Address by Minister Ahern

UPDATE

Tom Boland is Chief Executive of the Higher Education Authority (HEA) since January 2004. The HEA is a statutory body established to allocate public funding to Irish higher education institutions; to oversee performance of the higher education and research sector generally and to advise the Minister for Education and Science on the development of the sector.

Prior to his appointment to the HEA, Mr. Boland was Director of Strategic Policy in the Department of Education and Science, a role he combined with that of Head of Legal Services and Legal Adviser to the Department.

He is chairperson of the Board of HEAnet (a public sector company which provides high quality internet services to the Irish education and research system). He is a member of the Board of the Fulbright Commission and of the Central Applications Office.

He holds degrees in Civil Engineering and Law and was called to the Irish Bar in 1987.

HEAnet UPDATE

John Boland is the Chief Executive Officer of HEAnet, Ireland's National Education & Research Network. He was appointed to this position in October 1997 when HEAnet was incorporated as a limited company with its own staff.

Prior to 1997 he worked as Systems and Networks Manager in the Computer Services Department of Dublin City University and represented DCU on the HEAnet Network Management Committee, before its incorporation.

Prior to joining DCU John worked in industry with a number of international companies including Marconi Communications Systems in the UK, Motorola Information Systems in the UK and the US and Westinghouse in Australia.

He holds a B. E. in electronic engineering from University College Dublin and has embarked on an ongoing M. Sc. in Computer Applications.

As CEO of HEAnet John is involved in the development of world-class Internet services for education and research in Ireland.

Currently John is a member of DANTE's Board of Directors, and represents HEAnet on the NREN GEANT Policy Committee, a collaboration between the European National Research Networks and the European Commission, delivering advanced pan-European research and education networking. He is also a member of the TERENA General Assembly (Trans European Research and Education Networking Association) and on the international task force for Internet2.

Computing: It's more than Binary Code - It's About Criminals!!

Mr. Gibson is the Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft Ltd, in the UK. His primary role is to serve as an advisor to Microsoft's customers, and the public, on the work Microsoft is doing to improve the security of its products. This role comes on the heels of his retirement from a 20-year career as a Supervisory Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). During this period, Gibson was a recognized expert in investigating complex, international money laundering schemes, asset identification and confiscation, and intellectual property theft. While assigned to FBI Headquarters, Washington, DC, Mr. Gibson developed and managed an operational training program for all Special Agents and executive management, in money laundering and asset confiscation investigations.

From early 2000. mid 2005, Mr. Gibson was assigned to the FBI's Legal Attache office, US Embassy London, as an Assistant Legal Attache. There, he was responsible for all FBI cyber, hi-tech, cyber-terrorism, and infrastructure investigations in the UK. His leadership resulted in the creation of a model cyber program adopted by all Legal Attache offices around the world.

Mr. Gibson was a corporate lawyer for a US based multinational corporation for five years prior to the FBI. While assigned to the US Embassy, he qualified as a Solicitor in England and Wales, and completed a two-year computing program at Oxford University. He is a Member of the Board of the John Grieve Centre for Policing and Community Safety, in England.

Complexity in Networking - Challenges for Manageability and Security

Michael Behringer obtained his diploma in computer science at the Technical University of Munich. For five years he worked at the European Internet Service Provider DANTE, based in Cambridge, UK, where he last held the position of senior network engineer, responsible for the design and implementation of DANTE's pan-European networks. Since 1998 Michael works at Cisco Systems, based in France. As distinguished engineer he focuses on service provider security issues, such as MPLS security and Denial-of-Service attack prevention. Michael is an active member of the IETF.

ENUM - Electronic Numbering

Conor Daly is the Network Operations Manager with the IE Domain Registry (IEDR), the body that manages the dot IE country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). He has been working for the IEDR since 2000 and has been involved in all areas of technical operations during that time. During his seven years he has been primarily responsible for infrastructure and service improvements and most notably development of the dot IE DNS infrastructure. In May of this year, he was responsible for the launch of commercial ENUM services in Ireland, a service run by IENUM Ltd, a joint venture initiative of the IEDR and IPA of Austria. He is currently leading the development of this ENUM service and is a member of the Irish ENUM Policy advisory Board.

Traffic Engineering - Challenges for "hybrid" networks

Mark Miklic was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1976. He attended the University of Ljubljana from which he holds the BSc in Electrical Engineering-Telecommunications. After his studies he joined NIL Data Communications, one of the most respected networking companies in the central European region. While at NIL he co-authored Cisco BGP and MPLS courses and gave several presentations on CPN (Cisco Powered Networks) events in San Jose as well as a presentation on IS-IS protocol at Cisco Networkers in Las Vegas in 2005. Besides this he also consulted with companies like Novartis and Orange Switzerland during their MPLS rollouts. Currently he holds a position of Network Design Engineer at Google, concentrating on BGP and MPLS-TE design, expanding optical capacity and general build out of the Google core network.

