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TNC26 will be hosted by CSC, the Finnish Research and Education Network, and will take place in Helsinki, Finland, from June 8-12, 2026.
About TNC
The largest and most prestigious research and education networking conference, TNC attracts a truly diverse audience of over 800 participants from more than 70 countries, representing national and regional research and education networks, schools and universities, technology providers, and many of the world’s most exciting scientific projects. By bringing together decision-makers, networking and security specialists, identity and access management experts, researchers, academics and students, TNC offers a unique collaborative experience.
The Global Science Network Forum returns at TCN26 with a workshop on the challenges and the impact of the storage on networks and scientific collaborations. While networks have their own direct technological drivers (e.g. router interface speeds, ASIC performance and capabilities, optical system performance and capabilities), there are additional elements in the broader scientific ecosystem that determine the utility of NRENs in scientific workflows.
This session will explore the impact of storage system performance and costs on NRENs from several perspectives and will include a discussion of the broader implications of the information presented, and a call to action for NRENs to gather and analyze information from their constituents.
Meeting agenda
10:10 - 10.30 Break (20min)
The annual Mobility Day is a chance for anyone with an interest in eduroam and other roaming initiatives to come together and discuss developments. Mobility Day covers topics including eduroam, govroam, mobile networks, 4G, 5G, WiFi 6(e), Internet of Things, Low Power WAN, Passpoint/Hotspot 2.0 and other mobility related topics.
Mobility Day is supported by the Global eduroam Governance Committee.
The SIG-EDU Annual Meeting will explore digital education trends, including identity management, wallets, DC4EU, MyAcademicID, and the role of NRENs. It will highlight open standards, showcase NREN support for education, and address the digitalization of learning guided by HEIF, enabling improved interoperability and mobility for students and educators.
Slides from this session can be found on the SIG-EDU wiki.
This session brings together the global R&E security community that attend TNC26 and can have high-impact exchange on governance and strategic security management. By focusing on shared frameworks, leadership challenges and collaborative development, SIG-ISM continues strengthening the common approach and supporting NRENs building resilient and compliant security systems.
The SIG-Marcomms side meeting offers a dedicated space for marketing and communications professionals from the global research and education community to come together, exchange experiences, and strengthen collaboration across organisations and continents. Building on the ongoing work of the SIG-Marcomms group, the session provides an opportunity to discuss key trends, challenges, and best practices in promoting the value and impact of NRENs. Participants will explore ways to enhance topics such as visibility, storytelling, and stakeholder engagement, ultimately supporting the shared goal of advancing research and education through effective communication.
The agenda can be found on the SIG's wiki page.
Join the still growing group of NRENs who are (working towards) using Workflow Orcherstrator (WFO) in production, recieve core software feature updates and plans, listen to user implementation updates, and interact in open discussions between current and future users.
Streaming telemetry is a powerful successor to traditional SNMP, using push technology for far more efficient gathering of a wider variety of finer-grained telemetry data from networked devices in near real-time, while reducing load on devices. Our agenda will include:
- A short introduction to streaming telemetry protocols
- Examples from NRENs who have deployed it, presenting use cases, experiences and lessons learnt.
- Open discussion on the challenges, e.g., handling potentially huge volumes of data
- How the GÉANT and NREN community might develop and share best practices in streaming telemetry.
The GNA-G Network Automation Working group is established to collaborate on the transformation of NREN networks through network automation and orchestration. Join this meeting to learn, discuss, and share information about network automation, network orchestration and related topics. All the slides from this session are available here.
This session will explore why measuring sustainability impacts matters and how to calculate them across networks, products, and services. We’ll discuss practical steps to address these impacts and hear insights from NRENs actively working on measurement programmes, helping us understand the benefits and approaches for meaningful change.
This event is a technical discussion focused on RADIUS standards and practices. It continues from the RADIUS conference held last year in Tampere. We will be discussing changes to the RADIUS standards, and how they have a positive impact operators. The participants in this event will influence the next generation of RADIUS standards.
Further details can be found on the conference website.
This is the yearly SIG Procurement meeting for NREN procurement and contract management team members to convene and discuss 1) focal topics in public procurement in general, 2) specific ideas and challenges affecting procurement in the R&E community, and 3) discussing ways to work together towards a more unified procurement model stimulating active knowledge exchange, which could benefit NRENs and GÉANT.
The Special Interest Group on Research Engagement Development (SIG-RED), with the help of CSC, the Finnish NREN, has organised a visit to the VTT quantum lab in Espoo Otaniemi district for all interested TNC26 participants.
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd (VTT) is one of Europe's leading research organisations, which offers quantum computing services for research and companies, and develops quantum computing algorithms for various applications. VTT’s quantum computer, VTT Q50, is available for commercial and research use, either independently or connected to the CSC LUMI supercomputer. Also, during the visit, we will meet quantum researchers from InstituteQ, who carry out and coordinate globally top-level research in fundamental quantum science and technology.
Join us and register to participate on the registration page.
Collaborate with us on GN5‑2, eduVPN, Firewall‑on‑Demand, NeMo and Protective DNS. We'll discuss future features, integration, and shared support models to accelerate deployment across our institutions.
This event is the perfect opportunity for speakers and session chairs to meet, discuss presentations, catch up with community members and make new connections.
Light snacks and drinks will be served.
This events is sponsored by our host CSC.
Dinner will be held on Monday 8th June in conjunction with CEO Track attendees at Vila Ivan Filan. Buses will leave the Music Hall, (the main TNC venue) at 18:15 and leave to return to the Music Hall at around 22:00. The dinner will begin with welcome drinks at 19:00, followed by a sit-down buffet dinner starting at 19:45. Please note that the dinner is for General Assembly and CEO Track delegates only.
The traditional TNC Morning Run is an informal, voluntary activity that will be held on Tuesday, 9th June, starting at 7am in front of the Helsinki Music Hall at the TNC26 entrance. The run will cover a distance of 5km and last approximately one hour. Pauses on the run will allow us to catch our breath, chat with fellow runners and learn a bit about our host city. This is a great way to meet people that you might not otherwise come across at TNC.
If you haven’t joined us on the run before, and are tempted, do come along. It will be a great social event and is a fun way to get the mind alert for the sessions and discussions to follow that day.
New in 2026: We also know that not everyone can attend TNC every year, but would still like to participate in the TNC Morning Run. So in 2026, we will also do a Virtual TNC Morning Run. To join in, all you have to do is find a moment on 9th June for a 5km run, wherever you are, and then share it with us on LinkedIn using the tag #TNC26. You can also share your run via our “R&E Network Runners” club on Strava.
For those participating in person, we will share more information on the run with participants nearer the time via a TNC Morning Run mailing list. So that we can add you to the mailing list, please register.
Since 2018, the SEE Directors Forum has supported (N)RENs in the SEE region with GÉANT’s coordination. It facilitates quarterly meetings to address challenges and bridge the digital divide.
AI Factories and large‑scale AI infrastructures are being deployed rapidly across Europe. However, many user communities - particularly in research, education, environmental sciences and cultural heritage - are not yet structurally organised to engage with these facilities in a sustainable and effective way. This raises a critical question: how do we avoid building advanced AI infrastructure without clearly aligned and supported user communities?
This Birds of a Feather session brings together representatives from three research user communities - Destination Earth, ENVRI (environmental sciences), and cultural heritage - that have explicitly expressed the need for access to AI facilities. The session will explore how these communities are currently involved in strategic planning, onboarding, and service design, and where gaps remain.
In parallel, representatives from three service and infrastructure providers - GÉANT, Internet2, and PCSS - will share their perspectives on connecting AI facilities with research communities. These organisations pursue a common goal: enabling seamless, trusted and scalable access to AI infrastructure through NRENs and associated services.
The BoF will also reflect on concrete initiatives and deployments, including GÉANT’s EuroHPC Hyperconnectivity work, Internet2’s experience with hyperscaler connectivity for AI research, and PCSS insights into AI Factory infrastructures and their relationship with NRENs. Rather than promoting specific solutions, the session aims to jointly explore emerging NREN strategies for AI and to surface practical lessons from both providers and users.
Intercontinental submarine connectivity infrastructure is entering a new strategic era. Projects such as Medusa and Blue Raman - alongside emerging opportunities such as Polar Connect and the EurAfrica Gateway - are no longer simply telecommunications investments; they sit at the intersection of geopolitics, digital sovereignty, scientific collaboration, socio-economic development and long-term resilience.
As the European Union advances initiatives under Global Gateway, fundamental questions are emerging: who shapes the future architecture of international connectivity, who benefits from it, and how can public-interest infrastructure remain open, trusted and sustainable in an increasingly competitive and fragmented global environment?
This panel brings together representatives from the European Commission, EU financing institutions, regional and national networking organisations (RRENs and NRENs) to discuss how strategic connectivity projects can deliver lasting value for research and education (R&E) communities not only across Europe, but globally.
The discussion will explore:
Panellists:
The FileSender Board invites all interested persons to the annual meeting of FileSender service providers, users and developers to discuss the strategic roadmap, experiences with new versions 3.x, requirements, data mobility infrastructures, an NREN FileSender federation and whatever else is relevant.
Please register if you plan to participate so we have an idea of how many people we can expect.
NRENs across the world are taking on growing responsibility for enabling secure, sovereign, and compliant cloud use for research and education. The Global Cloud Café offers an open, informal space for NRENs from all continents to share short, 10-minute updates on their roles, current challenges, and lessons learned. The session will also provide an update on the feasibility study exploring whether the OCRE cloud tenders – already serving 39 European countries and over 1,100 institutions in 29 countries making use of them – could evolve into a global model. Four of the participating NRENs will share their perspective: BCNET/Cybera, Internet2, REANNZ & RNP.
It will also include a panel discussion on the role of NRENs in the procurement and delivery of cloud services.
This is a working conversation. Join to gain a concise overview of global NREN cloud developments, understand shared pain points, and explore whether practical cross-regional collaboration is possible.
More information on OCRE.
Much of the focus in international R&E networking lies with capacities and the ability to move large volumes of data in support of data-intensive science and international science collaborations. While important, capacity is not everything. Latency is also critical in many scenarios. As a colleague recently put it “it’s not just megabytes it’s also milliseconds”. Use cases for low latency networking are many and varied, from haptic control, through distributed databases, to networked music performances. Different applications will have different sensitivity to latency and jitter.
The BoF will include a small number of short talks to set the scene for subsequent discussion, and reserve at least half the allotted time for that discussion. The discussion will consider gaps in the tools and approaches for reporting measurements, and explore potential collaboration to address identified gaps.
In this interactive session, we will discuss and experience how we can support each other through hardship. We start the session (09:00-09:45) looking at how the war in Ukraine has affected our community and what we can do to help each other.
The international R&E community includes many people whose lives are deeply affected by global crises.This Community Hub session explores the experience of living and working abroad while war continues at home. Through reflections from Ukrainian colleagues working for NRENs in Europe, we will share what it means to remain professionally active while family members, friends, and communities face daily danger. This session will connect these personal perspectives with the work of the Humanitarian Support Group for NRENs, highlighting how the R&E community can respond not only technically, but also humanly.
Cyber threats are increasingly sophisticated, transnational, and persistent - posing significant risks to research and education infrastructures worldwide. At TNC25, the concept of the Security Policy Alliance (SPA) was introduced to CEOs as a strategic initiative to unite NRENs in a global alliance for cybersecurity policy alignment, intelligence sharing, and collective resilience.
The NREN community is now a frequent target for cybercriminals and state‑sponsored actors. While operational cooperation exists, there is currently no strategic‑level coordination to address systemic, cross‑border risks. The SPA aims to fill this gap by creating a trusted framework for policy harmonisation, shared situational awareness, and coordinated incident response.
In this session, we will explore key themes in NREN cybersecurity and strategic alignment, highlighting both current challenges and areas for improvement. You will hear from NREN leaders about the risks they are facing, what strategic alignment can achieve, and why collaboration is essential in an era of rising geopolitical tension. You will also meet the emerging SPA Steering Group and learn how your NREN can get involved.
Meet the next generation of voices in research and education networking. The Future Talent Programme (FTP) discovers and supports exceptional emerging talent across our community. At TNC26, FTP 2026 participants will present their innovative Lightning Talks, showcasing fresh ideas and perspectives. You can find more information about their topics and specialisms here.
Join this informal meet and greet to connect with the FTP 2026 presenters over coffee. The session aims to build valuable connections between the Future Talent participants, their NRENs, and the wider GÉANT community. Interested in FTP 2027? The GLAD team and FTP mentors will be happy to answer your questions.
For first-time attendees - come and find out how to make the most of your TNC visit from experienced TNC attendees. This session will help explain how to navigate the sessions, understanding jargon and unmissable sessions. Find out the difference between the community hub, BoFs and general sessions, learn about our social events and meet some of our community members to make your first connections.
