Next Generation Converged Digital infrastructure (NG-CDI)
Lead Research Organisation:
Lancaster University
Department Name: Computing & Communications
Abstract
This programme will forge the research required to underpin the next generation converged digital infrastructure for BT, creating a radically new technology architecture for autonomous operation of future networks and services.
Digital infrastructure networks of the future will be highly reliable and resilient to disruptions through autonomous operations and will be able to cope with increasing demands on its capacity and types of services. These networks will be equipped with programmable and virtualised network functions that can be flexibly placed at specific network locations. New and unpredicted services will be capable of being supported without the need to make costly changes to the infrastructure at the physical level. The physical nodes of the infrastructure network will be represented digitally by a 'digital twin' or 'software agent' which will make them "autonomic" - i.e., the capability to perceive its state and environment, understand and predict its behaviour, and react to disruptions and opportunities autonomously with an aim to enhance customer experience. The network will be able to detect and predict possible disruptions, analyse the risk to service provision, make autonomous decisions regarding the (re)deployment of functions to least risky network locations and arrange remedial actions such as repair or replacement of risk-prone nodes. This will lead to new services, improved resilience of the network, better customer experiences and greater operational efficiency ensuring that the UK remains a leading digital economy.
In order to realise this vision, the research carried out in this programme is structured around 5 challenges:
Research Challenge 1: Agile Converged Infrastructure Systems Architecture. The fundamental question addressed here is "How to build an agile digital infrastructure that is amenable to autonomous operations?" This will be achieved through developments in new technologies such as MicroNFV and SDN.
Research Challenge 2: Future Networks Operations and Services. The fundamental question addressed here is "How to ensure service reliability of the agile autonomic digital infrastructure?" This will be achieved by developing an automated service ecosystem capable of placing virtualised network functions at specific network locations.
Research Challenge 3: Autonomic Knowledge Framework. This challenge addresses the question "How to enable autonomous operational ability for the digital infrastructure?" This is tackled by a multi-agent system architecture and through creating data sources that are intelligent.
Research Challenge 4: Autonomous Diagnostics and Response. This challenge addresses the question "How can the digital infrastructure respond to disruptions autonomously?" This will be answered by developing novel automated change detection and statistical learning techniques.
Research Challenge 5: Future Organisational Dynamics. The question addressed here is "How can the organisation exploit the autonomic agile capabilities of the digital infrastructure?" This is addressed by developing decision-support algorithms for risk-based function redeployment and predictive asset management.
Digital infrastructure networks of the future will be highly reliable and resilient to disruptions through autonomous operations and will be able to cope with increasing demands on its capacity and types of services. These networks will be equipped with programmable and virtualised network functions that can be flexibly placed at specific network locations. New and unpredicted services will be capable of being supported without the need to make costly changes to the infrastructure at the physical level. The physical nodes of the infrastructure network will be represented digitally by a 'digital twin' or 'software agent' which will make them "autonomic" - i.e., the capability to perceive its state and environment, understand and predict its behaviour, and react to disruptions and opportunities autonomously with an aim to enhance customer experience. The network will be able to detect and predict possible disruptions, analyse the risk to service provision, make autonomous decisions regarding the (re)deployment of functions to least risky network locations and arrange remedial actions such as repair or replacement of risk-prone nodes. This will lead to new services, improved resilience of the network, better customer experiences and greater operational efficiency ensuring that the UK remains a leading digital economy.
In order to realise this vision, the research carried out in this programme is structured around 5 challenges:
Research Challenge 1: Agile Converged Infrastructure Systems Architecture. The fundamental question addressed here is "How to build an agile digital infrastructure that is amenable to autonomous operations?" This will be achieved through developments in new technologies such as MicroNFV and SDN.
Research Challenge 2: Future Networks Operations and Services. The fundamental question addressed here is "How to ensure service reliability of the agile autonomic digital infrastructure?" This will be achieved by developing an automated service ecosystem capable of placing virtualised network functions at specific network locations.
Research Challenge 3: Autonomic Knowledge Framework. This challenge addresses the question "How to enable autonomous operational ability for the digital infrastructure?" This is tackled by a multi-agent system architecture and through creating data sources that are intelligent.
Research Challenge 4: Autonomous Diagnostics and Response. This challenge addresses the question "How can the digital infrastructure respond to disruptions autonomously?" This will be answered by developing novel automated change detection and statistical learning techniques.
Research Challenge 5: Future Organisational Dynamics. The question addressed here is "How can the organisation exploit the autonomic agile capabilities of the digital infrastructure?" This is addressed by developing decision-support algorithms for risk-based function redeployment and predictive asset management.
Planned Impact
Society: Today's society is entirely dependent on technology and the availability of "connected" services. The UK currently has one of the most advanced digital infrastructures in the world with over 95% of its citizens and businesses having access to super-fast broadband and digital infrastructure overall was used by over 41million adults daily in 2016. The ongoing economic and societal importance that the UK Government places on the nation's digital infrastructure was highlighted in the 2016 Autumn Statement as well as the National Infrastructure Commission consultation. The technologies and solutions delivered by this project will bring direct benefits to society by improving the resilience of the digital telecommunications network, enhancing service assurance and thereby customer experience, and producing the next generation converged digital infrastructure that is sufficiently agile to respond to unforeseen new ICT services.
Business Impact: Future ICT services will change ever more rapidly - and unpredictably - and a fundamental change to the economic model for infrastructure development is required. The project will produce an infrastructure which drastically reduces the time taken for new services to be launched. By enabling this agility, our project will reduce BT's operational and development costs, producing huge capital and operational cost savings, and growing value significantly.
Economic Impact: By bringing the world of cyber-physical systems to the digital infrastructure domain, the project delivers significant scientific advances in an area that is critical to the success of the UK economy. The output from this programme will have a direct impact on the rate of adoption of technologies such as NFV and 5G by telecoms operators. By providing a resilient infrastructure with the flexibility for operators to configure and offer new services, and greater agility for businesses who need digital services that adapt as they grow, these outputs will directly address one of the new government industrial challenges - Transformative Digital Technologies.
Business Impact: Future ICT services will change ever more rapidly - and unpredictably - and a fundamental change to the economic model for infrastructure development is required. The project will produce an infrastructure which drastically reduces the time taken for new services to be launched. By enabling this agility, our project will reduce BT's operational and development costs, producing huge capital and operational cost savings, and growing value significantly.
Economic Impact: By bringing the world of cyber-physical systems to the digital infrastructure domain, the project delivers significant scientific advances in an area that is critical to the success of the UK economy. The output from this programme will have a direct impact on the rate of adoption of technologies such as NFV and 5G by telecoms operators. By providing a resilient infrastructure with the flexibility for operators to configure and offer new services, and greater agility for businesses who need digital services that adapt as they grow, these outputs will directly address one of the new government industrial challenges - Transformative Digital Technologies.
