Author: Valentino Cavalli

Medal Award 2023

The Vietsch Foundation awards the 2023 Medal of Honour to Arjan Xhelaj.

The recipient of the 2022 medal of honour of the Vietsch Foundation is Arjan Xhelaj, founder, Director General and Chairman of the Governance Board of RASH, the Academic Network of Albania.

The medal is awarded annually to people who have made a contribution of lasting value to the research and development of advanced Internet technology aimed to support science, research and higher education. The medal was presented to Arjan on 6 June, during the award ceremony at TNC 2023, the leading European networking conference organised by GÉANT.

Arjan Xhelaj has been responsible for establishing the RASH academic network from scratch and developing it through a decade of successful achievements to a fully functional organisation, serving the academic network and users of Albania  and representing the Albanian research and education community in international fora and projects. In the spirit of the award, which recognises individuals who have proved their organizational skills and whose efforts have led to the creation of institutions or services of long-term value, “Arjan Xhelaj was selected as the most deserving recipient, in a list of very valuable candidates, some of whom were nominated by various communities” said Valentino Cavalli, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Vietsch Foundation. Explaining the rationale for the choice, Valentino recalled that he “first met Arjan in 2011, during a meeting in Italy, where he and Karel Vietsch had been invited to advise on the consultancy project that paved the way to the creation of the research and education network of Albania. Arjan proved since then to be a very competent, strong and motivated player, and asked very soon to become a member of TERENA. The Vietsch Foundation board unanimously recognised the value of his commitment and successful achievements throughout the years. Board members are also particularly excited that the 2023 medal of honour has been awarded to the host of TNC this year”.

In accepting the award Arjan said:   

“It is with great honor and gratitude that I accept the Vietsch Foundation’s recognition for my work in the last decade in building the Albanian NREN, RASH. I want to express my sincere thanks to the Vietsch Foundation for their unwavering support for the scientific community and their dedication to promoting research and innovation. I also want to extend my appreciation to my fellow researchers, my staff and colleagues who have contributed to my work. Research and innovation are at the core of human progress. They drive advancements in science, technology, and society, and have the power to transform our world for the better. The Vietsch Foundation’s commitment to supporting research and innovation is commendable. Their philanthropic efforts have made a significant impact on advancing research. Their unwavering support has enabled researchers like me to pursue our passion for knowledge and make meaningful contributions to our work. Innovation is the engine that propels research forward. It involves not only generating new ideas but also translating them into practice that benefit society. However, research and innovation are not without challenges. They require perseverance, resilience, and dedication to overcome obstacles and setbacks. In conclusion, I would like to express my profound gratitude to the Vietsch Foundation for this prestigious recognition. It inspires me to continue my pursuit of excellence in research and innovation.”

Arjan Xhelaj is the founder, and currently Director General and Chairman of the Governance Board of RASH, the Academic Network of Albania. He is an experienced institutional leader with a proven track record of working in government, public administration, industry and International Relations. The Researcher and Innovator has strong experience in the European Commission as a Member of various governing and advisory Boards. He has studied Engineering in Applied Physics and Information Technology and worked as PhD researcher in Biophysics at Frankfurt am Main University, Germany.

Andrew Cormack, 16-4-1963 13-4-2023

The Vietsch Foundation mourns the death of our dear friend and esteemed colleague Andrew Cormack, who has left us too early yesterday. Andrew has been a member of the Board of Trustees since the 6th of June 2016, and we were blessed with his competence, dedication and invaluable contributions. He was known to many of us from his outstanding work in networking security and privacy, and he was a considerate and gentle person with the gift of bringing people together. Andrew was awarded the first Medal of Honour given by the Vietsch Foundation in 2015 and had been a good friend of Karel Vietsch.

Andrew is leaving a huge void in our community and in our board. He will be sorely missed.

Download the “Open Source Law, Policy and Practice” book

The brand new, second edition of “Open Source Law, Policy and Practice”, edited by Amanda Brock is available for download, Open Access, as well as in printed format by Oxford University Press at this OUP link.

Written by world leading Open Source and legal experts, this new edition of Open Source Law, Policy and Practice edited by Amanda Brock,  is fully updated to give a  global focus on technology, legal and market changes over the last decade. 

