Dec{}de 2024: Fusion Forward Experience

Once again we've been lucky to be invited to this years Decode, the annual cybersecurity conference sponsored by Trend Micro. Three ICS faculty members were able to attend this year's conference. I attended the talks on AI/ML-related topics. It is very interesting to learn how AI/ML can aid in improving malware analysis, threat intelligence, and other cybersecurity related tasks. The keynote by Robert McArdle was excellent as well as the locknote by  Ryan Flores. 

I also attened the CyberConnectED session, hosted by Rodel Villarez, which focuses on cybersecurity education in the Philippines. It's good to know that several universities have partnered with Trend Micro in developing their cybersecurity classes. 

Since my invitation to CyberConnectED was prioritized over my Dec{}de application, I was not entitled to the snacks and other freebies. At least I got a good shot. :)

  

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Dec{}de 2023: Resilience Rising Experience

Trend Micro's annual cybersecurity conference DEC{}DE is in person again this year with the theme "Resilience Rising".  ICS have participated in this free conference in the past. This year, there were 8 participants from ICS. In addition to the main security tracks, we also attended the Cybersecurity ConnectED event where Trend Micro presented how academic institutions can partner with them to bootstrap or enhance cybersecurity courses. We sure learned a lot from the conference and we are excited for the conference next year. This year is memorable for me because I was able to ask a question during the plenary session. 

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Virtual international academic conferences and workshops

A lot of major academic conferences in computing are being held online/virtual these days. The conferences and workshops I was able to attend so far include the following:

• ACM SIGMETRICS 2020
• ACM HPDC 2020
• SEED Workshop
  
• EuroSys 2021
• CHEOPS Workshop 
• HotStorage 2021
• SIGCOMM 2021

These conferences waived the registration fees this year. I hope to add more to this list.

If you are interested, here is a list of upcoming conferences from various professional organizations:

• https://www.acm.org/conferences
• https://www.usenix.org/conferences
• https://www.computer.org/conferences/calendar

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DOST Call Conference 2020 Experience

I attended the call conference hosted by the Department of Science and Technology last February 28, 2020. The call conference is intended to provide a unified venue to present some updates and new requirements and procedures  for research proposal processing, and submission. The event was participated by representatives from different HEIs and RDIs in NCR and Region IV.

One interesting requirement needed for research proposals for this round of calls is that there should be a private company partnering with the proponents. The purpose is for the possible commercialization of the research output. Although this is an interesting development, I think this will be difficult, especially for SUCs and UP. Issues regarding Intellectual Property should be addressed early on in the project.

The figure above shows some statistics about the DOST-funded projects sorted according to decreasing research index.

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DEC{}DE 2019: Gear UP Experience

We again attended this year's DEC{}DE event sponsored by Trend Micro. This is my third year attending the event (2018, 2017). The talks were really interesting especially the Keynote by Jay Yaneza.  I also liked the talk given by Jon Oliver about the role of Machine Learning in Cybersecurity where he emphasized that ML must be layered to existing security solutions. The hands-on session was on Powershell for the Blue Team.

(Photo from Trend Micro)

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PCSC 2019 Experience

This year's PCSC 2019 was held at the National University in Manila. According to the organizers, approximately 200 participants registered. There were three of us from UPLB. Although I did not present a paper, I enjoyed the presentations. Most are in the field of AI, ML and algorithms. It was good to see familiar faces in the computing research field in the country.  In the picture below is Dr. Roxas, the current president of the Computing Society of the Philippines delivering the opening remarks.

 

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DEC{}DE 2018: Connected Threat Intelligence Experience

We were lucky to be invited again in this year's security conference sponsored by Trend Micro, DECODE 2018.  The event was held at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel last October 11, 2018. This year's theme is Connected Threat Intelligence. I liked the talk by Andrew MacPherson on Graphing and Grey Data as well as Prof. Stefano Zanero's talk.

