Internet2 Showcase
Internet2 regularly showcases our members' efforts on behalf of advanced research and education networking. We not only encourage Internet2 members to share their achievements with the community, but also the interesting people, events, developments and collaborations that make those achievements possible. If you have suggestions for news, events, projects or people that might be featured, please contact info@internet2.edu and include a brief description, appropriate links and images and contact information. Thanks for helping us spread the word.
The New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) is hosting an Internet2 Day on 22 April 2005. This daylong event will showcase the advanced networking capabilities of Internet2 and highlight ways it is being used by higher-ed institutions across the US. The program will open with introductions by Dr. Donald Sebastian, Senior Vice President for Research and Development at NJIT, and David Ullman, Associate Provost and CIO at NJIT. A keynote presentation by Charles Yun, Internet2 Program Manager for Science and Engineering, will highlight Internet2 advanced applications activities in the science and engineering discipline areas. Jennifer MacDougall, University of Pennsylvania and Applications Coordinator for MAGPI, will provide perspectives on developing a regional research and education community on Internet2. MAGPI is the gigaPoP for NJIT and other research and education institutions in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. NJIT connects to MAGPI, which operates an OC-12 connection (622 Mbps) to the Abilene Network, via NJEDge.net (New Jersey's Higher Education Network).
The Internet2 Day will continue with a panel of NJIT faculty who will discuss research opportunities using Internet2. A series of small group discussions will allow attendees to learn more about applications of Internet2 in the sciences and engineering, the NJIT Access Grid, the Internet2 Commons, the Internet2 K20 Initiative, and other topics.
According to Ullman, "NJIT has an active research program in many areas including, engineering, mathematics, the applied sciences, technology, and computer-mediated communications. Our Internet2 Day is aimed at increasing awareness of the capabilities and possibilities that Internet2 brings to the campus and our research agenda. We feel the activities of the Internet2 Day will provide a springboard for new research initiatives not only among our research community, but for our visitors from neighboring academic and research institutions. Internet2 is a major evolution in the way people communicate, collaborate and exchange information. It will have profound effects on teaching, learning, and research."
Bridging the Gap Workshop: August 30-31, 2005
Networking problems are growing and must be addressed. Some of these problems are due to applications using far less network power than is potentially available with expert tuning. This workshop aims to bridge the gap between the four groups involved in network applications: 1) network experts ("wizards”), 2) members of scientific research communities using demanding, network-driven applications, 3) application developers and maintainers, and 4) campus network engineers who support local campus network infrastructures. The workshop will result in an action plan for moving forward on the following two issues related to cooperation and coordination.
The Internet2 community has deployed an advanced network infrastructure that represents the leading-edge of Internet technology and provides a window into the potential of the future Internet. However, the hundreds of campus networks, dozens of regional networks, and nationwide networks that make up the Internet2 community's network infrastructure are not immune to the issues that arise in today's commercial Internet, including illegal file sharing. Internet2 and its more than 200 university members are working together to prevent and address illegal file sharing.
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The inaugural gathering of the Internet2
Teaching and Learning Working Group will take place on 2 May at the Spring
2005 Internet2 Member Meeting in Arlington, Virginia. The mission of the
Teaching and Learning Working Group is to increase awareness of, and engagement
in, the uses of advanced networking technologies in support of teaching 
and learning
activities throughout the Internet2 member community. The Working Group will
serve as the convener of, and support group for, these initiatives—focusing on
the unique issues and needs of those who are implementers and early adopters
of advanced technologies in the teaching and learning arena. The kick-off
meeting will include updates on activities in the teaching and learning
arena and also include case studies, such as "Learning Commons and Internet2." The
Working Group is co-chaired by Jennifer MacDougall, MAGPI GigaPoP, University
of Pennsylvania and Martin Siegel, Indiana University. Ann Doyle, Internet2 Program
Manager for the Arts and Humanities Initiative, serves as the Internet2 staff
liaison to the Working Group.