Organisations
- Lancaster University (Lead Research Organisation)
- BT Group (Collaboration)
- Lancaster University (Collaboration)
- University of Surrey (Collaboration)
- NEC Corporation (Collaboration)
- Scania (Collaboration)
- UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE (Collaboration)
- University of Bristol (Collaboration)
- BT Group (United Kingdom) (Project Partner)
Publications
Austin E
(2023)
Online non-parametric changepoint detection with application to monitoring operational performance of network devices
in Computational Statistics & Data Analysis
Bakliwal K
(2018)
A Multi Agent System architecture to implement Collaborative Learning for social industrial assets
in IFAC-PapersOnLine
Bezahaf M
(2020)
Internet Evolution: Critical Issues
in IEEE Internet Computing
Bezahaf M
(2021)
To All Intents and Purposes: Towards Flexible Intent Expression
Bezahaf M
(2019)
Self-Generated Intent-Based System
| Description | The vision of NG-CDI to future-proof the communications aspect of the UK's Critical National Infrastructure has taken significant steps forward during the last period. Transformation on the scale of our ambition involves all aspects of operating the future infrastructure, and the project research has brought together wide range of technologies, business processes and culture. This integration has enabled the project to take on challenging use cases from the business which go beyond the more usual iterative developments. These were showcased at a "SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS" down-streaming event organised by the project in May '22 at Adastral Park and attended by 100+ attendees from all areas of BT. The event combined expo-style demonstrations of the research & technology, followed by workshops around key aspects of the BT business: • Intent-based Networks & DevOps • 5G Network slicing and user-driven QoE • Service Assurance & Infrastructure Management • Risk & Governance This has accelerated the down-streaming opportunities into BT, and during the remaining period of the project the emphasis will be on consolidating progress in these areas to maximise the business impact of the project, and also lay the foundations for future research informed by the newly emerging research questions. |
| Exploitation Route | The programme's primary impact pathway will be via the integral partnership between BT and the consortium universities. From co-creation of the proposal to shared oversight of the research, the programme has been designed to facilitate bidirectional transfer of understanding and skills, enabling efficient and trusted pathways to impact. Impact will be achieved via the direct engagement with BT's researchers, engagement with BT's network & system architects and operations centres, BT's strategic partners (including Intel, Cisco) and the ecosystem of associated small businesses at Adastral Park. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) |
| URL | http://www.ng-cdi.org |
| Description | The Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure (NG-CDI) partnership seeks to address the exponential demand for new network services and the associated challenges in terms of scale, costs, complexity, responsiveness, and reliability. The partnership is set up to build the foundations of the next generation of digital infrastructure, enabling its development and transforming the ability to manage a more resilient, responsive, and autonomic network, creating new ways of coping with this rapid change. As the major telecommunications infrastructure provider in the UK, BT takes responsibility for continuing to build this infrastructure fit for the future. As a result of the research activities undertaken in the project, new sophisticated techniques for a whole range of network capabilities, management processes and decision support have been established. Knowledge has been transferred from the partner universities to the R&D team in BT and more widely across the organisation. For example, the knowledge generated in intent-based networking has permeated the whole organisation and is now being used and incorporated into BT's future vision. It demonstrates that the knowledge has been adopted and become meaningful for different areas beyond R&D, for example, into the global business unit and senior leadership team. New statistical techniques and network modelling methods have been introduced into BT which expand the range of knowledge in R&D and that of operational areas in BT. The broad range of knowledge exchange activities has been positive and ensured the alignment of the research to the business needs, enriching the research activities through feedback from BT's diverse business areas, such as networks, BT Consumer and Global business. Another outstanding output relates to the interaction with the Tele Management Forum (TM Forum), alongside its other members. This Forum provides an international industry platform to collaborate to address shared industry challenges. The future of network infrastructure and how to operate them is one such challenge. Bringing the topic to the Forum and actively engaging with BT's strategic partners, such as Huawei, Cisco, Intel, amongst others, is key to developing an understanding in order to develop the future standards for network infrastructure. According to BT - based on the standard impact of a process improvement - the estimated impact of the anomaly detection technology is potentially worth around £10M per year once deployed and adopted. This figure is calculated from the expected reduction in engineering journeys and effort involved in monitoring and checking for faulty parts in the network in the field. Intent-based network has been identified as a service that will open a new growth opportunity for BT. It has already caught the attention of multinational companies (customers of BT) which are interested in this capability and are pleased to see BT undertaking research in the field which ultimately provides further opportunities for new value generation for BT and its customers. Moving into an autonomic and automated network will also have an economic impact in terms of energy consumption. It is expected to contribute to the minimisation of energy consumption and reducing BT's operation costs. The legacy telephony network consumes around £60m per year and therefore future technology will reduce this figure significantly. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2021 |
| Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) |
| Impact Types | Societal,Economic,Policy & public services |
| Description | 5G Testbeds and Trials Programme |
| Amount | £2,100,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 04/2018 |
| End | 03/2019 |
| Description | Driving Port Efficiency through 5G-enabled Connectivity |
| Amount | £1,634,590 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 11/2020 |
| End | 03/2022 |
| Description | NEWTRIP: New Transport-layer Intelligence and Protocols |
| Amount | £12,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | IEC\NSFC\170090 |
| Organisation | The Royal Society |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 04/2018 |
| End | 03/2020 |
| Description | Network 2030 |
| Amount | £1,050,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Huawei Technologies |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | China |
| Start | 01/2019 |
| End | 12/2021 |
| Description | TUDOR: Towards Ubiquitous 3D Open Resilient Network |
| Amount | £12,000,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 02/2023 |
| End | 01/2025 |
| Description | Worcestershire 5G Testing Project |
| Amount | £460,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 04/2018 |
| End | 03/2019 |
| Description | • Digital Twin Demonstrator |
| Amount | £250,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Digital Built Britain |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | |
| Description | • Digitally optimised through-life engineering services |
| Amount | £630,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Aerospace Technology Institute |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | |
| Description | • GIS-Based Infrastructure Management System for Optimised Response to Extreme Events on Terrestrial Transport Networks (2018-22 |
| Amount | € 295,800 (EUR) |
| Funding ID | 769255 |
| Organisation | European Commission |
| Department | Horizon 2020 |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | European Union (EU) |
| Start | |
| Description | • Social Networks of Gas Turbines for Collaborative Fault Prognosis |
| Amount | £130,500 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Siemens AG |
| Department | Siemens Power and Gas |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | Global |
| Start | |
| Description | • Socially aware infrastructure assets |
| Amount | £170,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | 104257 |
| Organisation | Innovate UK |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | |
| Description | BT |
| Organisation | BT Group |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | Shared research |
| Collaborator Contribution | Funding and joint research |
| Impact | TBC |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Collaboration with Scania |
| Organisation | Scania |
| Country | Sweden |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | This research showed the potential for improving equipment failure prognosis, and was demonstrated using a public dataset published by Scania. This has led to a collaboration agreement with Scania to test the methodology on more truck components. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Scania has shared datasets and access to engineering personnel. |
| Impact | Ongoing partnership. Further results will be published later this year. |
| Start Year | 2019 |
| Description | Unikraft/NEC contribution |
| Organisation | NEC Corporation |
| Department | NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH |
| Country | Germany |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | Development a performance characterization and CI/CD platform for the unikraft project. Port several open-source networking application in the unikraft eco-system. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Implement a performance characterization platform in Go to evaluate the performance of popular unikernel platforms. Developed a CI/CD pipeline for the unikraft project. Port several open-source networking application in the unikraft eco-system, including iperf, ping, traceroute, hping. |