Victor Reijs joins the Board of Trustees of the Vietsch Foundation

As of 1 January 2023 the Board of Trustees has a new member at large. The Vietsch Foundation is delighed to welcome Victor Reijs amongst its members.

Victor Reijs retired in 2021 and has a long track record working for KPN Telecom Research, SURFnet, HEAnet and SIDN. During his carreer he was involved in many networking technologies and services, spanning from pioneering to innovative and operational services.

Victor studied electrical engineering (BEng, 1977) at Avans University, microwave technology at University Twente (MSc, 1983) and cultural astronomy at University of Wales TSD (MA CAA, 2015). In 2022 he successfully passed the traditional wind miller exam.

Victor Reijs

Member of the  Board of  Trustees

Victor Reijs retired in 2021 and has a long track record working for KPN Telecom Research, SURFnet, HEAnet and SIDN. He was involved in many networking technologies and services from earlier alternatives for IPv6 to  development and operation of X.25, IP, ATM, optical links and point-to-point services. He was instrumental to national and international developments on Network as a Service (NaaS/SDN) and clouds in the Netherlands and Ireland, and in GÉANT. He contributed to study and development of alternative protocols, such as SCION, RINA and NDN as part of the 2STiC (Security, Stability and Transparency in inter-network Communication) program of SIDN.

Victor studied electrical engineering (BEng, 1977) at Avans University, microwave technology at University Twente (MSc, 1983) and cultural astronomy at University of Wales TSD (MA CAA, 2015). In 2022 he successfully passed the traditional wind miller exam.

ADDITIONAL project

Funded in 2022 –

A grant to support “Advanced Deep Learning-based Analysis of Network Traffic Generated by Communication-and-Collaboration Apps used in COVID-19 pandemic” (ADDITIONAL) was awarded in 2022 to the CINI  research unit at the University of Napoli Federico II, Italy. The project page is available at https://traffic.comics.unina.it/ADDITIONAL/.

The project aims at applying advanced Deep Learning methods to support two critical tasks in managing modern networks: 1) traffic classification (i.e., associating observed traffic with the application that generated it) and 2) fine-grained prediction (i.e., forecasting traffic behavior, knowing the kind of application generating it).”

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the usage of communication-and-collaboration apps (Discord, GotoMeeting, Meet, Messenger, Skype, Slack, Teams, Webex, and Zoom) by mobile users. This sudden shift in Internet traffic poses a challenge to efficient network management and calls for enhanced network analytics tools able to overcome traditional monitoring techniques requiring time-consuming human experts’ intervention to adapt to the new conditions. Accordingly, ADDITIONAL aims at designing, implementing, and evaluating innovative tools based on Artificial Intelligence methodologies, with particular reference to Deep Learning architectures, to support network traffic classification and prediction. Given the heterogeneous and large-scale landscape of mobile apps, the focus is on gathering fine-grained network visibility. The proposal matches the interests of the scientific community, being beneficial to network providers, customers, and researchers.

The ADDITIONAL project duration is five months. Works include (i) the collection and annotation of the dataset, then (ii) a systematic study of the classification and prediction performance of state-of-the-art approaches, and finally (iii) the research and experimental validation of novel and improved classification and prediction approaches.

The ADDITIONAL proposal was relayed to the Vietsch Foundation by GÉANT through its Innovation Programme

 

 

Open Source Law, Policy and Practice, book launch

31 October 2022

Open Source Software has seen mass adoption in the last decade to potentially form the majority of software today. It is realised through legal instruments, private law agreements, licences, governance, and community norms all of which lead to the sharing of Intellectual Property and economic and commercial disruption in technology. Whilst the adoption of Open Source has happened at scale the necessary user understanding of its curation on both a technical and governance level has not kept pace with its adoption.  

Written by world leading Open Source and legal experts, this new edition of Open Source Law, Policy and Practice edited by Amanda Brock,  is fully updated to give a  global focus on technology, legal and market changes over the last decade. The book is available for download, Open Access, as well as in printed format by Oxford University Press at this OUP link.

The work delivers an in-depth examination of the community, legal, economic and commercial structures relating to the usage and exploitation of Open Source, enabling readers to understand the legal environment within which Open Source operates and what is required for its appropriate governance and curation in enterprise and public sector.  

This is achieved by focusing on three main areas; intellectual property rights; the governance of Open Source; and the business and economic impacts.

