UCL Lecture – Feedback and Material

It was an almost full room in the Old Refectory of University College London, when on March 1st David Clark and myself shared a lecture on Future Internet research. BT organized this event with video and lunch buffet.

David led off the lecture with an argumentation as to “why should we re-invent the Internet”. It was following many of his well made points on why the current step-wise patch approach in the Internet will not remove fundamental issues that are leading to the erosion of the perceived value of the Internet, e.g., in the security space. He was calling for a fundamental change in looking at the development of the Future Internet, very much aligned with his clean slate arguments for the NSF FIND initiative.

David was handing over to my part with a call for international collaboration in this area, not only on technology and research but in particular also on the level of policy and governance.

It was then my pleasure to present the status of the current discussions around the EIFFEL initiative. One of the two recommendations made in this initiative targets the creation of a support action within the EU FP7 timeframe. This support action aims at momentum creation and coherence building among explorative research projects but also at interaction with more evolutionary research towards the Future Internet. The presentation outlined objectives, framework and potential structure of such support action with a glimpse of how this might be implemented. It is worthwhile noting that, although the support action has a European scope, the final target is certainly an international collaboration along the same lines.

The following Q&A was taken by David and myself together. Concerns of the audience centered around a potential bias of such collaboration towards European and US efforts only. Both, David and myself, tried to ensure that worldwide initiatives, in particular also in Asia, are the clear target but it is the existing US initiative and the forming European one that seemingly is leading this off. Other comments were also targeting the wider scope of the Future Internet, urging the inclusion of policy, governance and business into the realm of consideration. The EIFFEL whitepaper in particular has targeted this wider scope from the beginning (calling for research towards the Future Networked Society rather than the Future Internet).

Generally I felt that the feedback and the comments from the audience were quite positive, in particular towards the idea of international collaboration and the framework of EIFFEL to achieve exactly that. The event was a very good opportunity to outline this framework to the present research community at UCL, in particular with the similar sounding ideas and thoughts from David Clark’s presentation. His experience in the current NSF FIND initiative gives fruitful insight in issues and problems that one might encounter with an undertaking like EIFFEL.

For everybody interested, here is my part of the slides presented during the lecture.