The Internet2 Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP) is a collection of benefits to subscribers of the Internet2 NET+ AWS and NET+ GCP programs. In addition to a regular cadence of open discussion technical calls, we organize specialized webinars, discussions, and technical deep dives. This calendar lists our recent topics.

Unless otherwise indicated, access to the meetings, recordings, and assets are limited to subscribing institutions. If your institution subscribes to one or both of these programs (AWS subscribers | GCP subscribers) click on the asset link and request access. If your institution would like to become part of the NET+ AWS, NET+ GCP, or simply part of CICP, email program manager, Bob Flynn (bflynn@internet2.edu) for more information.

AWSGCP

2025

Date

Title

Description

Speaker(s)

Assets

1/21/2025

NET+ GCP Town Hall - Getting Involved: Working with Google RIT to develop the Campus Engagement Coach

In the late summer, the NET+ GCP community brainstormed about projects higher ed could do with Google’s Rapid Innovation Team (RIT). Rising to the top of that list of ideas was the Campus Engagement Coach, a tool to help members of a campus community learn about events going on in their university community that aligned with their interests.

This idea, championed by Washington University in St. Louis’s Assistant Director of Cloud Systems John Bailey, was taken up by the RIT, who quickly developed an impressive prototype.

John worked with Google RIT’s Stone Jiang over the course of a few short weeks to come up with the app. Join us for a discussion of the process and product of this partnership.

  • Who: Cloud teams, organizational leadership, developers, those interested in innovative uses of AI to help the mission or research and education institutions
  • When: Tuesday, January 21, 12pm PST/3pm EST
  • Where: Registration is for NET+ GCP and CICP subscribing institutions. Contact bflynn@internet2.edu 
  • John Bailey, Washington University in St. Louis
  • Stone Jiang, Google Rapid Innovation Team


(subscribers)

1/15/2025

NET+ AWS Town Hall - New Year, new NIH Genomic Data Sharing requirement: how AWS can help with compliance

The growth of genomic and biomedical research has led to an exponential increase in the amount of genomic data being generated. NIH has updated its requirement for responsible management of controlled access human genomic and phenotypic data to align with the NIST SP 800-171 security standard, a comprehensive framework for securing Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). The update takes effect on Jan 25, 2025, and institutions that don't comply with these requirements could face significant consequences. In this presentation you will learn about how AWS can help institutions build a compliant environment to meet these requirements through its Secure Research Environment, and the resources and support AWS provides for institutions along their compliance journey.

This presentation is for those responsible for Enterprise IT, Security and Compliance, Research IT, Research Computing and Data professionals, researchers, and those who support researchers using, collecting, analyzing, and sharing genomic and biomedical research data. Please share this with your colleagues to whom this requirement may apply.

  • Who: Cloud teams, medical researchers and their teams, data security and compliance professionals
  • When: Wednesday, January 15, 11am PST/2pm EST
  • Where: Registration


  • JP Laverde, AWS
  • Venkatesan Chandrababu, AWS
  • Donny Wilson, AWS
  • Karthik Narasimhan, AWS


(open)

2024

Date

Title

Description

Speaker(s)

Assets

12/18/2024

NET+ AWS Tech Jam - Miracle Murakoshi’s re:Markable re:Invent re:Cap

re:Invent is AWS's annual conference where far too many people gather in hotels along the Las Vegas strip to stand in lines in hopes of socks or seats in sessions. Attendees spend months planning, pouring over the schedule, and writing bots to get them signed up for the talks they want to attend.

The NET+ AWS program, however, takes a much more civilized approach to gathering the knowledge spread across multiple Vegas casinos and convention spaces. We just ask Kevin.

Anyone who knows AWS Principal Solutions Architect Kevin Murikoshi knows he talks fast, particularly when excited about something, but his annual re:Invent re:Cap is next level. One needs Kevin's speed, detailed understanding of the technology, and intimate knowledge of the research & education community, not to mention his breath control, to get through a complete recitation of AWS releases in a one-hour session.

Join us for this deeply informative, always entertaining recounting of all of the announcements at re:Invent that may be of interest to the R&E community. This is one holiday tradition you won't want to miss!

  • Who: Anyone in the R&E Community who works in or follows AWS
  • When: Wednesday, December 18, 11am PST/2pm EST
  • Where: Registration is for NET+ AWS and CICP subscribing institutions. Contact bflynn@internet2.edu 


  • Kevin Murakoshi, AWS

(subscribers)

12/17/2024

NET+ GCP Tech Jam - Integrating DocumentAI, BigQuery and Looker

Tech Jams provide an opportunity for one or more subscribing organizations to put forward an issue they are having and get help from an expert from Google. This quarter's Tech Jam issue has been brought to us by Sheila Zellner-Jenkins from the University of Maryland.

