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15th Meeting of the COST Domain Committee for ICT

March 4th, 2011

This has been cross posted to my TSSG blog

Some early morning fog in Brussels had me held up a little on arrival but once we touched down it turned out to be a glourious spring day in Belgium. I’m was here in Brussels for the COST ICT domain committee meeting and hearings, where we are listening to and deciding on some new COST actions in ICT.

We are also here to discuss the COST ICT Domain budget update, full proposal selection process and the proposal ranking algorithm, and had an overview of the outlier tool.

There were also some changes in final event handling (as of Nov. 2010) and some e-COST updates that needed to be discussed and of course the monitoring of ICT Actions in progress.

We went through the evaluation of completed and ending actions which included:

2010 Completed Actions

With the action ended the rappatours were giving an overview of some of the final news items from the Actions.


Action 2100 was highlighting its joint workshop on Wireless Communications, 1 – 2 March 2011, Paris, France. JNCW 2011 was organised jointly by the European Network of Excel- lence in Wireless Communications (NEWCOM++) and the European Cooperation Action on Pervasive Mobile and Ambient Wireless Communications (COST 2100).


Action 2101 was highlighting its Biometric ID Management Workshop ( BioID 2011 ) which was the Third International Workshop organised by COST Action 2101. The BioID 2011 will be held in the city of Brandenburg in the Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences.


Action 2102 was higlighting a publication announcement of the Proceedings of the PINK COST 2102 INTERNATIONAL Conference on “Analysis of Verbal and Non Verbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issues”, in LNCS and also its Third International Training School notes from March 15-19, 2010.

Posted in COST, EU, ICT, Research, Technology | No Comments »

7th concerntation meeting of Future Networks

February 11th, 2011

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

Okay time is not being kind to me especially when it comes to completing entries for this blog and while February 2011 is already a lifetime away, but given that I was in Brussels directly after the FIRE workshop, I’d like to report on my attendance at the 7th concerntation meeting of Future Networks.

The main part of the plenary was given over to description of Future Networks research towards standardisation activities. The last part of the session was given over to future research topics in the area as identified by Net!Works, ISI, EIFFEL, NEWCOMM++, BINE and EURO-NF. All presentations can be seen off this link.

The second day of this meeting was split into a number of separate plenaries as the Network of the Future projects are organised into three clusters: Future Internet Technologies (FI Cluster), Radio Access and Spectrum (RAS Cluster) and Converged and Optical Networks (CaON Cluster). I attended the FI Cluster, the agenda and presentations of which you can see off of this link.

There were a number of presentation on the economic and user perspective of Inter-ISP traffic optimization, where ETICS, IBBT, SESERV and SMOOTH-IT made presentations on the matter.

I was quite interested in the session on Information and Execution Automation between the Service and Network planes where GEYSERS, MEDIEVAL, ONE, ONEFIT and  UNIVERSELF gave their view points, however I was left a little perplexed that there was no real concensus on the topic and no plan to reach one.

Okay only a few words it really shouldn’t have taken me this long to post it
, but I hope this gives you a quick overview of the EU activities in the area of the Future Internet, with the next big event FIA Budapest in May.

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Posted in Autonomic Network Management, EC, EU, FP7, Future Internet, ICT, Research, Technology | No Comments »

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.

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Posted in Future Internet, ICT, Living Lab, Technology | No Comments »

SFI Future Internet workshop

February 8th, 2011

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

I have found it hard to keep a handle on all the Internet based research happening in Ireland so I jumped at the chance to participate in the recent SFI workshop on the Future Internet. It proved to be a fantastic opportunity to catch up with old aquaintancies and to meet some new researchers in the field.

Now the topic line is a little controversial in that the term Future Internet now means many things to many people however what’s good about the term is that it can act as a nice umbrella term to capture the massive shift in Internet research which is looking for new ways to move, share, find, define and create digital information. Whether this information is for use in Education, Health , Finance Marine or even Agricultural services it was great to see the wealth of situations to which Irish research was being applied to.

