Earlier this week I had the great pleasure of attending the 2014 Internet2 Global Summit in Denver.
With the theme of “Welcome to the New Era,” the well-attended conference reflected the international nature of our community’s work and the challenges we all are facing.
An OARnet colleague asked me what my top three takeaways were; I thought you might be interested as well. They are:
- Exemplary speakers at the plenary sessions addressed multi-disciplinary work that generates massive amount of data and, thus, creates the future needs for “Big Data” transport. These outstanding speakers encouraged all of us to embrace the phenomenon of distributed data compute and storage across the networks of the world.
- The executive session brought Chief Information Officers, leaders for Research and Education Networks and corporate members together, so we could talk “inside baseball.” We could discuss, in depth, the future needs of CIOs on a national level. Here at OARnet, these types of conversations help us modify and strategize our vision for the Regional Optical Networks. That translates into better and innovative services for all our statewide constituent groups.
- The excellent ability to network (the face-to-face kind) because the attendees reflected a superb cross-section – university presidents, “C” level executives, engineers, industry partners, applications and service providers, government officials and my peers across the world.
There were many more innovations and presentations that caught my attention – like the “Internet2 of Things” Showcase, which included a pilot project to deploy university electric vehicles to awarded campuses (see the link for more details on how to apply.) The all-electric vehicles, which feature advanced research and education technologies such as Internet2 eduroam, are part of Internet2’s efforts to support member research involving sensor data collection, analysis and interactivity across networks, and create opportunities for seamless sign-on and federated identity.
I’d like to learn more about your needs for this new era of technology. What needs do you see on your college campuses, school buildings or work places?