The University of Notre Dame Office of Information Technologies (OIT) will host an Internet2 Day on 6 April 2005. Notre Dame CIO Gordon Wishon will welcome attendees and provide opening remarks, followed by presentations by Ann Doyle, Internet2 Program Manager for Arts & Humanities Initiatives and Charles Yun, Internet2 Program Manager for Science & Engineering Initiatives. The Internet2 Day program will also feature demonstrations and presentations by Notre Dame faculty, including a professor using Internet2 advanced networks to conduct a cross-cultural class in two languages, in real time and on two continents. There also will be a demonstration of a scanning electron microscope located at the University of Michigan operated via remote control over Internet2. Finally, attendees will be treated to a dual live musical performance coordinated over Internet2 between musicians at Notre Dame and Vanderbilt University. "The event is designed to be both an enjoyable and functional demonstration of how educators, including those at Notre Dame, are using the technologies made possible by Internet2," says Kevin Abbott, an educational technology specialist in the OIT Educational Technologies and Services division, who organized the event. Internet2 related activities continue on 7 April, when Doyle and Yun offer private consultations to Notre Dame faculty and staff on the use of Internet2 resources in classrooms and other learning environments.
The InCommon(TM) Federation enables federated authentication and authorization so that higher education institutions and their partners can share information and resources in a highly secure environment while providing unparalleled privacy for individual users. Using Shibboleth® open source software, a technology developed by Internet2 members and deployed by over 150 organizations, InCommon creates a shared trust framework that allows participating organizations to make decisions about access privileges for protected online resources based on users' attributes rather than their identities. Elsevier's ScienceDirect®, the world's largest online library for peer-reviewed scientific, technological, and medical information, is one of the earliest adopters of Shibboleth and InCommon.
Shibboleth®, federated authentication technology developed by the Internet2 community, enables more scalable, privacy-preserving access to online resources. Internet2 corporate member EBSCO Information Services, one of the largest publishers of online information, has engaged in a key technology transfer role by incorporating Shibboleth into its commercially-available research service, which provides online access to more than 120 databases and thousands of electronic journals. EBSCO has worked with the Internet2 community to develop and test Shibboleth virtually since the beginning of the project. In collaboration with Internet2 member Ohio State University, EBSCO was the first resource provider site to implement Shibboleth. In 2004, EBSCO announced full Shibboleth support, as one of the authentication mechanisms enabling access to more than 11,000 journals and 5.1 million articles.
Photo by Mike Hutmacher provided courtesy of The Wichita Eagle.
An ensemble of Wichita State University (WSU) trombone students performed an arrangement of Scarborough Fair during a videoconference on 15 March 2005 for members of the New World Symphony (NWS) trombone section in Miami, FL. The high-bandwidth, low-latency audio and video streamed over Internet2 advanced networks, provided musicians in Wichita and Miami an experience that was as close to "in-person" as possible. The two-hour exchange, dubbed "The Slides of March" by WSU music professor Russ Widener, allowed the students to perform solo pieces as well and receive one-on-one critiques and tips on technique from the NWS musicians. Widener added, "It's like taking a trombone lesson, and you don't have to fly to Miami to do it." NWS loaned WSU an MPEG-2 codec to provide the live, interactive stream to Miami. The event was also streamed live across Kan-ed, the new Kansas statewide broadband network for educational institutions, hospitals, and libraries. Kan-ed funds a program called Kan-ed Live! which provides both live webcasts and a webcast archive to Kan-ed members.
The Virtual Room Videoconferencing System (VRVS)
is Caltech's web-oriented service that provides a low cost, bandwidth-efficient,
extensible means of videoconferencing and remote collaboration over IP networks.
The Caltech team passed a new milestone in global collaboration and communications
when VRVS's chief architect, Philippe Galvez originated an intercontinental
videoconference using the VRVS production system, on a flight over the Atlantic
at an altitude of 12,000 meters on March 7, 2005. Participants at Caltech in
Pasadena, California (USA), at a university in Kosice (Slovakia), at CERN in
Geneva (Switzerland), and Galvez on a Boeing 747 en route from Los Angeles to
Munich were able to enjoy a high quality videoconference session. This mile-high
conference was made possible by Caltech's advanced global collaboration system
and also the new Internet connectivity service now available on selected airlines.