To set the context for day early presentations in the workshop highlighted the meaning of the future Internet, the new architectures being discussed at the EU level and some perspectives on the European Future Internet Assembly.

I gave an overview presentaion on this topic, and my slides can be seen here.

EC FIA Activities overview 2011

Then in ernest a volley of 10 minute presentations were given by

  • Willie Donnelly on “Why the Future Internet?”
  • Stefan Decker on “From Linked Data to Networked Knowledge” and “Real-World Internet (FIA)”.
  • John Kennedy on the “Future Internet – An Intel Perspective”.
  • Pol Mac Aonghusa on “IBM Smart Cities”.
  • John Holland on the “Ericsson view”.
  • Keith Griffin on the “Cisco view”.
  • Fergal Ward on the “Intune view”.
  • Barry Smyth on “The Sensor Web”.
  • Ronan Farrell on the “CTVR Future Internet activities”.
  • Mike Hinchey on “Lero and FI”.
  • Barry O’Sullivan on “4C Future Internet activities”.
  • Steve Gotz on “CNGL and FI”.
  • Padraig Cunningham on “Clique and FI”.
  • Martin Johnsson on “FAME and FI”.
  • David Malone on th “Hamilton Institute Future Internet activities”.
  • Brendan Jennings on “FI Dagstuhl 2011”.

All the slides can be picked up off this SFI FI workshop page.

I found the format perfect 10 mins meant people had to get to point quickly while at the same time give an impression of the depth of research and it has to be said some very interesting solutions are being investigated in Irish research organisations.

Next up was a presentation by the Marine Institute with some use cases to which only Future Internet technologies could be applied. What followed was some discussion on other use cases which would be applicable, and I gave a presentation on upcoming FI PPP use case.

FI PPP Use Case Examples 2011

I usually find that the next steps for this type of event are left hanging in the wind however in this case it couldn’t be further from the truth as plans are now afoot for a broader workshop to take place in Q2 of 2011.

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Posted in EC, EU, Future Internet, ICT, Technology | No Comments »

2010 Blog posts a year in review

January 25th, 2011

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

Just to check my sanity, or insanity I’m going down through the years activities as captured in my blog posts.

In total I managed 19 posts for the year 2010, although admittedly some of them got written in 2011, but I thought it would make sense to date the posts for around the time the item actually happened.

The blog started in 2010 with an Update on Irish Future Internet Forum” from my 2009 activities and my last post for 2010 was on the “FIA Ghent and the PII Future Internet award“.

The most viewed post was a 2007 entry “The relationships between different scientific disciplines shown as a paradigm map” although I think because of the image and pick up from StumbleUpon during the year it brought through many viewers.

The most viewed 2010 post, written in 2010 was the one I put together on the MONET Special Issue: Advances In Wireless Test beds and Research Infrastructures which overall I’m especially proud of this activity, as I spent countless spare time hours to put together the actual journal, and I’m glad to see readers appreciated the post.

Google was by far the biggest referrer of people towards the blog, with people seemingly wanting to find out what I was doing for “EU FP7 Call 5”. Just to fill you in the team won 5 projects, all are up and running now, two of which I’m directly involved in day to day PASSIVE and ANIKETOS and three I monitor and support Effects+, BIC and ceFIMS.

There are still three posts I didn’t manage to complete in 2010, but I should get to send them out soon enough, and given a couple of recent trips there are a further two new posts in the making for 2011. So I plan to keep writing, bad grammer, spelling an all and if you’re still reading don’t be afraid to drop me a line, ask a question or dare I say leave a comment.

Another fresh new year is here . . .
Another year to live!
To banish worry, doubt, and fear,
To love and laugh and give!

This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest . . .
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!

I have the opportunity
Once more to right some wrongs,
To pray for peace, to plant a tree,
And sing more joyful songs!”

William Arthur Ward

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FIA Ghent and the PII Future Internet award

December 17th, 2010

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

So with the Pouzin Society meeting coming to a close I took the short train ride over to Ghent for the FIA activities. The assembly is quite big now as compared to FIA Madrid and there were tons of interesting sessions however I spent most of my time in the FIA session II: Smart Infrastructures and FIA session V: Architecture Group.