YouTube Education: Can we cope with the demand?

Brian Mulligan has been a lecturer at Institute of Technology Sligo since 1984, more recently being appointed as iOpen.ie Project Coordinator, a project whose mission is to rapidly grow online distance learning in Ireland. He has organised the EdTech series of e-learning conferences since 2000 and is a founding member of the Irish Learning Technology Association. He has worked on the development of online distance learning courses since 2001. More details at: http://brian.mulligan.googlepages.com/

WiMAX - Providing broadband connectivity in rural areas

John O'Raw has been IT Manager at Letterkenny Institute of Technology since 1996. Prior to this he worked as a project leader with ABB, based in Milan, for 6 years. Specialising in large scale process automation and information systems, John was involved in projects worldwide. Prior to this, during the late 1980.s John worked with Combustion Engineering in Dundalk as a Project Engineer. John holds a BSc in Information Technology, A Diploma in Electronic Engineering and separate Master.s Degrees in Applied Computing and Maritime Archaeology. John's current research activity is primarily in the delivery of broadband to dispersed rural areas; however, he retains an active involvement in both Maritime Archaeology and Geophysics. John currently represents the Institutes of Technology on the board of CHEST Ireland.

Outsource Everything: Webservices in education and research

Alan is a Senior Principal Engineer with Amazon and Director of Amazon's Infrastructure Technical Office. He's been with Amazon since June 2005, based in Amazon's Technology Operations office in Dublin. At Amazon he worries about building massive, reliable, global, distributed systems infrastructure. Prior to Amazon, he spent over a decade in the ISP industry architecting ISP systems and network infrastructure, initially as Technical Director of the first commercial ISP in Ireland and most recently as Head of R&D at eircom.net. Further back, he spent over a decade at Trinity College, Dublin, collecting BA and PhD degrees. As a postgrad, he worked on EU funded research into object-oriented distributed systems.

eduroam Workshop/Discussion

Louis Twomey has spent the last 16 years working in the IT industry. In the early stages of his career, he was heavily involved in a number of projects in the research and academic community, including the implementation of the national network interconnecting the Regional Technical Colleges (RTCnet). He subsequently spent over 10 years as a networking and security consultant with Kerna Communications Ltd before returning to the research and education sector by joining HEAnet in early 2006.

Virtual Learning Environments - Moodle

Eric Clarke began working in RCSI as a member of the Anatomy technical staff and since 1989 has been involved in the development of information and communication technology at the College. In 1998, Eric was formally appointed as Computer Aided Leaning Coordinator, this role gave him an opportunity to develop several projects including teaching software production, Intranet development and the implementation of online examinations at RCSI. Throughout the last 10 years Eric has also been closely involved in the RCSI compulsory laptop scheme and more recently in the implementation of Moodle. Eric has pursued formal training in Informatics and was awarded the degree of MSc in Healthcare Informatics in 2000. Eric was appointed as lecturer at RCSI in Medical Information Technology in August 2002.

Virtualisation Panel: Experiences with virtualisation (so far)

Mr. John Ronan received his Degree in Computer Science (B.Sc. in Industrial Computing) and his M.Sc. in Computing from Waterford Institute of Technology Ireland in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Since 2000 he has been a researcher in the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group in Waterford Institute of Technology where he studied for his CCNA in 2004. His research interests include Security in Next Generation Networks, Network testbeds and advanced grid systems and services, community wireless networks and low bandwidth digital communications. He has supervised undergraduate students for their BSc thesis, lectured in Networks & Communications and has worked on National and EU funded research projects.

Virtualisation Panel: Experiences with virtualisation (so far)

Brian Scanlan (MNS, HEAnet): Brian is a Senior Systems Administrator in the Managed Network Services team. Brian joined HEAnet in August 2004, on the Schools Broadband network project, and moved to his current position in December 2006. Brian is involved in day-to-day systems administration, network security and automating the provisioning of network resources.

"Running out of Space: IPv4 Exhaustion"

Brian Nisbet joined HEAnet in 2001, and is a Senior Network Engineer in the Network Operations team. Over that time he has had an opportunity to be involved in a wide variety of projects touching almost all of the areas of HEAnet's operations. His current focus is on certain HEAnet - client interactions and the NOC's network management infrastructure.

College Email Solutions - Why ?

Michael Nowlan has been Director of the Information Systems Services at Trinity College Dublin since 1995. Prior to that he headed up the service in the Computer Science Department in TCD. He is a director of the Irish Higher Education and Research Network HEAnet and was involved in the startup of the first commercial ISP in Ireland.