Here is the scenario: A researcher has collected over 3000 pages of National Archive of Japan documents and they plan to use Document AI to convert archival materials of varying quality to a digital database (BigQuery) and provide future access for performing analysis. Most of the documents scanned are typewritten memos. Data consists of initial memos, responses to memorandums, invoices, and others.

They are looking for the most efficient way to move these documents to BigQuery to allow researchers to perform data analysis which will assist them in their assessment over time. The end solution will run SQL queries against the data for analysis and eventually data visualization using Looker Studio in the short term for reporting.

Sheila will be joined by Rajat Gupta, Customer Engineer at Google. The rest of us get to learn by watching them work through the issues and slipping in our own questions from time to time.

  • Sheila Zellner-University of Maryland
  • Rajat Gupta - Google


(subscribers)

11/21/2024

NET+ AWS Barn Raising - Amplify GenAI

Please join us for our first NET+ AWS Barn-Raising event. We are using that term to describe a session where we all get together to help each other build something. Our goal is to do one of these each quarter. We will prioritize applications built by community members who are willing to share them with their peers.

Our first Barn-Raising will feature the Vanderbilt University Amplify Gen AI project. The NET+ AWS Town Hall in July featured Dr. Jules White from Vanderbilt talking about Amplify. It is an impressive piece of work. Now, you, too, can have that impressive work in your own AWS environment. You can read about that session and find a link to the recording at https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=310247609.

At this session, Allen Karns, Principal Cloud Architect at Vanderbilt, and Jason Bradley, Sr. Solutions Architect at AWS, will walk attendees through how to stand up Amplify in a sandbox/dev environment for testing and or evaluating. They will be joined by, well, all of us. There will be those who have already played with the Amplify code and the rest of us who are just interested in figuring out how to make it work in our environment so we can go off and play with it later.

Please note that there are prerequisites for the workshop. You can find that list on the project GitHub repo at https://github.com/gaiin-platform. If you don't follow these prior to attending, you will have difficulty catching up and keeping up. NOTE: By request of the presenters, this session will NOT be recorded, though they are always open to answering questions and helping others in the future.

  • Who: Cloud developers, researchers, AI teams
  • When: Thursday, November 21, 9am-2pm PST / 12-5pm EST (NOTE: This is a four-hour session)
  • Where: Registration is now full
  • Allen Karns, Vanderbilt
  • Jason Bradley, AWS


(subscribers)

11/12/2024

NET+ GCP Strat Call - The Service Advisory Board Wants to Hear from You

One of the strengths of the NET+ program is that it brings us together. We share what we are working on and we look to find common solutions to our challenges. We gather ideas, like the recent exercise of collecting projects to pitch to Google's Rapid Innovation Team. Throughout these conversations, we look to identify barriers to success on the platform.

Most of these conversations about successes and barriers take place during the monthly Tech Shares, but not everyone can make those. In this quarter's Strat Call, John Bailey, chair of the NET+ GCP Service Advisory Board (SAB), will talk about a SAB effort to make it easier for you to submit feedback, read what others are submitting, and add your voice to help the SAB prioritize requests to Google.

In October the NET+ GCP Service Advisory Board met face to face with the Google team in New York. Time permitting we will recap some of those discussions and other program updates.

  • Who: Cloud enablement teams, Developers, anyone who uses GCP
  • When: Tuesday, Nov 12, 12pm PST / 3pm EST
  • Where: Assets
  • John Bailey, Washington University in St. Louis


(subscribers)

10/16/2024

NET+ AWS Town Hall - Multi-account governance in AWS

Higher education is a uniquely complex industry, with many independent groups building unique solutions that are all expected to comply with university policies and applicable regulatory frameworks. Working in AWS introduces a number of new tools: Organizations, Landing Zones, and Control Tower. We’ll discuss the roles of each of these and how you can build a secure and predictable environment for your customers across campus.

  • Who: Cloud enablement teams, Cloud architects, DevSecOps professionals, Governance professionals
  • When: Wednesday, October 16, 11am PDT / 2pm EDT
  • Where: Assets
  • Chris Kuehn, AWS

(subscribers)

09/24/2024

NET+ GCP Tech Jam - Google Rapid Innovation Team Project Pitch Session

The NET+ GCP community reconvenes for an exciting project pitch session, taking over the usual Tech Jam slot. This event marks the culmination of efforts sparked by the August Strat Call, where participants learned about the Rapid Innovation Team (RIT) initiative and began formulating their project ideas (recording).