From the building of Community to the impact of Standards, Standard Essential Patents and FRAND licensing on Open Source Software, to the evolution of and management of Open Source Program Offices the book tackles areas for the first time in a publication, alongside its survey of  the more traditional legal areas such as contribution agreements, Open Source licensing, litigation patents, trademarks and competition law, this book is a unique and wide ranging volume which will form an invaluable resource.

Its utility will span those using it as an educational text, running Open Source Program Offices or wanting to understand better the legal and policy issues of Open Source. 

The Vietsch Foundation has stepped up to enabling users of the book to access it via Open Access for non commercial usage and also supported the authors by paying for a number of copies to be given away at Open Source Software conferences over the next 12 months.

Editor Amanda Brock is the CEO of OpenUK, the organisation for the business of Open Source in the UK, a member of a number of Open Source and Open Standards Boards, keynote speaker and author. A recognised expert herself, she  is joined by 25 other contributors, each with deep expertise in a particular area of Open Source Software, discussing their area of specialisation.`A book launch panel and book signing are taking place in Raleigh, North Carolina on 1 November, https://2022.allthingsopen.org/sessions/open-source-law-policy-and-practice-book-panel/

MARLIN Project

Funded in 2022 – The Vietsch Foundation announces a new grant to fund the MARLIN project, to support “Reliable user identification to grant access to local resources as well as secure remote access to scientific content”. The project was relayed to the Vietsch Foundation by GÉANT through its Innovation Programme.

Universities, research institutes and schools offer researchers and students a variety of local resources (class rooms, multimedia rooms, meeting rooms, libraries, etc.), specific equipment, and services, such print and scan. 

Eduroam provides end users with access to the Wi-Fi local networks, but doesn’t provide access to restricted locations, such as a multimedia room, for example. Moreover, this doesn’t allow users to access local resources, such a simple printing services, of a remote institution they happen to be hosted at.

The project promises to develop a novel way to access local resources using secure authentication and authorization mechanisms, together with the ability to acknowledge the user’s identity, using biometric data though smart devices, which most of the users carry in their pockets on a daily basis. 

The project runs for one year and will result in a prototype with the following features: 

  1. Secure access to content (university intranet portal) with ability to author document with verified user’s identity
  2. Access institution local resources 
    • Using a printer in a 3rd party institution where the user is temporary located 
    • Access a restricted room (laboratory) in a 3rd party institution where the user is temporary located 

The prototype is going to be tested and implemented at the Laboratory of Telematics of the Bulgaria Academy of Science (LT-BAS ). 

 

 

eduDNS project delivered and in operation

The eduDNS project ended succesfully in July 2022, we are happy to publish this final news item with permission from the project partners.

   eduDNS – Final report

In the eduDNS project, a Dynamic DNS service for academic users has been developed, deployed and delivered in full operation. The main component of the service is the NS-update server which consists of a GUI front-end, a REST API and a backend engine for the Dynamic DNS service.  A new authentication backend, based onPython Social Auth, has been developed for integration with eduTEAMS. Users can log in to the GUI front-end using an eduTEAMS account and register hostnames in supported domains (by default edudns.eu). After obtaining the hostnames, users will be able to assign/update IP addresses of VMs/servers to the hostnames, then access the VMs/services via the registered hostnames.

The eduDNS service helps reducing the administrative efforts of dynamic DNS management in a cloud environment, by leveraging a fully automated and self-serve service through a simple web interface or through a REST API. Besides, this service helps to improve the security, privacy and trust of services that are dynamically deployed in Cloud by enabling SSL certificates for the registered hostnames. There are also several other interesting use cases with eduDNS: DevOps automation, service migration, high availability, that will be demonstrated in separate webinars.

Links:

Acknowledgment:

The project eduDNS, a Dynamic DNS service for Academia, has been developed by the Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and by the Institute of Physics of Cantabria, Spanish National Research Council. The development has been supported by the Vietsch Foundation, after it had been relayed to the Vietsch Foundation by the GÉANT Innovation Programme.

Medal Award 2022

The Vietsch Foundation awards the 2022 Medal of Honour to Natalia Manola.

The recipient of the 2022 medal of honour of the Vietsch Foundation is Natalia Manola, Chief Executive Officer of OpenAIRE.

