Open Plenary - Fiche Bliain ag fas: a retrospective view of networking developments surrounding HEAnet over the last 20+ years. There are many lessons that can be learnt from the development of HEAnet that can be applied to its future development and that of networking in the constituent members.

As well as seminal points from HEAnet, the retrospective look will include the major developments in the world of networking from a European and Irish perspective.

Mike Norris, Senior Technical Officer, HEAnet

Dave Wilson, Senior
Network Engineer, HEAnet

Open Plenary - The next 20 years, the future of Irish Internet

"Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?"
Undeterred by the rhetorical nature of this question, Dave and Mike will attempt some answers. As a counterpoint to the retrospective theme of the Conference, they will be giving some sneak previews of what's in prospect for the Irish Education and Research Networking in the next twenty years.
The leitmotif of their light-hearted crystal ball exercise is
taken from Andrei Platonov: "What do you mean - lies? The truth's even worse."

Mike has worked for HEAnet since 1992. As Chief Technical Officer, he is directly responsible for the Network Operations Team and the Managed Network Services Team.
His duties and projects include IE hostmaster, local IP registrar for Irish education and research (1991 - 2001), expert in Telematics evaluation and reviews CEC (1995 - ).
Other affiliations and project in which he has been involved are: member of Terena task group to set up pilot European CERT (1996), co-author of ripe-152, chairman of RIPE Local-IR working group (1994 - 1998), board member, RIPE NCC (1987-2001), chairman of INEX and member of Terena Compendium review panel.

Dave Graduated in Computer Science from UCD in 1996, with a project in Formal Methods and worked for Kerna Communications where he created the Swift Guide to Ireland.
He has been Senior Network Engineer for HEAnet Limited since the company was founded in 1997, and since then have worked on deploying and maintaining the backbone of Cisco routers, and services offered on our UNIX and NT systems.
His current duties include National Backbone maintenance and continuing upgrades, Network management system and traffic analysis, UNIX system administration, ISDN access and backup, Network security and interfacing with JANET CERT.

Open Plenary - HEAnet stategic directions

John holds a B.E in electronic engineering from University College Dublin and has embarked on an ongoing M. Sc in Computer Applications with Professor Alan Smeaton in DCU.
Before he joined the company in1997 John was Systems and Networks Manager at Dublin City University and was a member of the HEAnet Network Management Committee.
John is dedicated to ensuring that Ireland's Education and world-class Network serves the Research community and places Ireland at the leading edge of worldwide Internet activity . Two of the key components for this are HEAnet's National Backbone Project and Next Generation Internet projects - both of which are implemented with the support of the HEA and Department of Education and Science and funding under the National Development Plan.
He and the senior HEAnet staff, represent Ireland on the strategic European networking organisations - including DANTE (Connecting European Research) who are primarily responsible for delivering the EC-funded pan-European Gigabit network to which Ireland is connected, TERENA (the Trans-European Research Network) and ENPG (European network policy group). Along with representing HEAnet on the IBEC Telecomms Internet Federation and the ISPAI (Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland).

Parallel A2 - Implementing WebCT: DIT’s Institutional Strategy

The Dublin Institute of Technology has begun to introduce WebCT as its chosen virtual learning environment to 22,000 students and 2,000 staff.
The initial phase is scheduled over a three-year period, when it is hoped that the technology will be adopted and incorporated by up to 50% of existing courses, enhancing face-to-face teaching. To achieve this target, a dedicated learning technology team of five has been appointed to work with
IT staff, librarians, academics and students. Technical and training targets have consistenly been met, and the strategy is now almost half-way through the initial roll-out phase. This paper will outline not only the technical setup (WebCT with LifeKeeper as failover, importing student records from SCT
Banner), but also the details of the roll-out itself, training programmes and the general reception of WebCT across DIT’s six faculties.

Parallel A3 - Virtual Museums

Charlie Pritchard is the manager of the Digital Media Centre a multidisciplinary research group within the Faculty of Applied Arts at the Dublin Institute of Technology. The Centre manages a number of research projects funded both nationally and by the EU. The projects are clustered around two main themes - intelligent heritage and technology enhanced learning environments

I3G Interactive gallery project

The presentation will focus on a demonstration of a project developed for the National Gallery of Ireland. The i3G is a modular system for planning and presenting the atmosphere and content of galleries and museums as interactive environments for use by the public and the gallery staff. It uses realistic 3D models of the gallery in question and a collection of digital images taken from the galleries holdings.
The presentation will discuss some of the issues encountered in modelling the building , digitising the paintings together with how the system was implemented.

Ann Harding,
NOC Manager, HEAnet

Dr.Dave Malone,
CNRI, DIT

Parallel B1 - IPv6 theory and implementation in HEAnet

In the first part of this presentation we will give a quick introduction to the details of IPv6 that will be useful to people running IPv6 networks and hosts. We will cover some IPv6 basics and some simple deployment examples.

In the second part of this presentation, we will outline experiences of deploying IPv6 on production services. Over the summer of 2002, many of HEAnet's core services went live with both IPv4 and IPv6 and summer 2003 saw the move from a testbed environment to running IPv6 natively on the
live core and access network, with full staff support. We will highlight some of the choices that faced us and outline how this affects the future.

