Conveners
Lightning Talks: Strike Two: 6A
- Renato Furter (Switch)
- Ariela Herček (Arnes)
Universities across Europe are experimenting with generative AI tools in teaching and learning. Many early implementations, however, remain isolated pilots or generic chatbot services that are not integrated into institutional course infrastructure. As a result, AI tools are often used outside the context of courses, without clear links to course enrolment, learning environments, or...
Generative AI challenges higher education institutions to rethink assessment. There is a need for reliable ways to ensure fair evaluation. Remote‑proctoring tools cannot reliably detect the use of AI, and organising large digital exams can be difficult. Traditional supervised exam rooms are secure, but not always convenient for students. Finnish higher education institutions have addressed...
MediaCMS is an emerging open-source media management system for the educational sector, that exemplifies a much needed direction of open source project in times of digital sovereignty. This includes a user-centred platform that prioritises usability, workflow simplicity, institutional autonomy, and sustainable development models. While MediaCMS is a fully functional VCMS for institutions...
This lightning talk presents our initiative: Empowering Women in STEM in Palestine. This initiative empowers women under conflict and occupation through National Research and Education Network (NREN) services. Palestinian women face challenges due to occupation, including limited mobility to attend conferences, restricted access to research labs and high-speed networks, and difficulties...
Trust is the invisible infrastructure of every high-performing team, and in remote environments, it becomes even more fragile and even more critical. This talk blends storytelling, behavioral science, and practical leadership tools into a memorable five-minute experience designed to leave the audience thinking differently about trust in distributed teams.
The “weakest link” narrative in security is both problematic and harmful. It shifts responsibility, undermines engagement and trust, but most damaging of all, turns victims into perpetrators. I will argue that this framing is at the heart of why mitigating human risk has been so difficult and will continue to be so unless we fundamentally rethink how we approach the human factor in security.
When I joined GÉANT, I found myself in a position where I need to be able to explain clearly, succinctly, and accurately what we do and who we are. The scope of GÉANT and NRENs is not easily captured in a 2-minute elevator pitch, something that many in the community can attest to. We are deeply embedded in Europe’s research and education ecosystem, but often our impact is only understood in...
The future of the NREN community is shaped not only by the fibre we deploy or the services we scale. Across many emerging NRENs, sustainability is often framed as an infrastructure challenge involving resilience, redundancy, funding, upgrades. These are critical conversations, but they are not complete.
Imagine it’s tomorrow. Your grant isn’t approved. Your contracts are delayed. Your accounts payable are due next week. What’s your plan? Do you have cash reserves?
How many months can you survive? I’m here to talk about something every organisation depends on - money. Money is oxygen for any organisation - it keeps it alive. It pays people. It funds innovation. It absorbs shocks. It buys...
Observing random spikes in website traffic at odd hours? If you go to investigate what’s causing it, it’s just an endless amount of requests from a battalion of AI scrapers visiting your website for content to train their machine learning models on. It’s like the plague, they hunt you for your content and you’re out there battling it with a toothpick. In a more technical view, your toothpick...
Modern digital services generate enormous volumes of log data every second. When something goes wrong, performance drops, or users start reporting failures, engineers turn to logs to understand what happened. In theory, logs contain all the answers. In practice, finding them is slow, manual, and stressful. Teams must sift through millions of technical messages under time pressure, trying to...
In this talk, I will present a tool developed at GARR that converts YANG models into developer-friendly, type-safe RESTCONF clients in Python, ensuring runtime validation of network configurations. This allows for seamless and safe interactions.
At TNC 2025, RENU (Uganda) and RNP (Brazil) signed a Memorandum of Understanding, marking the beginning of a South–South collaboration between two National Research and Education Networks. One year later, this lightning talk reflects on what happened after the signature. The talk briefly presents how the partnership evolved from a formal agreement into concrete collaboration, including joint...
This talk is not about how "technology can" enable collaboration. It is about putting people first: How do "we actually want" to enable researchers, teachers, and learners to collaborate? Interpreting "Digital Sisu" as a call to action, we need to future-proof higher education institutions as spaces for critical thinking, community, and resilience. Currently, many developments, decisions, and...
Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform agriculture and strengthen climate resilience, particularly in regions where smallholder farmers face increasing environmental uncertainty. As a woman lecturer and researcher in computer science in West Africa, I believe that education and innovation must work together to address real-world challenges. This conviction led to this project...
The Girls in STEM MENA initiative, led by the Hashemite University in Jordan, was created to open doors for girls from disadvantaged regions who rarely have access to scientific research environments. Each summer, the program hosts selected students on campus, where they are introduced to laboratory work, scientific thinking, mentorship, and the real-world possibilities of careers in STEM....
