Global Experimentation for Future Internet (GEFI):
Brazil - EU - Japan - US collaboration

This session will be the opportunity to present the outcomes of the first workshop on Global Experimentation for Future Internet or GEFI. With the participation of Europe, US, Brazil and Japan, the 1st GEFI workshop will take place in Brussels just before Net Futures 2016 conference.

The GENI[1]/FIRE[2] collaboration initiative, active since 2013, aims at developing joint activities between EU and US-based researchers in the field of Future Internet Experimentation. Their investigations have dug into areas of mutual interest, such as future internet architectures/services/applications, federation, cloud, IoT, wireless, ontologies,…

During the previous joint workshop, held in Washington DC in September 2015[3], the participants and organisers identified additional countries with Future Internet testbed activities well‐suited to participate in the first “enlarged” collaborative workshop. Japan and Brazil have confirmed their participation in the 1st GEFI workshop.

This session will start with an overview of the funded collaborations among the involved countries.

It will then continue by exploring and showing through live demos how global experimentation can boost research and innovation, and build a worldwide Future Internet playground enabling the researchers, industry, SMEs and startups to mature and tests their ideas.

Spanning from physical infrastructures and virtualized resources, up to end-users communities, the available testing facilities should offer a huge variety of environments and technologies, driving the development and faster growth of Internet-based products, services and new businesses.

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[1] GENI: Global Environment for Network Innovations (US) https://www.geni.net/
[2] FIRE: Future Internet Research and Experimentation (EU) http://www.ict-fire.eu/
[3] http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/GENIFireCollaborationWorkshopSeptember2015

Detailed Workshop Outline

14:30 Opportunities for collaboration from the funding authorities perspectives

  • Per Blixt, European Commission (EU) (presentation)
  • Jack Brassil, National Science Foundation (US) (presentation)
  • Nozomu Nishinaga, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (Japan) (presentation)
  • Michael Anthony Stanton, Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (Brazil) (presentation)

14:50 Challenges and way forward for global experimentation

  • State of the play of the FIRE/GENI collaboration – Piet Demeester (iMinds, Belgium) (presentation) / Chip Elliott (BBN, US) (presentation)
  • Aki Nakao (Univ. of Tokyo, Japan) (presentation)
  • Tom Lehman (Univ. of Maryland/Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (UMD/MAX), US) (presentation)
  • Iara Machado (National Research and Educational Network – RNP, Brazil) (presentation)
  • Brecht Vermeulen (iMinds, Belgium)
  • Mattias Vanhoutte (Televic company, Belgium) (presentation)

15:50 Q&A, conclusions and next steps

  • Per Blixt, European Commission (EU)

Session Speakers

Per Blixt
Per BlixtEuropean Commission - Head of Unit
Per is Head of Unit in the European Commission, DG CONNECT for over 10 years, currently responsible for unit Experimental Platforms. He is Civil Engineer from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH). For more than 10 years he was holding different positions in the Swedish Cabinet Office and later as Counsellor for Transport and Communication at the Swedish Representation to EU.
Nozomu Nishinaga
Nozomu NishinagaNICT Managing Director
Nozomu Nishinaga received his B.S. and M.S. in Electronics Engineering and his Ph. D in Information Engineering from Nagoya University, Japan in 1994, 1996, and 1998, respectively. From November 1998 to March 1999, he was a research assistant at the Information Media Education Center, Nagoya University. From 1999 to the present, he has been a researcher with National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (formerly, Communications Research Laboratory). Since April 2011, He is director of New Generation Network Laboratory, Network Research Headquarters. His current research interests include internet architecture and wireless communications. From January 2016, he is managing director of International Promotion Department and doing his business in Sunnyvale in California, US. He is a member of IEICE.
Jack Brassil
Jack BrassilProgram Director, National Science Foundation (USA)
Jack Brassil currently serves as a Program Director in the Division of Computer and Network Systems at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, USA. His program responsibilities include experimental computing and networking research infrastructure (e.g., GENI, US Ignite, NSFFutureCloud).

Dr. Brassil has performed and managed computing and networking research for over 25 years, is a Senior Scholar in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University (on leave), and is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Tom Lehman
Tom LehmanUniversity of Maryland/Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (UMD/MAX)/Director of Research
Tom Lehman is the Director of Research at the University of Maryland Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (UMD/MAX) in the United States of America. MAX operates a high performance regional network serving the Research and Education community in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Mr. Lehman is responsible for developing and leading research projects in the area of advanced network architectures, intelligent control planes, multi-layer inter-networking, and integration of dynamic networking with distributed compute and storage resources.
Iara Machado
Iara MachadoRNP - R&D Adjunct Director
Iara Machado is Assistant Director in the Directorate of R&D at RNP. She coordinates working groups related to Advanced Application projects. All this activities involve extensive collaboration with the Brazilian networking research community. She has also worked for more than 19 years in Brazilian Telecommunication Company (Embratel) as Management System Architect. Graduate in Physics from the University Federal of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and got a Master Degree in Computer Networks from the University Federal Fluminense (UFF).
Michael Stanton
Michael StantonRNP, Director of R&D
Michael Stanton is Director of Research and Development at RNP, the Brazilian national research and education network. After a PhD in mathematics at Cambridge University in 1971, he has taught at several universities in Brazil, since 1994 as professor of computer networking at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro state, until his retirement in 2014. Between 1986 and 1993, he helped to kick-start research and education networking in Brazil, including the setting-up and running of both a regional network in Rio de Janeiro state (Rede-Rio) and RNP. He returned to RNP in 2001, with responsibility for R&D and RNP involvement in new networking and large-scale collaboration projects. During this period, RNP has deployed a modern optical infrastructure providing high-capacity services for nationwide and international collaboration. RNP’s R&D activities have been conducted with the collaboration of research groups in ICT in Brazilian universities, and have led to the development and adoption of new user services by RNP, as well as enhancing RNP’s collaboration with similar network organisations abroad. RNP also provides focused support for the communications needs of its scientific and cultural user groups, supporting their collaborations with domestic and international partners. Since 2012, Michael’s new international activities include representing RNP on the Global CEO Forum’s Global Network Architecture (GNA) group, engaged in the design of the architecture of the future academic Internet, and joining the Council of the Research Data Alliance in 2014.
Aki Nakao
Aki NakaoThe University of Tokyo/Professor
Prof. Dr. Akihiro NAKAO received B.S.(1991) in Physics, M.E.(1994) in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo. He was at IBM Yamato Laboratory, Tokyo Research Laboratory, and IBM Texas Austin from 1994 till 2005.
He received M.S.(2001) and Ph.D.(2005) in Computer Science from Princeton University.
He is a full professor and also a department chair at Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the University.
He has also been appointed by the Japanese government as a chairman of network architecture committee of the fifth generation mobile network promotion forum (5GMF) in Japan.
Brecht Vermeulen
Brecht VermeuleniMinds iLab.t technical manager
Brecht Vermeulen received the M.Sc. and PhD degree in Electro-technical engineering from Ghent University, Belgium and leads a research team which investigate network and server performance and testbed federation. Since the start of iMinds in 2005, he also leads the iMinds Technical Test centre iLab.t where he started a.o. the local deployment of Emulab based testbeds and testbed tool development.
Mattias Vanhoutte
Mattias VanhoutteTelevic Rail NV - R&D Engineer
Mattias is working as an R&D Engineer in Televic Rail NV. He is Civil Engineer from the University of Ghent and worked on a software management platform for train applications. He did research on optimizations for train-to-wayside network communication in the rail industry together with different universities.