This project supports hosting the four day 21th edition of the GENI Engineering conference, including organizing and hosting the demo session, to be held October 20 to 23, 2014 at the Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, Indiana. The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a virtual instrument that is rapidly emerging in prototype form across the United States. GENI is an instrument designed to address three issues: 1) Science Issues: We cannot currently understand or predict the behavior of complex,large-scale networks. 2) Society Issues: We increasingly rely on the Internet but are unsure we can trust its security, privacy or resilience. 3) Innovation Issues: Pre-GENI substantial barriers existed to at-scale experimentation with new architectures, services, and technologies. GENI addresses these issues via scale (from federation) and support for two kinds of experiments: 1) controlled and repeatable experiments, which will greatly help improve our scientific understanding of complex, large-scale networks; and 2) in-the- wild trials of experimental services that ride atop or connect to today's Internet and that engage large numbers of human participants. The GEC meeting and Demo sessions provide graduate students with both an opportunity to demonstrate and explain their work to the GENI community prior to formal publication. It is a key part of helping new graduate students understand what is being done with GENI and who amongst their peers at other institutions might be valuable resources. It also supports outreach to new community members, including the emerging US Ignite community. GENI is already being used as an instrument for research. This project supports the development and use of the research instrument.
The four-day conference will be held at the Indiana Memorial Union (IMU) Biddle Hotel and Conference Center at the heart of the Bloomington campus. The demo night event will be held at the Cyberinfrastructure Building (CIB), located in IU's growing tech park at the edge of campus. Event planning and logistical support for the event will be coordinated by the IT Communications Office's events team, which has extensive experience in conference planning and access to executive and internal technical support. The IT Communications Office is part of University Information Technology Services (UITS), which maintains a modern IT environment throughout the university in support of research, teaching, outreach, and lifelong learning.
