Sessions

  • SESSIONS
Monday Sessions

1A Opening Plenary

17/06 11.00 - 12.30 | Cauldron Hall & Black Box

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Description

Official opening TNC19 by Chairman of the board (Christian Grimm) and CEO of GÉANT (Erik Huizer).

Chairs

  • Erik Huizer (GÉANT)

Presentations

Strengthening the Estonian Society with Technology

Estonia has been through a rapid development during the last decades, fully embracing new technologies to bring the country forward. The basic technologies used are the same as everywhere, but the purpose of which they are deployed differ, the speed of their deployment and how much it influences the life of people. In Estonia we have built a decentralized process to monitor technological developments and how they are brought into everyday use. In this talk we discuss how Estonia is trying to make technological changes and their application meaningful to everybody.

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Archived stream



Monday Sessions

2A Lightning Talks: First Strike

17/06 14.00 - 15.30 | Black Box

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Description

Lightning Talks are 5 minute presentations focusing on one key point. This can be an idea, successful project, a cautionary story, collaboration invitation, quick tip or demonstration. This session is an opportunity for ideas to get the attention they deserve.

The rules for this session are easy: five minutes and only five minutes.

Chairs

  • Anna Wilson (HEAnet)
  • Nicole Harris (GÉANT)

Presentations

5 things you didn’t know about perfSONAR

This lightning talk will present 5 things you didn't know about perfSONAR!

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ESnet6 High-Touch Services: Network Telemetry using Programmable Dataplane

This lightning talk will introduce ESnet’s motivation for high-speed, fine-grained telemetry (such as detecting micro-busts and congestion) and talk about the need for programmable data-plane to perform these functions.

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Out of the Ice Age: Can NRENs Support Antarctic Science?

My lightning talk will describe Antarctic science drivers and the current state of science data movement on the continent.

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Alert System for Big Data quality: facing the challenge of data-correction

In my studies I focus on the metadata of the datasets reflecting the quality problems: how is it possible to identify DQ problems during the analysis?

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Impact of snippet codes from Stack Overflow in real projects

Our goal is to produce a software product API that automatically identifies the correct cryptographic algorithms to use, based on the trusted codes from these repositories. Votes of users in Stack Overflow are used as a mechanism for trust code rating.

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Is there a way to explain networking to ordinary people and still look clever?

Why do many technicians feel that they can be understood only by other technicians and why do they feel perplexed when asked to explain technical stuff to the “muggles”?

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She's just not that into IT

What is so innately male about this profession?

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The Commons Conservancy

In this lightning fast lightning talk, Michiel will give a 300 second guided tour about what The Commons Conservancy can do for projects that emerge from our community - whether they concern free and open source software, open hardware, or open content including educational resources. And how better governance leads to better and more successful projects.

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Sport-Related Sudden Cardiac Death: a New In-Cloud System for Athletes Prevention

Our aim is to implement an in-Cloud system for sport-related sudden cardiac death prevention, using the data collected by athletes by means of commercial wearable sensors.

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Democratizing Smart Farming with AI on LoRa Sensor Networks

Digital technologies ignited a revolution in the agrofood domain known as smart farming.

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Building community Machine Learning Tool for agriculture and forest species identification

Wine certification through caste identification is of vital importance when it comes to provide the market with high-quality and trustable products.

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"But on <insert favourite service> I get <insert favourite feature> for free!"

Winter is coming.The wind is getting harsher in the NREN world. While we were used to have very little competition for our services because we were part of the higher education community, it seems that this has changed in the last few years.

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Face Recognition - Internet of Things Fused System for Criminal Recognition and Location Identification in West Africa

I am interested in developing Human Language Technologies (HLT) (especially for Nigerian / African languages), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), with particular deference to robotics. I am keenly interested in building intelligent systems and also, if possible, give the systems capacity to communicate in native languages. Internet of things, (IoT) and data analysis are new research areas that I am developing passion for and hope to engage in studies that can harness the strengths of IoTs, AI, HLTs and Data analysis as we advance in a world that is fast becoming digitized

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Operator, please! eduroam Switchboard

Switchboard is a web app to administer all parts of an eduroam federation: IdP, SP, FLR, Realms & Clients.

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Software-Defined Infrastructure at RNP

In this talk, we will describe the software-defined infrastructure and the corresponding orchestrator that is being deployed at RNP, the Brazilian NREN.

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eduroam Managed IdP - eduroam users in the cloud

This lightning talk presents a new service within the eduroam portfolio: eduroam Managed IdP. By the time of TNC19, eduroam Managed IdP is in full production service and ready to accept and serve customers.

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Archived stream



Monday Sessions

3A Workshop: Time to go back to the drawing board?

17/06 16.00 - 17.30 | Black Box

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Description

If we were to start over, what would we do, knowing what we know now? We often spend so much time in the day to day operational concerns that we can lose sight of what we're trying to do, and whether that has deviated from our original aims. By stepping back and thinking as if we were starting over, we can get an new perspective on what our real next steps should be.

This session will begin with two presentations: one looking at the differences between the commercial and academic internet, and the other questioning the very protocol of TCP itself. We will then open up the floor to the audience for a discussion about what we would like to change, if we could, and how we might get there.

Chairs

  • Anna Wilson (HEAnet)

Presentations

Performance analysis comparison between Academic and Commercial Internet

At present it is relatively easy to make a data transfer that gets sustained bandwidth results at high data rates between two servers located at institutions connected to NRENS. Previous data transfer tests have been carried out during the last decade. But, do this type of tests measure the performance perceived by a user of our infrastructures and compare it properly with that of the Commercial Internet?

This presentation’s objective is to describe the analysis conducted by the working group created by RedIRIS to measure the difference in performance in high-speed data transferences between the Commercial and the Academic Internet.

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Questioning TCP

TCP and UDP were forged in the early days of the Internet, anticipating the need for both a reliable delivery mechanism, as well as a simpler streaming or messaging system.  TCP has become the workhorse for data transfers on the internet, and thus we have inherited all the properties and constraints that come with TCP.  Changes have emerged due to the end of Moore's law, optical capacity limits, and the relatively small topology of R&E networks relative to the entire consumer internet.  Is TCP still the best protocol for the domain specific goal of large science data transfer ?  Elephant flows, in order packet delivery, deep packet buffers, and guaranteed packet loss are linked to the inherent design of TCP.   In this talk we question the fundamental properties and constraints inherent in TCP when applied to the network technologies of today's R&E networks.  We will present some thought exercises in network traffic engineering, and set the case for further work in network measurement and protocol design.

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Monday Sessions

3B Are we done with T&I?

17/06 16.00 - 17.30 | Woodblock Hall

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Description

Trust and Identity has long been a theme at TNC and might lead you to ask, are we not done yet with this space? These three presentations will show how Identity Federations and NRENs are continuing to evolve and change the way they think about identity to meet the needs of students, staff and researchers.