| Impact | A. Jung, etal., "Navigating the Unikernel Benchmarking and Performance Tuning Labyrinth with ukbench", under submission to VEE 2021 |
| Start Year | 2020 |
| Description | University of Bristol |
| Organisation | University of Bristol |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | TBC |
| Collaborator Contribution | TBC |
| Impact | TBC |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | University of Cambridge |
| Organisation | University of Cambridge |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | TBC |
| Collaborator Contribution | TBC |
| Impact | TBC |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | University of Lancaster |
| Organisation | Lancaster University |
| Department | School of Computing and Communications |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | TBC |
| Collaborator Contribution | TBC |
| Impact | TBC |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | University of Surrey |
| Organisation | University of Surrey |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | TBC |
| Collaborator Contribution | TBC |
| Impact | tbc |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Title | Anomaly |
| Description | An implementation of CAPA (Collective And Point Anomaly) for the detection of anomalies in time series data. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | An implementation of CAPA (Collective And Point Anomaly) for the detection of anomalies in time series data. |
| URL | https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/anomaly/index.html |
| Title | DataPlane Broker |
| Description | The DataPlane Broker is an open and extensible service providing WIM management capabilities over SDN networks. The system can build point-to-multipoint virtual network over SDN networks. Furthermore, a driver for the service is available in the main source tree of the OSM orchestration framework. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Impact | Driver for the DataPlane Broker (DPB) (http://dataplanebtoker.github.io) WAN controller is released in OSM release 9 for public use. https://osm.etsi.org/wikipub/images/0/01/OSM_Release_NINE_-_Release_Notes.pdf |
| URL | https://github.com/DataPlaneBroker/DPB |
| Title | NEAT |
| Description | Network Emulation-based Automated Testing (NEAT) is an automated testing framework for network configuration. NEAT allows network managers to define network topologies and tests through YAML files and run realistic network topologies and tests. Furthermore, network managers can control the fidelity of their network tests and bound the execution time of testing suites, as well as exploit parallelization of modern servers to speed up test execution. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | NEAT demo (https://github.com/ng-cdi/neat-demo) was demoed in various public events. |
| URL | https://github.com/ng-cdi/neat |
| Title | NES |
| Description | Network emulation plays a important role in the design and prototyping of network technologies and architectures, and its relevance has only increased with the advent of recent network paradigms, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). The increasing interest in improving network automation and expand softwarization has motivated the development of several novel application scenarios for network experimentation, including Network DevOps and Network Twins (NT). Nonetheless, automation in current emulation tools remains limited beyond topology creation and is negatively affected by the lack of high-level APIs capable of capturing and synchronizing complex node interaction scenarios. As well as this, current platforms tend to depend on human interaction in order to execute experimental scenarios. NES is an automated, cloud-native, and highly-parallelizable NEaaS platform, designed from the ground up for facilitating codeless experiment specification and autonomous network testing workflows in cloud Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) environments. NES can improve topology instantiation times in comparison to existing emulation platforms, whilst its life-cycle model can automate testing processes for complex network configurations using existing CI/CD platforms, like GitHub Actions. https://github.com/WillFantom/nescript |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | Submitted a paper to NOMS 2023. Developed a new network testing use-case in collaboration with BT. |
| Title | Wayfinder |
| Description | Wayfinder is a generic OS performance evaluation platform. Wayfinder is fully automated and ensures both the accuracy and reproducibility of results, all the while speeding up how fast tests are run on a system. Wayfinder is easily extensible and offers convenient APIs to: (i) Implement custom configuration space exploration techniques, (ii) Add new benchmarks; and, (iii) Support additional OS projects. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The code was demonstrated in ACM Apsys event. The code is under use by the Unikraft project to support its performance optimization processes. |
| URL | https://github.com/lancs-net/wayfinder |
| Company Name | MAVERICK ML LTD |
| Description | The company is a spin off from the Asset Management Group, and the focus of the company is to provide machine-learning based solutions for detection and prediction of industrial equipment failures. The unique value proposition for the company is based on the research carried out by Gishan Don Ranasinghe (CEO of the company), a PhD student under the supervision of Dr Ajith Parlikad. |
| Year Established | 2020 |
| Impact | The company was established in January 2020. It is too early to describe impacts from the company. |
| Description | "Introduction of Self-Generated Intent-Based System Demonstration". ITU-T Network 2030 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Sixth ITU Workshop on Network 2030 and Demo Day, 13 January 2020, presented by Dr Mehdi Bezahaf. Abstract: Recently, intent and Intent-Based Networking (IBN) concepts have created enormous interest in academia and industry, although the idea is not original at all. In fact, in 2015, the concept of IBN has been presented in RFC 7575 and proposed as a new network management framework in OpenDaylight Network Intent Composition. The idea behind these concepts is to allow the user and the operator to express their intentions (i.e., a desired state or behavior) without the need to specify every technical detail of the process and operations to achieve it. The IETF Network Management Research Group (NMRG) has already submitted three "work in progress" Internet-Drafts about the topic. In their active work, they define the concept and they give an overview of Intent-based networking, a classification of different intents, and they propose a framework of intents. In this demo, we present a new approach where the intent is not only generated by the end-user, the application, or the operator but also by the system itself. In fact, for Quality of Service (QoS) purposes, the system can itself detect network improvements and expresses them through intents. We demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach under a flexible testbed based on mininet, OVS switches, and the ONOS OpenFlow controller. Resulted into |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/focusgroups/net2030/Documents/Description_of_Demonstrations.pdf?csf=1&e... |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership - Intelligent Asset Management for Service Assurance & Infrastructure Management |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | This is a series of linked talks & seminars in 2020/2021 by principal academics on the NG-CDI project on subjects of relevance to BT, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme, and aimed to raise awareness of new thinking or techniques on the horizon. This 3rd talk was introduced by Arjun Parekh. Self-learning Networks, BT Applied Research, and presented by Dr Ajith Parlikad (Asset Management, University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing). Abstract - Adding intelligence to network assets offers the possibility that the infrastructure can trigger appropriate maintenance processes. Prognostic maintenance scheduling concentrates engineering effort on reducing the risk to customer service and costs. Assets can learn from their own experiences, or from swarms of similar assets to anticipate their remaining useful life and co-operatively decide the best means to maintain service, reconfiguring themselves or calling for human help. Risk models embrace the likely propagation of problems across the regions of the network and between other networks such as the power network. The prospect is offered of determining the best action at the time, based on the dynamics of the existing traffic pattern. Impact: These talks are attended by BT researchers and decision makers, as well as researchers from other universities. The attendees also include members of industry, in particular those from the 100+ startups and established companies (including vendors) that form the Innovation Martlesham cluster. These have been very well attended and the discussions which follow have been useful in engaging interest and spreading understanding of the research. At this stage of the project we are particularly interested in influencing senior architects and the wider set of researchers, to align viewpoints and to prepare the ground for down-streaming. We have captured the linkages we have made, and extended the discussion through these, leading to a set of planned workshops on key topic areas, with key BT people and more broadly with standards and vendor communities. Each of the talks was recorded and is available on the NG-CDI website, and has been disseminated around BT and their partners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership - Intent Based Networking |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | This is a series of linked talks & seminars in 2020/2021 by principal academics on the NG-CDI project on subjects of relevance to BT, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme, and aimed to raise awareness of new thinking or techniques on the horizon. This 2nd