The unique features of VRVS helped to transparently resolve technical issues
such as a firewall, Network Address Translation (NAT), multi-site connectivity,
latency, and jitter—while managing to deliver 1.5 Mbps video to the plane
and around 200 Kbps to the ground with nearly zero packet loss. Philippe Galvez—VRVS
project manager and co-inventor (with Harvey Newman, Professor of Physics at
Caltech)—summed it up by saying "You now have no excuse to miss
a meeting!" Galvez and collaborators will be presenting on VRVS during their session Next
Generation Grid-Enabled Collaborative System at the Spring
2005 Internet2 Member Meeting.
Registration will close on 18 March for the Seventh Annual SURA/ViDe Digital Video Conference, taking place in Atlanta, GA on 28-31 March 2005. This year's conference—sponsored by Microsoft, Internet2, VBrick, and Global Media—includes several highlights including a keynote presentation by Dr. Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, who will be speaking on multimedia literacy. In addition, attendees can select from sessions on public broadcasting and collaborations in higher education, eLearning, K-12 applications, Session Initiation Protocol, multicast, eHealth, and much more.
A number of post-conference workshops are also scheduled:
>The Internet2 Commons Site Coordinator Training provides hands-on instruction for set-up and operation of H.323 videoconferencing. Successful completion of site coordinator training certifies each participant as an Internet2 Commons Site Coordinator—enabling them to provide support for users of the Internet2 Commons Videoconferencing via H.323 and other Commons remote collaboration services within their organization. Jonathan Tyman, Internet2 Manager for Digital Video will be among the presenters at this workshop.
>The Hands-On How-To for Big Video workshop will look at the latest applications in videoconferencing and streaming and include discussion of multicast, DVTS, DV/IP, HD/IP, costs, bandwidth requirements, and production considerations. Bob Riddle, Internet2 Technologist, will be among the presenters at this workshop.
>The Moving Image Metadata workshop will look at all the components of OAIS-compliant metadata and demonstrate the Moving Image Collections (MIC) Project strategy of using them.
The post-conference workshops require separate registration.
Registration and the preliminary program for the Spring 2005 Internet2 Member Meeting, taking place 2-4 May in Arlington, VA, are now available. Thanks to dedicated effort on the part of the Spring 2005 Program Committee, meeting highlights include a general session presentation by the new Director of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., as well as more than 110 presentations and panels, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, Special Interest Group and Working Group meetings. Register and reserve your housing early, as room rates increase after 8 April and registration fees increase after 18 April.
CampusEAI, a non-profit organization created to address the unique needs of educational institutions and other non-profits in the areas of software development and digital content distribution, recently became the newest Internet2 Association Member. With 70 member organizations, representing over one million learners, CampusEAI’s mission is to facilitate communications and collaboration among member institutions to help leverage collective work and minimize duplication of effort. The recently created Internet2 association membership category is intended for non-profit, higher education associations and other membership-based consortia with missions that focus on advanced technologies for research and education.
A key component of security is well-managed access to and protection of online resources and user privacy while enhancing ease of use. Managing user identity and related information not only reduces the staff required to manage appropriate access but also allows better service by facilitating the provisioning of services and the flexible auditing of information access requests. The NMI-EDIT Consortium—together with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)—held CAMP Med: Identity and Access Management for Medical Applications Workshop, which took place 9-11 February 2005 in Tempe, AZ. This workshop brought together over 70 registrants from both central campus IT organizations and academic medical centers, who convened to discuss identity and access management issues for academic medical centers and areas of mutual interest. Topics presented at the workshop included background on the middleware work currently underway in NMI-EDIT and the Internet2 Middleware Initiative, as well as related challenges in the medical space, including HIPAA and research support. Specific discussion sessions allowed attendees to explore common requirements, needs, and deployment issues. Workshop proceedings are now available online on the EDUCAUSE web site.
Initially created as a one-day event to celebrate reading on Dr. Seuss' birthday on 2 March, the National Education Association's (NEA) Read Across America event has grown into a nationwide initiative that promotes reading every day. The effort includes the TWICE Read Across America celebration, a point-to-point videoconference to connect classrooms in the continental United States, providing children the opportunity to both read to, and be read to by, another class. This successful program is the result of a partnership between NEA and Two Way Interactive Connections in Education (TWICE), a Michigan organization promoting videoconferencing in K-12 education. TWICE provides a matching service for this annual videoconference project. In 2005, from 1-3 March, over 630 classrooms in 18 states are sharing reading activities such as book related game shows, reader's theater, choral reading, songs, raps, and skits.