Chairs

  • Rhys Smith (Jisc)

Presentations

AEGIS: ensuring continuity in federated access for research collaboration beyond the AARC Project and into the EOSC

In this session we will introduce the main concepts of the AARC BPA and we will outline how the AARC Blueprint Architecture model (i) leverages eduGAIN to enable users to use their own home organisation credentials to access services and, (ii) underpins community AAI services in EOSC and its implementation projects.
We will also highlight the impact of EOSC for the GEANT Community service delivery. Lastly, we will discuss how AEGIS is going to continue after the end of the AARC project with the material support from GÉANT, EGI, EUDAT, PRACE and OpenAIRE and the broad participation from research and e-Infrastructures globally, and what the plans are for shepherding and further evolving the AARC Blueprint Architecture and its accompanying set of guidelines.

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The Solution for IdP Discovery and the Exploration of the Next Big Thing

This session will review how the RA21 project evolved and brought a solution to the identity provider discovery space and look at how those outputs are becoming part of the global instrustructure for identity federations. We will also take a look at what’s next, and how we might learn from RA21’s success in order to make progress on the next big area of friction in the identity federation space.

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From Transparency to Practice: InCommon Baseline Expectations

This presentation describes the InCommon Federation’s motivation, process, and lessons learned throughout the InCommon Baseline Expectations deployment journey.

A successful Trust Federation responds to its members’ evolving needs. It should be an adaptable platform to enable community-driven change and design it into the fabric of its endeavors. InCommon will describe how it met these challenges.

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Monday Sessions

3C Why Communities Matter

17/06 16.00 - 17.30 | Terrace Hall

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Description

Emerging Technologies vs. NRENs, Communities, and Individuals

The rapid pace of technological innovation naturally shapes the evolution of NRENs and how they serve their stakeholders. But individuals, communities, and NRENs have the power to shape the impact of these emerging technologies.

This session tackles the topic from all three perspectives: a global view that examines the benefits of strengthening emerging NRENs, an example of how a motivated community is facilitating knowledge exchange, and finally a case for how human intelligence, delegated intelligence, and artificial intelligence can be harnessed to shape a safe and prosperous future.

Chairs

  • Nancy Carter (CANARIE)

Presentations

The Power of Human Disruption

Many in the NREN community are preoccupied with understanding how technological disruption – from Blockchain to AI – will impact both the evolution of global NRENs, and the evolution of human society. Fewer are considering the power of human disruption to shape new technologies and mitigate the negative consequences of those technologies. In this talk, Jim will discuss how human intelligence, delegated intelligence, and artificial intelligence can be harnessed to shape a safe and prosperous future. Using examples from our everyday lives, and injecting a healthy dose of optimism and humour, Jim will remind global NREN leaders that we do in fact retain the power to mould our futures and to evolve technologies that will make our lives and our world better.

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NORDUnet Emerging NREN Program

In this presentation, Lars will briefly describe the evolution of established and emerging NRENs. He will then, in some detail, talk about the NORDUnet emerging NREN program and the crucial importance of global NREN collaboration to fully service research and education. Lars will outline the organisation of the conference-centred activities and the knowledge transfer activities that go along with them, and describe the benefits to both NORDUnet, Nordic NRENs, and the participating emerging NREN. Finally, he will describe the Facilitating Distance Learning using Digital Conferencing Facility project.

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Communities - why they matter, and what makes them work

Along with digitalisation, communities seem to become more and more relevant in the future, especially in the face of challenges that digitalisation brings about. In this presentation, Nathalie will look at why communities matter by taking a close look at the Swiss academic e-learning community eduhub.
The motivation of such a community is not a commercial one. The incentive is knowledge exchange, exchange of best practices, networking and collaboration. Members of the community can benefit from each other by collaborating on projects and discussing best practices.

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Monday Sessions

3D Opening data silos

17/06 16.00 - 17.30 | Small Hall

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Description

Nowadays the progress in science and economy depends on processing, analysing, preserving as well as sharing, opening, making data discoverable, accessible and enabling to re-use the datasets held in IT systems. NRENs should have a word in this area and a role in these processes, otherwise their significance as IT services and resources provider will be marginal. And, at the end, opportunities will be missed.

This session sheds light on the current and envisioned future role of NRENs, collaborating universities and computing centres as well as end-users in the process of de-siloing the data, i.e. enabling high-perforkance data analytics (AARNet’s talk), ensuring data preservation (second AARNet’s talk) and fostering data-based collaboration and improving data accessibility across local on-premise sync & share installations and data repositories (CERN’s talk).

The presenters in the session will not only show the NRENs and collaborators re-acting on the known challenges of today’s data-driven World as well as addressing needs of the community related to processing and preserving the data. The speakers will also show show how NRENs and collaborators can contribute to working out game-changing models and solutions that enable opening data siloes existing nowadays.

We all live in the a data-driven World. Come to the session! Paritcipate in data de-siloing!

Chairs

  • Maciej Brzezniak (PSNC)

Presentations

Analytics@AARNet - Reaching Deeper into the Research Community

NRENs exist to serve the specific needs of the research community. If researchers aren’t making full use of their research networks then Universities might as well subscribe to a commercial commodity internet service provider. And the industry commercial providers’ headline advertised speeds continue to grow rapidly.

Opening data silos for research requires data access that is high speed. Analytics@AARNetTM is an innovative solution AARNet has been using to reach deeper into Australia’s 60,000 strong research community to identify researchers getting less than the full value of their research network and to improve their data work flows and research outcomes. For AARNet a fast research network is only part of the solution. It is complemented by the data analytics platform and functionality offerted at high performance to the researchers and users through the high-speed network.

In the presentation we will show: how to bring benefits of large infrastructure to the interested users using the proper network and how to implement scientific workflows - using data - in the real life, contributing to better data reuse and exploitation for the scientific and economic benefits.

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what if CloudStor overflows?! -- adding preservation to synch&share

AARNet has for over six years offered the CloudStor platform to the Australian R&E community. CloudStor (an enriched synch&share platform based on ownCloud) was designed to accept content directly from researchers and other users, including both active research data and research data that is no longer being actively used but which has been cited in publications. Although CloudStor provides vast storage capability, long-term preservation of the data stored wasn’t actively addressed, neither in architecture nor in customer facing functionality. In the presentation, the data preservation related developments at AARNet will be discussed including the processes implemented, that will allow the data to be discovered, accessed, rendered, deemed reliable and re-used over many years and even decades. The talk will provide the view on the NREN role in the data preservation and data de-siloing processes, that are considered important part of the NRENs and other organisations mission vs the academic and scientific community.

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Going FAIR at the rate of n × log n -- Interlinking Synch&Share stores to benefit from Metcalfe’s Law

In the presentation we will discuss the idea of interlinked synch&share stores composing a new pan-european data eInfrastructure. We will present the initiative backed by and coordinated with the CS3 community as well as with SIG-CISS (formely TF-Storage) group at Geant, and GN4-3’s cloud activity. Technology-wise, the basis of the federation may be provided by the OpenCloudMesh (OCM) protocol that is by now supported by most synch&share software vendors.

The purpose of the intiative is to foster data-based collaboration, enable seamless sharing of large datasets, promote usage and adoption of sync & share standads, develop and extend enabling technologies (including OCM) and making data easily accessible by making e-Infrastructure holding them more usable and user-friendly.