Three particular items caught my eye “Programmability of the Infrastructure – CHANGE project” and “Resilience in Networks: Elements and Approach for a Trustworthy Infrastructure – ResumeNet project” and the follow up activities of the FI Arch group (on the current internet limitations document [pdf])

Then came the great news that Panlab II had won the Future Internet prize for the best European Future Internet initiative. Wow a great success for the PII team, and especially those in the TSSG which included Eamonn, Shane and Zohra.

Their work focused on PII resource repository, which was implemented using a REST style architecture, the full design of which can be seen below.

The PII Repository Data Model was defined by two data models
* Core Data Model
* Test Suite Data Model

The list of deliverables capturing this work include:
D3.1 System Analysis where a list of the Panlab Community testbeds are maintained and the resources from those testbeds providing PII components are described in UML [pdf].

D3.2 Testbed Service Description Specification in which the specification of the service description system is given. Also requirements are broken down into more refined technical requirements for the specification of the PII testbed services description system [pdf].

D3.7 Implementation Report in which the Service Description, Service Discovery and Service Orchestration of the PII testbed is given. This document also reports on the extensive implementation efforts realised by WP3 PII partners delivering a functional PII framework [pdf].

D4.2 Monitoring requirements and procedures for service level agreement compliance has the functional specification of PII’s quality assurance framework, which hosts the metrics and processes for quality assurance in the PII framework [pdf].

And finally their paper
Eamonn Power, Zohra Boudjemil and Shane Fox. Architecture and Implementation of a Testbeds Repository [pdf]. International Conference on Telecommunications and Multimedia (TEMU) 2010, Chania, Crete, Greece, July 2010.

I’m delighted to see that Eamonn, Shane’s and Zohra’s work has been recognised.

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Posted in FP7, Future Internet, ICT, Technology | No Comments »

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.

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European Network on Quality of Experience in Multimedia Systems and Services

November 8th, 2010

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

This 1st Management Committee (MC) meeting of the European Network on Quality of Experience in Multimedia Systems and Services (QUALINET) on the 8th of Nov. 2010 was another item I participated in late last year and for which I wanted to report on.

The network is a new COST action in the ICT area. I won’t explain COST again, but if you haven’t come across this EU wide programme may I point you towards an overview of mine on COST at this link

Back to QUALINET, the objective of this COST Action is to establish a strong network on Quality of Experience (QoE) research and to promote methodologies to subjectively and objectively measure the impact in terms of quality of future multimedia products and services.

The network has large academic and significant industrial participation which will stand to it in the long run. The purpose of this meeting was to give all the MC participants some general information on the COST mechanism and on the funding and reporting of coordination activities. The MC’s also had to agree on the internal rules for the management committee, and most importantly to elect the Chair and Vice-Chair which all went very smoothly as Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi (Chair) and Prof. Andrew PERKIS (Vice-Chair) took the reins.

What followed were presentations on workplan and working methods for the implementation of the COST Action and the initial distribution of tasks. It was interesting to learn about the International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX), which has a deadline of submission coming up on March 14, 2011. There was also some impact on the standards side already, with some participation in the ETSI Workshop on QoE, QoS and User Experience . All the presentaions from this ETSI QoE workshop can be sourced here.

Finally the meeting had a twist as I got the opportunity to meet face-to-face a fellow tweeter Christian Timmerer (@timse7) from Austria. Given that I have only interacted with Christian online, it was nice to finally meet and have a quick chat.

Alround a quality first meeting.

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EU – Japan Symposium on Future Internet and New Generation Networks

October 22nd, 2010

This entry is cross posted to my TSSG blog.

Directly from finishing my open source session at the 6th Future Networks concertation meeting I headed for the Brussels airport to catch a flight to Tampere, Finland (via Stockholm) for the 3rd EU-Japan Symposium on Future Internet and New Generation Networks.
The flight was easy going, and the stop off in Stockholm was nice as I got to watch some Champions League football and then relax a little in the Starbucks cafe, catching up on some emails.

