Trust and Internet Identity Meeting Europe
2013 - 2020: Workshops and Unconference

Next Generation Internet Initiative

(Jean-Luc Dorel)

EU bureaucracy causes for a lot of people and talent not to participate in EU funded projects. Instead give money to intermediaries to lower the participation point. Three intermediaries:

- Trust and Privacy
- Distributed Architectures
- Discovery

Main requirements are: must result in business case, use case, etc. Dealine for participation is April 7th 2018 New call next year Longer term question w.r.t. this type of funding is how to continue: what sort of funding, amount of money, what to fund, regulation, etc.

Short term: what priorities topics for next year Identity issues

Focus for AARC has been on running production systems. For the future more innovation is needed. To make future projects more successful three things are needed:?, ?, ?

Geant is quite an operational project. Funding manpower. In general, we are notified that a lot of talents are not going through European commission programs. Smaller institutions, individuals. We are in the big room and someone asked who is the 2020 and from 1000 people 20 people lifted their hand. There are talents that are not in our program and there are many reasons for that, it’s a blocking factor for many institutions. You need to be a big consortium, so its partially untrue but there is this perception. This is more about the process, if they do the consultation in one subject to be studied. We have 6 years’ worth of projects from the start to the result. In IT this doesn’t work, 6 years is a long amount of time. That’s why we engineered this (what is this?). Most of it will go through classical tools, AI and a few other things. Having smaller teams, more focused team of individuals and more focused topics. Solving real case problems. We are going to do a two-step system. To give the money to several intermediaries that will address the talents for the people that are not in the 2020 system. The first step is now, three topics, each of them 7 mil euros. We are going to select three and each of them will focus on 3 different aspects. First one is trust and privacy and its precisely feeding very well on what you’re walking on today, improving privacy, trust. If you look at tits relatively generic, calling for more use for the users, that the internet is trustable but it will have to be implemented into user case, scientific case, infrastructure to address those. A capacity to also take these 7 mil euros. This is the main objective and then when the money will be handed over the contract will be signed. These intermediaries will issue course, that they will themselves write. Real case, use case, solving problems and addressing what can solve these problems. Discovery mechanism for discovering resources, that is very much in need of today. These are three topics, deadline is 17th of April. I am not sure if you can answer this call but if you can please contact me. The conversation is also short-term and long-term. Next year we will issue another call, one of the things that will be good to hear from you. It’s the longer term then, what sort of investment we should do for this next generation internet, potentially with more funding, what mechanisms, is it something that should be repeated in the future? It was precisely the same model in Geant plus, where the intermediary was opening and focusing on very specific topics. What sort of funding we should have in the future? Is it funding technology? Is it just regulation? I think this community is very rich and aware of the latest technologies.

Kristos: Identity issues, I think there is a gap for the next two years. There is a need to continue development, on how to manage identities. We have covered big paths and it would be a pity if it stops. I see a problem and a strength of arc which is that it brings together what you mentioned before. Infrastructure development and this is key to success. Either you are just replicating things, you are making something that nobody will pick up. It can’t be a by-product, also bringing in the infrastructure and policies of standardization.

Ioannis: I agree with what he said, this should guide you through what is important and what you should focus on, it’s a 7th layer this is what you should be doing, you should have set a goal and have a product you want to create or service and from then we can define the architecture. You should focus on what building block is important. If I tell you to look into blockchain but it might not be the right block to focus on. I see services as a whole thing. There are layers but these technologies, you can’t separate the architecture from the real business value, you need to see what you want to build and then define the architecture for it. You can be building something that don’t match perfectly but you might be facing problems in the future.

Jean-Luc: So your point is that we can’t separate them? This is precisely what the commission did without success for many years because not so many people are able to join the programs, so the definition of omission that drives the development is not working superbly well that’s why in this run we have a different approach, we ask the intermediaries that elaborate the use cases, so my questions is what sort of area, I agree that it’s not technology, what is it, it could be fin tech, could be scalability, the robustness. What sort of I-level priority would you have?

Ioannis: I do system engineering and we worked with European programmes but my tendency is to try to build things that are flexible, you may define what you need now but in two months it might change and they change all the time. I have in my mind a set of patterns that provide you with this thing. What I am looking into is the more abstract levels of the systems that are close to even sourcing where things can be more flexible. These kinds of things can’t operate later but also where to grow from. If you look into this area of banks you will definitely find this kind of systems. I understand this is technical but that’s where I would be focusing on.

Kristos: I think that the academic sector, we are losing the race in terms for innovation but also of technical abilities. Things like microservices, wherever you go into the commercial space, everyone starts from there. I think if you want to be competitive and to maintain the internet for people we need to be in the technical lead and that’s how we can attract targets.

Jean-Luc: hat you mentioned the whole combinations is there is latency in the system. It brings something that is unreal, there is a big thread in between sped and innovation.

Ioannis: Regarding the blockchain, what I see in it ts the ability to have a group of entities that together decide what should be accepted or not. The decision making is a part of the algorithm. This is the big advantage but also the big disadvantage as it removes the power from the people that operate the system.

Jean-Luc: We have 7 mi euros for the decentralized architecture. There will be a project in it.

Slavek: except what was being said, there is a strong point in the entities, and that there is an initiative. There isn’t enough integration for these use cases it would be nice to making this following more. Leveraging strong entity systems.

Hideaki: I became interested in the Wi-Fi system and I met the guy in the project and it seems that the commission hasn’t decided whether the Wi-Fi system has a system or not and it’s a very important point and it the authentication is available we can use better authorization system but I have no idea what the national ID system is called.

Jean-Luc: I don’t know if people are aware of this initiative, it’s a system to deploy Wi-Fi and to deploy it into the European infrastructure that everyone connects to the internet, there are vouchers, 10000 for example. There is an idea of involving this and having authorization. Wi-Fi is an infrastructure for you.

Hideaki: We need a national database then the Wi-Fi can be authenticated.

Hideaki: European commission already has Geant. They gave money of course, so it’s still unclear who is going to run this. But the architecture exists. I can connect you with the spot and comities. Not only the technology but also the operation and coordination globally.

Silke: Support for public and free infrastructures where anonymous users can access the resources under free license. Like universities that seem to have individual struggles. Its only open access research in gender studies or whatever so bringing all of this together then giving up the public access that don’t need the authentication to strongly support the researchers to publish what has been funded with public money.

Jean-Luc: You need to check the authorisation part so this requires by definition a mechanism otherwise you can change the data.

Peter: I think the major problem is these AI silos meaning Facebook and amazon and other people collecting our data and making money out of that. If we want to change that we need an alternative. The EU is big enough to provide such an alternative. General IDs is very important to do so that you make pseudonymity to these silos. There should be pseudonymity and alternatives where we need a different business model so that the data should belong to the owners of the data. Everyone should be able to do statistics on anonymized data but who is going to pay for that. If you don’t want to sell the data but if you want to do it for free you need a model. One idea is that the user pays and the other one is that the state in this case the EU would be that sustainably funds this infrastructure. That would be utopic but we have a problem and I think a big player like the EU could add a solution to this problem.

One comment is which is another observation is that we work in the projects that are long-term so if it takes you two ideas they might be outdated. This is how you achieve continuous innovation.