Speakers:

David received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Trinity College Dublin in 2000 after receiving an M.Sc. in 1997 and a B.A.(mod) in 1996. In 1999, while still a postgraduate, he worked as a lecturer on TCD's High Performance Computing M.Sc. course. On graduating with his Ph.D., he was recruited by Corvil Networks as a R&D Engineer where he worked until taking up the post at CNRI. He is the author, along with Niall Murphy from Enigma Consulting, of "Deploying IPv6: An Operational Guide to the Next Generation Protocol."

Ann joined HEAnet in 2000 as a network engineer and is currently Network Operations Manager. HEAnet's Network operations and Network Development teams worked together to deploy IPv6 as a fully available HEAnet service.

Parallel B2 - WIT experience with IPv6

Mícheál Ó Foghlú is one of the founder member of the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) in Waterford Institute of Technology (http://www.tssg.org). His primary research interests are in are area of Internet technologies for of mobile services.

The TSSG has established an internal IPv6 testbed with some basic IPv6 services, and IPv6 tunnelling via HEAnet to the Europrean research networks. Using this infrastructure the TSSG has carried out some research into the overhead of deploying IPsec using IPv6 (this is important when planning for deployment of secure IPv6 to the home, for example). The talk will also summarize work done in the TSSG on a DiffServ bandwidth broker for IPv6/IPv4 and how this relates to an overall testbed architecture for a Premium QoS-enabled IPv6 service lifecycle (QoS, Security, Accounting, Mediation, Rating and Billing).
Much of this work is directly related to use of IPv6 in UMTS 3G networks.

Parallel B4 - The Development of an All-island Expertise Portal - expertiseireland.com

This presentation will outline the background to the development of expertiseireland.com the island's expertise portal. Central to this project was the design of systems and processes that provide tangible benefits to each of the stakeholders, namely the individual expert, the institutions in which the experts work, and the regional development authority InterTradeIreland that funded the initiative.

The strategy adopted to ensure that the information on the portal is maintained will be outlined, along with its main functions and facilities.

Likely future developments for the portal will also be described.

Closing Plenary - Building security into our infrastructure

This talk will cover:

1. General security awareness - What we have seen in the past
2. Common misunderstandings - What is information security and why do we all need it (some stories from the front line)
3. Whats really important about security? - Policies and proceedures / Some Law and how it affects us
4. The road ahead - what HEAnet are doing for you, now and in the future.
5. Q & A

Warren joined HEAnet in Nov 2001. Prior to that he worked with Broadcom Eireann Reseach for two years, and previously for EMC and Scientific Systems.
Currently, Warren is HEAnet's Security Expert.

Opening Plenary - From Black Box to Crystal Ball: Still a journey.

We will take you on a tour of the last 20 years of networking in Ireland and we will consider the future of Education & Research Networking and the Internet

The evolution of technology over the last twenty years has been marked by great accomplishments and unanticipated (surprising) results. Both industry and government were unprepared for the affinity with technology that the general public inherently had, and the demands imposed on the technology sector both in terms of solutions and talent. Today we examine Education, Research Networking and the Internet as distinct scenarios in the evolution of technology into the future. A brief summary of already examined overviews will be followed by examples in each of these areas based on work being undertaken by inViVo Vision scientists. These will include Pedagogenomics, a Personal Research Networking Space (PreNS) and the Carousel Website Solution.

Dr. Miriam Masullo is the founder and CEO of inViVo Vision, Inc., a technology and intellectual property solutions company in Connecticut, US. She was Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center,until her retirement earlier this year from IBM. She went to IBM Research in 1985, with a long-held personal interest in education and 16 years of experience in both systems analysis and network engineering from the telecommunications industry.

At IBM Research Dr. Masullo she made significant contributions to the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Expert Systems, System Management, Policy Management, and Object Oriented Systems. Her education research activities at Watson included the design of a systems infrastructure for the management and coordination of curriculum in K-12 education; and, other related research in the fields of networked multimedia, digital libraries, digital broadcast satellite and digital data broadcast systems and pilot projects for education. Her work in educational technology research has been focused on worldwide equity of access to education.

Dr. Masullo was named New York City's Business Educator of the Year in 1997 by the City College of New York and "A Woman Who Makes a Difference" in 1998 by Black Engineer and Hispanic Engineer Magazines.
Dr. Masullo was a member of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the New York Academy of Science, a member of the Experts Group on Education and Technology of the National Council on Competitiveness, a member of the Advisory Board of the City College School of Engineering, and a member of the Advisory Board of the National Peace Garden. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Discovery Museum in Bridgeport Connecticut, and of the Board of Directors of Mount Saint Michael Academy in New York City, New York. She is cited in Who'sWho in America Millennium, Who'sWho in American Women in Science and the International Who'sWho of Distance Learning.

This presentation reviews the challenges of harnessing the Web to the benefit of all citizens - specifically including those with disabilities. This will be a roller-coaster tour of needs, opportunities, technologies, and obligations - ethical and, increasingly, legal. It should be of particular interest to
policy makers and those responsible for the deployment of
web services of all sorts, both public and private.

Barry's background, research interests and current activities can be found at his DCU Website.

Paralell B5 - Network Synchronisation using the Network Time Protocol (NTP)

Time synchronisation across interconnected networks is an aspect of network design that is often overlooked. Without some means to insure that all devices in a network are synchronised to a single time reference, functions such as event logging, fault analysis, security incident response and network management become unmanageable. This talk presents the Network Time Protocol (NTP) as a synchronisation solution offering high accuracy and low computational burden. In particular, it focuses on the infrastructure necessary to provide a robust NTP service and the current state of the Irish NTP subnet.