Natalia Manola speaks at TNC after she received the Medal from Antoinette Vietsch

The medal is awarded annually to people who have made a contribution of lasting value to the research and development of advanced Internet technology aimed to support science, research and higher education. The medal was presented to Natalia on 14 June, during the award ceremony at TNC2022, the leading European networking conference organised by GÉANT.

In the spirit of the award, which recognises individuals who have proved their organizational skills and whose efforts have led to the creation of institutions or services of long-term value, “the Board of Trustees of the Vietsch Foundation chose to award the 2022 medal of honour to Natalia, as a recognition of her continuous and successful dedication to management of OpenAIRE across many years of project activity, making it now an independent stable and sustainable legal entity” said Valentino Cavalli, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Vietsch Foundation, explaining the rationale for the choice.

In accepting the award Natalia said: “Building OpenAIRE from scratch with a dedicated group of visionaries has been a challenging yet rewarding experience. In OpenAIRE the spirit  has been, is and will be about “we”,  about our collective goals and accomplishments. A spirit that has largely contributed to its success. The  Vietsch Foundation medal is a great honor  for me and for all my colleagues who diligently work to make Open Science and OpenAIRE an integral part of the research and development ecosystem. A great incentive to do even more.”

Natalia Manola is the CEO of OpenAIRE (www.openaire.eu), a pan European e-Infrastructure supporting scholarly communication and Open Science Europe since 2009. She is also a research associate in “Athena” Research and Innovation Center and in the University of Athens, Department of Informatics & Telecommunications. She holds a Physics degree from the University of Athens, and an MS in Electrical and Computing Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has several years of employment as a Software Engineer and Architect employed in the Bioinformatics commercial sector. She has expertise in Open Science policies and implementation, having served in the EOSC Executive Board (2018-20, chairing the Working Group on Skills and Training) and in the Open Science Policy Platform (2016-18), an EC High-Level Advisory Group to provide advice about the development and implementation of open science policy in Europe. Her research interests include the topics of e-Infrastructures development and management, scientific data management, data curation and validation, text and data mining and research analytics. Natalia has also served in the EC Future Emerging Technology (FET) Advisory Group (2013-2017).

ENDS

The mission of the Vietsch Foundation is to promote research and development of advanced Internet technology for scientific research and higher education. The Vietsch Foundation fulfils its goals in two ways: First, it contributes funding to specific research and development projects that demonstrate potential value to progress European and global research and education networking. And second, each year it awards a medal of honour to people who have contributed to the development of services or technologies of lasting value that are used by the networking community and its users in research, development and education. The Foundation was created through the last will and testament of Willem Karel Vietsch (1952–2014), a Dutch expert, a leader of the international Internet community, and also the Secretary-General of TERENA, a former association of European national research and education networks. For details visit: https://www.vietsch-foundation.org

Vietsch Foundation and GÉANT project to support Ukrainian Research and Education Network

Funded in 2022 – The Vietsch Foundation and the GÉANT Association have started a project to support URAN, the research and education network of Ukraine and a member of GÉANT.

As the war in Ukraine goes on URAN will need our support and help more than ever, not just to survive but to stay as safe as possible and where possible to maintain and rebuild.

GÉANT and Europe’s NRENs will donate funds to primarily address URAN’s cash flow challenges and help to ensure URAN’s survival as an NREN. Whilst the war has heavily affected URAN’s many users who are currently unable to operate themselves and are therefore unable to pay for URAN services, URAN faces ongoing operational costs and is therefore at severe risk itself.

The funds donated to the Vietsch Foundation will be reserved only for the purpose of this project. The reservation is bound to the proposals as formulated by URAN and GÉANT in the pursuit of the objectives stated in the project agreement, and thus help to preserve the knowledge and skills of the Ukrainian NREN.

eduDNS Project

Funded in 2022 – The Vietsch Foundation announces a new grant to fund the project eduDNS, a Dynamic DNS service for Academia, eduDNS was relayed to the Vietsch Foundation by GÉANT through its Innovation Programme.

Nowadays, more and more services are dynamically deployed in Cloud environments. Usually, the services hosted on virtual machines in Cloud are accessible only via IP addresses or pre-configured hostnames given by the target Cloud providers, making it difficult to provide them with meaningful domain names. Dynamic DNS services exist to alleviate this problem, but none of them is scoped to the Academic realm.