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DEC{}DE 2017: Transforming Security Experience

We attended this one-day event sponsored by Trend Micro last Nov. 29. The morning session was devoted to keynote sessions and the afternoon on technical sessions which included a hands-on lab.
Majority of the talks focused on the modern threats and attack approaches. The speakers also presented interesting statistics on the security landscape. With the growing security threats, the speaker from FBI urged the cooperation among the industry, government, and the academe. A common attack nowadays is the Business Email Compromise (BEC) wherein employees are subjected to phishing attacks resulting to the spread of malware, particularly ransom ware. With the growing popularity of the crypto-currencies, attackers are also taking advantage of user resources for mining without their consent. There were also talks on cloud security(Amazon) and application of machine learning techniques to security(Microsoft). A final takeaway from the event is that "security is a habit.".

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NCITE 2017 Experience

This year's NCITE was held at Leyte Normal University, Tacloban City, Leyte. We presented a paper on distance estimation using RSSI for drones. Together with me are four colleagues from ICS. The food was good and we really enjoyed the presentations. 

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CNSEC 2017

In line with the offering of a new Special Topics course on Computer and Network Security, SRG hosted the Computer and Network Security 2017(CNSEC2017) Workshop last June 17-18, 2017. The objective of the workshop is to provide computer security related hands-on activities for the ICS faculty. SRG prepared two activities, one on buffer overflow exploitation and another on SQL injection. Contests were held to test the participants knowledge.  Winners of the “Olympus has fallen” stack overflow exploitation contest are Mam Maan, Sir TJ, and Miguel. Clinton won the “Attack on Titan” SQL injection contest.  

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SenseDev'17 Experience

SenseDev is a five-day workshop on wireless sensor networks hosted by the University of San Carlos Talamban Campus in Cebu City last March 20-24, 2017. The resource persons were from Coventry University. Participants came from all over the country, mostly from Luzon. Before the actual workshop, we were asked to prepare a virtual machine (for VirtualBox). The virtual machine setup was automated using vagrant using a vagrant file provided by the resource persons. Included in the virtual machine are source code for TinyOS and OMNET++ for programming the TelosB mote. The first day of the conference included a field trip and socials night. The remaining days were devoted to the actual workshop. We were divided into groups where each group must develop a simple project to be presented at the last day of the workshop. Our project won the best project award.

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PCSC 2017 Experience

The conference was held at the University of San Carlos Talamban Campus in Cebu City last March 16-18, 2017. The venue for the plenary sessions is nice and the food was great. There were a lot of student participants also. Several  pre-conference workshops were hosted by different schools. I attended the Women in Computing workshop which featured talks by some of the top women in computing from the Philippines. The paper presentations were divided into different tracks. I attended the Computer Networks and Cloud Computing where we presented our paper. There were six from ICS who attended the conference. The best paper for the conference came from National University.

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NCITE 2016 Experience

This year's NCITE was held at DMC College, Dipolog City, Zamboanga del Norte. I presented a paper on OSv-MPI, part of my PhD project, under the IT track. The best papers for CS, IT, and IS came from ADMU, MSU-IIT, ADNU respectively. There were a lot of participants from the different regions. This was also the first time I attended a conference without the company of ICS colleagues. It was fun and enjoyable.

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APAN 41 Manila - Fellowship Summary Report

First of all I would like to thank APAN, especially the Fellowship Committee headed by Dr. Basuki Suhardiman, for awarding me a fellowship. I doubt that I will be able to attend such a meeting without a fellowship.

(Some Photos)

The main reason why I want to attend an APAN meeting is of course because I am very interested in the topics that will be discussed in the technical sessions, as well as the opportunity to network.  The workshops on cloud computing, network engineering, network research testbeds, and other co-located events are very much related to my research area and I learned a lot from attending them. I have a few blog entries that summarize some of the talks I attended.

The main realization that I came up with in this meeting is to never underestimate the value of COLLABORATION. The advances in research and education networks cannot be achieved without collaboration. I am amazed that majority of the presentations end with a slide having the logos of collaborating institutions and partners!

