The TSSG have been recipients of support from this programme and had the pleasure of presenting demonstrations from our research. Our exhibit was called the "Metropolitan Information Management System" and a number of TSSG staff worked extremely hard to highlight how our research has impacted on everyones day-to-day live; helping us to get around faster, to plan more effectively and to understand our environment.

The exhibit ‘Services in the City’ demonstrated to the visitors a scenario in which a person within the vicinity of a city centre could gain access to various information like shopping, child amenities, entertainment, directions to a location, details of the travel options etc., on their PDA or mobile phone.

This demonstration also marked the success of a PRTLI funded project called M-Zones which provided the basis and initial research that led to this vision of ubiquitous computing being pursued. The TSSG is currently involved in newly funded HEA project called "Serving Society: Management of Future Communications Networks and Services" or HEA FutureComm. This interdisciplinary project is investigating the relationship between technological and social trends/aspects in the future communication networks.

Back to the exhibit when you see how the set up of the demo looked before being constructed in the Science Gallery there were times when you wondered ...... will this really be an interactive exhibit, however once the finished exhibit was in place it looked great, and people did come and interact!

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

EU FP7 call 4 is open and a good starting point is the main ICT page.

The topics being covered in this call include
* Challenge 1 - Pervasive and Trustworthy Network and Service Infrastructures
* Challenge 2 - Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics
* Challenge 3 - Components, systems, engineering
* Challenge 5 - Towards sustainable and personalised healthcare
* Challenge 6 - ICT for Mobility, Environmental Sustainability and Energy Efficiency
* Challenge 7 - ICT for Independent Living, Inclusion and Governance
* Future and Emerging Technologies (FET)

Although you have to watch out, there are specific objectives from these challenges which are being addressed so have a good look at the call fiche.

The EU approach is summed up with the video attached below

With the accompanying EU website on ICT reaserch around the Future Internet worth a visit.

I've given a more general overview of the document on on the main TSSG 4WARD page. Just to say most of my contribution in this document was towards the consolidation of the WP2 new architecture requirements and the WP4 in-netwrk management requirements.

In WP2 we are developing an architecture framework that is flexible enough for specifying and realising a new family of interoperable network architectures with varying degrees of desired properties according to the needs of the targeted networking scenario (e.g., in a backbone network, a sensor network, or a mobile ad hoc network) while ensuring certain common principles and properties (e.g. interoperability, security, mobility, quality of service). Hence this framework has to take into account a multitude of network variants in order to facilitate the design of the “best” network for each task, each device, each customer, and each technology.

I also had a part to play in pulling together the requirements for WP4 for In-Network Management in which we are devising an embedded "default-on" management capability which is an inseparable part of the network itself. This capability will generate extra value in terms of guaranteed performance in a cost effective way, and will enable the networks to adjust themselves to different sizes, configurations and external conditions”. The guiding principles to achieve this goal are decentralisation and self-organisation.
The realisation of the In-Network Management paradigm includes developing a network management plane that self-configures and dynamically adapts to changes in networking conditions. The plane provides communication and coordination primitives for a range of distributed management functions.
4WARD In-Network Management addresses these challenges by introducing a thin, pervasive layer which performs core management functionalities already inside the network, but which can be complemented by additional management functionality outside the network where necessary.
For more information in relation to this 4WARD In-Network Management there is an public deliverable available D4.1 Definition of scenarios and use cases [pdf]

I must admit it is still early in the project and there are a number of significant advances being made, however at times it feels as though there are some many things happening in parallel its hard to keep up with everthing going on.

3 destinctive clusters have been established:
1) Radio Access and Spectrum (RAS)
2) Future Internet (FI)
3) Converged and Optical Networks (CaON)

From the 30th Sept to 2nd Oct there were cluster meetings, a plenery meeting and a couple workshops worth noting.

For the cluster meeting, I attended the Workshop on Self-Management, which was organized by a partner of mine in the EFIPSANS project, Ranganai Chaparadza, and his presentation on the rationale, duration scope and structure of a new ISG being proposed towards ETSI for the Autonomic Network Engineering for the Self-Managing Future Internet [pdf] was quite interesting.

A set of slides expressing the conclusions from this cluster meeting can be found here [pdf] and all the presentations for the day can be found on this link.

While I had to head for Stockholm at the end of this 1st day, my collegue Kevin Quinn stayed for the plenary sessions, where there was some significant progress made on the Madrid Future Internet Assembly preparation [pdf].

Finally the last day completed with a 4WARD workshop on Future Internet 'Business Innovation and Regulation Challenges [pdf]. The workshop was broken into 4 parts with Session 1 giving a 4WARD introduction and then an overview of the projects Use Cases and Business Models. Session 2 looked at Policy, Regulation & Governance and Session 3 covered Future Internet Innovations. It all ended with a Panel Discussion on the Network of the Future: Is there a business for a radically new approach?

All the presentations from this 4WARD workshop can be picked up off the 4WARD website

[1] I always wondered if the word concertation was a real word. It appears it is, well in Wikipedia land, however in the dictionary of record OED I cannot find it at all as there is no publicly available search function and from Collins and Merriam-Websters I've not had much luck either, so does the word concertation really exist?

The ICT 2008 event in Lyon was massive ..... again it never ceases to amaze me the pure size of this event.

There was just so much to cover at this event and it is interesting to see it from a number of different perspectives, such as Dave Levy's entry on ict_2008_lyon and this report on the opening plenary debate of the ICT 2008.

And you can gather a flavour of this event for yourself with a look at the plenary session videos.

Although as with any conference there were networking sessions that were not run very well, and then there were sessions such as the one on Societal and ICT perspectives: the impact of Trust, Security, Dependability, Privacy and Identity, which ran very smoothly (okay shameless plug this session was organised by the TSSG).