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Tuesday Sessions

4A Next Generation Networks in the UK, USA and EU

18/06 09.00 - 10.30 | Black Box

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Description

Various R&E network operators are in the midst of refreshing not only their network but also the way the network can be utilized by their constituents. What are some of the insights and results?

Chairs

  • JP Velders (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Presentations

Internet2 Next Generation Infrastructure: Process and Community Engagement

Internet2 is currently engaged in a process of designing and implementing its Next Generation Infrastructure (NGI). The NGI initiative is structured to be more comprehensive than a simple network refresh - it includes community discussion of our service structures, collaborative testbed development, and technology exploration; it culminates in a comprehensive refresh of Internet2 services and optical, route-switch, and software infrastructure.

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Deploying 400Gbit/s on the Janet network

Over the past 2 years, Jisc has successfully deployed single-carrier 400Gbit/s optical technology across the Janet network, to meet the continually increasing demands from its users. This presentation looks at what changes and enhancements to the Janet network were required prior to 400Gbit/s optical channels being put into production, the differences between theory and practice when deploying such services, and the challenging but ultimately successful delivery programme, including hardware deployment at multiple points of presence, numerous software upgrades, and 6 months of service disruption, in order to achieve the goal.

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GÉANT Network Evolution

GÉANT is currently in process of procuring the new fibre network and the new optical line system. This presentation will provide an update on the progress of fibre and optical line system procurement, the GÉANT fibre topology changes and the preparation for implementation. It will cover new changes and additions to the GÉANT Network topology, provide update on the financial impact, the procurement process and the plan for implementation of new fibre and Optical Line System.

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Tuesday Sessions

4B eduTEAMS - Enabling digital communities

18/06 09.00 - 10.30 | Woodblock Hall

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Description

eduTEAMS enables users to create digital communities through which they can collaborate by sharing digital resources and services in a secure, flexible and scalable manner. eduTEAMS provides a central point for the digital community to manage its membership, to connect trusted identity sources and service providers. Communities can define access and sharing policies and integrate with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and other environments.

In this session we are going present how eduTEAMS is being used by several communities in order to enhance their IT security and user experience and take the full advantage of federated access. We are going to discuss how eduTEAMS implements the AARC Blueprint Architecture, its capabilities and roadmap and how it can enable digital communities across a spectrum of disciplines and sizes to create and manage their collaborative environments.

In this session, we are going present how eduTEAMS is being used by several communities in order to enhance their IT security, Identity Management capabilities and user experience and take the full advantage of federated access. We are going to discuss how eduTEAMS implements the AARC BPA and how it can enable digital communities across a spectrum of disciplines and sizes to use best practices, the collective knowledge and the work that has been put in eduTEAMS by the GÉANT community itself.

Chairs

  • Mandeep Saini (Ms)

Presentations

eduTEAMS - Enabling digital communities

Licia Florio from GÉANT and Marina Adomeit from AMRES ​are going to introduce us to the strategic goals of the GN4-3 project in the Trust & Identity space and how eduTEAMS will be helping GÉANT in achieving these goals.

Christos Kanellopoulos from GÉANT is going to provide an in depth view of the eduTEAMS service, its capabilities and roadmap. He is going to walk the audience through the three different eduTEAMS offerings and discuss with them how eduTEAMS can be used to help research communities and NRENs enable their members to create and manage digital collaborations.

Mihaly Heder from SZTAKI and Slavek Licehammer from CESNET are going to present how eduTEAMS takes advantage of the existing ecosystem of tools such as COmanage, HEXAA and Perun in order to deliver capabilities that meet a wide range of communities and discuss the plans for the evolution of this ecosystem of tools.

Chris Atherton from GÉANT is going to present the work we are doing with communities and NRENs and how we can help them deliver services to their users in a number of strategic fields.

In a more technical presentation, Ivan Karakanakis from SUNET is going to present the “Identity Python” initiative, the work that has been taking place and how we are pushing forward the underlying software infrastructure that drives not only eduTEAMS but also a number of AAI projects globally.

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Tuesday Sessions

4C Digital collaborations

18/06 09.00 - 10.30 | Terrace Hall

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Description

How to provide the better services to support for the scientific and educational purposes in our community is a very popular topic for many years since NRENs were established. The three presentations in this session will share their experiences and lessons learned nowadays about how to work with their end users to support data transfer for the distributed collaborations between domain scientists, and to support the universities and institutions for building their digital learning environment.

Chairs

  • Jie An (China Education and Research Network Center)

Presentations

Pragmatic Science Engagement Using an Operations Center Approach

The Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC) works with domain scientists to accelerate the ability of distributed collaborations to share data in order to reach broader science goals. This presentation will give a detailed look at how we are working with end user scientists related to European and African collaborations and data transfers, and how others can use these services. It will also detail lessons learned so that other science engagement approaches can be modified to be more effective based on the EPOC approach to further the support of today’s digital collaborations.

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Creating Learning Standards to Support Next Generation Digital Learning Environments

In 2015, EDUCAUSE released a report on Next Generation Digital Learning Environments (NGDLE) that was funded by the Gates Foundation. This work identified the need for learning systems to evolve from being LMS-centric to the creation of a learning ecosystem that would support interoperability, personalization, analytics, collaboration, and accessibility and universal design. This session will explain the key standards efforts underway in the US and Europe to support the NGDLE. As part of this effort, we will discuss a major project in open educational resources (OER) textbooks and courseware at Rice University, named OpenStax. Attendees will learn about the key standards efforts they should follow and some of the major projects that can benefit their universities in supporting high-quality stem content.

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Back to the Future: Bringing students to the XXI century

Up to University (Up2U) aims to bridge the gap between secondary schools and universities by providing European schools with a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) that helps high school teachers equip their students with the knowledge, skills and attitudes they will need to succeed at university.
To support universal use, Up2U’s architecture has been designed as modular, scalable and portable. Students and teachers will be able to create, share, attend and search for digital multimedia content produced at international level.
Running Up2U will tie students closer to the NREN and also help the NREN to better understand the situation its institutions are in, it is R&E networks but E&R services.

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Tuesday Sessions

4D EOSC

18/06 09.00 - 10.30 | Small Hall

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Description

Want to find out more about how different aspects of the European Open Science Cloud support and forge new Digital Societies – and what this paradigm change means for European National Research and Education Networks? Then this is the session for you! We aim to demonstrate how EOSC supports pan-European digital societies and wider communities and also showcase existing and fledgling National initiatives and collaborations. You will also learn more about how Research and Education communities can benefit from current and future European Open Science Cloud initiatives and how you can get involved.

Chairs

  • Natalia Manola (University of Athens, Greece)
  • Cathrin Stöver (GÉANT)

Presentations

European Open Science Cloud (EOSC): It’s a brave new world - creating and supporting digital Communities

Over recent years, the vision of Open Science has developed, defining a world of transparent, data-driven science capable of accelerating competitiveness and innovation.
The embodiment of this vision in Europe is the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), first proposed in April 2016 as part of the Communication on the ‘European Cloud Initiative’, making it one of the pillars of European Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy. In order to make this vision a reality a number of implementation projects are in place and you will find out more about them during this interactive session.

