that engage file system introduce unacceptable latencies. Such data streaming is challenging to realize in practice because of lack of direct external network connectivity for scientific instruments; and authentication/security requirements. We propose SciStream, a middlebox-based architecture with control protocols to enable secure data streaming from producer’s memory at one facility to consumer’s memory at another remote facility.

Identifying and Understanding Scientific Network Flows

There is a network flow marking effort underway from the High-Energy Physics (HEP) and Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) communities. This effort aims to mark packets/flows so they can be correlated with specific research projects. This allows identification of flows for troubleshooting and gives network providers visibility into the research flows they support and allows them to demonstrate the value of research and education networks. This effort is not confined to the HEP and WLCG communities and can be leveraged by any research organization and network provider willing to participate in packet marking. This talk will inform the audience of these efforts and how they can participate.

GÉANT CEO Update

Community Support for URAN

KEYNOTE: Leveraging the Digital Native Superpower in Research & Education

Conventional wisdom suggests that digital natives should be naturals at applying highly-connected digital techniques to scholarship. But, academic tradition, policy, and technological barriers currently limit and discourage methods that may be second nature to this group. Unconstrained, they might be inclined to create real-time snapshots of in-progress research, seek near-constant peer support of personal successes and challenges, employ highly-collaborative knowledge creation and dissemination, and use broad communication methods beyond traditional academic journals. The earliest digital natives are approaching Ph.D. graduation age. What disruption will they bring to scholarship, and how might it impact future innovation and knowledge advancement?

TNC Close and Welcome to TNC24