Event Highlights  - Wednesday 2 December 2009
 


On Day 2 of the event, speakers and panel sessions continued to educate and raise awareness of issues and challenges that networking can help to address:

Delegates were reminded of the stark differences between connectivity across the world and the severe need for geographical extension of the internet. For example, amongst Africa’s population of 1 billion only a tiny percentage have internet access, with some universities having little more bandwidth than the average European household. This connectivity is set to grow by a factor of 15 in the next two years.

With science focusing more and more on global issues, the demand for seamless global connectivity will continue to grow exponentially.

• Global earth observation projects need to interoperate and share data across disciplines, only possible through connected research networks
• The contribution of some regions towards global research can only grow with high speed connectivity

Raised as part of a panel discussion was the positive contribution networks make towards society:

• Coordinated research into Alzheimer’s disease
• World weather forecasting for early warning and identification of trends
• Global earth observation addressing climate change, carbon monitoring etc.
• Fusion research

As a community we are more able to experiment than the commercial world – we should not be afraid of risk, and should be more open to publicising our failures

Our next challenge should be to achieve desk-to-desk connectivity.