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Tuesday Sessions

5A Plenary Building Foundations of Trust / Research Infrastructures

18/06 11.00 - 12.30 | Black Box

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Description

Our Tuesday Plenary will bring two keynotes - Merike Kaeo, CEO and founder of Double Shot Security and John Womersley, Director General of the European Spallation Source.

Chairs

  • Inder Monga (ESnet)

Presentations

Building Foundations of Trust

Functioning digital societies rely on generating trust between government, private sector and public interests. This digitalization provides infinite number of opportunities but also risks and challenges for human and data safety. The vast amount of data freely shared to enable societal functions to be online and the increasing number of breaches that put our private information at risk has given pause to consider the balances between convenience, security and privacy. This talk will delve into what security, privacy, safety and risk mitigation mean in today’s global interconnected digital world.

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Research Infrastructures

Scientific and Technological innovation is key to our future economic prosperity in a globalising, knowledge-based world; and it’s also essential if we are to address the challenges of climate, energy, secure and safe food supply, and an aging population. These large research challenges require large scale investments in scientific capability in the form of major research infrastructures. Whether these are physical investments in a single site, like my own project the European Spallation Source, or distributed networks of nodes spread across Europe, they bring together large numbers of scientists to address common goals, and they generate large amounts of data that must be analysed and made available in an open way. I’ll describe some of the challenges and opportunities that this landscape brings and how it is changing the way research is done.

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Tuesday Sessions

6A Lightning Talks: Second Strike

18/06 14.00 - 15.30 | Black Box

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Description

Lightning Talks are 5 minute presentations focusing on one key point. This can be an idea, successful project, a cautionary story, collaboration invitation, quick tip or demonstration. This session is an opportunity for ideas to get the attention they deserve.

The rules for this session are easy: five minutes and only five minutes.

Chairs

  • Nicole Harris (GÉANT)
  • Nicholas Mbonimpa (Research and Education Network for Uganda (RENU))

Presentations

TNC – behind the scenes

We would like to present TNC multimedia "behind the scenes" from technical perspective. Everything one wanted to ask about, but there has never been an opportunity: innovative ideas, artistic work, advanced technologies and some ordinary, though well-prepared craftsmanship. Since the effect of these works can usually be seen as audio and video design & artwork, this time we would show, what we normally want to hide…

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InAcademia - towards a production service

The purpose of this lightening talk is to raise awareness of InAcademia, who it is aimed at, why it's been developed, and to encourage promotion and uptake as the service moves into production.

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Consumer IoT security and privacy frameworks, trustmarks and certifications: useful, or useless?

There is a growing number of organizations and government agencies actively working on developing or promoting IoT security and privacy frameworks, and related trustmark and certification programs, around the world. How can we work with these programs?

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Internet4kids

Internet4kid is a creative lab ideated by GARR, the Italian NREN, to explain how internet works, for kids but not only. The laboratory is based on the use of straws that are interconnected together creating a model of the Internet with links and routers.

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Mansplaining Diversity

Yhe talk will ask the question of the audience to determine if there are practical or subconscious barriers preventing staff of BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) from attending education focused conferences such as TNC.

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Project Fox, a quest for a statically typed embeddable programming language

In today’s world, most embeddable programming languages are dynamically typed - so, if you’re like me and prefer static typing, you’re out of luck!

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FOG Computing as a Lifeline for E-Health Users

E-Health services are becoming ubiquitous in the modern world however, this connection comes at a price - latency is a main concern when dealing with enormous amounts of sensitive data, and especially so when the data is time-critical as well. Monitoring health parameters for individuals with chronic or life-threatening conditions is not just a luxury, but also a necessity.

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Content interaction powered distance learning - Contact, pointing, immersion and feeling of presence

Development of a real-time cooperative interface for score/textual material in support to (music) distance learning and practicing on audio-video conference systems, open source, easily accessible and easily executable.

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Open Infrastructure: Integrating OpenStack and Kubernetes

OpenStack and Kubernetes are currently the most popular Open Infrastructure solutions: it is worthwhile to provide users access to a platform that provides both services, using a single personal account. Currently this is hardly possible, since the two systems provide different authentication mechanisms.

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Enlighten the darkness in your fiber topology

Your customer will disappear from the network. You wont receive light anymore, what is the problem? Could it be an equipment issue at the customer site or is it a fiber cut? Your precious Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) tool is ready but the customer is located too far away, you cannot just go to make OTDR measurements yourself. The only option left would be reporting the issue to the fiber provider even if
it may as well be a hardware problem or a power outage.

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Non-web federated access using QR-codes

In this lightning talk, we will present a proof-of-concept solution for federated access to non-web based services using standardised protocols and technologies. The solution is based on out-of-the-bound authentication flow executed by users who might initiate it in a user-friendly manner using QR-codes and a mobile device.

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Open, Honest & Wonderful!

This lighting talk attempts to highlight why being honest (sometimes brutally so) is good for the community and to present a few answers to the question of "Will people be interested in what I have to say?" In the end we want everyone to be open, honest and wonderful!

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CloudStor Strategy – One Ring to Rule Them All

AARNet’s original vision for CloudStor was to provide a simple-to-use ad hoc cloud storage capability, to meet the needs of researchers who just wanted somewhere to put their data “for the time being”. Some of us maybe had a grander vision, but in any case we soon became overwhelmed by the adoption rate of this sync-and-share cloud storage, built on ownCloud. The number of research users in Australia has now exceeded 60,000, which is remarkable considering there are only that many researchers in the whole of Australia.

We have asked our users what they want from CloudStor, and apart from all the usual requirements of reliability, speed of access, ease of use, longevity, backup and so on, they shared that they wanted CloudStor to form the backbone of their research data workflow.

We have thus planned for and introduced a range of capabilities to enable this integration. These features enable CloudStor users to support the whole range of sharing, publishing and archiving research data.

Equally importantly, and arguably far more strategically, we have been working to include, along with storage and data movement (our core capabilities), the ability to integrate compute. This we have done by incorporating into CloudStor, in conjunction with CERN, their Service for Web-based Analysis (SWAN), which allows users to perform interactive data analysis in CloudStor. It is built upon the widely-used Jupyter Notebooks, which allows users to perform data analyses using only a web browser, and which can be launched through SWAN to analyse research data using cloud computing services. In the era of research reproducibility, we believe that this represents a dramatic and powerful development of our support for the research endeavour, and forms the keystone of a strategy and roadmap for a National Collaborative Storage Infrastructure for the Australian research community. We believe this heralds how NRENs are likely to develop in the future – “not just a network organisation”.

Speakers:
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Prediction of Emergence of Novel Rotavirus Lineages in G1P[8] and G2P[4] Strains

There are many cases of severe diarrhea in under five children worldwide. Rotavirus is one of the leading causes of these diarrhea cases.

Speakers:
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Strengthening engineering research and training in Africa through Low cost environmental monitoring systems

The project aims at implementing innovative research and training in some African universities while reinforcing collaboration between universities.