Unlike academic meetings that I frequent, the APAN meeting has a relatively informal and light atmosphere. Everyone seems to be at ease with each other and the senior members are very kind, accommodating, and generous. 

Attending this meeting also made me realize that my country, Philippines, is behind in terms of network infrastructure and capacity compared to its neighbors. I think improving this is just not a priority of the government as of the moment. It is great that DOST-ASTI is participating in this kind of activities that puts Philippines on the map. I also hope to be able to contribute, perhaps submit a research paper or join a working group to organize some workshops during the technical sessions. Interestingly, APAN publishes proceedings.

Since the APAN 41 Meeting is an international event, I also learned to appreciate the culture of people from other countries, particularly the other fellows. Talking to them gave me new perspectives in looking at things, not just on technical matters but also on other aspects of life. 

I believe that the APAN Fellowship was able to achieve its objectives and I hope that APAN will continue to support this program. I highly encourage others, especially the young ones, to participate and contribute to future APAN meetings.

MARAMING SALAMAT PO.

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APAN 41 Manila - Day 4

27 January 2016

Today I attended the Network Engineering Workshop. The abstracts and slides of the talks are here. This workshop is by far the most organized which started and finished on time.

Majority of the talks described their home institution's current network infrastructure as well as their future plans. They are slowly moving to 100Gbps connections( the term is Long Fat Networks or LFNs) from 10Gbps.

There were also some presentations on protocol modifications (TCP in particular) in order to support 10/100 Gbps transfer over long distances across the Pacific Ocean.

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APAN 41 Manila - Day 3

26 January 2016

Today I attended most of the sessions from the Cloud Working Group.

Talk: More than Three Years of OpenStack Clouds at NCI

Speaker: Andrew Howard, NCI High Performance, andrew.howard@anu.edu (via Skype)

In this talk, Andrew talked about the history of their OpenStack deployments at NCI. It is surprising to know that they have deployments using different versions. At this point in time, they are experimenting with using Ceph for storage. One person from the audience asked how they keep up with the rapid release of newer versions of OpenStack in order to keep updated. They use fibre channel for connectivity.

Talk: Application-Centric Overlay Cloud Utilizing Inter-Cloud

Speaker: Shigetoshi Yokohama

This is a short talk about the use of cloud in big data analysis. The middleware group where the speaker is a member of, focuses on automatic and quick creation of virtual clouds.  Other groups are working on aspects such as optimal resource selection and infrastructure.

Talk: SmartX Playground Update

Speaker: JongWon Kim, gwangju institute of technology

This talk is more of an update of the SmartX Playground which integrate the recent technologies such as SDN and IoT with clouds. 

Talk: National Computing Center Singapore

Speaker: 

This talk describes some updates on the NCC in Singapore. It is located in the 7th floor. They use the term InfinCloud because they use Infiniband interconnect. Their facility is state of the art.

Talk: Kreonet cloud update

Speaker: Yoonjoo Kwon, Kisti

This talk is about some updates on the Kreonet, including COREEN and RealLab. 

Talk: VM Migration on SDNs

Speaker: Kashir Nifan

This talk is about a VM migration mechanism implemented in Java. 

Talk: Collaboration with APAN WG

Speaker: Eric Yen, Academia Sinica

In this talk Eric emphasized that collaboration must be made in order to encourage members of other working groups to utilize the infrastructure developed from the Cloud WG. He said that the requirements should drive the cloud facility.


In the afternoon, I attended sessions on Future Internet Testbeds. Testbeds are real/virtual networks where researchers can experiment with new ideas.

The day ended with a fellowship dinner with some presentations from local talents.

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APAN 41 Manila - Day 2

25 January 2016

Talk: IPv6 Working Group Meeting
Speaker: Nava C. Arjuman

In this talk, Nava gave an overview of an IoT case study in Japan. According to him, in adopting a new technology three things are usually considered: performance, security, cost. Also he said that market/industry needs drive innovation. In the case of Japan for example, energy conservation is a driving factor for the development and deployment of smart meters. Using the ECHONET-Lite standard, devices can be monitored. 


