Category: Projects

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

 

 

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 3^rd party institution where the user is temporary located 
  • Access a restricted room (laboratory) in a 3^rd 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 ). 

 

 

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.

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).

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.”

Funded in 2019 – The Vietsch Foundation funds a study by the European Campus Card Association (ECCA) that will encompass requirements for cross-border trusted student eID credentials, and provide recommendations for a trusted student eID framework to support the provision of secure identification and authentication on a cross-border basis in Europe.

The study started on 10 September 2019 and will end in May 2020 with the publication of a report surveying state of the art and business aspects and issuing recommendations for the establishment of a cross-border Student eID Project.

The Vietsch Foundation has decided to fund a new project under the NLnet Research and Higher Education Technology Fund :

TRACKING EXPOSED

Algorithms are the technological solution to the information overload: they are as powerful as necessary to manage the overflow of data that reaches us. Unfortunately, they can also conceal the existence and use of assessments and judgments that impact the dissemination of ideas and culture. No one should be allowed to abuse such power over connected people. At this stage, consent is nor informed nor optional.

The main objective of the project is to put a spotlight on users’ tracking, profiling, on the data market and on the influence of algorithms. As long as these phenomena are shielded from view or understood only by experts, they cannot be tackled with the political determination that problems of such magnitude deserve. That is why we strive to explain the issue, test and promote new solutions, developed to benefit the community.

Project URL https://tracking.exposed/

Funded in 2018

– The Referoo project aims to create a set of tools to address some of the most critical inefficiencies of the traditional peer-reviewing process of scientific publications. In particular, it will build a web portal for managing the refereeing tasks of researchers. The portal will be designed in such a way as to encourage referees to perform their duties conscientiously and efficiently, and provide them with clearer incentives. At the same time, the portal will implement tools to avoid the inefficiencies and the work duplication of the usual refereeing process.