Speakers:
  • Charlene GABA (National Institute of Water, University of Abomey-Calavi, BENIN)
Files:

Extending the NREN through Campus Network as a Service

Share campus network and security operations by standardizing network architecture, tools and processes. A brief overview on what GÉANT, Uninett and Sunet are trying to accomplish.

Speakers:
Files:

Archived stream



Tuesday Sessions

7A SDN and Optical:New kids on the block

18/06 16.00 - 17.30 | Black Box

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Description

What new advances are impactful in the area of Optical and Software-Defined Networking? This session will cover topics that cover new approaches to Optical networks, programmable data planes for telemetry as well as experience with building production OpenFlow-based networks.

Chairs

  • Inder Monga (ESnet)

Presentations

Differentiation in the Age of Optical Convergence

At TNC 2018, SURFnet and ECI jointly presented a vision of Organic Self-Adjusting Optical Networks. At TNC 2019, we bring this subject to the present. We detail how a Programmable Modular Optical Network – the forbearer of an Agile Self-Adjusting Optical Network – can be specified and constructed today. Most importantly, and this is the central theme, we show an approach that allows NRENs and vendors alike to differentiate their offerings, based on where they choose to focus, even though underlying optical transmission and switching technologies are converging. In particular, we show how the work of industry consortiums like the Open ROADM MSA initiative can be a boost to differentiation by defining functional boundaries in which innovation can take place.

Speakers:
Files:

AmLight-INT: In-band Network Telemetry to support big data applications

AmLight SDN network is being expanded to support in-band network telemetry using P4 and programmable switches. The goal is to support bandwidth-intensive science drivers with very strict SLAs, such as the LSST project. This presentation will share our experience in replacing the current SDN switches for PISA switches as well as trying in-band network telemetry in the field in partnership with NoviFlow switch manufacturer.

Speakers:
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SDN is the Easy Part: Production OpenFlow

Over the previous decade many technologies have emerged in the networking space that have positioned themselves to disrupt traditional workflows. They enable engineers and operators to rely more on software, reduce human intervention, and obfuscate the mechanics upon which networks have traditionally been operated. However, in this space there has been slow movement, reluctance to adopt and deploy, and in some cases refusal to consider the emerging alternatives.
In this talk we briefly explore the multi-year transformation from hand crafted networking to an acceptance of automation and tooling, and do a deep dive into a world-first, production deployment of a fully software-defined network. In the course of this discussion we will explore the significant advantages, the dark corners, the limits, the exceptions, and the lessons learned building and running a large-scale production software-defined network.

Speakers:
Files:

Archived stream



Tuesday Sessions

7B Crypto For Now!

18/06 16.00 - 17.30 | Woodblock Hall

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Description

This session will look at a variety of new and emerging projects in the field of cryptography that are support innovation in the NREN environment. Covering topics as diverse as Internet of Things (IoT), Hardware Security Modules (HSM) and document encryption, this session will demonstrate that cryptography is still very much a technology for now!

Chairs

  • Robin Wilton (N/A)

Presentations

IoT Cybersecurity with Natural Language Processing

In this talk we present a novel technique for securing large and heterogeneous IoT deployments by leveraging modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.

Our approach *automatically models the meaning of higher-order networking concepts* (e.g., what is a TCP packet? how do packet towards port 53/udp usually look like? etc.) to distils the typical behavior of a given IoT network endpoint and alert of any unusual or suspect change.

Learning is done in a purely *unsupervised* manner, without requiring the end user to “label” traffic. Additionally, network flow data is ingested and only used once in the learning process, without requiring the user of operating a “big data” storage backend. We call this approach *zero-footprint behavioral modelling*.

In this presentation we will provide a quick primer to recent NLP techniques for language modelling, describe our algorithm and finally give a live demo of the current implementation.

Speakers:
Files:

CrypTech Open Source Crypto Project

The CrypTech project began in 2014 with a vision to make key Internet security infrastructure transparent and trustworthy. To do this, we set out to make a fully open crypto-engine reference design, including both hardware and software, to enable the development of critical Internet infrastructure components. Such a fully open design is transparent and fully auditable by external parties. We believe this helps ensure trust in the components used to operate the Internet. Examples of this key security infrastructure include Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), TOR Consensus, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), Identity Federations, and the Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority (CA).

This talk will provide a brief history of the project, an overview of the hardware and software design of CrypTech, a discussion of use cases in DNSSEC signing and identity management, a brief overview of how to use CrypTech, and explore additional collaboration opportunities with the NREN community.

Speakers:
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Remote Document Encryption - encrypting data for passport holders

We introduce Remote Document Encryption (RDE) allowing any party to encrypt data for a holder of an electronic passport such that only with physical possession of the passport decryption is possible. RDE is not an intended functionality of passports and actually consists of a tweak of passport protocols. Electronic passports allow for 160 bit security exceeding current good practice of 128 bit security. In the presentation we also indicate possible applications including secure email and end-to-end secure file sending. In the second quarter of 2018 a proof-of-concept was done with RDE based secure mail. This pilot was successful and indicated that RDE was indeed a viable technique. SURF, the collaborative ICT organisation for Dutch education and research, intends to implement RDE in its Filesender instance and is planning a pilot in 2019.

Speakers:
Files:

Archived stream



Tuesday Sessions

7C Multilayered service orchestration and monitoring

18/06 16.00 - 17.30 | Terrace Hall

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Description

Welcome and Introduction (Ivana Golub, PSNC, 15 mins)

In this session we present the work on network technology and service development that began in January with the new GÉANT GN4-3 project, where Work Package 6 is tasked with evaluating new technologies and services for their applicability to NREN use cases, and developing network management and monitoring software platforms towards and into production.
The scope of the work is broad, and as a result the WP has a very wide representation, with 78 team members from 32 partner organisations across 23 countries. In this session we’ll present the work that is being undertaken in three areas: network technology evolution, network services evolution and development, and monitoring and management, and allow plenty of time for questions, comments and discussion.

Chairs

  • Anna Wilson (HEAnet)
  • Klaas Wierenga (GEANT)

Presentations

Network technology and service development in the new GÉANT Project

Network Technology Evolution (Xavier Jeannin, Renater, 20 mins)

Our white box activity is exploring practical scenarios for white box deployment in NREN networks, whether an open Network Operating System (NOS) combined with use of P4 might form the basis for an R&E router platform, and exploring use cases for data plane programmability (DPP), such as telemetry and DDoS detection and mitigation. The optical time and frequency networking (OTFN) work is determining how to deploy such an ultra high precision, stable infrastructure within GÉANT, building on the expertise from the CLONETS project, and working with the meteorologist research community. Our activity on Low Latency (LoLa) explores infrastructures to support such applications and solutions for steering network traffic across specific low latency paths. And our data transfer node (DTN) stimulation activity is reviewing approaches for supporting large scale data transfers across NREN networks, with a view to identifying a potential new service.