There were 11 people from the TSSG including Paul Malone, Mark McLaughlin, John Ronan, Martin Serrano, Jim Clarke, Kevin Doolin, Jason Finnegan, Huaiguo Fu, Keith Howker & Sinead ( I hope I haven't missed anyone) and I would be interested to hear their thoughts on participating in such an event.

So there was FIREWeek in September in Paris

The event started on the 10th of September with the FIRE Launch Event in L'Hotel de Ville Paris. All the slides can be seen off the launch event site
, however for me it was quite interesting to see the perspectives of the American Testbed Initiative and Japanese Testbed Initiative.

On the 11th of September 2008 I participated in the FIREworks Strategy Workshop, which I must say was excellently run.

I was asked to give a few words around the topic of "Resource description: The cornerstone of federation" and my presentation can be seen on SlideShare (and below if embedded correctly).

Haven given the presentation and receiving some feedback it is clear this there are two schools of thought in regards to the Resource description, one on the side of Service Orientated Architectures (SoA) and another towards Ontologies (and the Semantic Web).

All the slides and presentations can be seen off this programme link.

On the 12th of September 2008, I was due to take a day off and visit ...... well Paris, however with the very interesting Workshop on Converged Networks happening that day I took in the morning session and made a quick presentation on the TSSG research activities around the "Management Of Future Communication Networks And Services".

One a forum discussion on What is innovation? which is part of discussion being posed by NESTA on : What should an Innovation Index contain?.

Which goes hand in hand with a recent report on The New Inventors: How users are changing the rules of innovation with a full report [pdf].

Although the question always being asked is where is the proof, the report above give some examples ... here's a couple of others

1) The crowdsourced restaurant Elements, which is a concept that has expanded from the original idea for a small cafe to a full-fledged, green-certified restaurant. Members earn points for their participation efforts, and are eligible to share in the profits allocated to members. {As reported in the Washington Post}

2) If you're going to write a book about crowdsourcing why not get the crowd involved in the book cover design as was the case with Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe. The Top 20 designs that just missed out being the book cover can be seen here, and nicely enough the first 5 Chapters of the book can be seen on the site also.

PERIMETER is really attempting to take user-centric strategies to achieve seamless mobility driven by actual user needs, we believe that putting the user at the centre rather than the operator enables the user to control their identity, preferences and credentials, and so seamless mobility is streamlined, enabling mobile users to be “Always Best Connected” in multiple-access multiple-operator networks.

A major part of the TSSG work will be in the testbeds, where we will interconnect with TUB and then help co-create and assess Perimeters middleware components and its integrated applications and services.

Which leads nicely to FIREweek September 10-12th in Paris. An interesting event launched on the 10th with a follow up strategy workshop on the 11th, the week closing out with the 2nd workshop on IMS Enabled Converged Networks: New paradigms for services delivery

It started with an excellent new comers presentation by Scott Bradner

There were some highlights from MEXT such as the
The Global HAHA Operation at the Interop Tokyo 2008 & The Design Consideration of Correspondent Router [pdf]
and
RADIUS Mobile IPv6 Support [pdf]

Also from MIPSHOP
AAA-based Handover key for FMIPv6 [pdf]

and Netmod
NETMOD Architecture

But this is just to mention the tip of the iceberg of the many interactive sessions from IETF #72. And I say interactive, as at all the sessions I attended there were questions from the floor towards the speaker, something I've not seen before. And believe there were some very strong questions, if I remember rightly John called it a session of feeding someone to the sharks!
For me this made the sessions memorable.

A large number of the IETF 72 Meeting Materials can be accessed from this link provided.

The week ended with an Advisory Council meeting with ISOC. The TSSG are new organisational members to the AC and this was my first opportunity to attend such a session. One eye opener was the presentation by Arnoud Van Wijk, Disability Projects Coordinator, on the Real-Time Text Task Force, this is something definitely worth further investigation.

For me TridentCom 2008 hasn't finished and the 2009 call for papers has already been out for sometime now.
This is the 5th International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks & Communities (Tridentcom) which is being held April 6-8, 2009, Washington D.C., USA. www.tridentcom.org/cfp.htm

The important dates (but always check the website) to hand are :-
Papers due (to be received by): October 1, 2008
Demo proposals due: November 1, 2008
Notification of acceptance: December 15, 2008
Submission of camera-ready papers: January 15, 2009

[1]

its going to be a busy week

According to Gisle Hannemyr and his report 'A Critical Examination of Adoption Rates' there appear to be no major differences between the adoption rate of the Internet and the patterns of adoption for radio and tv in the past.

Through the report he has

identified the discrepancy in adoption rates as possibly resulting from trans­lations of actual data into carefully phrased re-statements of fact in support of a particular financial or political agenda.

Funny that!

More can be seen from Dan Kaminsky Discovers Fundamental Issue In DNS: Massive Multivendor Patch Released .

To save the day we also have the newly created Industry Consortium for the Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI), which offer advisories and support.

All of which still has me very worried given that on Wednesday, 3rd December 2008 the .tel TLD will offer a service that allows individuals and businesses to store and manage all their contact information and keywords directly within the Domain Name System (DNS) without the need to build, host or manage a website.

And what about SocialDNS, personal details already retrieved via DNS. go://miguelpdl [Just a Firefox plugin required].

A list of recently published papers from Google
http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

And here is just a great paper on the "Cold Topics in Networking"

J. Crowcroft, Cold topics in Networking, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 38 , Issue 1, January 2008.

One last item which I didn't get to use this time was the new "PDF Widget on Acrobat.com". I had the same concern as the commenter, as I don't own the pdf I didn't feel comfortable uploading it to the Acrobat site. But I will try this on some of my own pdfs next time.