by Dimitrios Pezaros
15 January 2018
In September 2016, I took over as leader of the SICSA Networking and Systems (NET-SYS) theme from Marwan Fayed who had done an excellent job leading SICSA’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) activities over the past few years. Not only there was a succession in leadership, there was also the launch of SICSA’s updated research themes to broaden representation of our research communities.
In the case of Networking and Systems, the theme was launched to succeed SICSA’s NGI as an umbrella theme which would capture all research activity under the broadened constituent areas, and to which NGI would be one specialised strand.
The first thing we did was to set up the NET-SYS mailing list and invite academic colleagues with relevant backgrounds and interests from academia and industry to join. Also, we have invited colleagues to take initiative and form specialist sub-groups to reflect the diverse areas under the merit of NET-SYS, and seek SICSA funding for the organisation of research-focused events in, among others, computer architecture, hardware systems, compiler and language support for parallelisation, networked systems, etc.
NGI continued as a focused strand under NET-SYS, and have had two SCONE (SCOttish Networking Event) meetings, one in January (Glasgow) and one in April (St Andrews), featuring student talks, mentorship activities, research integrity activities, community discussion, and an invited talk from Mirco Musolesi (UCL) on data-driven behaviour interventions, and how smart technologies can contribute to eHealth.
Finally, SICSA NET-SYS together with the EPSRC MaRIONet network co-funded the Reliable, Secure and Scalable Software Systems (RS4) Workshop hosted at Glasgow on 1st September 2017, as part of the activities celebrating 60 years of Computing at Glasgow. The event was very vibrant and well-attended, discussing topics on building secure and resilient systems, and featured talks from academia and industry, including speakers from ARM, EPCC, Codeplay, Maidsafe, and Twitter.
We are now looking forward to another even more vibrant and productive year, with wider engagement from colleagues working in the networking and systems areas across Scotland. There is a budget to support research and community-building events across the theme as well as for conference organisation, and we are very much looking forward to receiving your proposals.