talk was introduced by Introduced by Peter Willis, Software-based Networks, BT Applied Research, and presented by Prof. Ning Wang (Networks, University of Surrey, 5G Centre) and Dr Charalampos Rotsos (Computer Networks, University of Lancaster). Abstract - Increasing the rate of delivery and value of new services will depend on smarter ways to capture customer needs and translate these into service definition and delivery. The research is investigating the capture of customer intents in machine-readable ways. The research covers not only service creation and DevOps, but also methods to maintain or re-negotiate service levels in real-time in the face of changing network dynamics, using autonomous distributed agent architectures. Impact: These talks are attended by BT researchers and decision makers, as well as researchers from other universities. The attendees also include members of industry, in particular those from the 100+ startups and established companies (including vendors) that form the Innovation Martlesham cluster. These have been very well attended and the discussions which follow have been useful in engaging interest and spreading understanding of the research. At this stage of the project we are particularly interested in influencing senior architects and the wider set of researchers, to align viewpoints and to prepare the ground for down-streaming. We have captured the linkages we have made, and extended the discussion through these, leading to a set of planned workshops on key topic areas, with key BT people and more broadly with standards and vendor communities. Each of the talks was recorded and is available on the NG-CDI website, and has been disseminated around BT and their partners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership - Network Assurance through Massive on-line Anomaly Detection |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | This is a series of linked talks & seminars in 2020/2021 by principal academics on the NG-CDI project on subjects of relevance to BT, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme, and aimed to raise awareness of new thinking or techniques on the horizon. This 4th talk was introduced by Trevor Burbridge, Diagnostic and Network Assurance, BT Applied Research, and presented by Prof. Idris Eckley. (Mathematics and Statistics, University of Lancaster). Abstract - New statistical techniques have been developed which are able to monitor very large data streams and identify anomalies in near real time. Distinguishing between normal randomness and specific types of anomalies is essential for determining when a pattern of events means an intervention is needed. Multivariate techniques extend this to distinguish real system changes from spurious changes in the data. Such techniques greatly increase the power and discrimination of Test and Diagnostic processes which deliver Network Assurance. Impact: These talks are attended by BT researchers and decision makers, as well as researchers from other universities. The attendees also include members of industry, in particular those from the 100+ startups and established companies (including vendors) that form the Innovation Martlesham cluster. These have been very well attended and the discussions which follow have been useful in engaging interest and spreading understanding of the research. At this stage of the project we are particularly interested in influencing senior architects and the wider set of researchers, to align viewpoints and to prepare the ground for down-streaming. We have captured the linkages we have made, and extended the discussion through these, leading to a set of planned workshops on key topic areas, with key BT people and more broadly with standards and vendor communities. Each of the talks was recorded and is available on the NG-CDI website, and has been disseminated around BT and their partners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership - Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | This is a series of linked talks & seminars in 2020/2021 by principal academics on the NG-CDI project on subjects of relevance to BT, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme, and aimed to raise awareness of new thinking or techniques on the horizon. This 1st talk was Introduced by Stephen Cassidy. System Science, BT Applied Research, and presented by Prof. Nicholas Race (Network Systems, Lancaster University) providing on overview & introducing and describing the research underway to deliver the strategic aims of the project to BT. Impact: These talks are attended by BT researchers and decision makers, as well as researchers from other universities. The attendees also include members of industry, in particular those from the 100+ startups and established companies (including vendors) that form the Innovation Martlesham cluster. These have been very well attended and the discussions which follow have been useful in engaging interest and spreading understanding of the research. At this stage of the project we are particularly interested in influencing senior architects and the wider set of researchers, to align viewpoints and to prepare the ground for down-streaming. We have captured the linkages we have made, and extended the discussion through these, leading to a set of planned workshops on key topic areas, with key BT people and more broadly with standards and vendor communities. Each of the talks was recorded and is available on the NG-CDI website, and has been disseminated around BT and their partners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership - Technology, Risk & Organisations |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | This is a series of linked talks & seminars in 2020/2021 by principal academics on the NG-CDI project on subjects of relevance to BT, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme, and aimed to raise awareness of new thinking or techniques on the horizon. This 5th talk was introduced Stephen Cassidy, System Science, BT Applied Research, and presented by Dr Philip Stiles, Corporate Governance and Co-Director of the Centre for International Human Resource management, Cambridge Judge Business School. Abstract - Successful operation of an increasingly autonomous infrastructure means that it must connect with the principal business functions of the company. It needs to be trusted at all levels to operate safely. It needs to be driven by well-defined business decisions and goals. It needs to warn us of problems. And it needs to be a vehicle for stimulating innovation, providing information and what-if capabilities to explore new possibilities. These will mean that we need to build increasing trust between human and machine. We need increasing willingness to experiment and comfort with balancing benefits and risks. New systems of governance and support tools which support trust and enlightened risk-taking. Learnings from other industry sectors which are treading these paths, such as Financial algorithmic trading, or Retail logistics, suggests useful approaches. Impact: These talks are attended by BT researchers and decision makers, as well as researchers from other universities. The attendees also include members of industry, in particular those from the 100+ startups and established companies (including vendors) that form the Innovation Martlesham cluster. These have been very well attended and the discussions which follow have been useful in engaging interest and spreading understanding of the research. At this stage of the project we are particularly interested in influencing senior architects and the wider set of researchers, to align viewpoints and to prepare the ground for down-streaming. We have captured the linkages we have made, and extended the discussion through these, leading to a set of planned workshops on key topic areas, with key BT people and more broadly with standards and vendor communities. Each of the talks was recorded and is available on the NG-CDI website, and has been disseminated around BT and their partners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership - World Models and Digital Networks |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | This is a series of linked talks & seminars in 2020/2021 by principal academics on the NG-CDI project on subjects of relevance to BT, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme, and aimed to raise awareness of new thinking or techniques on the horizon. This 6th talk was introduced by Arjun Parekh. Self-learning Networks, BT Applied Research and presented by Prof. Robert Piechocki, (Wireless Systems, University of Bristol, and Turing Fellow) Abstract - In this lecture I will review recent achievements in machine learning underpinned by learning representations in an un(self)supervised paradigm. Such techniques are at the heart of the latest and best performing language models (BERT, GPT-3), contrastive learning computer vision or protein folding predictors (AlphaFold2). The common feature of such techniques is an attempt to build a fundamental understanding of the model i.e. its "world model", before a subsequent attempt is made to solve the given task. This is in stark contrast to the state-of-the-art techniques (including ML/AI) currently used in digital networks, where the algorithms are specifically crafted to solve the given task(s) and trained from the outset to achieve this. Can digital networks perform better by initially learning their own digital world models? I will present the case in favour of this view, and not shy from listing arguments against it. Impact: These talks are attended by BT researchers and decision makers, as well as researchers from other universities. The attendees also include members of industry, in particular those from the 100+ startups and established companies (including vendors) that form the Innovation Martlesham cluster. These have been very well attended and the discussions which follow have been useful in engaging interest and spreading understanding of the research. At this stage of the project we are particularly interested in influencing senior architects and the wider set of researchers, to align viewpoints and to prepare the ground for down-streaming. We have captured the linkages we have made, and extended the discussion through these, leading to a set of planned workshops on key topic areas, with key BT people and more broadly