IT Security Policies and Campus Networks

Sara McAneney is the IT Security Officer in Trinity College Dublin, a role she has held since 2003. She has been responsible for authoring and implementing the University's information security policies which are based on the international ISO 27001 standards. Sara is a graduate of Queens University Belfast and also a qualified Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP).

Wireless extends the reach of the internet

Dr. Markku Ellilä, Head of Technology, Broadband Wireless, Radio Access has held R&D and general management positions in several international companies, covering technologies from paper machinery and fiber optics to telecommunications. He received his degree of Doctor of Technology at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1988, based on work on detector technology of the LEP particle accelerator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Most recently, Dr. Ellilä has held management positions within the Radio Access businesses of Networks, Nokia and in Nokia Siemens Networks. His main interests have been in enterprise solutions, in GSM/EDGE, WCDMA and WiMAX infrastructure and in software business.

Looking in EARNEST for future directions in European Research and Education Networking

Kevin Meynell is a Project Development Officer at TERENA, the European Association of NRENs. He was the editor of the EARNEST Technical Sub-Study, and is currently involved with the FEDERICA and GLIF initiatives. After graduating from Middlesex Polytechnic in 1991, Kevin Meynell joined the JET Project, an experimental nuclear fusion programme. He moved to UKERNA (now JANET(UK)) in 1995, before joining TERENA in 1997. He also spent a short period working on domain name issues with CENTR.

Web2.0 / Student2.0 Key challenges for IT in Higher Education over the next 5 years

Dr Conor Galvin is a Lecturer and Researcher at UCD College of Human Sciences where he work on various education, ICT, and research methods programmes. He also guest lectures on the MScIT programme at Trinity College, Dublin and on the MSc Learning Technology course at NCI. Dr Galvin is currently Director of Professional Development at UCD School of Education and Lifelong Learning. Dr Galvin’s research interests include social capital, professional knowledge, innovation transfer in an information society, e-learning, schools ICT and the impact of new and emergent technology on learning and society. He has recently completed research evaluations of the Diageo Liberties Learning Initiative, Dublin and the EU funded DigEuLit project. He has also been an Assessor on a number of EU actions relating to the Information Society - most recently on eLearning and MINERVA - and has been National Delegate (Ireland) to an OECD summit on the Information Society & Education. Dr Galvin ho lds The President’s Award for Teaching Excellence at UCD and regularly speaks throughout Europe at conferences on ICT / IST and policy related issues.

Security Workshop: Hack the Network

Rob Gallagher joined HEAnet in 2006 as a Network Engineer in the Managed Network Services (MNS) team. He is primarily involved in the areas of security and system administration. Prior to joining the company, Rob received an MSc in Security & Forensic Computing from DCU and spent 2 years working for Kerna Communications as a systems and network engineer.

Security Workshop: Hack the Network

Aidan Carty joined HEAnet in 2006 as their Security Expert. He is primarily involved in the internal and external security of HEAnet along with providing security advice to HEAnet's clients. Prior to joining HEAnet Aidan spent 9 years working for Entropy Ltd as a Security Engineer. Aidan is also a CISSP, CCSP, CCSE+I and an ISO 27001 Lead Auditor.

e-INIS

Professor Luke Drury is a theoretical astrophysicist with a strong interest in computational methods. As an undergraduate he studied both pure mathematics and experimental physics at TCD, graduating in 1975 with a gold medal in Physics. He obtaind his PhD from the University of Cambridge (England) in 1979 with a thesis on "Some fluid dynamical problems in astrophysics" and then went on to work at the Max-Planck Institut fuer Kernphysik in Heidelberg, Germany. Here his interests switched to particle acceleration in shock waves and the origin of cosmic rays. He was promoted to a permanent position in Heidelberg and then received an invitation to return to Dublin as Senior Professor in the School of Cosmic Physics of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1986. In 1987 he was awarded the Shakti P Duggal award at the 20th International Cosmic Ray Conference in Moscow "in recognition of significant contributions to cosmic ray physics by a young scientist of outstanding ability". He successfully led the DIAS bid under PRTLI cycle 3 for the CosmoGrid project and was instrumental in establishing the Irish Centre for High-End Computing of which he was acting director from June 2006 to February 2007. He currently leads the e-INIS consortium which has just been funded under PRTLI cycle 4.

Service Development Planning

Ronan Byrne is Special Programmes Manager at HEAnet, with responsibility for programme management of certain large scale projects. Within this remit, Ronan heads up HEAnet's Schools Team which has responsibility for the delivery of a Schools Network broadband backbone infrastructure and associated portfolio of network services to approximately 4,000 primary and post-primary schools in Ireland. Ronan has over 17 years experience in the IT sector and prior to joining HEAnet in 2004, he established a successful track record of large-scale project deployments with Fujitsu Services, Via Networks, and ICL Computers, where he delivered technical projects to clients such as American Airlines, Esso Ireland, Irish Shell, Dublin City Council and the Irish Revenue Commissioners. With qualifications in corporate compliance, marketing and project management, Ronan also holds an MSc. in Internet Systems from Dublin City University.