Network Services Evolution and Development (Roman Lapacz, PSNC, and Tim Chown, Jisc, 20 mins)

Adoption of orchestration, automation and virtualisation (OAV) principles is becoming increasingly important for network operators. In this area we are seeking to promote knowledge exchange and sharing of best OAV practices, building consensus towards a longer-term OAV strategy for the GÉANT and NREN community and the necessary immediate next steps along that path. A survey of the NRENs run in April, and a Future Strategy workshop held in May, have provided very good input on the strategy and next steps, which we will report here, together with our future plans. In parallel, we are performing development activity towards an enhanced self-service portal (SSP) for GÉANT connectivity services, working in collaboration with WP7 for priorities on operational requirements, and exploring other services to which the portal could be applied.

Management and Monitoring (Pavle Vuletic, AMRES, 20 mins)

We are developing and maintaining a range of network management and monitoring tools. The perfSONAR toolkit and its associated multi-domain consultancy and expertise service have been in production for some time, offering an open platform for measurement of network performance characteristics. The Performance Measurement Platform (PMP) service provides a set of perfSONAR small nodes across Europe measuring the performance of the GÉANT network from the NREN perspective. And Network Management as a Service (NMaaS) offers a secure, cloud-based network management platform with pre-installed network management tools. Tools being worked on towards future service include WiFiMon, a crowd-sourced, distributed performance monitoring package for WiFi networks and NetMon, a network service performance verification and fault localisation platform.

Open discussion (15 mins)

We conclude the session with open discussion of the topics raised.

Speakers:
Files:

Archived stream



Tuesday Sessions

7D edu*

18/06 16.00 - 17.30 | Small Hall

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Description

The edu* (wildcard) session is all about edu* services and supportive actions – edumeet, edubadges and eduVPN. The edu* suite is all about services developed by NRENs for NRENs to meet the specific and unique needs of our community.

* edumeet aims to tackle issues of standardised compliance and cost of service.
* edubadges will provide a more flexible and transparent approach to curriculum and grading for all learners.
* eduVPN tackles the security and privacy concerns of the very mobile staff and student that we cater for.

We will see and discuss how those three activities have supported the NREN community, why it was important to tackle these issues as NRENS, how important issues like standards, security and privacy were tackled and where we are heading next with these edu* products.

Chairs

  • Sten Aus (N/A)

Presentations

edumeet – easy and cheap video-conferencing for NRENs

Research and education users need to collaborate across different organisations and countries, through services that are safe, easy to use, accessible, affordable and inter-operable.
edumeet is a WebRTC web-conferencing platform, designed and developed within GÉANT project. Comprehensive and transverse approach resulted in set if services, that are supporting each other in order to offer a full value product, in particular:
- WebRTC video conferencing service;
- distributed STUN/TURN infrastructure to overcome firewall and NAT obstacles;
- monitoring, statistics and testing modules to assess the performance of the aforementioned components.

Speakers:
Files:

We endorse you for being an edubadger!

At SURF we strongly believe that open badges enable micro-credentialing and therefore are the new digital currency for learning that fit well within a rapidly changing educational system. We see an increasing demand for a more transparent and flexible curriculum, which better suits the personal ambition- and qualification level of the individual student and meet the needs of employers.

For over a year now and together with 16 Higher Education institutions we are conducting a pilot with an open badge infrastructure. In this presentation we will share our findings and discuss the next steps in realizing an edubadges service offering.

Speakers:
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eduVPN

Internet users and ISPs within and outside the R&E community usually identify security and privacy issues as key preoccupations. However, this doesn’t necessarily trigger behaviours. This is sometimes described as the privacy or the security paradoxes: people are aware that they are at risk but yet they don’t necessarily do the right thing to protect themselves.
eduVPN aims to contribute and address these issues in two ways: trust and ease of use. eduVPN is co-provided by NRENs using open-sourced audited software; it’s using apps in known operating systems for ease of use.

Speakers:
Files:

Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

8A Under the sea

19/06 09.00 - 10.30 | Black Box

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Description

When it comes down to moving data around the world, a lot of activity is happening deep down in the sea! To keep the global R&E networking community able to serve the current and (more importantly) future needs of global science and education, submarine cable systems are the “place you want to be”.

In this session we will present three different cases where regional or national RENs are playing a leading role in building or partnering with those cable systems that will be the vessel to carry scientific data between continents in the next decades, in three different regions of the world: Asia to Europe (CAE-1), Asia-Pacific (INDIGO) and Latin America (AARCLight).

Come and listen to how the R&E Networks are gearing up to deep-sea diving.

Chairs

  • Vincenzo Capone (GÉANT)

Presentations

Interfacing to Indigo - Technical & Operational considerations interfacing to a submarine open line system

The presentation will focus on the technical aspects of interfacing to the INDIGO submarine cable system. We will share the lessons we’ve learned with the NREN community whilst making this strategic initiative a reality. This capacity will continue to allow Australian researchers to participate in global research collaborations like the SKA that demand high speed connectivity around the globe.

Speakers:
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CAE-1: A Next Step in Securing Sustainable Intercontinental R&E Bandwidth in the GREN

This presentation will dive into the opportunities, hurdles and obstacles encountered during the process of creating a six party collaboration for jointly buying intercontinental transmission bandwidth. This presentation is, besides a story of a new and sustainable collaboration of R&E Networks jointly entering the whole-sale market, a peek into a number of interesting lessons learned that other R&E Networks around the world can consider when planning their next investments in transmission infrastructure, while contributing to the growth of the GREN, along the lines of the Global Network Architecture.

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Developments in the South Atlantic: Exploring models for sharing submarine cable capacity

Bandwidth in the South Atlantic is increasing for the R&E community. In 2018, four events occurred. GEANT and CLARA announced an IRU with EllaLink, connecting Europe and Latin America . FIU signed an IRU with Angola Cables on the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) and interconnection in Fortaleza to the Monet cable connecting Brazil to Florida . AmLight-ExP announced an IRU with Angola Cable for spectrum from Florida to Fortaleza and Sao Paulo. The SACS submarine cable system started interconnecting Fortaleza and Luanda, Angola. We will report on the AARCLight study and status of network infrastructure via the South Atlantic

Speakers:
  • Michael Stanton (Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa - RNP (Brazilian NREN))
  • Len Lotz (TENET)
  • Heidi Morgan (Information Science Institute (ISI) Internet and Networked Systems group at the University of Southern California (USC))
Files:

Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

8B OpenID Connect in R&E

19/06 09.00 - 10.30 | Woodblock Hall

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Description

The three presentations in this session will give both an overview on the state of the art of OpenID Connect and R&E world relationship, as well as a glance to the currently available bleeding-edge OpenID Connect Federation standard and tools.

Chairs

  • Paul Dekkers (Surfnet)

Presentations

OpenID Connect and R&E

First Presentation: OpenID Connect and R&E: Achievements, challenges, and future plans. Presenter: Chris Phillips, CANARIE Inc.