with standards and vendor communities. Each of the talks was recorded and is available on the NG-CDI website, and has been disseminated around BT and their partners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership II - Automation in 5G Network Slicing: Challenges on resource control and service assurances |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | 2022 Thought Leadership series... A new series of linked talks in 2022 by Academic Researchers on the NG-CDI project, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme... Details This talk will mainly focus on the technical challenges relating to network automations in supporting resource control and service assurances in the context of 5G network slicing. In particular, we will discuss key strategies in performing resource optimizations within/across heterogeneous 5G network segments (RAN, Transport and Core) and how they can be coordinated through end-to-end orchestration. Requirements on the end-to-end service assurance in dynamic network conditions will also be elaborated. Towards the end we also discuss network automations for handling on-the-fly user-initiated intents during real-time network operations. Ning received his PhD degree at University of Surrey in 2004 and he is currently a full-Professor at the Institute for Communication Systems (ICS) at the University of Surrey. His general research interests include 5G and beyond networking, Future Internet, network autonomics, multimedia content delivery, as well as Quality of Services (QoS) and Quality of Experiences (QoE). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyzVqqGriYw&list=PLpB64NkjN1dJ1TJXGP8N8aEmmqaS3Jcmz&index=5 |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership II - Dynamic Risk & Governance |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | 2022 Thought Leadership series... A new series of linked talks in 2022 by Academic Researchers on the NG-CDI project, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme... Details During the NG-CDI research we have developed a model of risk and governance that links enterprise risk and model risk management. This has been informed by a number of use cases as well as drawing on existing research. In this tech talk, we take these ideas forward and look specifically at the distinction between enduring and dynamic risks. This distinction is being used within BT as part of a project to reframe risk and governance away from a predominantly compliance focus towards a more behavioural, culturally embedded, perspective. In our research we have seen similar transitions in other organisations. We will present the implications of this approach for risk and governance by drawing on examples from our use cases and from discussions conducted within BT, as well as further presenting an overall storyboard that encompasses the various elements of NG-CDI research projects to show how risk and governance maps across them and highlight the interconnections between them. Philip is an associate professor at the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and Director of the Centre for International Human Resource Management. He has a long-standing interest in technology, culture, and leadership and has worked extensively with a number of public sector, private sector and third sector organisaitions, and works with boards of directors looking at issues of transformations. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RiK3h5itlI&list=PLpB64NkjN1dJ1TJXGP8N8aEmmqaS3Jcmz&index=4 |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership II - Intent-driven network testing and monitoring |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | 2022 Thought Leadership series... A new series of linked talks in 2022 by Academic Researchers on the NG-CDI project, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme... Details Autonomic network management can greatly improve service delivery times and reduce operational costs for telecommunication providers. Nonetheless, automation mechanisms are far from perfect, and they can occasionally have a negative effect on network functionality (sub-optimal or incorrect network configurations, delivery delays). In this talk, we are going to discuss the challenges to validating and monitoring autonomic network management. Motivated by the design of our business intent layer, we are going to discuss how intent-based networking can be used not only to drive service deployment but can equally define precise network testing and monitoring goals. Furthermore, we are going to present the design of new tools, that can support automated network testing and monitoring. NEAT is a multi-layer network testing platform, providing a holistic environment to validate the correctness of a network configuration in realistic network conditions. Unimon is a novel service monitoring framework providing just-in-time lightweight service monitoring. Charalampos is a Lecturer in Computer Networks and Networked Systems at Lancaster University. His research focus is in network service management and orchestration, network programmability and monitoring and cloud operating systems. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzjxuf7KLQg&list=PLpB64NkjN1dJ1TJXGP8N8aEmmqaS3Jcmz&index=2 |
| Description | BT Thought Leadership II - Modern agent-based control for digital infrastructures |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | 2022 Thought Leadership series... A new series of linked talks in 2022 by Academic Researchers on the NG-CDI project, hosted by the BT Thought Leadership programme... Digital infrastructures are complex, elastic and inherently distributed. Various research efforts have addressed the use of agent-based systems in the control of critical infrastructures. One of the key promises of such systems is to enable distributed autonomous decision-making without compromising flexibility, scalability and portability. However, it has been only until the last decade that developments in virtualisation have enable real distribution of intelligence along the digital infrastructure and new challenges have emerged for the engineering of these control systems. In this talk we will review core concepts of the agent control systems and the current trends with application to control of modern digital infrastructures. Marco is Lecturer of Computer Science at the University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol and Research Collaborator of the Distributed Information and Automation Lab (DIAL) of the University of Cambridge, and his research has addressed challenges related to the design and evaluation of agent-based supervisory control architectures for the network infrastructure. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/nJj7s7KxR3M |
| Description | Dissemination through International Telecommunication Standardization Focus Group of Network 2030 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | On October 2nd 2018, Prof. Ning Wang was invited to give a keynote talk at the first technical workshop of ITU-T Focus Group on Network 2030. The presentation focus is on network intelligence in future networks and the technical work carried out in NG-CDI was highlighted in the talk. The workshop was held at University of New York and there were around 70 people from both ICT industry and academia. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/201810/Pages/default.aspx |
| Description | Fourth Workshop on Network 2030 and the fourth meeting of force group Network 2030 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has attended both the Fourth Workshop on Network 2030 and the fourth meeting of force group Network 2030 organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has met some interesting people, such as Prof. Zhani who invited him to visit ETS Montreal or Dr. Shen Yan from Huawei who invited him to participate in a workshop on the future of the Internet. These invitations allow Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf to get involve with standardization bodies such as IETF and have a better understanding of intent-based networking that becomes one of an important aspect of the project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/201905/Pages/default.aspx |
| Description | Network Management (NMRG) research group of IETF |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Through different discussions during his different meetings and workshops, Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has started picking interest in the Network Management (NMRG) research group of IETF. He has taken advantage of being in Montreal to attend the NMRG sessions at the IETF 105. After exchanging with the chair of the research group (Laurent Ciavaglia from Nokia), He gets invited to the NMRG workshop. Network automation is one of the most important aspects of our project, and intent-based networking is one way to achieve it. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Network Management (NMRG) research group IBN workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has participated in the Network Management (NMRG) research group IBN workshop. After this meeting, Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf had a better view of intent and how it can impact our project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Presented NG-CDI intent Demo to BT partners (ServiceNow) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Presented our Intent demo to ServiceNow, client of BT based in America. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| Description | Research Presentation - Detecting Emergent Phenomena in Throughput Data Using FAST |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Research Presentation by Ed Austin to industry partners on research linked to NG-CDI. Abstract: Throughput data measures the volume of internet traffic passing through a point on the BT network. Over the course of each day the volume of throughput is expected to follow a similar shape, however deviations from this shape can occur and these may indicate that a fault or outage has occurred. In this talk I will present a FAST, a novel method for detecting these deviations in real time. Furthermore, I will present some results from applying FAST to BT data, and then propose extending the method to monitor multiple points on the BT network. Ed Austin is currently a Research Associate working in Lancaster University on anomaly detection on the NG-CDI project, and a 2nd year PhD student completing a project titled "Novel Methods for the Detection of Emergent Phenomena Within Streaming Data", supervised by Prof. Idris Eckley. Ed's research focusses on the detection of anomalies within streaming data, using techniques from online changepoint detection, nonparametric statistics, and functional data analysis to detect faults within telecommunications data in real time |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | Research Presentation - Predictive maintenance planning optimisation for telecommunication networks |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Research Presentation by Alena Puchkove, university of Cambridge, to industry partners on research linked to NG-CDI. Abstract: The first attempts into developing an optimisation model for maintenance planning from a network point of view will be presented. Given predicted failure times of equipment across the whole network, the optimisation model aims to identify a network-wide optimal plan to perform predictive maintenance in such a way that the impact on the overall network performance and costs associated with maintenance are minimised. In addition, the model also identifies the best way to reroute traffic when nodes/links are shut down for maintenance or failed. To demonstrate the solution, a visualisation model has been developed which will be shown using several simple scenarios. Dr Alena Puchkova is a Senior Research Associate in the Distributed Information & Automation Laboratory, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, and she is looking into developing optimisation models to improve traffic rerouting and maintenance planning for assets across the network. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | Research Presentation - Towards an Automated Testing Platform |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Research Presentation by Will Fantom & Paul Alcock on research linked to NG-CDI. Abstract: As the network function virtualisation (NFV) paradigm evolves, the diversity of VNF entities available to operators expands. Technologies such as containers and unikernels pose new challenges to modern infrastructures. The NG-CDI project looks to bring an automation architecture to the deployment and management of these µVNFs, putting more control into the hands of developers through NetDevOps. The demonstration presented here shows how critical configuration errors can be caught prior to deployment within an emulation sandbox that represents the heterogeneous networks used today. Adding VM support the Mininet emulator, we show how µVNFs can be tested alongside userspace networking applications and SDN devices. Will Fantom is a 3rd year PhD student at Lancaster University, investigating the roles that unikernels will play in next generation network infrastructure. Paul Alcock is a 1st year PhD student with the networking group at Lancaster University, working in the domain of network service deployment, and researching how to create a testbed for virtual network function development with the popular network emulator mininet. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS II - 2 day showcase event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An event to accelerate the down-streaming of this collaboration between BT and Academia: Shaping a future software-driven BT network infrastructure.Following on from our online SPOTLIGHT event last year, this event focussed on down-streaming the research activity from the project into the business. This exposition & workshop at Adastral Park was a great opportunity for the business and researchers to co-create the down-streaming plan for the remaining 12 months of the project. The event featured an Expo-style set of demonstrations, covering all the main topics of the project. These enabled BT colleagues to spend time with the university researchers to find out more and discuss the topics in depth. A number of workshop sessions was held with BT colleagues across all business areas, and was focussed around 4 key areas for the business - Intent-based Networks & DevOps; - 5G Network slicing and user-driven QoE; - Service Assurance & Infrastructure Management; - Risk & Governance - Better connected decisions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5LbLhipHzc&list=PLpB64NkjN1dId09eYERej1n4jmy6OvErs |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - CASE STUDY - Automation in Financial Services - Algorithmic Trading |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Dr Philip Stiles (Judge Business School, University of Cambridge) and Steve Cassidy (BT), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations, discussions and demonstrations around Digital Twins & dynamic environments for ORAN & Governance & Risk Management, with presentations from Piezheng Li, Jonathon Thomas, Dr Pradeep Debata and Dr Eleanor Toye Scott Use case presented by Dr Pradeep Debata - Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/dG6R3vZEij8 |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - CASE STUDY - Digital Transformation in a civil engineering firm |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Dr Philip Stiles (Judge Business School, University of Cambridge) and Steve Cassidy (BT), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations, discussions and demonstrations around Digital Twins & dynamic environments for ORAN & Governance & Risk Management, with presentations from Piezheng Li, Jonathon Thomas, Dr Pradeep Debata and Dr Eleanor Toye Scott Use Case presented by Dr Eleanor Toye Scott.- Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/GW9TaktEJ1Y |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Governance and Risk Management |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. This NG-CDI presentation on "Governance and Risk Management" by Dr Philip Stiles (University of Cambridge) Judge Business School, looks at how we ensure that autonomics at scale is used to improve how we manage business risks, and how we avoid the pitfalls of emergent systems, at technical and organisational levels. How we ensure that autonomics at scale is used to improve how we manage business risks, and how we avoid the pitfalls of emergent systems, at technical and organisational levels. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/dT5uggzBVHc |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Prognostics for Service Assurance |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Presented by Dr Ajith Parlikad (University of Cambridge) from the Institute of Manufacturing, this presentation outlines NG-CDI's work in "Prognostics for Service Assurance" - using self-learning between smart network assets to optimise the economics of service delivery and maintenance of the network, taking account of different timescales of investments and business impact. This presentation provides an introduction into the projects work to develop tools/ methodologies/techniques to predictively manage the telecoms infrastructure to assure service to customers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/f-tA0atL21Y |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Workshop presentation - Agent-based control of Infrastructure Management |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Dr Haris Rotsos (Lancaster University) & Phil Eardly (BT), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations, discussions and demonstrations around Intent-Based Networking and Integrating Asset Management processes, with presentations from Dr Haris Rotsos & Ben Simms, Dr Marco Hernandez and Dr Alena Puchkova |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/i91xsaQykUQ |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Workshop presentation - Anomaly Detection for Dynamic Infrastructure |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Trevor Burbridge (BT) & Ed Austin, this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations and discussions, and demonstrations of CAPPA, FAST & NUNC. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/6eBC7HQuGLM |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Workshop presentation - Business INTENT demonstration |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Dr Haris Rotsos (Lancaster University) & Phil Eardly (BT), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations, discussions and demonstrations around Intent-Based Networking and Integrating Asset Management processes, with presentations from Dr Haris Rotsos & Ben Simms, Dr Marco Hernandez and Dr Alena Puchkova |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/xOlq7ffHMhE |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Workshop presentation - Collaborative Network Maintenance |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Dr Ajith Parlikad (University of Cambridge), Prof. Rob Piechocki (University of Bristol) & Arjun Parekh (BT, EE), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations and discussions, and demonstrations around Deep Reinforced Learning, Collaborative Network Maintenance and Network Simulators for Risk and Critical Assessment, with presentations from Dr Xiaoyang Wang, Maharshi Dhada & Dr Manuel Herrera. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/r8kFnDsGznc |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Workshop presentation - Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for future Open RAN |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Dr Ajith Parlikad (University of Cambridge), Prof. Rob Piechocki (University of Bristol) & Arjun Parekh (BT, EE), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations and discussions, and demonstrations around Deep Reinforced Learning, Collaborative Network Maintenance and Network Simulators for Risk and Critical Assessment, with presentations from Dr Xiaoyang Wang, Maharshi Dhada & Dr Manuel Herrera. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/8TnyTvUMDf8 |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Workshop presentation - Digital Twins and dynamic environments for Open RAN |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Dr Philip Stiles (Judge Business School, University of Cambridge) and Steve Cassidy (BT), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations, discussions and demonstrations around Digital Twins & dynamic environments for ORAN & Governance & Risk Management, with presentations from Piezheng Li, Jonathon Thomas, Dr Pradeep Debata and Dr Eleanor Toye Scott |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/dJiDbz08_7w |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Workshop presentation - Infrastructure Management Tool |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Dr Ajith Parlikad (University of Cambridge), Prof. Rob Piechocki (University of Bristol) & Arjun Parekh (BT, EE), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations and discussions, and demonstrations around Deep Reinforced Learning, Collaborative Network Maintenance and Network Simulators for Risk and Critical Assessment, with presentations from Dr Xiaoyang Wang, Maharshi Dhada & Dr Manuel Herrera. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/-oDgHJyePxY |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Workshop presentation - Integrating Asset Management and Traffic engineering |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Dr Haris Rotsos (Lancaster University) & Phil Eardly (BT), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations, discussions and demonstrations around Intent-Based Networking and Integrating Asset Management processes, with presentations from Dr Haris Rotsos & Ben Simms, Dr Marco Hernandez and Dr Alena Puchkova |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/MDatb4EII7k |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Workshop presentation - Network DevOps - NEAT |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Session hosted by Hosted by Prof. Ning Wang (University of Surrey) and Andy Reid (BT), this Storyboard & Demonstrator workshop contained presentations, discussions and demonstrations around Intent-Based Service Management Control (SRV6) and DevOps (NEAT - Network Automated Testing), with presentations from Peng Qian, Will Fantom & Paul Alcock - Also contributed to delivery of the conference paper "A NEAT way to test-driven network management" |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/2WDtBlG0YUc |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Anomaly Detection for Dynamic Infrastructure. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Presented by Prof. Idris Eckley (Lancaster University), one of the projects original objectives was to create "...a new autonomic framework for digital infrastructure to equip the nodes of the infrastructure network with the ability to understand their state, detect and diagnose disruptions to service, and take autonomous actions..." Idris presents on detecting anomalies in massive real-time on-line data flows to diagnose network or operational problems and trigger corrective actions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/rfZIWrg6g7I |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Intent-Based Networking and Network DevOps. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Presented by Dr Charalampos Rotsos (Lancaster University) & Prof. Ning Wang (University of Surrey) this presentation focusses on balancing Customer and Operator needs ("intent") concerning service, economics & risk, simplifying the translation from higher level business processes to deployment into infrastructure. Haris & Ning provide and introduction to the projects work on Intent-Based Networking (IBN) and Automation, looking at Intent capture, testing & monitoring, managing 5G infrastructure with Intents & future directions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/p73ifHdD7oA |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Keynote SPeech by Prof. Tim Whitley |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. The Keynote for the day was delivered by Prof. Tim Whitley, Distinguished Engineer who serves as MD Applied Research & Adastral Park for BT. He is accountable for all aspects of BT's Global Research activities, which includes applied research, technology and partnerships with world leading universities. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/rhfJ1LoM6b8 |
| Description | SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS event - Principal Investigators Nicholas Race & Stephen Cassidy |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | An ONLINE seminar & workshop event hosted by NG-CDI, SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS, aimed at BT and their SME partners, with academic presentations, technical demonstrations and workshops around themed areas of, Anomaly Detection, Service Assurance, Risk & Governance, and Intent-based Networking & Dev-ops. Introduction by the Principal Investigator's of the project, Prof. Nicholas Race (Lancaster University) & Stephen Cassidy (BT), exploring "What could an autonomic and virtualised BT look like?". This event seeks to help BT exploit work from the NG-CDI research project, a collaboration of four universities jointly funded by BT and the UK Government. Its vision is to create Autonomic network technologies for fixed and mobile networks that will enable BT to perform greater market experimentation, improve the economic scaling of new services and make our business processes more efficient. NG-CDI leverages Cambridge, Lancaster, Bristol and Surrey universities' expertise in machine learning, digital twins, statistics, 5G radio, business processes and intent based networks in a unique project focused on BT's future challenges. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://youtu.be/tXtCnF8QFmY |
| Description | Software-isation: The Challenges of Software Quality for ICT Intense Industries - Refining the Research Focus |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | This was a one day "live" dual-venue event hosted by BCS in London, with an additional linked (via conferencing platform) venue at the UK5G Showcase in Birmingham at the Eastside Rooms Conference Centre. The presenters will be located at the London venue. By application of creative problem-solving techniques, the workshop critically reviewed industry case studies that may point to symptoms or evidence of underlying causes where application of new software techniques or technologies may improve future mid to long term outcomes and created the opportunity for software-oriented research leaders to promote their capabilities to policy makers and industry leaders. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Tech Talk - AI-Driven QoS Assurance for 5G Network Slices |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A short series of Technical focused talks from PhD students and researchers on the project, aimed at industry professional and technical users on research from NG-CDI. This activity was aimed at sharing insights of the developed research, whilst engaging the wider industry in debate and future landscape / future research questions. Follow on conversations with industry/academia working groups occurred in preparation for the SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS II event in Adastral Park in May 2022, a 2 day showcase event involving all 4 universities, Industry partners from all areas of BT, including Applied Research, BT Global, BT Networks, Dynamic Infrastructure, Network Security, Openreach and others. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/techtalks |
| Description | Tech Talk - Advanced Topics in Deep Learning |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | A series of short technical talks by Researchers and PhD students on the NG-CDI project to industry partners and SME's... Abstract: The last decades have witnessed rapid progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) technologies. As a subset of ML, DL is essentially using neural networks with multiple layers to solve ML problems. Through learning from large amounts of data, DL automates feature extraction, enabling predictions with incredible accuracy. In this talk, the basics of machine learning and deep learning will be introduced, followed by more details around advanced DL topics including deep reinforcement learning (DRL), self-supervised learning, graph neural networks and several specific applications in telecommunications. Xiaoyang is a Research Associate in the Communication Systems and Networks Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol. Her current research focuses on machine learning, especially reinforcement learning, and its applications in next-generation network management. Jonathan is a PhD student in the Communication Systems and Networks Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol. His research focuses on the application of cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning within next-generation communications networks. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | Tech Talk - Bad Apples and Good Labels: Learning in Real-time Fault Detection |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | A series of short technical talks by Researchers and PhD students on the NG-CDI project to industry partners and SME's... Abstract: When monitoring telecommunications networks, it can be a relatively low-cost activity to flag anomalous patterns in data streams. It can be much more costly to ask engineers to respond to or counterfactually label these anomalies, and there is often is a high proportion of patterns which are anomalous in a statistical sense, but innocuous in an operational sense. This talk describes an approach we have developed which can work as a mediator between anomaly detection algorithms and experts. The approach, based on the so-called 'apple tasting model', learns (in an online fashion, from limited expert feedback) to escalate only operationally-relevant anomalies to the expert, further automating the process of fault detection and monitoring. James is a lecturer in Statistics at Lancaster University and a researcher on the NG-CDI project. His research considers the application of statistical thinking to sequential decision-making, particularly in settings with complex data structures. He has research interests in multi-armed bandits, recommender systems, and time series. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | Tech Talk - Rethinking DevOps for Networks: Enabling automation via ultra-lightweight µVNFs |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | A short series of Technical focused talks from PhD students and researchers on the project, aimed at industry professional and technical users on research from NG-CDI. This activity was aimed at sharing insights of the developed research, whilst engaging the wider industry in debate and future landscape / future research questions. Follow on conversations with industry/academia working groups occurred in preparation for the SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS II event in Adastral Park in May 2022, a 2 day showcase event involving all 4 universities, Industry partners from all areas of BT, including Applied Research, BT Global, BT Networks, Dynamic Infrastructure, Network Security, Openreach and others. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/techtalks |