The eduDNS project will provide a universal, vendor-independent Dynamic DNS support for research and education users. Service owners will log in the eduDNS portal via eduTEAMS, register meaningful, memorable hostnames (e.g. service-portal.vo.edudns.eu), assign the hostnames to their servers then provide access to their services via the hostnames.

eduDNS will simplify the deployment of services that are dynamically deployed in Cloud infrastructures. It removes the obstacles of changing IP addresses of services in Cloud at every deployment and enables obtaining SSL certificates for the hostnames. Service providers can migrate services from local servers to Cloud or from a Cloud site to another without noticing users from the change.

The project started at the beginning of 2022 and will end in Summer 2022 with a prototype of eduDNS service deployed at IISAS (Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences) and IFCA (Instituto de Física de Cantabria).

AALD Project

Funded in 2021 – The Vietsch Foundation announces a new project grant on Academic Achievement and Learning Diaries (AALD).

Epistemic cognition, like the justification of knowledge, is a growing theme in learning analytics. It is highly topical in the era of MOOCs and conflicting resources of knowledge.

AALD aims to increase the scientific understanding of students’ epistemic thinking related to learning analytics applications. This information is vital for making advancements in designing new applications to measure and monitor student success.

The application used to record student experience is a structured learning diary that allows higher education students to prepare for classes, make notes, and reflect on their learning experience afterward. Our research expands the dataset to include student interviews, student register data, and questionnaires (pre-test, post-test, and two delayed post-test questionnaires).

AALD contributes to publishing two scientific open access articles, a public web page describing the structured diary tool contents, and main findings summary of the project. In addition, a public presentation will be given as part of a relevant conference. The project timeline is from Oct 2021 to Jan 2022. Publications’ should be open after the review processes later in 2022.

For more information: Ville Kivimäki, University of Helsinki, ville.kivimaki@helsinki.fi

 

Public version of the Science Checker website released

The science-checker.opscidia.com is now publicly available.

Funded in 2020/21 – The Science Checker project built a free to access search engine, developing a novel approach that verifies scientific claims by means of analysing the pertinent and available scientific literature.

In the words of the developers the Science Checker:

– facilitates access and exploration of scientific literature.
– illustrates the need to analyze several studies in order to get a better idea of the state of scientific knowledge on a subject.
– illustrates that Open Access, combined with the right artificial intelligence tools, can facilitate the transmission of knowledge outside the academic world.

The grant was awarded to Opscidia, a startup which develops artificial intelligence tools that make use of open access articles to accelerate innovation, promote sound policies and help providing rigorous information to the general public. 

Medal Award 2021

The Vietsch Foundation awards the 2021 Medal of Honour to Laurel Haak.

Laurel L. Haak, Founding Executive Director of ORCID, is the recipient of the 2021 medal of honour of the Vietsch Foundation.

The medal is awarded annually to people who have made a contribution of lasting value to the research and development of advanced Internet technology aimed to support science, research and higher education. The 2021 award ceremony was held online on the 22nd of June, during a plenary session of TNC2021, the leading European networking conference organised by GÉANT.

In the spirit of the award, which recognises individuals who have proved their organizational skills and whose efforts have led to the creation of institutions or services of long-term value, the choice fell on Laure as the best in a range of very qualified nominees. “Laure led the development of ORCID from a concept to a global, community-led, non-profit service used by more than ten million researchers. ORCID IDs are now the essential foundation for research processes in and between institutions, funders, and publishers: enabling the creation, testing, sharing and finding of new knowledge,” said Andrew Cormack, Member of the Board of Trustees of the Vietsch Foundation, explaining the rationale for the award.

Laure currently is the Founder and CEO of Mighty Red Barn where her work centers on trust-building to foster communities, through practice areas of digital infrastructure and identity, governance and decision frameworks, product strategy and practice. She also serves as a volunteer mentor for the SCORE small business start-up program. 

Prior to her work at ORCID, Laure was the Chief Science Officer at Discovery Logic, Inc. (acquired by Thomson Reuters and now part of Clarivate), providing workforce analysis, metrics, benchmarking, and data visualizations for funding agencies and academic institutions, including the development of the electronic Scientific Portfolio Assistant, which combined back-end database ingest, machine learning, and expert analytics to transform agency approaches to program evaluation.