The R&E community has built a successful, reliable, and trusted global identity ecosystem over the past decade and a half using SAML as the backbone protocol. As a result, researchers and their platforms are able to focus on their mission to be globally connected with fewer distractions as we focused on infrastructure to support them. Recently, researchers have been using more off the shelf components that depend on OpenID Connect (OIDC), and are asking to integrate this protocol into the trust ecosystem. In this presentation we will discuss how we are working with the OpenID Foundation(OIDF), through the OIDC R&E working group to help bring the R&E community’s unique trust and identity needs into a bona fide Profile in the OIDF. An OIDF Profile represents a standard OIDC profile that off the shelf OIDC solutions need to be capable of supporting, thus allowing our community to continue to benefit from an enhanced R&E trust ecosystem

Second Presentation: OpenID Connect Federations: Achievements, challenges, and future plans. Presenter: Roland Hedberg, OpenID Foundation

The R&E community has run Identity Federations based on SAML2 now for more then a decade. Now when OIDC are making inroads at our Universities we need to understand how to run Identity Federations based on OIDC. At the same time if we can figure out how to run authorization federations based on OAuth2 we’re even better of. The work on OIDC Federation is being done in the OIDF AB/Connect working Group and the intent is to eventually get it accepted as an OIDF standard. A first draft on how to do OIDC Federations was accepted as an Implementers draft July 2018. Since then we have been working on implementations on the draft that will allow us to start running pilots.
In this presentation we will discuss what OIDC Federations can do for you that SAML2 Federations can not.

Third Presentation: Research and Education profiles for OpenID Connect. Presenter: Davide Vaghetti, GARR

To run SAML2 based Identity Federations, R&E identity specialists developed quite a large number of specifications, profiles, guidelines and operational procedures to effectively manage those federations. OpenID Connect based Identity Federations cannot be built without the proper tools, profiles and procedures.

OpenID Connect based Identity Federations cannot be built without the proper tools, profiles and procedures. That is why we developed a registry application, a metadata signing service and a federation profile that combined together can be used to successfully set up an OpenID Connect Identity Federation. Let’s see how.

Speakers:
Files:

Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

8C Cloud User Stories

19/06 09.00 - 10.30 | Terrace Hall

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Description

The GÉANT digital single cloud market changed the way European researchers and instructors access cloud services. In this session you will hear how institutions and NRENs have saved time, money and improved research and education by deploying cloud-based services safely and easily. Representatives from HEAnet, DFN, JISC, SURFnet and RedIRIS will share their institutions’ experience, as well as their own. This session is recommended for anyone interested in cloud sourcing, migration and usage for their own institution, or to support cloud deployment of other users.

Chairs

  • Andres Ehrenpreis (N/A)
  • Kristina Lillemets (N/A)
  • Maria Ristkok (N/A)

Presentations

GÉANT Digital Single Cloud Market Experiences: User Stories from NRENs and Institutions

The NREN presentations describe cloud integration journeys of institutions (single or hybrid cloud, on-premises or online, build or rent services) and bring examples from different provider environments - NREN cloud services, as well as commercial clouds from Microsoft Azure, AWS and others. The use cases focus on the needs of various online services: virtual machines, video recording lectures, storing datasets, backup solutions, disaster recovery and more.

Speakers:
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Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

9A Sharing (Spectrum) Fair & QAM64

19/06 11.00 - 12.30 | Black Box

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Description

As R&E network operators utilize and offer spectrum services to each
other, how do they jointly (co)operate their distinct networks across
each others physical infrastructures ? Existing initiatives, tests and
future plans are used to illustrate that in this session.

Chairs

  • JP Velders (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Presentations

Spectrum Sharing for Next Generation Networks

Spectrum sharing technology pioneered by NRENs allow multiple networks, with different governance and different business and operational objectives to co-exist on the same core fibre infrastructure. The purpose of this session is to address the strategic and business-oriented aspects of the spectrum sharing and optical services in federated infrastructure environments. We will give examples of how federated operations have been realized to make spectrum sharing an operational reality today, emphasizing the strategic and long-term outlook on provision of consistent services using the underlying fabric of federated infrastructure.

Speakers:
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Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

9B Are you ready for your next crisis?

19/06 11.00 - 12.30 | Woodblock Hall

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Description

Crisis exercises are an ideal way of allowing a group of people – ranging in size from a small team to multiple organisations – the opportunity to test and train their way of dealing with (aspects of) a crisis in a safe manner and context. Conducting crisis exercises has additional benefits next to the immediate benefits related to security: It effectively shines a light on the importance of crisis management, tests personal and team skills and provides a group-bonding experience to the players that will make working together in times of a real crisis much easier.

Chairs

  • Alf Moens (SURFnet)

Presentations

Dragons, Sharks, Unicorns and Elves; Stories of Crisis Exercises

In this session we want to present the wide variety of types of cyber crisis exercises that can be conducted and address the different aspects of organising crisis exercises in all their varieties. We will do this by providing presentations on different table-top and large-scale exercises organised by the presenters, and by a presentation on the link between story-telling and crisis exercises.

Speakers:
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Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

9C Everything you always wanted to know about cloud but were afraid to ask

19/06 11.00 - 12.30 | Terrace Hall

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Description

With research and education becoming increasingly global and collaborative, access to cost effective and easy to use services is essential. Cloud computing and cloud based services are a vital component in delivering the next generation of education facilities.

Cloud computing is moving from the computer science labs into the mainstream of R&E with users across all sectors from archaeology to music and drama. Users will become consumers of cloud computing facilities rather than managers or developers. This changes how services are developed and consumed and presents new opportunities and challenges to cloud services providers.

Chairs

  • karl meyer (GEANT)

Presentations

Cloud Services and their role in supporting the next generation of Research and Education Collaboration

This session is a virtually unique opportunity to bring together representatives from the major cloud computing providers to discuss these issues and more!

Speakers:
  • N/A
Files:
Wednesday Sessions

10A 5G: pan-European mobile research capabilities

19/06 14.00 - 15.30 | Black Box

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Description

Research in mobile networks is hampered today by the lack of access to licensed spectrum and commercial equipment. Telecom providers and mobile network operators have invested heavily in licensed radio spectrum and the cellular infrastructure needed to utilize that spectrum. Emerging 5G technologies and IoT-like services require a level of integration with the network (not previously required )to provide extremely low latency services for autonomous vehicles, gaming, sensors, and advanced computationally or data intense services. Research in these technologies are not just hampered by financial or commercial issues, there are jurisdictional and legal issues surrounding access to and use of licensed spectrum.

The EuWireless Project is developing the technical capabilities and administrative recommendations that will allow network researchers to access and share licensed spectrum and link it seamlessly with edge computing facilities, core transport facilities, and large-scale cloud facilities. Technical approaches utilizing abstraction and infrastructure virtualization, network slicing, and software-defined network (SDN) are being complemented with access to spectrum virtualization and sharing, software-defined radio (SDR), and mobile user equipment and applications.

Chairs

  • Nicholas Mbonimpa (Research and Education Network for Uganda (RENU))

Presentations

EuWireless – An initiative to deliver pan-European mobile research capabilities over licensed spectrum

This session will describe the EuWireless Project goals and present a number of key technologies being explored and refined to provide scalable, secure, and ubiquitous access to licensed spectrum and state of art mobile networking infrastructure for European research and development.

As of Dec 2018, the EuWireless project funded and completing first year. By June 2019, we expect to have early prototypes of virtualized mobile resources: eNodeB devices and virtual spectrum. This work is leveraging the network slicing capabilities of the GEANT Testbeds Service software to construct virtual network slices incorporating mobile resource and spectrum. If things go well, we will demonstrate the spectrum sharing.