Deploying IPTV services in the Campus Network

Orla joined HEAnet in 2000 to create HEAnet's IPv6 testbed. After a career break during which she completed a M.Eng.Sc in IPv6 Firewalling in the Hamilton Institute (NUI Maynooth), she returned to work in Network Operations. In December 2006 she moved to her current position as part of the Managed Network Services team. Orla works mainly on the services network infrastructure, the services and Co-location PoP, the NDLR Project, BGP, IPv6, and Multicast.

Network needs of 4000 EU researchers

Dr. Thibaut Lery is presently Science Officer of the Physical and Engineering Sciences Unit for the European Science Foundation (ESF). He manages European projects, foresight studies and is the Unit contact person with several boards and external institutions or projects, such as the e-IRG or PACE. He has also been working as an expert for the European Commission. His main areas of expertise are computer sciences, astrophysics, plasma physics and space science. He was previously involved in the Irish Cosmogrid project and the European Research and Training Network JETSET as scientific manager, and was an active member of the Irish Center for High End Computing (ICHEC) during the starting phase. Before this, he was holding postdoctoral positions in France, Canada and Ireland.

PRTLI, Cycle 4, HEA

Sheena Duffy is Assistant Secretary in Research Programmes in the HEA. Sheena works on a wide range of research policy issues and is responsible for the financial management of the research grants administered by the HEA. She has been involved in the Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions since its commencement on a pilot basis in 1998. During her time in the HEA, Sheena also worked in the Recurrent Grants Section where she was responsible for the management and administration of the recurrent grant to the Universities and other HEA designated institutions.

Sheena was Acting Director of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) from September 2006 to July 2007.

Virtualisation Panel:Experiences so far

Graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from UCC in 1999. After stints in Cork, Bray and Paris he joined DCU in 2002 initially in a support role. He is now the Desktop Development Supervisor, charged with the support and maintenance of the DCU desktop infrastructure.

IReL - Irish Research e-Library

Marie Reddan is Librarian of the James Hardiman Library at NUI, Galway since December 1991, her previous post being that of Deputy Librarian at the University of Limerick. Her professional interests include scholarly publishing and open access, library support to researchers, collaborative resource sharing (IReL the major example here), library space planning, library services to users with special needs, staff development and in particular, management of change and quality of services in academic libraries. A former Chair of CONUL and the IUA Librarians’ Group (currently secretary), she serves on a number of national committees. She is a member of Chest Ireland Management Board and is a Director of both IRIS and HEAnet Ltd. She chaired the HSS Infrastructures sub-committee of the RIA’s Expert Group on the Humanities and Social Sciences and is a member of the National Library of Ireland’s Reader’s Advisory Committee. She is also a member of SCONUL’S Advisory Committee on Space and is a former member of An Chomhairle Leabharlanna.

NIBEST: Autobahn of the Northwest - The Link, the Projects, and the Potential

Tim is the NORIBIC co-pilot of the NORIBIC / WestBic Cross Border Business Innovation Centre initiative, CBBIC. As the CBBIC Development Officer, Tim Kelley has had the privilege to work with HEAnet and NIRAN on NIBEST, Northwest Ireland Business and Education Supported by Technology. NIBEST is about plugging in Northwest Ireland. We attempt to expand the educational horizon of the region's students with informational and collaborative support systems across the northwest's new Gigabyte link. Our aim is to increase their options, their knowledge, and their chances for pursuit of their passions. Tim is responsible for the provision of a full range of innovation, marketing promotion, support and development to the Cross-Border BIC. His principal activities include: researching the needs of students, educators, and businesses on both sides of the border; developing suitable innovation programmes that will meet these needs; researching relevant funding sources and supporting the management team in making applications for funding to support those programmes. He also provides ongoing inputs to the strategic development plan of the Cross-Border BIC. Tim Kelley has over 20 years of business development experience, most recently focusing his energies on pre-startups and incubation support. This follows a five year stint exclusively in SME strategy and alliance development, grounded in ten years of internal and external delivery of corporate IT solutions. Currently, the Cross Border BIC project, which is funded by Interreg IIIA, affords Tim the luxury of developing projects and partners for the region. He most enjoys his work with the students, the pre-startups, the incubates, and helping them carve out a place for them and what they love to do. His most recent engagements in Territory Development, Business Development and Strategic Alliances, involved the alignment of corporate objectives to identifiable trends / industry directions, to develop new lines of sales, products, and customers