As a program officer for the US National Academies, Laure managed expert panels and the development and publication of research policy reports for the US government, academic, and association stakeholders, including reports on interdisciplinary research, international students, and women in academia. This work built on her experience as editor of Science’s Next Wave Postdoc Network at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where she helped to build a community of practice around postdoctoral workforce policy and supported the launch of the National Postdoctoral Association. 

Laure received a B.S. and an M.S. in Biology from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the US National Institutes of Health.

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Haak

ENDS

The mission of the Vietsch Foundation is to promote research and development of advanced Internet technology for scientific research and higher education. The Vietsch Foundation fulfils its goals in two ways: First, it contributes funding to specific research and development projects that demonstrate potential value to progress European and global research and education networking. And second, each year it awards a medal of honour to people who have contributed to the development of services or technologies of lasting value that are used by the networking community and its users in research, development and education. The Foundation was created through the last will and testament of Willem Karel Vietsch (1952–2014), a Dutch expert, a leader of the international Internet community, and also the Secretary-General of TERENA, a former association of European national research and education networks. For details visit: https://www.vietsch-foundation.org

Targeted Online – A publication on how AdTech works

 

Funded in 2020 – The Vietsch Foundation funded the publication of “Targeted Online”, a handbok by the European Digital Rights (EDRi), an association of civil and human rights organisations from across Europe.

The web has become a place where visiting a webpage triggers many effects elsewhere, where advertising technology results in a surveillance ecosystem. Yet people still think of the ‘friendly’ world wide web of the nineties. The “Targeted Onlie” handbook is intended for curious internet users who want to understand the internet’s dominant business model, how tech companies use (and abuse) data, why some ads are eerily creepy and others so foolishly wrong. The handbook explains how online advertising works, and why a reform of the entire online advertising industry is urgently needed.

The “Targeted Online” handbook can be dowloaded here. For more informtion visit the EDRI website.

Lígia Maria Ribeiro steps down as Trustee of the Vietsch Foundation

 

Starting from the 1st of January 2021, Lígia Maria Ribeiro steps down as trustee of the Vietsch Foundation. Lígia is Principal Researcher at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and set on the Board of Directors of the European University Information Systems Organization (EUNIS) until 2020. Since joining the Vietsch Foundation Board of Trustees in January 2018, Lígia has contributed enormously to the relation with EUNIS and to the establishment of many successful projects.

In saying farewell to her fellow trustees Lígia said “I want to express my satisfaction for having had the opportunity to be part of the Vietsch Foundation’s Board of Trustees over these three years.”

The Vietsch Foundation expresses many thanks to Lígia in return and wishes her all the best with her retirement.

 

Pekka Kähkipuro and Kathleen Shearer new Trustees of the Vietsch Foundation

In 2020 the Board of Trustees of the Vietsch Foundation was extended with two new members whose important role in international research education and technology is widely recognised. Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director of COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) joined the Foundation in August. In October, Pekka Kähkipuro, Chief Information Officer at Brunel University London became the seventh member of the Board of Trustees.

Valentino Cavalli, chair of the Vietsch Foundation said “We’ve had a strategic goal of reaching out to new and wider communities for some time and I’m extremely pleased that Pekka and Kathleen accepted the Board’s invitation to become part of the Foundation. With their addition, the Board has greatly increased its range of expertises and strengthened its reach to research areas in Europe and beyond, in an impressive way”. Kathleen and Pekka have been appointed as member at large for an initial term of three years.

Pekka Kähkipuro

Member of the Board of   Trustees

Pekka Kähkipuro is Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Tampere University, Finland.

Prior to joining Tampere, Pekka was CIO at Brunel University UK 2016-2021, Director of IT at Aalto University in Finland 2010-2015 and, before that, he held various senior roles in the private sector including Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks in 2005-2010. Pekka obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Helsinki in 2000. He has been Board member of the European University Information Systems (EUNIS) organization on two occasions and the President of EUNIS in 2015. He has also been board member and Chairman of the Board in several private sector companies.

EMREX project

The Vietsch Foundation announces a new grant to CSC for a project to expand the EMREX network to the EU and beyond.