Tampere is the third largest city in Finland, and the scene for a number of technological innovations, I was told the first test GSM calls were made here. The actual hotel / conference location was set in a picturesque location by a lake.

Tampere outskirts

The event itself started with some high level presentations on EU Digital Policy, the Digital Agenda for Europe and the ICT Paradigm Shift in this decade. I found the presentation Masahiko Tominaga, Vice President, NICT on NwGN R&D Strategy [pdf] the most interesting of these.

On the next break, it was great to get the opportunity to share lunch with Sasi. Now I know Sasi normally only sits a couple of floors away from me, but it’s times like this we really get a chance to discuss at length a whole miriad of topics.

After lunch the event was broken up into sepereate Tracks and I headed for Internet/Network Architectures session. Sasi presented on the emerging generation of symbiotic networks: Federated Communication Systems [pdf] while I took the opportunity to present on RINA, the Recursive Inter Network Architecture, which is based on the work originated by John Day.

RINA: Recursive Inter Network Architecture

What I took from the whole session was the interesting work of Takeshi Usui (NICT/KDDI Laboratories) on the Virtual Network Mobility:Advanced Mobility Management over Network Virtualization [pdf] and Nao Kawanishi (ATR) on his vision of An Open Mobile Communication System with All Strata Virtualization [pdf].

I was pleasantly surprised by the symposium and people I meet at this event and the first sign of snow, which made the long trip back, via bus to Helsinki and then plane via London Heathrow and onto Dublin a worthwhile one.

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Posted in EC, EU, FP7, Future Internet, ICT, Research, Technology | No Comments »

Open source software and FP7 research for future networks

October 20th, 2010


The were a number of items I didn’t manage to record from 2010, so here is a catch up session on the Future Networks 6th FP7 concertation meeting, in Brussels, 18-20 October 2010. As I had recieved an invite to put together a small part of the programme, with a panel session that discussed Open Source & FP7 Research, I just wanted to relay its outcome.
Given that open source software is being recognised as a potential exploitation avenue for the FP7 Future Network programme, there are many projects looking to go this route, but there are clearly many items to consider. I must say I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to open source software relam but thankfullly I had the pleasure sharing the sesion with 4 very experienced people in this space.
Image of Open Source & FP7 Research panel session, kindly provided by Johan Myrberger of the Sailors Inn http://www.sail-project.eu/sailorsinn/author/johan/
Richard Graham of the Bird & Bird Law firm, took the first part of the session and through his presentation [ppt] offered his insight on the legal aspects of OSS in proprietary projects and OSS in open source projects, drawing some parallels to the FP7 project environment and gave an interesting overview of the licenses that are out there.
Now next up was due to be Roberto Galoppini, and I hadn’t meet Roberto before, however just through our online conversations he was super enthusiastic about presenting, however due to personnel circumstances he couldn’t phyiscally make it to Brussels. However he did write an excellent piece with his thoughts on EU-funded Projects and Open Source.
Next up was Marko Boger, CEO of Gentleware and Professor for Software Archtitecture at the University of Applied Science Constance (HTWG Konstanz). I was delighted to see Marko really engage the audience with his presentation on Open Source in Business. He also used the Prezi tool to put his presentation together, it really came out well. One major point he highlighted was software quality, and ways to measure it when it came to FP7 projects. Sonar looked extremely interesting for this.
The final speaker was Dr Diogo Gomes of IT Aveiro, and through his slides [ppt] Diogo highlighted the role of managing open source software in ?an academic environment. He showed how his group developed, supported and integrated open source software into the research programme at IT Aveiro.
Finally to say, my contribution to the session was an overview of my experience of open source software when it came to the 4WARD project. The slide set can be seen below.
All the slides can be seen from the Europa site.
Finally just to prove that this event did actually take place, I found that as I was putting this blog entry together there is an entry by Johan Myrberger at the Sailors Inn which nicely records a summary of the session also.

Open Source Research in FP7 Future Networks

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