Maria Ritola’s keynote on 9 June will focus on “Successful teams and good work life in the digital age”. An awarded technology influencer, Maria is one of the founders of Iris.ai, where she has built AI-based applications to help researchers utilise scientific articles more quickly and comprehensively. Maria has studied exponential technologies at Singularity University, Silicon Valley, has been selected as the Young Achiever of the Year, and is among the influential women in technology in the Nordic countries. She is a regular on the Finnish morning TV program Jälkidigi, where she discusses technological phenomena.
Beyond the technology itself lies the question: what does it take to build successful teams, and sustain a good work-life balance in an increasingly digital world? Drawing on her experience with exponential technologies at Singularity University in the Silicon Valley and her role as a public voice on Finnish TV, Ritola challenges us to look beyond efficiency and rethink how we define productivity, leadership, and balance.
In addition to delivering a world class network infrastructure, NORDUnet and the Nordic NRENs drive a number of service evolution initiatives. This presentation will present a number of these and invite conference attendees to join us for conversations on pushing new services and technologies forward.
An inside look at HPE Networking’s journey from assisted operations to autonomous, AI driven networks, with a glimpse into how we’re future proofing security for the post quantum world.
This session will provide an update on SIG-Quantum. Both SIGs are examples of community-led initiatives aiming at creating our next-generation infrastructure, in a way that is increasingly relevant to NRENs, National Metrology Institutes (NMIs), and research communities across Europe.
NRENs face rapid technological change, rising cybersecurity threats, regulatory complexity, funding pressure and increasing competition from hyperscalers. In this environment, resilience depends not only on technical strength but on internal alignment. This session positions communication as the “confidence layer” that enables clarity, trust and coordinated action. Introducing a practical framework built on clarity, confidence and cohesion, it offers techniques for explaining complex change, equipping staff to engage stakeholders, and maintaining trust during adversity. Aligned with TNC’s sisu theme, the session highlights communication as a strategic capability essential to NREN evolution and long-term sustainability.
When a large-scale crisis hits our community, collaboration between NRENs is critical. But what really happens when the pressure is on? In March 2026, 9 N/RRENs and GÉANT took part in the first TALON exercise: a one-day, live crisis simulation played out in real time across organisations. In this talk, we share key insights from the exercise, with a focus on coordination and cooperation across operational, communicational and strategic levels. We conclude with the main lessons the NREN community can draw for future crisis situations.
Can cross-functional teams collaborate effectively when people bring different ways of working and perspectives? Over the past two years, we’ve worked together to build products that solve user needs. Along the way, we’ve identified four practical tips that help us break down silos, reduce friction, build trust, and collaborate better. This talk is for anyone working in or with cross-functional teams - developers, designers, product managers, and beyond. We will show that when collaboration works, you can create a great product through effective teamwork.
In the technical world of National Research and Education Networks, teams depend on accurate communication to deliver services, collaborate across borders, and respond to emerging issues. Yet unclear messaging remains one of the most persistent, and preventable, sources of friction. This session explores how miscommunication in chat channels, email, and meetings leads to duplicated work, delays, conflict, and erosion of trust. Through real-world examples and practical guidance, participants will learn how miscommunication happens, how assumptions and jargon create “invisible” misunderstandings, how to write clear, concise messages in asynchronous tools, and how to navigate individuals’ differences to improve understanding and collaboration.
Emerging standards - Verifiable Credentials, Open Badges 3.0, and the European Learning Model - combined with the EU Digital Identity Wallet are reshaping how learners own and share credentials. SURF, the Dutch NREN, is piloting this future through the Eduwallet project: a national testing ground integrating eduID, Edubadges, and wallet infrastructure across real education and labour-market use cases. This session includes a demonstration of the public Eduwallet Playground and explores how wallet-based credentialing reduces dependency on federated gatekeepers, positions NRENs as trust brokers, and lays the groundwork for eduCredentials - a next-generation platform designed for portable, interoperable, and privacy-respecting lifelong learning.
Switch was among the first NRENs to establish a national identity federation as a production service in 2005. A first strategic realignment resulted in the launch of Switch edu-ID in 2015 to better support life-long learning and to increase synergies. Since then, we left the service architecture largely untouched – while the world around us continued to transform. Switch started the “re-thinking edu-ID” journey in 2025 to re-align with the new realities and making it fit for the next decade. Join this session to learn about our wake-up call, the community consultation process, the scenarios we identified and what our next steps will be.
Network automation is transforming how organisations design, operate, and scale their digital infrastructure. This session explores practical strategies and emerging approaches that simplify complex network tasks and improve service agility. Attendees will learn how automation frameworks, APIs, and intent‑based networking can streamline operations while enhancing visibility and compliance. Real‑world case studies will highlight measurable benefits - from faster deployments to improved resilience. Whether you’re beginning your automation journey or looking to deepen existing capabilities, this session will provide actionable guidance to help modernise your network and empower your teams.
The GÉANT backbone network has completed its packet layer migration to a new equipment vendor. This move has been made possible by the GÉANT Service Orchestrator, a result of cross-departmental collaboration between teams and, the software developed in the Workflow Orchestrator programme. Looking back on the migration, how have we managed pull this off, and what is our new vantage point into the future?
The presentation outlines the evolutionary migration to fully automated network service lifecycle management in the PIONIER network while preserving complete user control and trust. Three stages are covered: (1) building a unified data model and a flexible Single Source of Truth component, (2) deploying network service orchestration, and (3) integrating with monitoring, advanced visualization, and AI for data filtering, analysis, and intent‑based service management. This case study illustrates how collaboration among network engineers, NOC staff, software developers, and DevOps experts, together with open‑source tools and standards, enables scalable, secure, and controllable automation in national research and educational networks.
Generative AI is rapidly emerging as a transformative force in networking, reshaping how services are designed, configured and orchestrated. This presentation provides a practical and forward-looking exploration of how generative AI can significantly accelerate operations paving the way for more adaptive network services. It aims to provide a clear understanding of what generative AI can realistically offer today, how it can be applied to orchestration, and what to expect when AI-driven agents shape the next generation of autonomous network operations. The shared hands-on experience serves as inspiration and guidance, while stimulating a broader conversation about responsible adoption.
In an era of geopolitical uncertainty, accelerating cloud adoption, fragmentation, and rising security risk, NRENs hold together far more than infrastructure - they hold communities. This session explores the key ingredients sustaining collaboration: funding models that shape collective purpose and financial sustainability; approaches that maximise community value from cloud infrastructure investments; and models for building a more cohesive trust fabric across NRENs, federations, universities, and libraries. Drawing on perspectives from GÉANT, Internet2, and EBSCO, the talks invite participants to tune into how different communities are creating the bridges that global research and education professionals need to overcome current day threats.
National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) have built global impact through physical networks and identity federations. This session explores building a third pillar: collaborative human networks for cloud infrastructure. Internet2's Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP) leverages hyperscaler standardization to create workforce multipliers. By sharing solutions, data, and skills across common platforms, NRENs transform individual institutional efforts into collective community capabilities. Learn how structured communities of practice, cohort-based learning, and data benchmarking create network effects that benefit all participants.
Libraries are core to the R&E mission—they provide access to knowledge that powers the academic enterprise. Yet in cybersecurity terms, they remain one of its least integrated components. While universities and NRENs have advanced identity and incident-response programs, libraries often operate alongside these efforts, relying on access methodologies that offer limited assurance and put reliable access to research at risk. This session explores how we might bridge federations, universities, and libraries to build a more cohesive trust fabric. Drawing on lessons from the field, presenters from the academic library community will share opportunities for meaningful alignment and invite discussion on further collaboration.
The presentation will recap on the ways the GÉANT Association – and, more broadly, collaboration within the European R&E networking community - has been funded to date. It will reflect on what has worked well and what remains unstable and uncertain, share insights into future funding trends, and outline potential funding scenarios considering the current knowledge of the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). Finally, it will invite participants to consider how European R&E collaboration can be safeguarded from a funding perspective in an era of geopolitical uncertainty and ongoing changes that the European Commission - the primary funding body for European cross-border collaboration - must itself undergo.
The denomination “NREN” to signify National Research and Education Networks has not changed since its conception, even while our community’s activities have evolved and adapted to the ever changing circumstances of the world we live in. This interactive, mostly unplugged Community Hub session will explore who we are, what being an “NREN” really means, what our purpose is in the time of uncertainty, and how we can stand together and collaborate in order to hold true to those ideals of openness, community service, independence and resilience that connect us all under the four-letter moniker, as well as in the GÉANT Community.
“The Case for NRENs" website long served as a vital repository of knowledge for the global research and education community. However, to remain effective, the platform must move beyond a rather static document library to become an interactive, strategic roadmap for NREN leaders. We are currently spearheading a major revamp of the platform, transforming it into a dynamic tool where operational actions directly feed into strategic development. This Community Hub session showcases the transition from a vision to a digital reality.
This proposal outlines an interactive co-creation session where participants explore the value of NRENs by imagining their absence. Through storytelling and small-group work, participants identify what fails, who is impacted, and why NRENs matter, from the evaluation of real experiences. The session encourages reflection on challenges in communicating NREN value to decision-makers and develops clearer, more compelling narratives. Participants are encouraged to collaboratively produce reusable advocacy messages and concrete personas illustrating impact. Outcomes include shared stories, improved communication strategies, and practical messaging tools. The format is highly participatory, supported by diverse moderators, and designed to generate actionable insights for strengthening NREN advocacy and positioning.
This Community Hub session will highlight the GÉANT Twinning Programme as a strategic instrument for fostering impactful collaboration between National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) worldwide. Building on last year’s discussion-based format, this 30-45 minute session will be structured in two complementary parts to move beyond information sharing and actively catalyse new initiatives.
The first half will feature a focused Project Spotlight on the currently running Twinning project between CSC /FUNET (Finland) and NREN (Nepal). This practical showcase will outline the project’s objectives, implementation approach, and lessons learned. Emphasis will be placed on tangible outcomes and capacity building, providing participants with a concrete understanding of how Twinning projects are managed and successfully delivered.
The second half adopts a dynamic ‘Rapid-fire Partner Pitch’ format designed to stimulate new collaborations. NRENs seeking Twinning partners will be invited to deliver concise, three-minute pitches introducing their organisation and a concrete collaboration idea. This segment is already gaining momentum, with BdREN (Bangladesh) and RASH (Albania) confirmed to present their partnership interests. Other potential contributors are expected from Latin America and Africa, providing high visibility to interested NRENs and creating immediate momentum for networking.
The session will conclude with a moderated Q&A, enabling participants to explore potential next steps. By combining a real-world showcase with structured pitching, the session aims to empower the global community to initiate their own partnerships for the 2026-2027 cycle.
Quantum security is becoming a critical component of digital sovereignty, but for NRENs and government institutions, sovereignty depends on operational control over secure infrastructure—not policy alone. As quantum threats evolve, the challenge is shifting from adoption to deployment: how to integrate quantum-safe technologies into existing networks in a scalable and operationally viable way. This session explores how quantum security is moving from testbeds into production NREN environments, focusing on:
Attendees will gain a clear understanding of how to operationalise quantum-safe infrastructure today, and how CV-QKD complements existing security strategies to enable sovereign, future-proof communications.
This session explores how cloud sovereignty, open ecosystems, and NREN internal developer platforms transform regulatory and infrastructure constraints into strategic advantage-reducing complexity, enabling interoperability, and building resilient, sovereign by design digital foundations for research, education, and innovation.
Across the research and education community, organizations face a dilemma where adopting cloud and containers has made service delivery more complex rather than simpler. RNP is addressing this complexity by building an Internal Developer Platform that offers well designed self service paths for common services. The platform is organized around four pillars: Speed, Safety, Efficiency, and Scalability. This session describes how RNP treats the platform as a product to provide golden paths that reduce cognitive load while maintaining flexibility for service teams.
Global hyperscale outages in 2025, such as the AWS outage and the global Cloudflare outage, exposed the fragility of centralized cloud dependencies. For institutions in the Global South, these failures compound local constraints such as power instability, high latency, and legal requirements of the Data Protection and Privacy laws, turning cloud adoption into a sovereignty issue. This session presents an actionable blueprint for transforming regulatory constraint and infrastructure fragility into competitive advantage, paving the way for stronger, sovereign-by-design infrastructure for Ugandan and continental innovation.
Over 20 European tech organizations, led by OpenNebula Systems, launched Virt8ra.eu in early 2025, an open source initiative focused on building Europe's first sovereign virtualization stack. Part of the €3B IPCEI-CIS project, this collaboration created a European technological ecosystem around vendor-neutral cloud-edge continuum management and virtualization. Virt8ra enables interoperability and portability for applications, supporting low-latency use cases and reducing dependence on hyperscalers. In this talk we will present this initiative, its main technological results, and the different options for third-parties to join this community and contribute with their components and innovations.