EMREX is a solution for transferring student data internationally in a machine-readable way. It consists of two parts: the technical solution and the international network (EMREX user group – EUG) enabling and developing the activities. EMREX originated as an EU-funded project 2015-2017, aiming to simplify and increase the quality of the credit transfer process after a student exchange. At present, EMREX is operational in a number of countries in Europe. It is a technical solution used to securely exchange educational data between students and third parties, for example higher education institutions (HEIs) or potential employers. In this way, EMREX can facilitate student mobility and decrease the administrative burden of student exchanges for the institutions. EMREX uses an open source technical solution, through which different kinds of educational data can be transferred, be it transcript of records or entire diplomas.

The Vietsch Foundation grant will serve two objectives:

  • Industrializing the EMREX registry and reviewing the ELMO standard
  • Dissemination of EMREX services and building the EMREX brand

This will help EMREX to make a step-change towards a self-standing service which creates value to students and organizations in Europe and also globally.

Kathleen Shearer

Member of  the Board of  Trustees

Kathleen Shearer is the Executive Director of COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), an international association of repository initiatives with a membership of over 150 institutions worldwide from over 40 countries on all 5 continents. COAR’s aim is to enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through a global network of open access repositories based on international collaboration and interoperability.

Kathleen Shearer has been working in the area of open access, open science, scholarly communications, and research data management for over 20 years. She has been the Executive Director of COAR since 2013, and participates in numerous other organizations in Canada and internationally. She is an active member of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and other initiatives related to open science. Most recently in April 2020, Shearer published a paper with colleagues on the need for bibliodiversity in open scholarly communications called Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action. Shearer is also a Research Associate with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and was instrumental in launching the Portage Initiative in Canada, a national research data management network.

Science Checker Project

Funded in 2020/21 – The Science Checker project built a free to access search engine, developing a novel approach that verifies scientific claims by means of analysing the pertinent and available scientific literature. The science-checker.opscidia.com is now publicly available.

The subject of fake news is a very topical one. With social networks, and the advances of artificial intelligence, it is increasingly easier to create fake news and make them circulate quicker and quicker. Health and sciences are particularly nasty topic for fake news. Scam medicine, and worrisome information circulate, often based on absolutely no scientific facts. The current context of Covid19 pandemic has made the need to tackle this crisis in the scientific information even more serious. 

The grant was awarded to Opscidia, a startup which develops artificial intelligence tools that make use of open access articles to accelerate innovation, promote sound policies and help providing rigorous information to the general public. Thanks to the Vietsch Foundation grant, Opscidia will build a prototype online application that allows to check scientific fake news. This prototype will consist in different types of indicators based on the analysis of large volumes of scientific articles. These indicators will be easy to understand in order for the non-specialists to form quickly a good idea of whether an information is backed by the scientific literature, is under debate, or is totally groundless.

Medal Award 2020

The Vietsch Foundation Medal of Honour is awarded annually to individuals or teams that have developed new ideas or demonstrated sustained organisational skills and whose efforts have led to the creation of institutions or services of enduring value. 

This year, the Trustees of the Vietsch Foundation are thrilled to announce that they have unanimously selected two outstanding individuals whose dedication and commitment have contributed enormously to the community.

The 2020 Vietsch Foundation Medal of Honour recipients are Erik Kikkenborg and Bartłomiej Idzikowski.

Andrew Cormack, member of the Board of Trustees explains the rationale behind this year’s award. “For many years, Erik and Bartek have led the team that broadcasts and records talks from the TNC conferences. Thanks to their work many thousands of people from around the world have been able to hear about advances in European research networking and join that community, even when geographical constraints meant they could not attend the conferences in person.

Providing high-quality video streams from a wide variety of locations, often over temporary networks that are installed only for the duration of the conference, requires a particular mix of human and technical skills. Everyone who has presented at TNC, attended the conference remotely, or watched the recordings afterwards, has reason to be grateful to them.”

In the past few years, they have introduced innovative solutions at TNC combining artistic graphics, audio and video design with cutting edge technologies: high resolution, advanced audio, big range of cameras (including on a crane), higher number of screens, dynamic content (including bio info, sponsors details, social media feedback or clock).

