Supporting further and higher education 19th APAN Meetings in Bangkok Innovative Uses of Pervasive...

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 ReadJISC Executive Secretary


CONTENT

• What is the JISC

• The JANET Network

• Middleware

• Application– e-Research– e-Learning


JISC’S MISSION

To provide world-class leadership

in the innovative use of ICT

to support education and research


JISC BUDGET 2004-05 £m Networking 29.43 Integrated Info Environment 7.27 Content and Services 11.49 Learning & Teaching 3.99 Organisational Support 6.21 Support of Research 2.87 Central Services 5.25 66.51


e-Le

arn

ing

e-R

ese

arch

e-A

dm

inistra

tion

e-Resources

Information Environment

Middleware

Network

Outreach & Embedding

Committees & Consultation

ServicesDevelopment Programmes


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700

800

900InstitutionsExternalTBytes

JANET Usage

Month

SJ4

Summer break


0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450InOutTBytes

International Usage


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’.


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


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


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


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


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.


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 http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/dame/


DAME (Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment)

• EPSRC Funded, £3.2 Million, 3 years, commenced Jan 2002.

• 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


DAME PARTNERS

• 4 Universities:– Universities of York, Sheffield, Oxford,

Leeds

• 3 Industrial Partners:– Rolls-Royce– Data Systems and Solutions– Cybula Ltd


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

GridDiagnostics Centre

OPERATIONAL SCENARIO


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)


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


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


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

Harvestingmetadata

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


Deposit / self-archiving

Learning object creation, re-use

Searching , harvesting, embedding

Quality assurance bodies

Validation

Presentation services: subject, media-specific, data, commercial portals


Linking

DIGITAL CURATION CENTRE

Industry

research collaborators

standards bodies

testbeds& tools

communities of practice:

users

community support & outreach

research

development

servicesmanagement

& co-ordination

curation organisations

Collaborative Associates Network of DataOrganisations


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


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) • http://www.cse.salford.ac.uk/nactem/


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


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.

Date post:	27-Mar-2015
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Supporting further and higher education 19th APAN Meetings in Bangkok Innovative Uses of Pervasive...

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