| Description | Tech Talk - The value of information for dynamic decentralised criticality computation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | A short series of Technical focused talks from PhD students and researchers on the project, aimed at industry professional and technical users on research from NG-CDI. This activity was aimed at sharing insights of the developed research, whilst engaging the wider industry in debate and future landscape / future research questions. Follow on conversations with industry/academia working groups occurred in preparation for the SPOTLIGHT on the FUTURE of NETWORKS II event in Adastral Park in May 2022, a 2 day showcase event involving all 4 universities, Industry partners from all areas of BT, including Applied Research, BT Global, BT Networks, Dynamic Infrastructure, Network Security, Openreach and others. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/techtalks |
| Description | Tech Talk - Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | A series of short technical talks by Researchers and PhD students on the NG-CDI project to industry partners and SME's... Abstract: The increasing softwarization of network technologies has mold computation as an essential resource to deliver next-generation network services. Nonetheless, the adoption of cloud technologies in order to manage and virtualize compute resources in the network infrastructure, limits the ability of operators to improve the resource efficiency and responsiveness of network services. In this talk, we will present a novel toolchain and library operating system for the cloud; Unikraft. Unikraft builds highly specialized unikernels, software bundles that consist of a target application along with just the operating system primitives and libraries features it needs to run. The Unikraft platform supports a wide range of VNF appliances (e.g. Click programs, HAproxy) and Unikraft kernels can run with minimal resource requirements (image size ~ 1Mb, memory footprint ~ 10 Mb) and fast boot times (30-40 msec). Furthermore, we will elaborate on the benefits of OS configuration tuning on cloud application performance and present Wayfinder, an holistic OS measurement platform which allows users to explore the configuration space of modern OSes and run custom OS benchmarking scenario in a reproducible way. Alex is a 3rd year PhD student at Lancaster University focused primarily on the optimization of serverless applications and lightweight Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) constructed using specialized library Operating Systems known as Unikernels. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/video-archive |
| Description | Tech Talk 2023 - Creating conditions for effective technology implementation. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | A new series of our yearly Tech Talks for 2023, a new series of short technical talks from PhD students and Researchers on the project.. Details Digital transformation, through the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), offers organizations expanding opportunities for greater control and efficiency and more timely and accurate results, but at the same time brings escalating emergent risks. This talk will focus on recent results from our research on technology and organizations for NG-CDI, including our findings at BT. I will draw out two main themes for discussion: firstly, the role of organizational factors in ensuring preparedness for technology deployment, and secondly, some of the organizational challenges raised by the technologies themselves. Dr Eleanor Toye Scott is a Research Associate at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, and until very recently at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Her PhD was in Experimental Psychology, and she has worked in academia and industry at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction and Organisational Behaviour. Her research interests include design and integration of complex technologies into organisations, oversight and risk management of automated and AI systems over different timescales and stakeholder engagement with technological, social and organisational change. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.ng-cdi.org/techtalks2023 |
| Description | The 10th International Conference on Network of the Future (NoF 2019) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has presented his paper on Self-Generated Intent-Based Systems at the 10th International Conference on Network of the Future (NoF 2019). During the conference, He has caught up with the chair of NMRG. Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has proposed to work on a survey on the intents. As a follow up to this discussion, they have gathered people from UCL London, Nokia, Orange, Telefonica, University of Bologna, and UFRGS Brasil to work on collaborative papers on Intent. Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf is currently leading the team working on common definitions of intents. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://web.uniroma1.it/nof2019/home |
| Description | The fifth Workshop on Network 2030 and the fifth meeting of force group Network 2030 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has attended both the fifth Workshop on Network 2030 and the fifth meeting of force group Network 2030 organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been elected to be a champion to harmonize different contributions and check if all the used terms are consistent. He has also presented his views on intents. He has been responsible for contributing to the Net2030 architecture (intent and automation section). This contribution gets used for the project deliverables. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/2019101416/Pages/default.aspx |
| Description | The sixth Workshop on Network 2030 and the sixth meeting of force group Network 2030 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has attended both the sixth Workshop on Network 2030 and the sixth meeting of force group Network 2030 organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Ms. Eleanor Davies and Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf presented our project's demo at the event, which gives more impact on our project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/2019101416/Pages/default.aspx |
| Description | Third Workshop on Network 2030 and the third meeting of force group Network 2030 ITU |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has attended both the Third Workshop on Network 2030 and the third meeting of force group Network 2030 organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Both events were really interesting and it was the first contact for him with standardization body people. He gets involved with sub-group 3 on the topic of network architecture and infrastructure. Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has also the chance to discuss with Prof. Mostafa Ammar (Georgia Tech - US) about network architectures and Internet evolution. This meeting and his engagement with sub-group 3 helped him, later on, to write a paper on Internet evolution and submit it to the IEEE Internet Computing magazine. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/20190218/Pages/default.aspx |
| Description | Visit of ETS Montreal |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | During his last Network 2030 workshop at Saint Petersburg, Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf gets invited by Prof. Zhani to visit ETS Montreal. He has spent almost a week visiting and discussing network management and intent topics with Prof. Zhani. He has introduced the NG-CDI project and did a presentation on the evolution of the Internet. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Visit to BT by Lancaster colleagues to meet researchers at BT in anomaly detection. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | The purpose of the visit was to try and embed the anomaly detection methods for real time data developed, into BT's systems. BT researchers had developed a system to obtain a feed to get real time data on measurements from a variety of instruments, such as edge routers. These measurements were typically quite high frequency, i.e. every 30 seconds. The challenge they encountered was in identifying anomalous behavior and sounding an alarm when enough evidence had been observed but quickly enough to still be useful in practice. The first challenge was to model the behavior of the data in its "normal" state. A group of researchers from Lancaster visited BT for a week to discuss these problems. We were given a sample of training data, reminiscent of this "normal" state and estimated a model, based on which we could define a measure of how anomalous a datum was. The method we developed has been used by BT researches and has been tested in internal systems to more quickly identify potential faults in real time. After the event BT researchers expressed interest in other areas where anomaly detection. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| Description | Workshop on the future of the Internet |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | During the fourth workshop on Network 2030, Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf has met some people from Huawei that invited him to a workshop on the future of the Internet organized by Huawei. He has participated and debated on self-driving networks and future network architecture. During this event, Dr. Mehdi Bezahaf met with Cheng Zhou (from China Mobile), with whom he writes a section on intent-base networking as a contribution for ITU Network 2030. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |