Supporting further and higher education 19th APAN Meetings in Bangkok Innovative Uses of Pervasive Broadband Network Is adoption of technology running ahead of policy and practice? Dr Malcolm Read JISC Executive Secretary

Supporting further and higher education CONTENT What is the JISC The JANET Network Middleware Application –e-Research –e-Learning

Supporting further and higher education JISCS MISSION To provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research

Supporting further and higher education JISC BUDGET

Supporting further and higher education e-Learning e-Research e-Administration e-Resources Information Environment Middleware Network Outreach & Embedding Committees & Consultation Services Development Programmes

Supporting further and higher education TBytes JANET Usage Month SJ4 Summer break

Supporting further and higher education TBytes International Usage

Supporting further and higher education MIDDLEWARE JISC Core Middleware requirements can be summarised as follows: An access management solution that will solve access to internal resources (e.g. computer facilities, exam papers) as well as external resources. Need for support for long-term stable collaborations between institutions, particularly collaborative e-learning scenarios. Need for support for ad-hoc collaborations between groups of researchers (virtual organisations). Continued need for support for access to external resources, preferably via a single sign-on.

Supporting further and higher education INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT A number of countries have launched national programmes to roll out middleware within research and higher education Already some major schemes which target the whole population within these communities, for example, authentication and authorisation schemes for access to digital context Now facing imminent issues in extending these schemes: –inter-working between schemes, to move from national to international coverage –expanding federations of trust –not principally technical issues Malcolm Read and Ken Klingenstein proposed an international meeting to try to define a way ahead

Supporting further and higher education INTERNATIONAL MIDDLEWARE EVENT Hosted by JISC Representatives invited from countries which have committed funding to a comprehensive national programme Attended by representatives from Australia, Finland, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, UK, US and CERN Aims: –to establish framework for further international collaboration of authentication and authorisation systems, leading –to interoperable user mechanisms, and –to help other countries develop similar large-scale systems

Supporting further and higher education GLOBAL INTER- WORKING OF NATIONAL SCHEMES Most schemes (federations of trust) are limited to one country The network peering model is relevant to extending coverage Set of criteria needed to judge whether to accept a candidate federation Key Action: production of a cookbook to describe the criteria and the selection process

Supporting further and higher education THE COOKBOOK The cookbook should contain –guidance on practical issues of setting up a scheme –criteria for judging the quality of a scheme –design of structures to underpin governance and management –examples of successful implementations The cookbook should also help those countries planning to set up a scheme for the first time It was agreed that the first version of the cookbook should be produced on a short time-scale

Supporting further and higher education OUTPUTS On behalf of the organisations attending, it was agreed to fund: –the authoring of the cookbook –a full-time facilitator for one year initially Both of these will be actioned immediately: the timescale for the production of the cookbook will be short. These initial actions may be extended in conjunction with other interested parties. The estimate costs of the initial actions is about 150K.

Supporting further and higher education THE UK E-SCIENCE PROGRAMME In November 2000 funding for UK e-Science programme was announced, with allocations to programmes within each of the Research Councils Core e-Science Programme develops and brokers generic technology solutions and generic middleware to enable e-Science. The Core e-Science Programme is managed by EPSRC on behalf of all the Research Councils. Example project – DAME

Supporting further and higher education DAME (Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment) EPSRC Funded, £3.2 Million, 3 years, commenced Jan UK pilot project for e-Science Aims to show the utility of Grid computing for data and compute intensive engineering problems A generic system applicable in many domains

Supporting further and higher education DAME PARTNERS 4 Universities: –Universities of York, Sheffield, Oxford, Leeds 3 Industrial Partners: –Rolls-Royce –Data Systems and Solutions –Cybula Ltd

Supporting further and higher education DEMONSTRATOR OBJECTIVES The DAME demonstration system provides a diagnosis workbench (portal) which brings together a suite of analysis services via Grid technology: –Provides access to a range of analysis tools for the engine diagnosis process –Will act as central control point for automated workflows –Manages issues of distributed diagnosis team and virtual organisations –Manages issues of security and user roles.

