Blog of Random Thoughts and Pictures

FIRE open call, mini call, whatyamacall

February 9th, 2011

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

Having finished up the SFI FI workshop, I had a little time to kill before an early flight to Brussels so I stayed in Dublin and headed for Landsdowne Road (Aviva Stadium) and the Ireland V Wales friendly. It was a cold-wet night, with not that many fans about, with it only livened up by a fantastic goal by Darron Gibson.

Anyway to day one of a 3 day trip to Brussels, I headed for Etterbeck and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) campus for the FIRE open call information day. Firstly there was a slight route optimization problem with getting to VUB from the airport but a train, metro, bus combination eventually got me there. Then comes the maze that is VUB really even with new signs the place is hard to navigate but lucky enough a memory of a Living Labs & Open Innovation event in 2007 got me to the right building location and room.

The information day was an opportunity to see how to submit proposals for the open calls launched by the BonFIRE, OFELIA, and TEFIS projects.

BonFIRE was up first up giving an overview of how it targets the Internet of Services and Future Networks research communities with it’s text bed infrastructure and in particular highlighting its multi-cloud facility and sophisticated network emulation [pdf].

Next up the TEFIS project gave an overview of their interdisciplinary infrastructure which has various testbed resources such as new network paradigms, cloud computing, advanced user interface for services [pdf].

Finally of most interest to me was the OpenFlow based testbed OFELIA which provides a platform for experimentation of novel networking protocols, addressing schemes and applications in the Internet [pdf].

Lunch was extracted form one of the biggest soup vats I’ve ever seen and then afterwards everyone headed over to Plienan 2 for more in-depth sessions with the project participants.

I headed for the OFELIA session which seemed to have the smallest room allocation and the largest number of participants. Further details on the open call process were provided which makes it sounds like a mini FP7 project proposal. I must say I feel for Hagan the coordinator as it doesn’t sound like an easy call to manage.

The last part of the session was the best as people pitched potential projects that could fit into the call and the project partners around the table offered their thoughts and advise in regards to the suitability of the proposal.

So that’s the FIRE open call day, I’ll complete a separate entry for the other two days in Brussels which was for the 7th FP7 Future Networks concentration meeting.

Pouzin Society meets Louis in Brussels

December 15th, 2010

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

Brussels in December is cold but then again this last week in Ireland (Dec 2010) hasn’t been a walk in the park and really I’ve been so lucky to be traveling after all the snow storms have passed. I was also lucky enough to be traveling with Patsy who kept us all in good spirits during the trip, irrespective of the wintry conditions.

Anyway this trip to Brussels was for the first European meeting of the Pouzin Society hosted in Boston University offices. Yes you read that right Boston University hosts some programmes in Europe.

The goal of the meeting was to host an initial gathering of the European networking
community, and to bring them up to speed on the progress the Pouzin Society, of PNA / RINA and to provide a status update on the current demonstrator of RINA.

The initial session of the meeting was given over to Patsy who provided a light tutorial of RINA, and a presentation of the current demonstrator of RINA (OpenTinos). Further to that Eduard gave an overview of the DTP and CDAP specifications.

John and Steve conferenced in via Skype for the next session which was devoted to the logistics and location of a possible workshop in Europe for Q3-Q4 of 2011. The next session during the meeting was given to a discussion on the marketing of PSOC through 2011, with a look at the possible online and offline presence of the society.

The next session was dedicated to the possible strategies towards member state national funding and EU funding of research with targeted deadlines in Aug 2011 and Jan 2012. There was a final session devoted to invited guests (EC) to give them an opportunity a listen in and to also present to the society.

Full minutes and presentations from the meeting can be found at the PSOC yahoo tech group (requires registration).

Now I have to say the biggest trill of the trip was getting the chance to talk with Louis Pouzin the Grandfather of the Internet. Louis was so kind to give us all a run down of his experience and the reasons why and how he designed the networking systems he was involved in. Louis is now the oldest software hacker I know!

left to right, Eduard Grasa, Miguel Ponce de Leon, Louis Pouzin, Patsy Phelan

It was great to be able to ask Louis one fundamental question “did he realize when designing datagrams that 40 plus years later there would be script kiddies and spam?”
The answer from Louis drew an hilarious response which I’m only really willing to repeat when I see you in person.

Finally for those who may not know how important Louis’s work has been to the current Internet as we know it, have a little look at this video just replace 2009, with 2011, 2012, or whatever year you’re in now, the history part still rings true.