Miguel PdL

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.