• Announces

The 25th RedIRIS Technical Conference took place in the Caceres San Francisco Cultural Complex. It was celebrated from 24th to 27th of November.

The event this year was supported by the University of Extremadura and the City Council of Caceres and welcomed more than 400 ICT experts and managers from Spanish universities, autonomous region networks and research centres.

The institutional opening ceremony was hosted by the Deputy Rector of the Digital University of the University of Extremadura, Carmen García González, who was accompanied by the Deputy Director General of Science and Infrastructure Planning of the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), José Doncel; the Director of RedIRIS, Tomás de Miguel; the Secretary General of Science and Technology of the Government of Extremadura, María Guardiola; and the Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Innovation of the City Council of Caceres, Jorge Carrasco García.

Themes

The themes addressed at this annual meeting were as follows:

• Models of Institutionally Shared Services: The search for service efficiency, focussed on cost reduction, has driven the identification of models spanning from centralised purchasing to self-provision by the institutions and sharing of Cloud applications with growing interoperability, establishing coordination between institutions and defining standards for relationships with suppliers that ensure the viability of new modes of service provision.
  

• The University and Global Sciences, a glimpse of the future: Education and science are increasingly becoming more global through networks. Students can be from any place, accessing content from any device, at any time; science articles reach any part of the world from the moment they are published and the way in which the actors interact is changing, driving ICT services to evolve.
  

• Cloud Storage: From fully outsourced to in-house solutions to hybrid storage models, storage is a matter of interest in the community and also serves as a base for delivering other services. This theme provided the opportunity to share success stories and examine areas for improvement.
  

• Campus Networks and Mobility Services: The fact is that the desktop PC is being replaced by mobile devices. This phenomenon impacts service types, such as access (Wi-Fi, 3G, LTE, etc.), mobile phone services that are being adapted to the cloud, device management and new trends such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).
  

• Big Data and Open Government: deployment of sensors and information capture devices, computing elements, data transport networks, development of algorithms and applications, analysis of legal and social implications.
  

Plenary Sessions and Working Groups

During the 25th RedIRIS Technical Conference, there were two plenary sessions led by the Director of Communications and Security of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Víctor Castelo, and the surgeon specialising in minimal invasive surgery, Jesús Usón. There was also a round table organised by the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) entitled, “RedIRIS and the Universities".

The Technical Conference sessions were preceded by Working Groups focussed on the technical staff of the institutions affiliated to RedIRIS, mainly Spanish universities and research centres, where the objective was to share the experiences of the following developments:

• Deployment of the platform virtualised with OpenNebula
• New challenges for specification of "intelligent" facilities
• Middleware – Identity
• Security in RedIRIS
• Electronic Administration
• MOOCs and new multimedia services
• Connectivity in RedIRIS (NOC)

You can see the video sessions: (The Working Groups and The Technical Conference)
More information: http://www.rediris.es/jt/jt2014/