Engine flight data Airline office Maintenance Centre European data center London Airport New York Airport American data center Grid Diagnostics Centre OPERATIONAL SCENARIO

Supporting further and higher education DAME GRID CHALLENGES Building proof of concept for Grid technology in the aerospace diagnostic domain. Two primary Grid challenges: –Management of large, distributed and heterogeneous data repositories; –Rapid data mining and analysis of fault data; Other key (commercial) issues: –Remote, secure access to flight data and other operational data and resources; –Management of distributed users and resources; –Quality of Service issues (and Service Level Agreements)

Supporting further and higher education e-RESEARCH AGENDA Significant infrastructure challenges: –creation of a multidisciplinary research environment for research-intensive universities (see VRE slides) –mechanisms to systematically collect, preserve and make available digital information

Supporting further and higher education e-RESEARCH AGENDA (continued) –need for a national e-infrastructure to support the research community: SJ5 will provide a network infrastructure to support researchers sustained, high capacity data transfers, and also facilitate collaboration across education and research –need to encourage young people to study science subjects: JISC funded three pilot projects to provide school students access to some of the most advanced scientific applications currently available

Supporting further and higher education VIRTUAL RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT (VRE) VRE aims to help researchers in all disciplines manage the complex range of tasks involved in research Standards-based, service-oriented architecture Integrated functionality Managed / secure / sustainable Usable and accessible Personalised Agent-assisted / Intelligent Extensible Collaborative Portable / ubiquitous access

Learning & Teaching workflows Research & e-Science workflows Aggregator services: national, commercial Repositories : institutional, e-prints, subject, data, learning objects Data curation: databases & databanks Institutional presentation services: portals, Learning Management Systems, u/g, p/g courses, modules Validation Harvesting metadata Data creation / capture / gathering: laboratory experiments, Grids, fieldwork, surveys, media Resource discovery, linking, embedding Deposit / self- archiving Peer-reviewed publications: journals, conference proceedings Publication Validation Data analysis, transformation, mining, modelling Resource discovery, linking, embedding Deposit / self- archiving Learning object creation, re-use Searching, harvesting, embedding Quality assurance bodies Validation Presentation services: subject, media-specific, data, commercial portals Resource discovery, linking, embedding Linking

DIGITAL CURATION CENTRE Industry research collaborators standards bodies testbeds & tools communities of practice: users community support & outreach research development services management & co- ordination curation organisations Collaborative Associates Network of Data Organisations

Supporting further and higher education TEXT MINING Text mining attempts to discover new information by applying techniques from data mining, information retrieval, and natural language processing: –identifies and gathers relevant textual sources –analyses these to extract facts involving key entities and their properties –combines the extracted facts to form new facts or to gain valuable insights –finds applications in diverse areas of wide interest such as drug discovery and predictive toxicology, protein interaction, competitive intelligence, protection of the citizen, identification of new product possibilities, detection of links between lifestyle and states of health

Supporting further and higher education NATIONAL UK CENTRE FOR TEXT MINING Jointly funded by JISC, BBSRC and EPSRC Based at University of Manchester, in partnership with the Universities of Liverpool and Salford. International partners include University of California at Berkeley, University of Geneva, University of Tokyo, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center A number of aims (see next slide)

Supporting further and higher education e-LEARNING FRAMEWORK Development of a common technical framework Open source Will facilitate the integration of commercial, home-grown and open source components, and applications within institutions and regional federations by agreeing common service definitions

Supporting further and higher education ELF PROJECTS ARE DEVELOPING Web Service Definitions for component services Implemented in Web Service Toolkits –Service and client adapters –Mainly in Java and.NET, with standardised APIs –Derived from the Web Service Definition Language Open Source –Liberal commercial use licenses –Encourage wide adoption of specifications Service definitions submitted to specification bodies –IMS only e-Learning body developing Web Service specifications.