According to Janine Lim, Instructional Technology Consultant for theBerrien County Intermediate School District in Michigan, "Kid-to-kid encounters via videoconferencing are the most powerful experiences I've seen. Besides practicing reading and presentation skills, students participating in this project learn about communities in a different area of the U.S. Students love seeing kids in other places; they love seeing the work that other kids do. It motivates them to do quality creative work."
The next generation of the Abilene backbone network
will use Juniper Networks' most
advanced core routing product. The nationwide upgrade will quadruple
Abilene's capacity to 10 gigabits per second and natively deploy the
next generation Internet protocol, IPv6, using Qwest Communications' nationwide
network infrastructure. The upgrade will maintain Abilene's position as
one of the most advanced and far-reaching education and research
networks in the world.
With the adoption of network applications that consume multiple-gigabits of bandwidth, the Internet2 community will soon require capabilities beyond those available on its current network infrastructure. To meet the leading-edge networking needs of the research and education community, Internet2 has partnered with Force10 Networks, a pioneer in gigabit and 10 gigabit Ethernet networking, to deploy the company's switch/routers in five nodes of the nationwide Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) testbed. As an Internet2 Corporate Partner, Force10 is providing leadership for the HOPI project, which is developing and testing architectures and technologies that will be the foundation for the Internet2 community's next generation, scalable, high-performance network.
Jointly sponsored by the ESnet Coordinating Commitee and Internet2, and hosted by the University of Utah, the latest Joint Techs Workshop brought together over 250 leaders in advanced networking from industry, government and academia last week in Salt Lake City, Utah. Presentations from the workshop are now available online.
The Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF), along with several partners, has received a planning grant from the National Science Foundation to propose very high speed Internet extensions, on the order of 10 Gbps, to connect the academic, research, health and non-governmental organization (NGO) communities in African countries to the rest of the world. Such connections would provide African universities and medical centers connectivity equivalent to the best available to comparable institutions in the United States. To win the large grant that would allow the network connection to be implemented, the team that won the NSF planning grant is seeking evidence of academic collaboration, particularly in science and in health, between U.S. and Africans in four countries—Ghana and Senegal most importantly, but also Madagascar and Mozambique—to help the NSF understand, appreciate, and value the impact of having these high speed connections in place.
The team is requesting information about:
- Joint projects at your institution that involve collaboration with scientists, other researchers, medical personnel, and NGOs in any of these countries.
- Joint projects with known individuals from or in these countries that would take place, but cannot currently because of inadequate bandwidth/communication between your institution and the African country.
- Projects involving existing or former graduate students from any of these countries that are good candidates for joint work upon the graduate student's returns to his or her country.
- Potential projects, previously not conceptualized or implemented because of a lack of high-speed Internet connections to institutions and researchers in these countries.
Megaconference Jr., now in its second year, is a project designed to give students in elementary and secondary schools around the world the opportunity to communicate, collaborate and contribute to each other's learning in real time, using advanced multi-point videoconferencing technology. Presenters will design and conduct videoconference-based presentations and activities focused on both academic and cultural issues. Participants will be able to address questions to presenters and to collaborate with geographically diverse peers in collaborative learning activities, thus building international cultural awareness. Megaconference Jr. takes place on 19 May 2005 and runs from 7:00 am until 7:00 pm EDT (UTC-4). The 12-hour duration will make it possible for schools from many time zones to participate during their regular school hours. Students, teachers, content providers and technical staff members are all encouraged to participate—by either preparing 15 min presentation about an interesting project at your school, suggesting activities that could be organized between presentations, or you can join us as participants, with no special presentation given from your side. Presenter proposals are due by 18 March and registration closes on 15 April.
Juniper Networks, a leading global provider of networking and security solutions and an Internet2 Corporate Partner, is now a
Collaboration Site and will connect to the Abilene Network. With access to Abilene, Juniper's router development engineers can more effectively work with the Internet2 community to comprehensively test and evaluate new technology. The nationwide Internet2 network infrastructure provides the ability to conduct experiments and collect data in ways not feasible in a typical laboratory, enabling a more robust understanding of high-performance networking that can be integrated into the development of future products and services.