Erik Kikkenborg

Erik Kikkenborg is the NORDUnet Media Services Manager, working on the organisation and distribution of cloud-based hosted video services. He is also the technical project coordinator of a vast number of NORDUnet, DeIC, SUNET,  NeIC, GÉANT activities and TNC. For more than 20 years  Erik has been active in audio visual and communications technology, from technician and project coordinator to manager and consultant on video communications, learning platforms and technology, online video and live streaming. For the past 10 years Erik’s primary focus has been collaboration with Nordic and International Research and Education institutions in the area of online platforms for learning and collaboration, in the context of European and global projects under the GÉANT Event Team, GÉANT (eduCONF), TERENA (NRENum), Global CEO Forum (GVA), (GRTC), asi@connect and Up2University (Up2U).

Erik’s professional interests comprise the exploration of the potential of video as a way of communication in education with a focus on new tools and technologies. Currently he is working on how to change the educational landscape in developing countries applying online education platforms.

Bartłomiej Idzikowski

Bartlomiej Idzikowski graduated from Poznan University of Technology in 2003 (Computing Science – Computer Networks and Distributed Systems). He became PSNC employee in the organisation’s Network Department. His research interests focus on video- and web-conferencing, high resolution video systems (4K, 8K), web-based applications, streaming technologies, network management and traffic monitoring. Bartłomiej’s professional background includes long-term cooperation within different European and national projects, such as GN2, GN3, GN3plus, GN4-1, GN4-2, GN4-3, 6NET, Phosphorus, Porta Optica Study, VISIONAIR, ImmersiaTV and Immersify. He was a member of the TNC programme committee in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and member of the TERENA NRENum.net task force. Currently, he is the Task Leader of the eduMEET / eduTURN task in GÉANT, technical coordinator of TNC, coordinator of the scientific TV team (Pionier TV) and steering committee member of the Special Interest Group Multi Media.

 

ENDS 

The mission of the Vietsch Foundation is to promote research and development of advanced Internet technology for scientific research and higher education. The Vietsch Foundation fulfils its goals in two ways: First, it contributes funding to specific research and development projects that demonstrate potential value to progress European and global research and education networking. And second, each year it awards a medal of honour to people who have contributed to the development of services or technologies of lasting value that are used by the networking community and its users in research, development and education. The Foundation was created through the last will and testament of Willem Karel Vietsch (1952–2014), a Dutch expert, a leader of the international Internet community, and also the Secretary-General of TERENA, a former association of European national research and education networks. For details visit: https://www.vietsch-foundation.org

 

 

New project: “Free and Open Source: Law, policy and practice” edited by Amanda Brock

The second edition of “Free and Open Source: Law, policy and practice” edited by Amanda Brock, has been published by Oxford University Press, as an “open access title” with pdf, html and e-reader freely available on an attribution basis, thanks to the generous funding of the Vietsch foundation.

The book is available for download, Open Access, as well as in printed format by Oxford University Press at this OUP link.

When we decided to fund this project we were particularly attracted by what Amanda Brock, told us: “ having managed to persuade an amazing group of contributors to write chapters for the second edition, we will create what I believe will be one of the most important collaborations in open source in 2020. It’s great that the legal and other advisory and support communities around open source, have been willing to pull together and commit their time to create this work. We will be going beyond the European slant of the first edition to a global viewpoint with authors from the US, including Stephen Walli and Ross Gardler on community and governance, Mark Radcliffe on Blockchain and McCoy Smith on copyright. All areas of IP will be covered. Miriam Ballhausen, will pick up on copyright litigation considering recent actions in her home country, Germany and Canonical’s Jilayne Lovejoy will write about contribution agreements. On the patent front, as well as an update of the existing chapter on Patent litigation from the Origin team, Peter Langley and Colm McKernan and Malcolm Bain’s introduction to patents, we will be joined by Knut Blind writing on standard essential patents and his recent report from the Commission. Pam Chesteck is of course covering trade marks while Carlo Piano considers competition and antitrust issues.

Mirko Böhme will explain the economic of open source and Andre Katz will look at All Things Open and open hardware. The Linux Foundation’s Shane Coughlan will write on Open Chain and Kate Stewart on SPDX while Redhat’s Richard Fontana and David Levine will write on Cloud. Iain Mitchell will look at public sector and Open Forum Europe’s Sachiko Muto public policy.

As well as editing, I will be looking at commercial and operational models in open source.

It will be an incredibly practical and useful text for lawyers, open source offices and people working on compliance, suitable for academics and those working at the code face.

The icing on the cake for me as editor of this book is to know that the book will be available to all through open access thanks to the Veitsch Foundation.

Look out for further updates on the book status over the next few months.”