Australia - update and overview of projects - George McLaughlin (AARNET) [ppt] [htm]

George McLaughlin will provide an update covering Australia's international connections and plans; progress on Australia's advanced network programs (GrangeNet, CeNTIE and MNet); International collabotaion on advanced communication and grid services. Using AARnet's carrier licence to members benefit.

DataTAG project and CERN - Olivier Martin (CERN) [ppt] [htm]

A report on the EU DataTAG project and recent development of CERN's connectivity to the USA

European collaboration on research networking development - Karel Vietsch (TERENA) [ppt] [htm]

Summary overview of current joint European work in developing, evaluating, testing, integrating and promoting new networking, middleware and application technologies in the TERENA Technical Programme. Some of the work areas to be outlined: directories, PKI, videoconferencing and streaming, IPv6 testbeds, developing measurement tools for networks with very high capacities, optical testbeds.

SingAREN update - Akkihebbal L. Ananda (SingAREN) [ppt] [htm]

• Infrastructure - current and future plans
• International collaborative projects on SingAREN & I2 networks
• Major research initiatives in Singapore

The session will discuss and demonstrate TTMed Channel, an advanced platform for scientific and biomedical information retrieval, developed by Prous Science (Barcelona, Spain), in collaboration with the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (ICAIR, Chicago, US) and the Catalan Internet2 Initiative (i2CAT, Barcelona, Spain).
The platform stores large collections of relevant information in different formats, such as:

• data on new and established drugs
• chemical structures and synthesis schemes for selected compounds
• patent and reference information
• genomics
• experimental pharmacology and pharmacodinamics
• clinical studies
• digital video and slide archives of scientific and medical conferences
• digital video recordings of advanced surgical techniques
• educational animations
• CME courses

All information items are interlinked, enabling navigation between different media types. The information makes full use of the Internet2's bandwith, offering broadcast quality full screen video and animations delivered in multicast. Multimedia information in the database is indexed via a patent pending multilingual speech recognition and indexation engine, which is based on a phonetic approach and is fully vocabulary and speaker independent. Textual information present in slides is also extracted and indexed.

The session will demonstrate large scale multimedia digital archives, enabling precise information retrieval on a multimedia and multiformat database via textual, chemical substructure or voice queries.

In this presentation, we will introduce CSTNET's progress within past one year and the planned upgrade of CSTNET in next five years, which is being implemented on a key project of Tenth Five-year Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Furthermore, we will focus on research projects on the layers of middleware and application at CSTNET. Some are finished, such as "Scientific Database Applications on High-speed Network" and "Scientific Database Applications on HPC environment", and others are in progress, such as "High Performance Streaming System" and "Scientific Data Grid".As Grid is a hot topic today, we will discuss several specific issues in our system and give a draft design of our SDG.

PingER Project -- Connie Logg [ppt] [htm]

With the increasing globalization of the Internet, grids and the academic and research collaborations, understanding the inter nation network performance is increasingly important. We will report on publicly available Internet performance measurements, from the PingER project, that include loss, from January 1995 to the current day. The measurements are made using the ubiquitous ping facility, are low impact and provide round trip time, loss, reachability, jitter, and estimated throughput. The measurements are made from about 15 countries to over 70 countries which together contain over 99% of the world's population with Internet connections. After a brief description of the measurement method, deployment and visualization tools, we will report on: the improvements in performance seen over the years (roughly a factor of 10 in 4 years between well connected countries); where the digital divide between well connected regions and for less well connected regions may be increasing; performance between regions of the world identifying regions with poor connectivity. Also presented will be: examples of the frequency and impacts of upgrades on performance; the impact of events such as September 11 '01 on reachability; a comparison of ESnet and Internet 2 performance.

CUDI and Latin American connections update - Carlos Casasus (CUDI) [ppt] [htm]

An update on CUDI and recent developments within the country and other important Latin American countries.

International Collaborations - Stuart Kippelman (Johnson & Johnson) [ppt] [htm]

This session will provide an overview of the vision for instantaneous global collaboration in business, and within scientific research. By combining communications, global connectivity, and business requirements, we begin to scratch the surface of the benefits that true global collaboration can provide - to be productive and creative from anywhere, to anywhere in the world - at anytime! Included is an overview of how Johnson & Johnson is using collaboration technologies to connect scientists worldwide.