This session explores how National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) can support Europe’s transition toward an interoperable higher education ecosystem. Speakers introduce the Higher Education Interoperability Framework and highlight the key role of NRENs in enabling trusted cross‑border services. Participants will also hear insights from a CSC–SURF proof of concept, demonstrating how a federated approach to course data can enhance Europe‑wide course discoverability. A panel discussion will explore how mobility can become the new normal, and how closer cooperation across HEIs, NRENs, and European initiatives can reduce fragmentation and strengthen the higher education landscape.
Europe’s ambition for a borderless European Education Area is hindered by fragmented digital systems that burden learners with complex cross-border search, authentication, application, and recognition processes. National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), collaborating through GÉANT, offer a trusted, federated infrastructure -eduroam, eduGAIN, MyAcademicID, eduID and credential services - forming Europe’s education trust fabric. Building on the Higher Education Interoperability Framework (HEIF), NRENs address three urgent use cases: Discover (interoperable catalogues), User Identity (secure cross-border identities), and Apply & Recognition (ELM-aligned processes). By connecting national systems through a coordinated European layer, NRENs enable mobility-by-default, reduce bureaucracy, and safeguard European digital sovereignty.
This presentation explores how higher education institutions are adopting the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework (HEIF) to strengthen collaboration within European university alliances and beyond. Using practical use cases, we demonstrate how HEIF helps create shared structures and a common language that enable mutual understanding and long‑term planning for truly interoperable services and processes. The session highlights that functional interoperability depends on deeper, ongoing collaboration between HEIs and European initiatives, working together to develop the shared standards, governance models, and services required to achieve seamless learner mobility.
Across Europe, universities collaborate through alliances and cross-border programmes, yet students still struggle to discover courses beyond national and institutional boundaries. Course data remains fragmented, duplicated, and locked into local systems. This session presents fed-eduhub, a prototype for a federated, scalable architecture that interconnects national platforms such as SURFeduhub (NL) and Opin.fi (FI) using OEAPI (Open Education API). Rather than creating a central catalogue, fed-eduhub demonstrates how NRENs can jointly operate a DNS-like federated trust network for course discoverability. This approach reduces duplication, preserves institutional and national sovereignty, and offers a realistic, standards-based path towards European-wide educational interoperability.
This session explores how NRENs can evolve their services in a changing environment, balancing innovation with long-term maintainability. It brings together strategic and technical perspectives to examine how services are conceived, developed, and adapted over time to continue delivering clear value to research and education communities.
The session will highlight shared challenges such as avoiding duplication of effort, ensuring adaptability, and engaging the community in decision-making. Participants will reflect on how to build services that are not only successful at launch, but resilient, maintainable, and relevant in the long run.
As NRENs, we historically leverage technology and build services to support research & education. A technology focused exercise that has long been successful. But the context in which NRENs operate has become more complex: a general market with more integrated services, our added value in relation to the market is no longer self-evident and the world around us is changing and getting more complex by the day.
A challenge many of us are facing is: how do we optimize and maximize the value created for R&E institutes by our services? How do we create strong narratives around our services and portfolio?
Participants in this session will exchange knowledge and insights on their approaches to ensure that services are designed and developed in ways that maximize the value delivered.
At GÉANT we have a service that has been online for more than 10 years: Firewall on Demand. This service is a firewall for your network, it integrates with your router platform and sends rules to block or rate limit certain IP addresses.
This software plays a crucial role in our network and the security of it. Over the years, we have added new features, bug fixes and went through multiple software and OS upgrades. Recently, we upgraded our network to use a different router vendor, which meant that this software had to be updated. This posed a difficult challenge: the software was too intertwined with the old routers and adding a new router platform was tricky. We could either refactor the current software or start from scratch. We chose the latter as we think this can improve the maintainability.
This presentation will be about the experience doing a project like this. We will go over the challenges, the advantages and disadvantages that led from this project. More interestingly, it will talk about what it means for software to be maintainable. The approach we took to write the new version is to implement only the things we absolutely need but allow for easy extensibility using scripts.
To find out more about this session please listen to the short podcast.
At Sikt, the Norwegian NREN, we make high‑impact decisions under uncertainty, balancing diverse stakeholders, federated governance, legacy systems, and limited budgets. Hypothesis‑driven development offers a disciplined way to earn trust by turning assumptions into testable bets, learning from small, safe experiments, and making decisions about when to continue, pivot, or stop. This session translates that mindset into a practical playbook for NREN and R&E contexts. We’ll focus on designing experiments and defining outcomes that matter to our communities, emphasizing adoption, reliability, trust, and resilience. Participants will learn to frame testable hypotheses, run small safe experiments and make clear continue/pivot/stop decisions.
SIRTFI defines how federated organisations should coordinate during security incidents, yet asserting compliance does not automatically build operational trust. In 2025, InCommon conducted a multi-day, story-driven cybersecurity cooperation exercise involving distributed Identity Providers and Service Providers. The exercise revealed gaps between IAM and security teams, inconsistent handling of TLP markings, and challenges in cross-institution communication. This session shares lessons learned and demonstrates how structured tabletop exercises can operationalise federated trust, strengthen coordination across eduGAIN participants, and move communities beyond checkbox compliance toward a culture of shared responsibility and practical cooperation.
At the Munich University of Applied Sciences, MFA and passkeys were deployed in May 2025. After one year in production, we share results and lessons learned. We combine a controlled usability study with an ongoing longitudinal analysis to show why passkeys outperform OTPs and traditional FIDO2 security keys in usability, acceptance, and speed, and where they still struggle. Drawing on operational data, such as completion times, error rates, and helpdesk tickets, we distill actionable guidance for NRENs and campus IAM teams integrating passkeys into Shibboleth-based infrastructures. Attendees will leave with concrete deployment recommendations and ready-to-adapt practices.
The boundary between network service and network security is rapidly dissolving. Today’s infrastructures must not only deliver performance and reliability, but also sense, learn, and adapt in the face of constant change and persistent threat. In “To Serve and Protect” session we examine how AI-enabled operations and AI-aware defense strategies converge into a new operational model. Through real-world deployments of ML-based anomaly detection, AI-assisted incident management, and LLM-powered honeypots, this session reveals how academic and research networks are transforming raw telemetry and attacker interaction into collective intelligence, faster response, and more resilient digital services.
ESnet shares its pragmatic journey developing AI tools that deliver measurable improvements to Network Operations Center efficiency. Rather than chasing trends, ESnet focused on AI-assisted ticket resolution. This presentation details two concrete applications - Intelligent Resolution Guidance that proactively surfaces relevant documentation, and Adaptive Incident Summarization that generates audience-tailored ticket summaries. Through systematic stakeholder engagement and incremental development, ESnet demonstrates how responsible AI implementation can genuinely augment operational capabilities. Attendees will gain practical insights on balancing AI capabilities with limitations, ensuring tools address real workflow pain points while integrating seamlessly into existing processes, and learn from both successes and challenges encountered.
We demonstrate efforts to collect threat intelligence by provisioning honeypot infrastructure and the synergy between honeypots and Large Language Models. We show data from the GN5-2 honeynet, including Kibana-based visualisations, and our pipelines, including sandboxing infrastructure. Monitoring with T-Pot and LangFuse enables behavioural analysis by tracking session abandonments caused by LLM failures (e.g. unrealistic interaction). LLMs, besides opportunities, also bring risks. A honeypot designed to engage attackers may enable prompt injection attacks. Thus, we compare robust (secure) system prompts with poorly crafted ones that expose system details or allow instruction hijacking. Prompt quality influences detection accuracy and attack resistance.
As networks grow in scale and complexity, traditional monitoring tools struggle to track subtle deviations and manage increasing incident volumes. Modern applications depend on stable latency, packet loss, and jitter, where small variations can degrade user experience. Machine Learning offers an intelligent approach to anomaly detection by learning baseline behavior and identifying deviations without static thresholds. By analyzing large sets of measurements, ML enhances situational awareness, accelerates troubleshooting, and improves reliability. This presentation discusses how ML techniques support anomaly detection in RNP network operations.
Some of the best connections at TNC26 happen over a shared moment - a song, a story, or a spontaneous dance move that nobody saw coming.
During the opening reception on Tuesday 9 June, head over to the Community Hub for an Open Mic where attendees are invited to take the floor and share whatever they love - a hidden talent, singing, dancing, spoken word, comedy, you name it.
Do you play an instrument? Even better. Pack that ukulele or harmonica in your bag and bring it along. If it brings you joy, bring it to TNC!
No sign-up, no preparation required. Just stay for the opening reception, find the Community Hub, and join the fun whenever you feel ready.
Not a performer? No worries - the Open Mic needs an audience just as much as it needs artists. Grab a drink, cheer loud, and be the hype our performers need.
The Opening Reception will take place at the Music Hall, TNC26’s main venue, on Tuesday 9 June, right after the last parallel session of the day. This is your first chance to socialise with other delegates, meet the speakers and engage with our exhibitors.
Join us for the TNC26 Kick-Off Party at club Maxine, located in central Helsinki. Whether you’re networking, catching up with friends and colleagues, or just or dancing the night away, this is the perfect way to start the event.
WHO IS INVITED?
All registered participants (Full Conference Pass or Tuesday Social Pass holders) are welcome! Please bring your conference badge, as it will serve as your entry pass and allow you to collect your drink vouchers
HOW TO GET THERE?
-> Club Maxine is located in the Kamppi shopping centre, at the top floor providing us with a beautiful city view. You can get in by taking the elevator on the Narinkkatori side.
-> Please use the separate Maxine entrance on the left side of the shopping mall main entrance at Narinkkatori Square. Entering through the main shopping centre entrances you might get lost.
-> Next to the main Kamppi doors, there is a small dedicated entrance door for Maxine. Immediately inside this entrance on the left there is the elevator that goes directly to the venue. Only this elevator provides access to Maxine.
Getting to Narinkkatori Square
● Metro: Take the metro to Kamppi Station. Follow signs for “Narinkkatori” or “Kamppi Shopping Centre”.
● Tram or bus: Several tram and bus lines stop at Kamppi in central Helsinki.
● Walking: Narinkkatori Square is about a 5-minute walk from Helsinki Central Railway Station.
● Taxi: Ask for: “Maxine entrance at Narinkkatori Square”
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By invite only - please note this is a private side meeting for NREN CEOs only. Invites will have been sent directly to indiviudals who can attend this event.
We invite BoF participants to share their thoughts about the different components a CNaaS service portfolio should contain, explore opportunities for collaboration on those components and what to prioritise. This could be items such as business models, technology, architecture, procurement, product management principles and software development. Everybody interested in campus network services is very welcome to join the BoF as well as the SIG.
This workshop will explore how risk management practices can be applied to strengthen cybersecurity across the research and education ecosystem. Participants will discuss practical approaches, shared challenges, and collaborative strategies to make NRENs and their connected institutions more resilient and secure.
Attendees are requested to please bring a laptop for this working session.
In this Birds of a Feather session, we invite participants interested in the security aspects of federated authentication and authorization. We will open the session with a brief introduction to the eduGAIN CSIRT and an overview of its role and capabilities.
To stimulate discussion, we will present several real-world incidents that the team has handled in recent years, along with the lessons we learnt. These cases span a range of challenges, including large‑scale misuse of compromised identities, problematic behavior of services weakening the overall security, and problems caused by insecure configurations. These cases also trigger a review of the eduGAIN security baseline, which represents the minimum capabilities that the relevant security teams, consisting of eduGAIN CSIRT and the federations security contacts, needs to meet.
The goal of the session is to exchange experiences, compare different approaches to incident handling in distributed environments, and identify common challenges across the federated ecosystem. We aim to discuss expectations and requirements for incident response in eduGAIN from the perspectives of all involved actors, i.e., service operators, identity providers, and individual federations.
All information presented or discussed in this session is strictly for the attending participants and must not be disclosed further (TLP:AMBER+STRICT).
The Management & Leadership Development Programme (MLDP) has supported internal leaders in strengthening clarity, ownership, accountability, and collaboration across distributed environments. Now, we are exploring how MLDP can be adapted and offered to Members.
This 90-minute BoF session will serve as both a practical leadership taster session and the official launch and consultation space for MLDP for Members. The session will not be a presentation about the programme. Instead, participants will experience a facilitated leadership exercise drawn directly from MLDP content.
Speakers: Ilias Papastamatiou (GRNET), Alexis Aivaliotis (GRNET), Domenico (Dom) Vicinanza (GÉANT), Piotr Rydlichowski (PCSS), Wojciech Kozlowski (SURF), Sergejs Kozlovics (IMCS, University of Latvia).