Speakers:
Files:

Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

10B Trust and Security for Students

19/06 14.00 - 15.30 | Woodblock Hall

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Description

Technology has changed and improved the traditional education in campuses, allowing students and staff to collaborate instantly with others all over the world. This strong dependency on technology brings a responsibility to provide a robust and safe digital environment that needs to be open and inspiring as well.

This session will focus on several initiatives related to the security and T&I in higher education sector.

Chairs

  • Marina Adomeit (AMRES)

Presentations

SWITCH edu-ID: How to spoof Identity Providers

In this presentation, we present new developments of the SWITCH edu-ID service during the last two years. As presented earlier, the key aspect of edu-ID is to tie the identity, i.e. the account and it's associated information, to the person using it instead of to the organisation providing it. Thus the identity can span multiple relationships with academic institutions, the latter only adding (and later removing) attributes to the account that describe the person's affiliation with the institution. Hence, edu-ID introduces a more comprehensive long-term identity schema with personal attributes provided by users themselves and affiliation attributes provided by organisations. These "attribute sets" have varying sources and degrees of quality. How can they be managed, kept up to date, deleted and transmitted to services that use them? These are the challenges our developments address, with a strong penchant for backward compatibility and minimisation of changes for existing services.

Speakers:
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eIDAS-enabled Student Mobility (ESMO) for Identity Federation

ESMO, which stands for eIDAS-enabled Student Mobility, is an EC co-funded project through the Connection Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom program, on e-Identification & e-Signature. The aim of ESMO is to enable students and Higher Education Institutions (HEI) Staff access to HEI online resources and services anywhere in Europe, through the validation of their national eIDs and academic records. This goal is mainly achieved by enabling the convergence among the two main blocks currently advancing in the European Identity Federation scene: eduGAIN and eIDAS.

Speakers:
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Security & Privacy Awareness for everyone!

ICT has brought improvements to traditional education and research processes, it allows students, scholars and staff to collaborate and it has digitalized most if not all administrative processes. This also brings a challenge, not only because of increasing cyber criminality, security leaks and data breaches, but also because institutions and individual users are making use of – often free – cloud services.
Institutions can improve their security and privacy through technological solutions, introducing policies and increasing individual awareness. This inherently makes security a shared responsibility within an institution, and SURFnet believes that a joint effort of institutions, a collective approach, will lead to a more robust, a more mature and a more resilient community.
SURFnet provides a service to its constituency called Cybersave Yourself, as a toolkit for institutions to build their own awareness programme. This presentation will share how we set-up the service and how we collaborate with the community.

Speakers:
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Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

10C Network Automation and Monitoring

19/06 14.00 - 15.30 | Terrace Hall

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Description

Network automation and monitoring is a subject a lot of NRENs are looking into or working on these years. In the first talk we will learn about what drives NRENs to consider network automation, not as much from a technological perspective but from the perspective of providing value to the NREN. The second talk looks into practical and technical experiences with building a monitoring platform that scientific communities deploy monitoring nodes inside their own domains and measuring performance toward centrally placed measurement points.

Chairs

  • Josva Kleist (NORDUnet A/S)

Presentations

Network Automation & Orchestration: Are you in business?

Today, many NRENs are developing network automation strategies. Network technology has been advancing towards the vague promise of Software Defined Networking (SDN) over the last years. Software evangelists promise a world of endless possibilities and ultimate freedom: industry giants will perish and innovation will finally speed up since the hardware is no longer the limitation.

But NREN’s, are struggling. The cooperative power that made the Internet great, is needed to converge all the great new ideas that are labeled SDN. Standards are needed and scattering of valuable developing effort needs to be avoided. Support must be organised for open source applications before they can be deployed in a high availability network. Clearly, developing an automation strategy is not for the faint of heart.

SURFnet has been investing a lot of time and effort in automation & orchestration over the last years. While our new network, SURFnet8, is being deployed across the Netherlands, SURFnet is developing the software that will determine its features and operations.

In this talk, we will share our insights, not just taking a technological perspective, but rather exploring the arguments that may lead NRENs to balance their efforts between automation and serving niches. We will aim to identify fairytales and help guide NRENs who wish to take the next step towards network automation. But we are also interested in learning what the audience believes. Which problem are you solving? Is it worth the effort? At what cost?

Speakers:
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Building Performance Measurement Platform - Lessons learned from operations

Widely deployed multi-domain measurement frameworks enhance the user’s ability to have better network performance visibility. They facilitate the optimal operation of research infrastructures and provide the performance view for globally distributed ecosystems for scientific organisations. perfSONAR is an international open source project focused on delivering a multi-domain network performance measurement and monitoring capability, with a particular emphasis on Research and Education (R&E) networks where high-speed, international data transfers are an increasingly common requirement.

The Performance Measurement Platform is composed of a number of low-cast perfSONAR nodes with pre-installed perfSONAR software deployed in Europe and Africa, a set of measurement points located in the core GÉANT network and a central server. Each small node performed regular network performance measurements towards the core sites and streamed the results into the central archive from which performance data can be displayed, used for alerting and further analysis.

In the talk we relay our experience in deploying the PMP platform and share lessons learned from operating and using it for measurements. We show how the distribution of different monitoring platforms contributes to a global view of network performance and how the perfSONAR-based PMP platform adds a new perspective to existing deployments. We discuss the differences in research network capabilities in different R&E domains that create challenges in the full operation of PMP. We show how participation to the PMP platform inspired the scientific community into further extensions and deployments of monitoring infrastructures.

Speakers:
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Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

11A Closing Plenary

19/06 16.00 - 17.30 | Black Box

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Description

With: Tusu Tusubira, Founding CEO of the UbuntuNet Alliance & Managing Partner of Knowledge Consulting Ltd

Chairs

  • Josva Kleist (NORDUnet A/S)

Presentations

Research and Education Networks in an Environment of Accelerating Change: The Need for a Community-based Approach

Rapid and unpredictable changes driven by the fourth industrial revolution and global mega-trends mean RENs, like other organisations, must adopt a different mould and learn new skills that will make the difference between withering and growth. The technological boundary between REN space and commercial space has become a continuum with unclear borders. The power of the whole that RENS have unleashed through unprecedented access to global knowledge, computational power, and collaboration has led to scientific breakthroughs that challenge ethical underpinnings around the world. We face an uncertain future whose scientific breakthroughs can be predicted, but with social consequences that remain shrouded. This presentation will set a reflective tone with the thesis of a community approach and different skill sets for NRENs to be ready for an exciting but uncertain future

Speakers:
Files:
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Archived stream



Wednesday Sessions

Social Event Cloud Café

19/06 18.00 - 20.00 | Fuel Lounge

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Description

The Cloud Café is organised as an informal discussion and exchange of ideas and experiences on the adoption of cloud services. Refreshments and finger food will be served. Here you can meet the GÉANT project cloud team, colleagues working with clouds from NRENs and institutions across Europe and representatives from cloud providers.

Chairs

  • Maria Ristkok (N/A)

Presentations

N/A