Talk: FELIX Tutorial: Federation of SDN testbeds for large-scale network experiments
Speaker: Jason H. Haga et al

The talk described the architecture of FELIX. Basically it is about resource sharing across different domains, both in terms of geographical and political boundaries. The idea is very similar to grid computing. Felix uses 'slices' to as the basic unit of resource that is being shared which may include compute resources or network resources. Felix follows a hierarchical design. Majority of Felix components are implemented in Python. Several cases studies were also presented.

Talk: Introduction to cloud computing and OpenStack
Speaker: Karlo Paulino

The talk gave an overview of the advantages of cloud computing, in particular IaaS. Karlo described the different components of OpenStack as well as RedHat's virtualization engine. A short demo was given to highlight the features.

Talk: Role of the IX Manager/Coordinator
Speaker: Jake Chin

This talk summarized some tips on how to be a good IX coordinator. One tip that I remembered is that doing your homework before any attempt to peer must be done first.

Talk: Blacklisting DNS using a software defined network switch
Speaker: Mon Nunez

This talk outlined a solution to blacklisting malicious DNS access using openflow and raspberry PI's.

Fellowship Meeting:

The general manager of APAN, Marcus, gave an introduction about APAN. All the APAN 41 fellows finally get to see each other face to face.

The day ended with a fellowship dinner.

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APAN 41 Manila - Day 1

24 January 2016

Talk: Identity and Access Management
Speaker: Terry Smith

Terry is from the Australian Access Federation(AAF) and he discussed some aspects of how they operate this project. He talked about federated identity management which is essentially an arrangement among multiple enterprises to use identification data. This arrangement requires parties to follow a trust model. The advantages include single sign on, reduction in work, updated data, improved security and usability. The main entities include the Identity Provider (IdP), Service Provider (SP), and the Users. When a user wants to use a service provided by a service provider, the service provider contacts the identity provider to get the user credentials needed to use the resource. In this scenario, active protection of user information must be guaranteed.

The federation is responsible for the following: maintains a list of IdP and SP, define rules, provide user support, operates a central discovery service, and tool development.

A common issue is how much information is to be shared among the entities. This can be resolved using a consent engine or government policies (as in the case of Singapore). 

Terry also talked about the types of federations which include mesh, hub-and-spoke, centralized, and mashups.

Operating a federation requires tools. Terry discussed some of these tools such as the AAF Registry Tool, Jagger, Janus, OpenConext, and others. A hands-on activity was also conducted using AAF Registry tools.

A brief overview of EduRoam, a location-independent wireless network, was discussed. This is an example service that uses federated identity and access management.

Operating a national federation is very much like operating a business requiring full-time staff and resources. Marketing the services is also important.

DOST-ASTI is starting to roll out a federated IAM for the Philippines.

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NCITE 2015 Experience

This year's NCITE was held at Angeles Foundation University. There were four of us who attended the conference. Three papers from ICS were accepted for oral presentation. The acceptance rate was 22%!

There were several notable presentations in the conference. One is the presentation of Dr. Sioson of ADNU on the state of NCITE since its beginning 13 years ago. Another is the presentation of the new CHED guidelines for BSCS, BSIT, BSIS degree offerings.

James' paper won the Best Paper Award for the conference.

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SMACS 2014 Experience

I attended SMACS 2014 in Ateneo de Naga last November, but only the seminar part. It was attended by about fifty participants including the presenters. There were a few presenters from Japan and China, but majority are from the Philippines. Most of the presentations came from the ACLab  in UP Diliman tackling some topics on membrane computing particularly P Systems. Presenters from Japan talked about some formalizations on programming language constructs as well as formal specifications for real-time systems. Topics on bioinformatics were discussed by UPLB  presenters. Being a "systems" person, I needed some effort to understand their presentations. I've already forgotten some topics on graphs and NP-completeness!The talk I liked the most is the one delivered by Ma'am Marge on reversible sorting networks using quantum gates.

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