An open discussion and Q&A session will follow the presentations.
Quantum technologies are increasingly progressing as a strategic priority for research, digital infrastructure, and secure communications worldwide. Significant progress is being made across all main domains of quantum technologies - quantum communication, quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum metrology. In this evolving landscape, NRENs are increasingly expected to play an enabling role by providing advanced use cases, connectivity to users, trusted infrastructures, testbeds, services and operational expertise to support research communities and emerging quantum infrastructures.
This BoF session at TNC26 Conference will bring together representatives from the NREN community to exchange experiences and discuss how NRENs and GÉANT can contribute to the development and deployment of quantum technologies across Europe and beyond.
Dive straight into action with a fast-paced, unplugged crisis simulation where teamwork, quick thinking and clear roles are put to the test - revealing how pressure shapes decision-making in real time. Then explore the human side of cybersecurity through interactive discussions, expert insights and the Digital Safety Fresco, a hands-on workshop designed to make digital safety accessible and engaging for all. Finally, discover how innovation comes to life within the GÉANT Security Innovation Lab, a collaborative space where ideas grow into impactful security solutions. Together, these sessions blend experience, interaction and forward-thinking to spark new perspectives on security.
This community hub session will be an unplugged mini crisis management exercise in which you participate. No slides and no setup, just a short exercise that forces fast group decisions. It is a quick and very real way to show how pressure immediately changes team behaviour and how even a simple exercise can reveal the importance of clear roles, structured decision making and the basics of crisis coordination.
In the second part, it guides participants through the initiatives behind CLAW and PAW, including a visual walkthrough of the PAW exercise materials.
This interactive session focusses on the human aspects of cybersecurity. The session introduces community activities, shared resources like the Security Awareness Hub, and insights from the 2025 cybersecurity campaign. Participants engage with experts, discuss practical challenges, and explore the Digital Safety Fresco, a collaborative workshop helping non-technical users understand digital systems and safe behaviour.
The GÉANT Security Innovation Lab is a new community-driven initiative designed to accelerate cybersecurity innovation across Europe's research and education networking ecosystem. It provides a shared space for NRENs and other GÉANT members to develop, test, and showcase security research projects - ranging from early-stage ideas to advanced prototypes requiring realistic network conditions. This talk introduces the Lab, its dual structure, its current development status, and how community members can actively participate. The goal is clear: expand the Research & Education security innovation landscape by bringing more projects together and increasing collaboration across the GÉANT community. The session first explains the vision and purpose of the GÉANT Security Innovation Lab as an open incubator for security research. Attendees will learn how the Lab creates value through two complementary components: The Soft and the Hard Lab.
Research organisations are under growing pressure to accelerate discovery while meeting increasing demands for security, compliance, and governance. This session explores how Secure Research Environments and Trusted Research Environments help bring fragmented data together in secure cloud-based environments - improving security posture, reducing friction, and enabling faster, safer research at scale.
Invitation Only - please note this is a private side meeting for NREN CEOs only. Invites will have been sent directly to indiviudals who can attend this event.
This workshop will explore how risk management practices can be applied to strengthen cybersecurity across the research and education ecosystem. Participants will discuss practical approaches, shared challenges, and collaborative strategies to make NRENs and their connected institutions more resilient and secure.
Attendees are requested to please bring a laptop for this working session.
The Global eduroam Governance Committee (GeGC) comprises fifteen senior representatives of roaming operators in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, North America and Europe. It oversees the governance of the eduroam service, including recommending policy changes and admitting new participants. This open meeting of the GeGC allows National Roaming Operators and other eduroam participants to get a unique view of the workings of this committee and an opportunity to ask questions or raise concerns.
Deepa Shinde, Senior Director of Research & Innovation at Microsoft EMEA, explores how the convergence of high‑performance computing, artificial intelligence, and emerging quantum techniques is redefining the pace, scale, and nature of scientific discovery. The keynote sets out a new operating model for research - AI‑native rather than marginally assisted, platform‑based rather than tool‑centric, federated rather than centralised, and governed by design rather than retrofitted control - arguing that sustained impact now depends on shared platforms that connect data, models, compute, and collaboration, with AI treated as a scientific instrument alongside supercomputers and laboratories. In the spirit of TNC26’s Digital Sisu theme, the talk combines this systems perspective with concrete research exemplars, including AI‑assisted materials discovery, foundation models for weather and climate forecasting, and hybrid AI–HPC–quantum workflows that open up problem classes beyond classical computation alone. It concludes by addressing why trust, reproducibility, provenance, and governance are not constraints but prerequisites for responsible acceleration, and how collaboration across universities, national research and education networks, organisations such as GÉANT, and industry partners enables research to move further, faster, and with greater credibility - positioning Microsoft as a long‑term partner within a broader public research ecosystem.
As AI becomes embedded in research, the real challenge is not access to models but building them properly: reproducible, auditable, and sovereign by design.
This session explores how research teams are developing AI end to end using Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Foundry and HPC within trusted, policy‑controlled cloud environments, from governed data and shared semantics through experimentation, large‑scale training and rigorous evaluation. The focus is on real research workflows, where collaborative data preparation, structured model development and high‑performance compute come together to support trust, compliance and scale without forcing centralisation or loss of control.
Treating AI as a scientific instrument, not a black‑box service.
A research team from an Irish university, collaborating with Sparkle through the OCRE2024 program, set out to develop a PhD-level AI assistant in the form of a conversational chatbot for sports analytics. Designed to serve coaches, scouts, and players alike, this intelligent system can answer complex questions - from identifying fatigued players in real time, to scouting high-performing young talent, to delivering personalized performance insights. The solution combines multi-source data integration from wearables, video, and match statistics with advanced analytics such as predictive injury modeling, tactical analysis, and computer vision. Through natural language interaction, automated reporting, and smart alerts, the assistant transforms raw data into actionable insights. Built on scalable cloud infrastructure using Amazon Web Services and enhanced with third-party tools from the AWS Marketplace, the project is now evolving from academic research into a commercial startup - demonstrating how cutting-edge AI can redefine decision-making and performance in modern sports.
This session highlights the projects selected for the 2026 edition of the GÉANT Innovation Programme (GIP). The six awarded projects reflect key innovation areas including artificial intelligence, security, multimedia services, and open-source software.
These projects demonstrate how community-driven ideas are transformed into working prototypes addressing real-world challenges, from AI-driven services and cybersecurity to collaborative platforms and open-source governance. Together, they provide a snapshot of current innovation priorities and emerging solutions within the GÉANT ecosystem.
The goal of the FeduMEET project is to design, implement and test a multi-operator, federated videoconferencing service based on the eduMEET platform, with customisable points ofaccess and support for SSO integrations (such as eduGAIN).
“Should I use my credit card in this online shop?”, “Is this really a government portal?”, “Is it safe to click the link in this email?”, “Why does this webpage look so suspicious?”…Every day, users face online decisions that can expose them to phishing attacks, identity theft, and fraud. Yet most security tools provide little more than a warning message, without helping users truly understand the risks behind it.
PHISHNET changes this experience by combining autonomous AI agents, graph-based machine learning, large language models, and advanced web analysis into an interactive AI-powered cybersecurity assistant. Users can naturally ask questions, request deeper investigations of suspicious websites or domains, and receive clear, human-readable explanations about the reasons behind detections.
Whether for everyday users, analysts, or cybersecurity teams, PHISHNET helps unlock the knowledge needed to better understand, investigate, and defend against modern web phishing threats.
Are you fed up with looking up and copy-pasting information from existing documents into complex surveys?
Our tool uses AI to analyze your documents and provide suggestions, with citations showing where each answer came from. No black boxes: every suggestion is traceable, editable, and yours to accept or reject.
Built privacy-first for the European research and education community: your documents stay on-premise, sessions are ephemeral, and nothing is retained without your consent. Our project is open-source and ready to pilot.
Derived from the OWASP Web Honeypot Project, Chameleon-REN deploys adaptive, low-interaction honeypots across National Research and Education Networks to capture, classify and share emerging threats targeting academic web application infrastructure. Dynamically mimicking REN-typical services, it generates real-time threat intelligence feeds for CSIRT teams, supports collaborative incident response across GÉANT partners, and strengthens collective defence of the global research community.
NRENs sit at the heart of global innovation, yet we often struggle to articulate that value to the technical specialists we need most. Drawing on my experience at Google, Uber, and GSMA, this 90-minute BoF is a professional masterclass designed to bridge the gap between corporate recruitment efficiency and the collaborative mission of the R&E sector.
This session is a practical workshop for hiring managers and team leads to move beyond reactive hiring and adopt proactive, engagement-led strategies. We will focus on:
The Global Talent Landscape: A professional analysis of the mechanics used by major tech organisations to identify specialised talent, and how NRENs can increase their visibility by aligning with the evolving aspirations of high-tier candidates.
Purpose-Led Storytelling: Moving beyond salary-centric competition by effectively communicating the societal impact of NRENs. We will discuss how to frame our role in global research as a primary differentiator to attract those seeking mission-driven work.
Competing on an NREN Budget: Tactical strategies for winning talent when you cannot match corporate salary scales. We will explore the "Total Value Proposition"—including culture, research proximity, and long-term stability—that makes NRENs a unique destination.
Specialised Talent Intelligence: A deep dive into modern sourcing methods required to find niche technical profiles (such as Cloud Architects or Security Specialists). We will discuss how to leverage data and proactive outreach to identify specialists not active on traditional job boards.
The Candidate Journey Audit: A collaborative look at the technical and administrative friction points in typical hiring processes. We will discuss how to streamline engagement and improve the "candidate experience" to ensure elite specialists remain in the recruitment funnel.
Building a Sustainable Pipeline: Moving from reactive hiring to proactive pipeline development. We will explore how to identify talent early and maintain long-term engagement with candidates, ensuring your organisation is the first choice for specialists ready for their next mission.
This BoF is for people interested in eduVPN. It aims to present the work done since our last meet-up at TNC25 as well as the current roadmap for the software, answer questions from NRENs and research and higher education institutions and gather new requirements.
Fiber sensing is a broad concept that defines the capability within optical networks to leverage existing fiber infrastructure for advanced monitoring and control applications. It can encompass monitoring capabilities that measure static fiber/optical signal properties and/or sensing capabilities that detect dynamic changes in optical signal properties due to external perturbations.
Among the sensing solutions is the one provided by coherent transponders, which are no longer merely receivers for data traffic but also powerful sensing devices. Thanks to their integrated digital signal processors (DSPs), these transponders can continuously monitor the physical state of the fiber in real time—without any additional hardware.
The DSP, by analyzing the received transponder symbols, determines the total accumulated Chromatic Dispersion and nonlinearities. In a subsequent step, an algorithm proposed by Nokia Bell Labs exploits the non-commutative property between Chromatic Dispersion and nonlinear effects, converting this data into power versus distance maps. This method is called Tomography and estimates the network topology (fiber types, length of each traversed span, and amplifier types) without requiring prior knowledge of the network infrastructure. This enables operators to quickly update their existing databases or characterize newly acquired network segments.
During this presentation, we will showcase the results of a field trial conducted by Nokia in early February 2026. This trial took place on a multi-vendor network connecting the Scandinavian Peninsula via operators CSC, Sikt, and SUNET. The optical signal connected Tromsø (Norway) to Espoo (Finland) via two different routes, whose characteristics were unknown to the Nokia team, using the Nokia PSE-Vs transponder (SFM6). The optical signal propagated on the C-Band alongside other traffic, with three different wavelengths measured for each route.
Thanks to the results obtained by the proposed Tomography method, we not only provided a quite accurate estimation of the fiber length (with less than 4% error) and a good match for the amplifier types, but the network operators were also able to correct some erroneous database entries, and an error in the path commissioning was detected.
In conclusion, the coherent transponder with its DSP is evolving from a pure transmission component into a multifunctional element that enables real-time network monitoring. This paradigm shift transforms optical networks from simple data pipes into intelligent infrastructures, improving operational efficiency, resilience, and sustainability. As the technology matures, applications like Tomography will play a significant role in building autonomous, AI-native networks that support emerging applications across telecommunications, energy, and smart infrastructure domains.
Network modernisation programmes rarely follow a straight line — they demand meticulous planning, tight coordination between vendor and implementation partner, and the ability to execute without disrupting the services that depend on the infrastructure underneath.
In this session, Michel Geensen, Network Architect at Nomios, walks through the full lifecycle of a major network upgrade delivered in partnership with Nokia. From initial architecture decisions and vendor alignment through to phased rollout and final cutover, Michiel shares the engineering challenges, hard-won lessons, and operational outcomes that defined the programme.
Attendees will come away with a practical perspective on what it takes to deliver a complex network transformation — and what good partnership between a technology vendor and integration specialist looks like in practice.
The GÉANT SIG–NOC (Special Interest Group for Network Operations Centres) is a group in the GÉANT community formed by members of Network Operation Centres (NOCs) as well as network engineers involved in the integration and optimization of NOC tools and processes.
SIG-NOC is a forum for exchanging and promoting ideas, experience and knowledge on NOC tools, functions, workflows, procedures and best practices, facilitate inter-NOC discussions, liaise with GÉANT Operations (and other e-infrastructures), provide a breeding ground to discuss, and elaborate and disseminate early thoughts, that can evolve into projects or services.
Many of the SIG-NOC members attend TNC and the Community Hub meetings have proved to spark conversations, arise topics that then turn into discussions or presentations for the SIG-NOC meetings, fruitful ideas to steer the group, learn about the evolution of the networks with Automation and AI, find common pain points and concerns, etc.
This proposal aims to have an informal unplugged session around the SIG-NOC, with an initial and short nostalgic view of the past 10 years (as last year it was the 10th anniversary of the group), a debate on the future of Network operation Centres and possible creative and engaging activities to keep NOCs as interesting places to work on. The next round of the SIG-NOC Tools survey will also be discussed, to gather feedback and make it even more useful for the research and education community.
The interest in fibre sensing has grown substantially over the last few years in the NREN community. Having started off with 8 NRENs having and interest in 2023, 21 now have registered their interest in 2025. This session will be a tour of the new fibre sensing service which is being developed by NRENs for NRENs, as well as looking at impact and use case examples from around the world and a panel discussion on some of the challenges and proposed methodologies being investigated to tackle secure release of data in a FAIR and Open Science way.
African Research and Education Networks operate under persistent constraints — limited infrastructure, high costs, and growing expectations. This session explores how Digital Sisu drives resilience, innovation, and collaboration across the continent.
Through perspectives from MaliREN, RENU, and WACREN, the talks share practical experiences from environments where resilience is not optional but essential. The session offers valuable insights for participants from well‑resourced contexts who want to broaden their perspective and learn how creativity, courage, and collaboration thrive under constraint.
Across West and Central Africa, research and education networks operate in environments defined by high connectivity costs, limited infrastructure, and uneven institutional digital maturity. While AfricaConnect has expanded regional connectivity across 12 countries, trusted and interoperable digital identity remains a critical gap.
WACREN is addressing this through a service-led approach, anchored by BonafID, an emerging identity-as-a-service platform designed to strengthen identity assurance, enable federation, and support seamless access to services such as eduroam and shared research platforms. As BonafID transitions from prototype to operational deployment, it tackles a foundational constraint limiting trust, collaboration, and service adoption across NRENs.
This work reflects a practical expression of Digital Sisu—building persistence at the identity layer despite structural challenges.
Presented jointly with GÉANT, this session explores lessons from deploying identity as a foundational service and introduces a scalable model for building sustainable research communities through progressive service adoption.
RENU operates under constraints common to NRENs worldwide: limited resources, rising expectations, and constant pressure. Embracing “Digital Sisu” a mindset of courage, resilience, and determination, RENU transformed its national digital ecosystem by focusing on people and culture rather than hardware. This led to adopting DevOps as a philosophy, breaking silos, fostering shared ownership, and encouraging collaboration. Automation through Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD improved reliability, consistency, and confidence, while proactive observability replaced reactive firefighting. Failures became learning opportunities. RENU’s journey shows that resilience is earned through courage, teamwork, and perseverance, proving that innovation is possible despite constraints.
The journey to MaliREN connectivity reflects a transformative pursuit to strengthen research and education across member institutions in Mali. MaliREN - the Mali Research and Education Network - was established to provide universities, research institutions, and innovation hubs with reliable, high-speed, secure and affordable connectivity for scientific collaboration. However, connectivity resilient enough for high-stakes, international research collaboration remained elusive. This talk reflects on the journey to address persistent challenges, including limited national fiber coverage, high commercial bandwidth costs, and inconsistent ICT infrastructure within academic institutions. Through coordinated national efforts, regional partnerships like WACREN, and support from international organizations like Africa Connect, GÉANT, MaliREN is gradually expanding its capacity, with a focus on improved network resilience, and fostered digital inclusion for the research and education community. This presentation will discuss the technical, financial, governance, regulatory and political challenges that MaliREN is going through has gone to being operational and the opportunities that still lie ahead.
Networking technologies have evolved significantly over time and those who manage them are needing to use increasingly more advanced software to do so, requiring a blend of network and software skills. This session will showcase several software options that will be of interest to network operators. Erik will explain how GÉANT has improved its own architecture used to gather various network metrics to help manage their backbone. Yannick will then discuss six open-source network flow collectors which he and his team evaluated. Finally, Scott's talk will show how use of network management plane software has changed recently and how security approaches have had to adapt to keep pace with such change.
GÉANT’s network monitoring software stack has recently undergone a significant redesign to address scaling and operational needs. This presentation introduces the journey toward new data-processing approaches tailored to GÉANT’s environment, the benefits these changes have delivered, choices and compromises involved, and lessons learned along the way. The experience and outcomes shared are intended to be useful to other network and software teams as they iterate to meet evolving requirements.
Network observability is a crucial aspect of operations that is often supported by flow-based traffic monitoring. This presentation provides an evaluation of six actively maintained open-source flow collectors for sFlow and IPFIX data: Akvorado, GoFlow2, IPFIXcol2, nfdump, pmacct, and SiLK. These collectors enable self-sovereign flow collection, as they can be deployed on-premises on modern Linux-based operating systems. Our evaluation combines qualitative analysis of features and usability with quantitative performance benchmarking in a controlled test environment. The results are relevant for high-performance NREN and ISP networks to make an informed decision that fits the operational requirements of their network best.
In the past decade, there have been significant changes in how the network management plane is used, with many of these changes challenging long held assumptions around network isolation. There are several reasons for this including configuration automation, instrumentation/telemetry, and more dynamic traffic engineering - all of which are necessary for running a modern network. This talk looks at how these changes influence the way we think about security architecture, as well as who needs to be involved in discussions around usability and security.
Get a clearer picture of how big science projects stay connected and run smoothly, with simple, real-world examples of how network performance is monitored and improved. Learn how AI is being used in practice through AI Factories like LUMI, including how they support new ideas such as smart tools for managing private 5G networks. Then hear directly from NRENs about their experience connecting Europe’s most powerful supercomputers to researchers, sharing what works, what’s challenging, and why it matters. Together, these sessions offer an easy-to-follow look at the technology and teamwork behind data-intensive science.
This Community Hub session will be an opportunity to bring together representatives from several large science projects and perfSONAR developers in an informal, interactive setting. Short, focused presentations will highlight concrete use cases, deployment patterns, and monitoring architectures used in EuroHPC, WLCG/LHC, EUMETSAT, LOFAR, and other communities. Developers will give a concise overview of the latest perfSONAR features and demonstrate how they can support emerging requirements.
This Community Hub session will begin with two short presentations. The first will introduce the concept and objectives of EU AI Factories using the LUMI AI Factory as a case study, highlighting its services and value for different user communities. The second will present a practical use case: how LUMI is supporting a start up in developing an AI based diagnostic agent for private 5G networks.
What does it take to connect Europe's most powerful supercomputers to the researchers who need them most? Join this session to hear directly from NRENs on the front line of the EuroHPC HyperConnectivity project what it means to onboard as a pilot site, what value it unlocks for your community, and what challenges and opportunities lie ahead. Whether you are already involved or interested in other NRENs' experiences, this session offers practical insights and the chance to ask questions to those involved in the project.
NRENs have built their reputation on making things resilient - but what about today's vendor dependencies and long-standing services like eduroam and eduGAIN that we now take for granted? This talk explores how NRENs can apply their traditional resilience thinking to operational, business, and strategic risks, and identify where to focus our efforts.
eduGAIN, the identity interfederation, enables researchers, teachers, and students to log into services worldwide using home organisation credentials. To remain the globally trusted infrastructure for Research and Education, we must enhance trust and modernize technology. This talk outlines a rethink of eduGAIN trust to improve attribute release, security, and interoperability. While specifications exist, the absence of formal verification at the eduGAIN level limits confidence in consistent implementation. We argue for common requirements, verification processes, and compliance signaling to ensure trustworthy use of REFEDS specifications. We also plan to introduce OpenID Federation, enabling scalable trust with OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, identity wallets, and other modern login methods.
As the technology landscape changes, some good things remain the same. eduroam and certificate services remain two stalwarts in the NREN box of services for good reason. As eduroam and certificate services approach 15 years old in the US, we are continuing to learn a number of lessons in how to scale through cloud services, and grow with new relationships in adjacent but highly aligned communities. Come to this session to learn how we have worked to mitigate risks and give old services a new boost in interest.
We're networkers - good at managing dependencies. But what about non-technical dependencies and need for service-related evolution? We have to go with the market flow and we have very little control or choice. This is daunting. These are forces far bigger than we are. What can we do? It's not as hopeless as it looks. Join us to explore dependencies up and down the NREN business model - from deep-level technical to high-level strategic - and when/how services can evolve. We can't do everything, but much like BCP drills - we can position ourselves to be ready for the next big surprise.
Envision a future where scientific progress accelerates at an unprecedented rate, condensing the time required for new discoveries from years to days or even hours. Artificial intelligence has already shown promise in expediting breakthroughs in fields like astronomy, genomics, and materials science, but these advancements have been isolated, driven by separate research groups working independently. The Department of Energy (DOE) aims to revolutionize the scientific process through the American Science Cloud (AmSC) project, as mandated by the OBBB Act. AmSC is an AI-focused, federated, and science-optimized cloud infrastructure designed to integrate data, models, and high-performance computing resources across DOE's leading facilities. This unified platform will accelerate mission delivery, enable AI to run where data is generated, and allow workflows to transition seamlessly, ultimately optimizing performance, accountability, and cost. The AmSC project is a key component of the broader Genesis Mission, which seeks to double the productivity and impact of research and development in the United States within a decade. The outcomes of the AmSC will drive requirements and designs of future generations of DOE’s High Performance Computing (i.e., ALCF, OLCF, NERSC), High Performance Networking (i.e., ESnet), and High Performance Data Facilities (i.e,, HPDF).
This presentation will explore the vision, architecture, and scope of the American Science Cloud in driving AI-driven science and innovation, and provide an insight into the Genesis Mission.
This presentation reports on two years of progress in InterQnet, a U.S. Department of Energy project advancing scalable, heterogeneous quantum networks through a full-stack co-design approach. We share quantitative insights from large-scale simulations, error-correction-aware architecture studies, and integration with experimental testbeds such as ArQNet. The talk highlights lessons learned in bridging abstract scalability models with real-world challenges in synchronization, orchestration, and cross-platform interoperability. For the research networking community, we outline how established principles in virtualization, orchestration, and performance benchmarking can inform the design of hybrid quantum-classical infrastructures and prepare NRENs for emerging quantum networking services.
Storage needs for research data are growing at an unprecedented pace. While datasets increase in volume, complexity, and retention requirements, the institutions are also expected to comply with security standards while collaborating in an international space. The storage solutions are often self-hosted and built using open-source storage components. Building these services from scratch, while meeting all requirements is challenging. Within the GÉANT GN5-2 project, a small team is developing an architectural blueprint and a multi-year roadmap for a federated, pan-European storage infrastructure. We describe the core elements of this blueprint, and the potential impact for the wider European research community.
As we move from an era of information retrieval to one of automated synthesis, the fundamental nature of research is changing. Join Google for a deep dive into how AI is being woven into the fabric of global research and discovery, and what this evolution means for the individuals and institutions that power the world's knowledge. We will cover the essentials for academic rigour, the most exciting uses of AI and research currently being deployed, and a glimpse at some of the most exciting developments we can expect in the future.
The interest in fibre sensing has grown substantially over the last few years in the NREN community. Having started off with 8 NRENs having and interest in 2023, 21 now have registered their interest in 2025. This session will be a tour of the new fibre sensing service which is being developed by NRENs for NRENs, as well as looking at impact and use case examples from around the world and a panel discussion on some of the challenges and proposed methodologies being investigated to tackle secure release of data in a FAIR and Open Science way.
Internet2 has accumulated data on eduroam US operations since 2018. What are the most useful and interesting questions to ask of this data, who should see it, and how can it be validated and delivered to this audience for maximum benefit?
Security in the eduroam login has been, and currently still is, a challenge.
Most eduroam providers still rely on passwords to authenticate the users, and need to provide their users with instructions how to set up their devices securely. While the Web makes a move towards passwordless authentication, eduroam still relies mostly on passwords. To address the challenges of current eduroam logins we leverage a passwordless solution the Web is currently excited about - Passkeys.
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a core component of modern cybersecurity, its deployment in operational network environments remains a significant challenge. A key example is Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) that must process continuous data streams, respond to threats in real time, and adapt to evolving attack techniques, while, at the same time, remaining stable and scalable under variable network load. Turning AI models into reliable, always-on security analytics therefore requires more than accurate algorithms. It also demands architectures designed for continuous operation, elastic scaling, and rapid adaptation.This talk describes the overall pipeline architecture together with the design choices that enable flexible and scalable AI deployment, along with practical lessons learned when transitioning AI-based intrusion detection from experimental setups to a dependable, cloud-native operational environment.
It is hard to imagine a world without new media technologies. In my life, for example, podcasts play an integral part: They entertain me, help me stay informed and teach me about different topics on the go. And I am not alone: A [2025 global study by the international research firm YouGov][1] shows that two out of five people listen to podcast episodes at least one hour per week. So why not use a podcast for science communication?
AI is already inside your network. The question is whether it is on your side. Research and education networks are deploying AI faster than they are securing it — monitoring tools, SOC automation, agentic network management systems — and these are being actively exploited. Not theoretically. Now. AI integrated into network operations is now a primary attack target — and most security teams have not updated their threat model to include it. The question to bring back to your team: "Where is AI making decisions in our infrastructure, and are we treating it as a security-critical component?"
The Europasinfonie project will stage the world’s first real-time pan-European distributed orchestra concert on 18 June 2027 in Dresden. In this performance, 62 string musicians of Dresdner Sinfoniker will perform live on stage, while wind, brass, percussion and choir musicians from 11 additional European cities – Athens, Birmingham, Brussels, Brno, Tallinn, Salzburg, Belgrade, Milan, Madrid, Pécs and Warsaw – participate simultaneously from remote locations. These musicians will appear life-size on LED panels integrated into the Dresden stage, creating the experience of a single unified orchestra performing across approximately 2,500 km of fibre network infrastructure.
When did you last access an atomic clock via a US military system? Probably less than a minute ago - through your phone. Today, I want to show how Europe is building another way.
Every time your phone synchronises time or determines its position, it quietly relies on GNSS, primarily GPS and Galileo, delivering access to atomic clocks in space. These systems are at the basis of everything from mobile networks and finance to transport, science, and emergency services. Yet they remain vulnerable: to jamming, spoofing, interference, and geopolitical risk.
This lightning talk will draw attention to the work undertaken on deployment of IPv6 the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (WLCG) infrastructure that provides connectivity for CERN experiments between some 170 sites in 40 countries. It will highlight that dual-stack is NOT the end game, and work underway to remove IPv4 from WAN links.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the European Union recommend transitioning to quantum-secure cryptography between 2030 and 2035. While Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) does not require specialized quantum hardware, it has to withstand the test of time, and it provides only security against quantum computational attacks. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) offers an alternative approach. Although it requires new network infrastructure, QKD can provide perfect forward secrecy and even information-theoretic security (ITS) when used with a one-time pad. While the broader vision of a quantum internet—including technologies such as quantum teleportation—will require further advances, practical QKD systems are already commercially available.
Before a network management system can function, it must parse configuration files to build a structural map. While necessary, this creates a massive initialization bottleneck. As modern networks grow, we aren't just parsing a few files; we're parsing hundreds. To make matters worse, multiple processes often rely on the exact same context, meaning this computationally heavy parsing is needlessly repeated every startup. But what if we could bypass this overhead by reusing the parsed result?
At the South African National Research Network (SANReN), South African researchers can participate in global research efforts. We do this by ensuring that local researchers can share their data efficiently with international researchers and that they can access data generated or processed abroad as efficiently as possible. This has been made possible by the implementation of 100Gbps Data Transfer Nodes (DTN) deployed for the South African research and education community.
European Research Infrastructures (RIs) generate petabyte-scale datasets in domains such as climate science, atmospheric research, biomedicine, and imaging. While Open Science policies have improved data availability and FAIR compliance, practical reuse remains limited. Researchers often face barriers related to compute capacity, software environments, AI tooling, and secure access. Moving large datasets across networks to local environments is increasingly inefficient, costly, and sometimes infeasible. The EU-funded RI-SCALE project introduces a scalable alternative: Data Exploitation Platforms (DEPs) that bring computation to the data rather than moving data to users.
Supplier security and confidentiality clauses often fail for one simple reason: we use the same words, but we mean different things. My one key point: attach a one-page Supplier Meaning Guide to the contract - a support document that explains, in plain language, what we mean by key terms and expectations.
In five minutes I’ll demo the guide’s structure:
- “When we say…” → “We mean…” (e.g., confidential information,
subcontractor, security incident, access, audit, deletion)
- “Show us this” (one example of acceptable evidence per term)
- “Common misunderstandings” (the top 3 traps and how to avoid them)
Modern networks are the backbone of our connected world, but increasing scale, complexity, and dependency mean that outages and performance degradation can quickly disrupt services and users. This track focuses on practical approaches to network monitoring and visibility that enable early detection, faster troubleshooting, and greater operational resilience. Presentations will explore distributed active monitoring using nmaas - including how RENATER uses the nmaas platform for active monitoring, Internet2’s federated network troubleshooting through independently deployed and controlled Looking Glass instances, and proven approaches to end-to-end visibility, drawing lessons from RedCLARA’s Integrated Monitoring Portal.
National Research and Education Networks increasingly require scalable and secure mechanisms to deploy monitoring services across distributed infrastructures. This presentation introduces the nmaas Active Monitoring use-case, which enables application deployment on remote compute clusters using the nmaas multi-tenant PaaS. The solution has been validated in practice by RENATER through a nationwide rollout of a distributed network monitoring infrastructure based on perfSONAR. Leveraging nmaas’ multi-cluster Kubernetes support and webhook-driven automation, RENATER achieved centralized lifecycle management of edge-deployed measurement nodes. The talk showcases the deployment architecture and operational lessons learned, and highlights nmaas as a flexible solution for distributed monitoring automation.
Since TNC25, we transformed HAWAT from experimental to production-ready on Internet2's network, with open-source containers available. The breakthrough is federated troubleshooting across organizations: our Looking Glass service lets organisations independently deploy and control what commands they expose, and HAWAT queries multiple instances to diagnose cross-network issues, isolating packet loss between universities or tracing BGP behavior across peers. Like perfSONAR, federated Looking Glass creates value that no single organisation can replicate alone.
This federated architecture is one pillar of a broader AIOps initiative, the natural progression of our work since TNC25, including an Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interoperability proof-of-concept with SURF, who presented complementary work at a recent session, demonstrating that AI agents from independent NRENs can collaborate on network diagnostics across organisational boundaries.
We'll demonstrate cross-organisational troubleshooting using a multi-network virtual environment and discuss participation opportunities. Attendees will see practical multi-network troubleshooting in action and explore how the AIOps platform can extend to their own infrastructure.
Network visibility has always been one of the most requested network features by RedCLARA users. The idea to be aware of everything moving within and through the network should define the new normal. With this concept in mind, RedCLARA Network Engineering Group (NEG) and Systems Engineering Group (SEG) have built the Integrated Monitoring Portal (IMP). Its goal is to become the best network monitoring and visualization tool for Latin American NRENs, where users can visualize and analyze network traffic, flows, latency, packet errors, BGP information like state, uptime, accepted and denied prefixes, service availability, network alerts among many others.
Strategies are the blueprint for an organisation’s purpose and future. They articulate long‑term direction, help navigate uncertainty, and turn challenges into opportunities. Several NRENs have recently launched new strategies. In this session, a diverse group of NRENs will share their journeys of strategy development - from shaping direction to embedding strategy across their organisations.
We will explore key questions such as: How do you create a strategy that people feel part of? How do you bring it to life in ways that are meaningful and measurable? And how can our strategies reinforce one another to strengthen the collective positioning of the R&E community at national, regional, and global levels?
Join this dynamic discussion with leaders of Asiera, CSC, GÉANT, RNP, and Switch.
Participants:
The conference dinner will be held at Wanha Satama, a historic harbour building with over a century of stories in its brick walls. If only the walls could talk! Although, being Finnish, they probably wouldn’t say that much. Located by the sea in Helsinki’s Katajanokka district, the venue offers a uniquely Finnish mix of maritime charm and relaxed elegance, very near the seaside.
So join us! Spend a relaxed evening enjoying Finnish food in a unique setting, while catching up and networking with colleagues from across the conference.
All registered participants (with a Full Conference Pass or Wednesday Social Pass) are cordially invited! Please, remember to take the conference badge with you as it will be your entry pass for the event.
DRESS CODE
Casual. A jacket is recommended, the evenings in June can still be a bit chilly in Helsinki.
ADDRESS
Pikku Satamakatu 3-5, 00610 Helsinki
HOW TO GET THERE?
By foot: 2,3 km from Music Hall (main venue), takes around 30 minutes
By public transportation: Tram 4 (direction to ”Katajanokan term” or "Katajanokka") Check out https://www.hsl.fi/en for more information
This dinner is hosted by CSC and HPE.
As European NRENs come under pressure to meet the European Commission’s objectives of sovereign infrastructures for critical services, the distribution of high-accuracy Time and Frequency (T&F) has become a strategic priority. Following the release of the GN5-2 Whitepaper on Long-haul White Rabbit (WR) Time Distribution, this BoF session brings together the community and infrastructure partners to discuss the technical and economic roadmap for terrestrial time services in the R&E environment.
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are increasingly vulnerable to jamming and spoofing. This session will explore how the GÉANT community can leverage existing "legacy" DWDM fibre infrastructure to distribute a sub-nanosecond "ground truth" using White Rabbit technology, serving as a sovereign, resilient backup to satellite-based time.
BoF Agenda
Internet2 and CAIDA, with sponsorship from the National Science Foundation, are building a community-focused toolset to help R&E operators better understand how current BGP policy affects routing outcomes, and to support safer deployment of policies that improve security and resilience.
The toolset includes:
Global R&E BGP Route Report
A route-level view across participating infrastructure, including:
Authoritative Global R&E Prefix Registry
A system to maintain and publish an authoritative set of R&E IP prefixes (approximately 12,000 prefixes) to support community filtering use cases. Internet2 will use this dataset to implement its own filtering policy and will publish it for broader community use.
AS Topology Observatory
A view of how R&E networks interconnect from a BGP perspective, including both primary and backup path structure.
IRR AS-SET Planning Tool
An interactive tool to assist network operators create an IRR AS-SET object that represents their customer cone.
Because these tools are being developed for operational use by the community, feedback and participation are essential. In this BoF, we will present current progress and invite discussion on priorities, usability, data quality, governance, and collaboration models for broader adoption.
Continuing from the well-attended EDI BoF in Brighton last year which saw broad support from the community, we aim to continue the conversation on the actions currently being undertaken by NRENs and the wider research and education community. The session will also explore how, as a community, we can more effectively share experiences and best practices around equality, diversity, and inclusion.
The session will begin with a set of short, focused talks highlighting concrete EDI initiatives currently underway within various NRENs and partner organisations. These will include examples of the implementation of Gender Equality Plans (GEPs) and broader EDI strategies. Speakers will share practical lessons from their implementation efforts, including common bottlenecks, organisational and cultural challenges, and approaches that have proven effective in addressing them. Particular attention will be given to how organisations are moving beyond formal legislative compliance towards initiatives that deliver lasting impact.
A key driver for the session will be the identification of concrete outcomes to help move this work forward. These could include shared resources, regular forums or working groups, and collaborative tools that can support sustained knowledge exchange across the NREN ecosystem.
Session 1: Technical Details
This session will introduce the MetrANOVA project and its forthcoming software stack, highlighting how this technology empowers community participants to share data with collaborators in a controlled manner while preserving digital sovereignty. The agenda will cover:
This BoF on Financial Resilience invites everyone with an entrepreneurial mindset to share ideas and experiences, with the aim of strengthening the collective resilience of the R&E networking ecosystem.
The session is designed as an interactive peer exchange, not a presentation forum. We are particularly interested in:
- Sharing concrete experiences - both successes and challenges - in developing new services, partnerships, or revenue approaches
- Reflecting openly on barriers and lessons learned, including organisational, financial, or governance challenges
All input will directly shape the discussion and help identify practical, community‑driven ways forward. We are keen to learn from each other, particularly around:
- Experimenting with new services, partnerships, or business models
- Navigating the tension between public mission and entrepreneurial action
- Vision on financial resilience, innovation, and long‑term community sustainability
- Vision on rethinking sustainability beyond “doing more with less”.
To strengthen global collaboration, we first need to identify and share the engagement mechanisms that make it possible and then scale these collaborations across regions and around the globe. This BoF session acknowledges the previous TNC BoFs that have explored member engagement from a marketing and dissemination perspective, showcasing what works in communicating with and involving members and end users. Using that valuable experience as a foundation, this session shifts the focus to the strategic level of (N)REN and stakeholder engagement. It brings together (N)REN engagement teams, leadership and thematic working groups to exchange experiences on how (N)RENs collaborate with each other and support their wider communities across domains. The session will highlight regional approaches to sustaining thematic communities, governance models, and engagement mechanisms that enable collaboration between networks, institutions, researchers and beyond. Drawing on concrete experiences across areas such as AI, Trust & Identity, Cloud, service development and more, the BoF lightning talks will lead into an interactive discussion with the audience to explore replicable practices, shared challenges, and how a more coordinated approach could enhance knowledge-sharing across regions. Discussions will also consider how today’s many bilateral (N)REN conversations could evolve into multilateral coordinated cooperation, including the potential creation of a permanent cross-regional strategic engagement group.
Explore how digital identity wallets are evolving, including key risks, real-world use cases and how the research and education community can help shape safer and more useful solutions. Then get hands-on with a fun role-playing game that simulates how eduroam authentication works behind the scenes. By acting as RADIUS clients, servers, and requests, you’ll see how secure login works across global networks and how eduroam scales while staying safe. You’ll also touch on topics like geteduroam and OpenRoaming, with time to exchange ideas with experts.
This Community Hub event consists of interactively playing RADIUS clients, servers and requests, to understand how authentication works in the eduroam federation. Through a hands-on role-playing activity, we will simulate how eduroam components interact. Some people will take the roles of RADIUS servers and clients, and others will play requests, hopping from proxy to proxy until they reach their home organisation. After the role-playing game, there will also be some time for exchange about current topics in eduroam, such as migration to geteduroam, OpenRoaming and eduroam Visitor Access.
By coming to this meeting, you will learn how an access point can verify that you are actually who you claim to be, even if you come from the other side of the world. You will also discover how RADIUS in eduroam ensures both security and scalability. This is your chance to play with and learn a textbook protocol without reading a book. It is also a nice opportunity to talk to and exchange with eduroam experts in the room.
The GN5-2 Wallets team is inviting you to participate in this interactive session.
Together with the audience we will look at the benefits wallets have to offer with respect to existing solutions and ask the question how we can leverage our experience and what role we can play in this field with the aim to encourage collaboration among NRENs, universities, and technology partners.
The session will conclude with an invitation to join us for coffee in the Community Hub room. We will split up into two groups.
Group 1: How do we get started?
Group 2: Let's discuss the R&E use cases
Researchers worldwide face a growing tension between leveraging cloud services to accelerate discovery and meeting digital sovereignty requirements - but it doesn't have to be a choice. This session will explore how AWS built its infrastructure with sovereignty in mind, giving researchers / institutions ownership and control of their data: where it is stored, who can access it, how it is governed, and where it is shared. We'll discuss how AWS scales security and control across a spectrum of needs, from institutional-level cloud access, to secure research environments, to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, and what this means for NRENs looking to unblock cloud access for their research communities.
We bend fibre To Our Will - but not TOO much, because Network Engineers know why a bend radius is important.This session will talk you through procuring fibre in 2026 - either for the first time, or if you are replacing aging infrastructure. We'll discuss Coherent optics - which use advanced modulations and Digital Signal Processing to transmit data at rates in the hundreds of gigabits-per-second range. We'll also showcase how nanosecond-grade time can be synchronised efficiently over an existing DWDM network.
Norway´s NREN, delivered by Sikt, is being renewed with new agreements on dark fiber and optical spectrum. The new network supports Terabit capacities, even more redundancy and lays the physical foundations for producing advanced optical services - like fiber optic sensing, high precision time and frequency transfer and quantum communication. The presentation will go through the procurement strategies, learnings and the results, both regarding technicalities and cost
Demystifying Coherent Optics for Network Professionals" is a practical, vendor‑neutral session designed to give conference attendees the tools they need to deploy and optimize 100G–800G coherent transceivers in real networks. The talk translates complex physical‑layer concepts - modulation formats, parameters like OSNR, Q‑values and link budgeting - into clear operational guidance, and pairs that theory with concrete configuration examples and command snippets from major routers’ vendors. For those who are evaluating or planning upgrades, the talk clarifies tradeoffs between 100G, 400G, 600G and 800G options, explains when to use OpenZR+, OIF 400ZR/800ZR profiles, and shows how to maximize spectral efficiency on DWDM systems.
This presentation details the deployment of a national-scale precision time and frequency distribution infrastructure based on White Rabbit (WR) technology, which runs directly over CESNET’s existing active DWDM network. This project moves beyond typical dark fiber deployments to offer a blueprint for NRENs seeking to maximize infrastructure utilization and support advanced services without costly network duplication. We detail an architecture where time transfer in the L-Band coexists with C-Band data traffic, enabled by SDN-controlled bidirectional amplifiers. Attendees will learn how this NetDevOps approach allows for seamless integration, real-time telemetry, and automated management of highly sensitive bidirectional transmissions over long-haul networks.
Community Impact
The Metranova project also provides adopters with essential guidance, including policy examples, data classification models, and other resources. This support is intended to enable well-founded justification for data sharing, allowing organizations to accurately assess and communicate the associated risk profiles and benefits.
This session builds on the software stack description from Session 1 and opens the floor to community discussion of critical legal, ethical, and policy considerations. The goal is to determine how MetrANOVA can best support adopters in leveraging a federated data sharing system for utility while protecting the interests of their users, customers, and other stakeholders. The agenda will cover:
In a time when research and education networks face growing complexity - technological, environmental, financial, and social - no single institution can move forward alone. The future of digital infrastructure is not meant to operate like isolated islands, but as interconnected ecosystems. This session, “Less me, more we,” highlights how collaboration is not just a nice to have - it is a must be.
This presentation introduces a field-tested, sustainability-oriented implementation model for deploying digital infrastructure in extreme ecosystems, based on real interventions in the Páramo de Sumapaz and the Ciénaga Grande del Magdalena. It details how agile methodologies, academic collaboration, renewable energy systems, and low-impact connectivity solutions, such as high-altitude photovoltaic systems and subfluvial fiber-optic deployment, can operate under strict environmental, technical, and social constraints. The presentation provides concrete lessons, design principles, and operational insights for NRENs seeking to deliver resilient, ecologically responsible digital inclusion in remote and high-complexity territories.
This session describes how the Nordic NRENs and NORDUnet work together to provide resilient, scalable, and cost‑efficient media services for research and education. The presentation highlights key insights, strategic choices, and practical examples of co‑operation.
Artificial intelligence has become integral to modern research infrastructure, yet access remains profoundly unequal. While large, well-resourced institutions rapidly deploy AI capabilities, smaller universities and historically underserved institutions face systematic barriers that widen the research capacity gap. This challenge transcends borders -research and education networks worldwide face critical questions: how do we democratize access to AI-enabled research infrastructure?
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 institutional access control. At the University of Helsinki we have explored an alternative approach: connecting generative AI interaction directly to existing university systems and course infrastructure.
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 this with EXAM, a national e‑assessment system used by 29 universities and universities of applied sciences. It combines secure exam software with dedicated exam rooms where students can take tests at a time that suits them. Because the exam is taken on the room’s locked‑down computer, the teacher can be certain which applications and tools the student is able to use during the exam.
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 seeking to support user focussed workflows - including easy editing and LMS integration - it also offers an opportunity for NRENs to reduce vendor dependency, through a collaborative development approach that allows institutions to influence and shape the platform. By engaging with the project, as is done by DeiC, NRENs can strengthen open source collaboration and gain greater adoption in the field of open source content management.
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 connecting with regional and global research communities. Despite these obstacles, women in Palestine are highly motivated and capable.
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 fragments. Our future depends on expanding how we are understood as an Association. This Lightning Talk is an invitation to reflect on the long-term framing of GÉANT, whether we recognize ourselves in the concept of Commons – and how we shape that narrative together.
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 time. We don’t think about oxygen when it’s flowing. But the moment it tightens, everything changes - decisions narrow, risks multiply, confidence drops. Every organisation knows that financial resilience is critical. But knowing is not the same as acting.
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 is the robots.txt, a file that politely indicates to bots to not scrape your website content. But it’s not like most AI scrapers care (only some good ones do), it was just a suggestion anyway. As it is a growing concern where content and website owners are tired of having their content scraped without their approval and dealing with the overhead costs that AI scrapers bring, it’s good to know what possible mitigation strategies are available. Do we play it safe, monetize, or obliterate these scrapers? How do we deal with stealthy destructive scrapers that use residential proxies? Is it worth trying such tactics or is the soup of training data for ML models poisoning itself? This talk answers these questions and many more, as well as analyzes the future scope of tackling these AI scrapers.
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 translate cryptic values into meaningful information. This process often becomes the bottleneck of incident response. This talk presents an alternative approach that focuses on meaning rather than patterns alone. Instead of treating dynamic values as anonymous parameters, modern AI language techniques analyze each value together with its surrounding text. By understanding context, the system can infer what the value represents and automatically match it to known data fields described in natural language and supported by examples.
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 planning, capacity building, technical exchanges, and the first steps toward shared infrastructure and mobile networks–related initiatives. It highlights key lessons learned, challenges faced when working across regions and contexts, and what proved essential to turn an MoU into real outcomes. By sharing this one-year journey, the talk aims to inspire other NRENs to view MoUs not as an endpoint, but as a starting point for sustainable and impactful international collaboration.
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 innovations within our system are driven by technological change. The rapidly changing and partly disruptive nature of the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and tech leaves us repositioning ourselves. We are constantly negotiating between restriction and enablement. Our main concern is making the most of technological possibilities to enable researchers, teachers, and learners to collaborate. But when we rethink hybrid networks as an extension of physical space and an enabler of pedagogy and research, as David Radcliffe's PST-Framework does, we might not talk about what "technology can" do, but rather about how "we want" to use it.
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 of Cacao_IA, a platform that converts meteorological, historical, and agricultural data into personalized recommendations — when to fertilize, when to harvest, how to prevent diseases, and how to optimize yields based on the microclimate of each plot. Cacao_IA does not simply forecast the weather — it transforms climate data into decisions. It is the difference between having information and having the power to act. This lightning talk will demonstrate how academic expertise can evolve into practical AI solutions with tangible societal impact.
This session introduces CSC’s journey toward more effective risk management by shifting from qualitative, point-based methods to a quantitative, decision-driven approach. It focuses on how risks can be modeled using probabilities, financial impact ranges, and expected loss to better capture uncertainty and support real business decisions. Participants will see how CSC has commenced the journey to embed quantification into decision-making, and building a culture where risk analysis directly improves the quality of decisions.
This session presents the development of Aalto AI Assistant, a secure generative AI service for teaching, learning, and staff work at Aalto University. The talk explores how trusted AI services can be designed for higher education, covering practical use cases, user needs, security considerations, and lessons learned from building an LLM-based application for a university community. It also looks ahead to future possibilities such as translation support, AI tutoring, and other AI-enabled services built on a trusted foundation
This highly interactive Community Hub provides a dedicated space for public affairs professionals, strategists, and stakeholders from across the global NREN community to connect, exchange experiences, and co-create insights. It is designed to go beyond informal networking by enabling structured, peer-driven learning across regions.
The session will center on Rapid Fire Discussions - short, facilitated rounds where participants actively contribute perspectives, challenges, and proven approaches. This format ensures broad participation and quickly surfaces diverse viewpoints from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. More information vcan be found onour wiki.
National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) worldwide face a common set of public affairs challenges in an evolving digital infrastructure landscape. Operating across diverse political and cultural contexts, they must engage policymakers, demonstrate the strategic value of connectivity, and position their infrastructures within national and international priorities. While approaches differ, many of the underlying questions and pressures are shared - creating a strong basis for exchange, comparison, and mutual learning.
This highly interactive Community Hub provides a dedicated space for public affairs professionals, strategists, and stakeholders from across the global NREN community to connect, exchange experiences, and co-create insights. It is designed to go beyond informal networking by enabling structured, peer-driven learning across regions.
The session will centre on Rapid Fire Discussions - short, facilitated rounds where participants actively contribute perspectives, challenges, and proven approaches. This format ensures broad participation and quickly surfaces diverse viewpoints from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Key guiding questions include:
- What advocacy approaches are most effective in different political environments?
- Which narratives resonate with policymakers across regions?
- Where are the opportunities to better align messaging and strengthen global positioning?
This session shows how universities and NRENs are building AI they actually control and own for several use-cases we all recognise. Across chatbots, advisory systems, agentic workflows, and speech-to-text infrastructure, the talks focus on practical ways to keep data, governance, and decision-making in-house. Rather than relying on commercial tools, these examples use open standards, shared infrastructure, and human-in-the-loop design. These AI systems are transparent and fit for real usage in education and infrastructure. Let's talk about how we can keep ourselfs knowledgable and in control of these technologies.
Across Europe, municipalities face increasing pressure to deliver secure, privacy-compliant, and accessible digital services for education. These challenges are amplified by fragmented responsibilities, limited resources, and rapid technological change. By creating a centralized service and developing shared frameworks, automated support tools, and AI-powered advisory systems , we aim to reduce this gap and empower schools to adopt solutions that are safe, privacy-friendly, and accessible to all students.
The AI-powered advisory system is designed to augment, not replace, human expertise. It will provide dynamic, data-driven recommendations that help specialists make faster, more informed decisions while retaining full control over critical judgment.
Generative AI is rapidly entering higher education, yet most institutions rely on commercial, opaque systems that undermine autonomy, privacy, and pedagogical control. Karlstad University has developed a system for digitally sovereign AI chatbots built on open standards, open-source technologies, and institutionally governed infrastructure. Integrated via LTI and using WordPress as a modular knowledge layer, the system ensures universities retain control over data, governance, and educational use. A key innovation is structured ingestion of Open Educational Resources and course syllabi, improving accuracy and pedagogical alignment. The project demonstrates how European universities and NRENs can collaboratively build transparent, sustainable AI aligned with public-sector values.
Speech-to-text is rapidly becoming a core capability in teaching, accessibility and research, but many institutions struggle with trust, cost and data protection when relying on commercial AI services. This talk presents Sunet Scribe, a national, self-hosted Whisper-based speech-to-text service operated inside the Swedish NREN. Starting from concrete operational experience, we explain why Sunet chose this path, how the service is integrated into existing media and collaboration platforms, and what we have learned so far about quality, governance and sustainability. The talk also places Sunet Scribe in a broader Nordic context, where NRENs are coordinating efforts towards long-term, sovereign AI services.
Agentic AI systems can plan actions, call tools, analyse logs, and trigger real automation. While this enables powerful operational workflows, it also introduces serious risks: hallucinated decisions, loss of control, escalating costs, and unclear accountability. This presentation introduces Saz, a self-hosted agentic workflow engine designed to embed AI into operational environments through structured workflows, human-authored instructions, strict policy enforcement, and a dual-agent safety model where a verifier agent evaluates the planner agent’s output before execution. The session presents practical patterns for adopting AI-driven workflows that remain controlled, auditable, and firmly human-governed.
How are our networks so strong, fast, reliable, resilient and smart? How are they operated and developed? How does the network know...? How do we know...? Join our session to hear from and discuss with speakers how to transform operational data into knowledge towards advancement of network infrastructure and federated services in three presentations.
Network topology maps are fundamental to the identity of an academic network, being essential for both strategic communication and operations. In this context, the GNA-G GREN Map working group has been developing a tool based on hierarchical databases for mapping these topologies. Prior to 2025, the publication of a global map of academic networks was made unfeasible by the complexity of the infrastructure and the lack of automation in data extraction. In 2025, the group proposed a change in approach, it simplified the hierarchical database architecture and began planning maps with a delimited scope, replacing the "one map to rule them all" model. In this demonstration, we will explore an automation that extracts information from a source of truth, applies data processing filters, and generates a GRENML file (an XML extension for representing academic network topologies) for direct import into the mapping tool. In addition to optimizing and facilitating data extraction, the goal is to demonstrate an interactive and innovative way to visualize the topologies of academic networks. This approach specifically takes into account the hierarchy of regional, national, continental, and pan-continental networks. With this new tool developed by the group, it is expected that users will be able to easily navigate the topologies and clearly identify the connection points between them.
nmaas is an open-source, multi-tenant platform designed to simplify deployment and lifecycle management of applications across distributed Kubernetes environments. Building on the nmaas Active Monitoring use case presented during the main programme, this Community Hub session provides a practical continuation through live and pre-recorded demonstrations showcasing how the nmaas Platform can support a broader range of operational and educational scenarios. Demonstrations and related discussions will be focused around the key nmaas use cases: Virtual NOC (vNOC), Virtual Lab (vLAB), Metrics, and Active Monitoring, emphasising their main concepts and the value each of them brings to the nmaas users.
Data once inaccessible or single-use can now drive research and service development in the R&E community. Different initiatives explore collecting, sharing, and transforming data into machine-actionable datasets. Yet key questions remain: how can NRENs enable research use, what use cases exist, and what can we learn together?
This session brings together five perspectives to examine how data-sharing fosters collaboration and supports data-driven innovation across the R&E community. Bringing together selected data-sharing initiatives from the community - a fibre-sensing project, CESNET’s Network Datasets, MetrANOVA, the ROBIN service, and the GÉANT FAIR Data Portal - the objective of this session is to foster a community discussion on shared experiences, best-practices, challenges, and future projects.
In today’s era of rapid digital transformation, research and education networks (NRENs) must orchestrate technology, processes, and people to keep critical infrastructures and services humming. Our goal is to apply the right technologies, build resilient architectures, focus on processes, and shift to adaptable service models that meet rapidly changing user expectations. This ongoing challenge demands courage and endurance; the human factor plays a crucial role: continuous learning, a purpose‑driven culture, and psychological safety help sustain performance. This session presents inspiring case studies showing how a harmonious blend of automation, human‑centred design, and resilient engineering creates true service excellence for all.
This presentation explores how Brazil’s National Research and Education Network (RNP) structured specialized support models to address the distinct demands of digital identity, video collaboration, and connectivity services. Through three dedicated operational cells, RNP combined technical specialization, collaborative practices, and a strong focus on user experience. The talk will highlight concrete results, including service performance and user satisfaction, and discuss how similar models can be adapted by other NRENs seeking to improve service delivery maturity and trust within their research and education communities.
This presentation explains how CEDIA, Ecuador’s NREN, transformed well-being into a strategic lever for service excellence, earning international recognition as a result - not the goal - of a people-centered culture. By integrating psychometrics, a 90° performance model, leadership alignment, and Great Place to Work practices, CEDIA fostered trust, closeness, and genuine care across teams. KPIs supported the journey, but people remained the priority. This cultural shift translated into measurable improvements in services delivered to universities. Participants will gain a practical, replicable framework to connect human-centered management, well-being, and organizational performance in NRENs facing digital transformation.
This presentation explores how DevOps automation can be used to build digital systems that remain reliable when things go wrong, combining robust technology with the right engineering mindset. Framed around Digital Sisu, it acknowledges that failures such as outages, bugs, and human error are inevitable and must be expected in system design. Drawing on real-world NREN experience, the session highlights how Infrastructure as Code, observability, automated testing, and self-healing mechanisms help infrastructures recover and adapt under pressure. Resilience is presented not only as uptime, but as intentional design, collective responsibility, and sustaining reliability over time.
AI is transforming software development across GÉANT and NRENs, boosting productivity while introducing new challenges in security, compliance, and trust. This presentation shows how the Software Governance and Support in is responding through structured practices - software reviews, license management, guidelines, and training on responsible AI-assisted development. We should also share early insights from the first GÉANT-wide survey on AI adoption planned for 2026. Join us to discover how to build trust, quality, and accountability into AI-assisted software projects.
Numerous activities are advancing state-of-the-art of authentication and authorization infrastructures, focusing primarily on establishing a trusted identity and enable collaboration across borders. Nevertheless, there are still often overlooked challenges that stems from a lack of visibility and control over who has access to what - and why. That can be addressed by an IGA system, as will be showcased in this talk using open-source IGA midPoint which is already established in the academic community. The talk also includes a demonstration of AI-powered features that lower typical barriers in adopting such tool.
In this session, the RIPE team will take you through some of their governance processes and why these are vital to the RIPE community,. The overview will look at:
Our community is continuously growing – as much in the amount of people as in the sheer number of tasks we have to carry out each day. Sometimes, especially in today’s rapid work tempo, we forget that work is not all there is to life. It can be hard to nurture work relationships internally and externally, but it is important to build a safe and understanding space for each other. After all, we are not only building a community of machines, but of people. And there is something to be said about the art of doing so – the art of being human.
As competition for visibility and funding grows, NRENs must position themselves beyond technical infrastructure. This presentation explores storytelling as a strategic approach inspired by Blue Ocean Strategy, shifting communication from technology to human impact. Using the RNP case, it demonstrates how real-life stories transform users into protagonists and infrastructure into social meaning. These narratives generate emotional connection, reinforce institutional purpose, and create a space of differentiation that commercial providers cannot replicate. The result is stronger advocacy, clearer public understanding, and greater sustainability for NRENs through authentic, community-driven communication.
Expand your leadership toolkit and explore the critical intersection of psychosocial safety, neurodivergence, and related governance. As global jurisdictions strengthen their focus on these areas, the risk of non-compliance - and our opportunity for growth and inclusivity - has never been higher. This session will move beyond compliance requirements to provide essential frameworks for building a secure, inclusive, and high performance culture. Participants will learn how to translate a diverse workforce into a strategic community advantage, ensuring that our unique collective skills are harnessed to drive our NREN culture of innovation and long-term resilience
745,000 people die from overwork every year. 42-62% of IT infrastructure workers report burnout symptoms. 55% don't talk about it. This talk is personal. After surviving a suicide attempt driven by years of toxic work culture, I spent months turning my experience into research. The result: a study with 60+ sources documenting the structural causes of mental health crises in internet infrastructure - and what actually works against them.
From always-on culture and KPI terror to harassment at conferences and forgotten disaster-response volunteers: the data is clear. The solutions exist. What's missing is the will to act.
The devotion to helping our clients in NRENs, to getting to know them and go above and beyond, is well known, and laudable. It’s arguably a core part of our success. But what happens when that goes too far, when heroics become the norm? This talk will briefly touch on some of the causes of this kind of behaviour, but the focus is to provide support on how to improve the situation and change practices. Sometimes things will happen that require the exceptional, but we should be striving and aiming for the ordinary, so that services operate and people can live their lives. We may need heroes now and again, but we should never want them!
This closing address reflects on a week of learning, connection, and collaboration within the global research and education community, celebrating the power of shared knowledge to drive innovation and positive change. Acknowledging growing geopolitical, technological, and regulatory challenges, the address calls on the community to embrace openness, resilience, and international partnership to strengthen its role as a vital foundation for future scientific and educational breakthroughs.
The TNC26 theme “Digital Sisu” embodies inner strength, tenacity, determination, and courage when facing adversity. But what happens when the adversity isn’t visible, but an invisible assault on the thinking that guides our decisions?
We understand technical security deeply, but information security must include our own thinking. In an increasingly uncertain world where sovereignty and sustainability define our challenges, cognitive security is foundational to both.
This presentation examines how we got here, why it works, and what we can do. You’ll understand the historical path that have lead here, understand our vulnerabilities and gain concrete tools for protecting your thinking—thereby protecting your community and society.
The Global Network Advancement Group (GNA-G) gathers worldwide network professionals from R&E Networking organisations to support and enhance continent-to-continent interconnectivity and global science collaboration. Motivated by the prior success, the meeting at TNC26 would serve as a platform for knowledge sharing and discussion around GNA-G working groups and relevant topics.
Join an action-oriented session exploring sovereignty in Above-the-Net services for research and the development of interoperable service concepts. The session will start with a deep dive into a proposal for a sovereign pan-European S3-compatible object storage, followed by updates on developments around the OCRE joint IaaS+ framework agreements, and will close with a panel discussion on cloud sovereignty and the evolving role of NRENs in a changing cloud landscape. Participants will gain insights to support strategic planning and daily service delivery decisions.
Agenda:
09:00-10:30 Deep dive into a proposed sovereign pan-European S3-compatible object storage infrastructure
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:30 OCRE Framework updates and cloud sovereignty panel
SIG-AI and SIG-RED collaborate to address the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and research engagement. The meeting aims to discuss how NRENs can engage researchers and provision key AI-relevant infrastructures (e.g., AI Factories and AI Factory Antennas). Join us to define the service portfolio needed to enable cutting-edge scientific discovery.
For more information please see:
As eduMEET becomes more mature, it will increasingly be perceived as one of many video conferencing systems. This raises questions about how to ensure sustaining eduMEET operations while maintaining its uniqueness for research and teaching purposes. Placement, price, persons, processes, p... - let's talk about making eduMEET a competitive software at saturated market.
eduGAIN Town Hall is the meeting where new and hot topics related to trust, identity and authentication are presented and discussed with the global research and education community. REFEDS Meeting is the event dedicated to the research and education federations community where you can have an update on the current working groups activities and latest specifications. This year eduGAIN Town Hall and the 50th REFEDS Meeting will join forces and organize a unique event for all the things related to trust, identity and federations.