Contributed by or Presented at Net@EDU (State Networks)

There are increasing demands on state education networks to provide more enterprise applications and services, including course management systems, video-on-demand content repositories, disaster recovery, and shared high performance computing GRIDS. Beyond the sizable economies of scale and efficiencies to be gained by constituent members, what are the benefits to our community? The panelists will discuss initiatives underway in their states and will describe some of the challenges, strategies and implementation issues to consider when contemplating centrally hosting enterprise applications and resources within your StateNet.

Starting and maintaining a new service offering is a significant undertaking that requires resources and time. Some services are tied directly to the network and local resources; these must be developed and run by the local state network. Others are not and can be shared by multiple state networks. Panelists will discuss how StateNets may offer services to other state networks, whereby recipients can then offer the service to their community as if it were their own.

In the spirit of convergence, the former Wireless Networking and Integrated Communications Strategies working groups have merged and will be once again holding their all day meeting as the Converged Communications working group (CCWG). Please join us to discuss some exciting topics in the realm of convergence and mobility such as Duke University's pilot wireless network project (using 802.11n) that affords up to five times the performance of traditional wireless networks. And what about IPvideo? Is there anything happening in the WiMAX space? And now that convergence is real, what about "presence" and privacy? Come prepared to share your questions and your experiences.

What are you doing to meet the exponential growth of network traffic? Are you moving from gigabit to 10-gigabit capacity on the backbone? Are you successfully increasing capacity to university and public education endpoints to gigabit or greater? Is your approach to increase capacity with network-owned fiber or to contract with telcos, or a combination of both? Panelists will share their experiences with and ideas about how a state education network can meet the growing bandwidth demands of their customers.

How important is videoconferencing to the member education organizations you support? Is fully interactive videoconferencing an important service you provide, or is it being replaced by other services such as asynchronous tools like course management systems or web conferencing? What support services do you provide, such as managing a video operations support center, scheduling, and so forth?

What Collaborative Services is your statewide community currently using and planning to use in the future? Will these services be centrally provisioned, managed, and maintained? Which of these services will be (or are) integrated with each other and with your existing managed services platforms? How did you accomplish this integration, or how do you plan to approach it? How far along are you with Web2.0 applications? Are these tools being shared across the entire K-20 continuum? Why or why not? What role(s) does SIP play in your institutions' learning applications?

This panel will discuss the interrelation between state networks and health care networks. In particular, the discussion will focus on the various community perspectives of the FCC-funded (Universal Service Fund) rural health care initiative and how we can work together as a community to educate the FCC on the role of regional and state networks.

Identity management is moving ahead rapidly. Shibboleth and InCommon are making great strides. Representatives from the banking and credit card industries are sitting around the table with federal and state government agencies in the Electronic Identity Assurance Expert Group (EIAEG) within the Liberty Alliance. The Credential Assessment Framework, developed by NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is being applied to an expanding federation of public and private institutions, including a number of campuses. The Identity Management working group will review these and other current activities of interest and chart a path for future action.

Scientific progress and discovery increasingly hinge upon analysis of a wide variety of data sources. With these datasets growing ever larger and more complex, we are increasingly challenged in the areas of management, preservation, integration, and access to high-level services that facilitate inquiry and hypothesis testing. We are also seeing an increase in geographically distributed resources. For science to advance, we must develop new knowledge-based environments that allow researchers to easily query and analyze vast holdings of diverse, distributed data. NCAR has joined a number of collaborations aimed at addressing critical science and societal challenges, ranging from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Polar Year, regional climate modeling, solar-terrestrial science, digital preservation, and more. We will survey these areas, discuss some of the challenges we face in developing effective cyberinfrastructure, and briefly touch on the important migration towards "science gateways" and knowledge-based environments.

This presentation is an overview of the Massachusetts HIgher Education Network - "MITI:" Massachusetts Information Turnpike Initiative.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a 3-year grant for nearly a million dollars to a partnership between William Paterson University, Rutgers University Libraries and NJEDge.Net to develop and deploy a statewide academic video-on-demand repository. The digital video repository (Fedora Commons-based) will he housed in the core of the NJEDge network and will provide "lectures-on-demand", licensed commercial videos, and locally owned videos. A Video Commons collection will be publically available including history, lectures from notables, and video documenting research and scientific advances. NJVid is notable for providing a statewide video strategy to accommodate any type of organization-higher education, K12, public libraries, museums and archives. A substantial part of this project will provide the resources to develop a statewide Shibboleth-based Identity management infrastructure, supporting statewide network authentication and authorization that can be used for many content resources. This presentation will describe the open source architecture and middleware applications that are under development.

The Directorate for Science and Technology (S&T) is the primary research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. S&T uses the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency to engage industry, academia, government, and other sectors in innovative research and development, rapid prototyping, and technology transfer to meet operational needs. Academic organizations such as the Computing Research Association and industry groups have called for increased funding for cybersecurity R&D. This keynote will describe what the S&T directorate is doing to drive, discover, and deliver new solutions to address cybervulnerabilities as well as what research areas it considers as priorities in the near term.

The Domain Name System Security Extensions, known as the DNSSEC, is a suite of IETF specifications for securing certain kinds of information provided by the DNS as used on IP networks. It is widely believed that deploying DNSSEC is critically important for securing the Internet as a whole, but deployment has been hampered by the difficulty of devising a backward-compatible standard that can scale to the size of the Internet and deploying DNSSEC implementations across a wide variety of DNS servers and resolvers (clients). This session will describe collaborative efforts between the federal government, industry, and academia, and how .edu can signal to the rest of the Internet community that it will lead the way with deployment of DNS security extensions.

Regional and state networks increasingly take a leadership role in providing last-mile networking access essential for cutting-edge scholarship and research. Collaboration and peering among these networks has proven beneficial (for now), but what will be the long-term impact for our national networking needs, and how will it help America compete with Europe and Asia? Speakers will share their insights on the future of regional networks, including what they perceive as their unique technical and policy challenges, and what their role will be in meeting America’s future networking needs.

Following his keynote address, “Rethinking the Internet Infrastructure,” Guru Parulkar will join a distinguished panel to compare and contrast different thinking on how the Internet will evolve over the coming decades. Will the infrastructure be replaced, or will current dilemmas be resolved through incremental change? Will these changes be a result of government research, commercial investment, or both? Audience participation is encouraged.