During this session, members of the NET+ GCP community will have the opportunity to present their project proposals to the NET+ GCP Service Advisory Board (SAB) and Chris Daugherty from Google. Each pitch will showcase innovative ideas that leverage GCP to address critical needs within higher education institutions and potentially benefit the broader academic community.

Presenters will outline their project's objectives, potential impact, and how it aligns with RIT's goal of creating impactful prototypes for the research and education sector. The audience can expect to hear a diverse range of concepts, from AI-driven solutions to data management tools to advising systems and beyond.

After this session, the SAB and Chris will vote to select the top three projects. These finalists ideas will be presented to the RIT at the face-to-face SAB meeting at Google's NYC offices on October 10.

This pitch session represents a pivotal moment for participants to transform their innovative concepts into tangible plans with the potential for realization through RIT's collaborative engagement. It's an unparalleled chance for higher education institutions to drive technological advancements in their field with the support of Google's expertise and resources.

  • Who: Individuals or teams with a project ready to pitch 
  • When: Tuesday, September 24, 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT
  • Where: Assets
  • Chris Daugherty, Google
  • Jeff Nessen, Google


(subscribers)

09/18/2024

NET+ AWS Tech Jam - Building Your AWS Private Marketplace: Hands-On Lab

Take your AWS Private Marketplace knowledge from theory to practice in this engaging 90-minute hands-on build lab. Designed as a follow-up to our August introduction to Private Marketplace, this session provides cloud and procurement teams from NET+ AWS institutions the opportunity to set up their own Private Marketplace with expert guidance from AWS specialists.

You'll work through a step-by-step process to configure your marketplace, applying the concepts and best practices discussed in the previous session. Our AWS experts will be on hand to provide real-time assistance, ensuring you leave with a functional Private Marketplace tailored to your institution's needs.

This practical session is your chance to implement powerful controls, streamline procurement processes, and optimize cloud resource management for your organization. Don't miss this opportunity to transform your cloud procurement strategy with AWS Private Marketplace.

  • Who: Cloud enablement teams, institutional procurement and contracting professionals
  • When: Wednesday, September 18, 11am PDT / 2pm EDT
  • Where: Assets
  • Brandi Steckel, Amazon
  • Radhika Vuyyuru, Amazon
  • Soumya Vanga, Amazon
  • Elhadj Barry, Amazon


(subscribers)

08/21/2024

NET+ AWS Strat Call - Unlocking AWS Private Marketplace

Join us for an insightful webinar tailored for cloud and procurement teams in research and education institutions. This session, the first in a two-part series, will demystify AWS Private Marketplace, showcasing its powerful controls and the benefits it offers to your institution.

Our expert presenters will provide a comprehensive overview of Private Marketplace, detailing its setup process and the information you'll need to gather before implementation. You'll gain valuable insights into how this tool can streamline your procurement processes, enhance security, and optimize cloud resource management.

This interactive session includes a Q&A segment, allowing you to address your specific concerns and scenarios. Additionally, open office hours will be available on September 11 at 11am PDT/2pm EDT for further inquiries. 

We will cap off the series with a hands-on build lab on September 18 at 11am PDT/2pm EDT, where AWS experts will guide you through setting up your own Private Marketplace.

Equip yourself with the knowledge to leverage AWS Private Marketplace effectively, paving the way for more efficient and controlled cloud resource management in your institution. 

  • Who: Cloud enablement teams, institutional procurement and contracting professionals
  • When: Wednesday, August 21, 11am PDT / 2pm EDT
  • Where: Recording and assets
  • Brandi Steckel, Amazon
  • Radhika Vuyyuru, Amazon
  • Soumya Vanga, Amazon
  • Elhadj Barry, Amazon


(subscribers)

08/20/2024

NET+ GCP Strat Call - Partner with the Google Rapid Innovation Team to Turn Your Idea into Reality

The Rapid Innovation Team (RIT) within Google Public Sector is looking to the NET+ GCP community for ideas of projects you want built to benefit your organization and the community. Did you catch the Grant AI session in June? That was an RIT project built with a higher ed institution (more info). RIT is working with the University of Georgia System to build a “personalized learning system” to leverage AI to help students build individualized education plans to help achieve their career objectives. Now they want to hear what ideas you and your colleagues have but just haven’t had the time, resources, or expertise to build.

RIT provides engineering expertise and hands-on partnership for prototype builds. They are looking for candidate projects for a focused, collaborative engagement, averaging 6 weeks where an organization’s team and RIT work together to build out a working prototype of projects leveraging the Google Cloud platform which are impactful to the research and education community. RIT provides the developer resources, the school would provide guidance, partnership, and feedback throughout the iterative process.

In our August Strat Call Google’s Chris Daugherty will explain the project outlines, answer your questions, and help get the creative gears turning. He will outline what you need to put together a good proposal. We will reconvene on September 24, giving our September Tech Jam over to a project pitch session to the NET+ GCP Service Advisory Board (SAB) and Chris. The top three projects, as voted by that group, will be presented to the RIT team at face-to-face SAB meeting at Google’s NYC offices on October 10.

It’s not too early to reach out to your campus community for projects. This is a tremendous opportunity to turn ideas into plans and plans into reality. I hope you’ll join us on August 20 to set your project in motion!

  • Who: Development teams, RCDs, academic program leads, administrators, anyone with a good idea
  • When: Tuesday, August 20, 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT
  • Where: Recording and assets
  • Chris Daugherty, Google
  • Jeff Nessen, Google


(subscribers)

07/17/2024

NET+ AWS Town Hall - Amplify GenAI - an Enterprise Open Source Generative AI Platform

To prepare their students for this future, and to reap operations and productivity gains for faculty, staff, and researchers today, Vanderbilt has built and deployed a private Generative AI platform named Amplify with features such as Retrieval Augmented Generation, Custom Assistants, Code-Interpreter support, and Sharing, with SSO integration.

Vanderbilt’s Amplify solution leverages a modern serverless architecture using services such as Amazon Bedrock, AWS Lambda, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon API Gateway to provide a rapidly scalable, secure and efficient generative AI environment for users.

In this session Dr. Jules White, Senior Advisor to the Chancellor, Director of Vanderbilt’s Initiative on the Future of Learning & Generative AI, and Professor of Computer Science in the Dept. of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, will cover the drivers behind their design approach and serverless architecture; how they engaged campus stakeholders to enhance the software; outcomes and lessons learned from their pilot and first 6 months of production usage; and details of the costs incurred.

He’ll wrap up with a brief demo of the platform and welcome institutions to download the open-source software and join the growing community of practice.

  • Who: IT leadership, trainers, builders, solution architects, faculty, and researchers
  • When: Wednesday, July 17, 11am PDT / 2pm EDT
  • Dr. Jules White, Vanderbilt


(open)

06/18/2024

NET+ GCP Tech Jam -  AuthN/AuthZ Challenges with Looker + BQ Optimization

Internet2 is working on a data benchmarking project for the subscribers of the NET+ GCP and NET+ AWS programs. The work is being done in Looker Studio powered by a Big Query back end.

It will not come as a surprise that you all produce a lot of data. We not only want to visualize that data in a way that will be meaningful and helpful to you, but it must be done efficiently to be affordable.

The project roadmap includes allowing self-service access so we need to figure out access control as well as personalization options with Looker. So many questions...

A NET+ Tech Jam is a technical deep dive that allows us all to go along for the ride to learn how to make this all work. Who knows when you'll have a project like this!

Join Google Looker/Analytics Customer Engineer Sirisha K, I2 Cloud Business Analyst Erdene Gankhuyag, and your NET+ GCP peers as we work our way through these very practical challenges for a couple of very useful GCP services.

  • Who: Business Analysts, Data Managers, DbAs, Cloud admins, Developers
  • When: Tuesday, June 18, 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT
  • Sirisha K, Google
  • Erdene Gankhuyag, Internet2


(subscribers)

06/12/2024

NET+ AWS Tech Jam - Figuring out Reserved Instances and Savings Plans

Cloud developers have a not-so-secret identity as financial engineers. We all sense that there are ways we could be saving more on our cloud costs. Sometimes it's changing an instance type, sometimes it's moving higher up the stack in your application architecture, and sometimes it's identifying the right pricing/discount plan for the workload. Sometimes it's spot pricing. Sometimes it's pay-as-you-go. And for the right workloads, the big savings can be found in reserved instances (RIs). 

RIs are great for the right situations, but what are those situations? Is every compute instance type compatible with RIs? What if your situation changes in the middle of the RI period and you no longer need it? Do you have to just eat the sunk cost? In what cases does it make sense to let your reseller take the risk? Do you benefit from that?

And where do Savings Plans come in? How are they related to RIs? How do you choose between them? 

Just writing this description has raised more questions that I want answered. Join us for this quarter's Tech Jam. A couple of NET+ community members will bring their situations and questions to the Tech Jam hot seat in search of answers.

We will be joined by AWS Joe Lin, AWS Principal Technical Account Manager. Joe will answer all these questions and more, so bring your own!

  • Who: Cloud architects, developers, cloud enablement team, Cloud FinOps Analyst
  • When: Wednesday, June 12 at 11am PDT / 2pm EDT
  • Joe Lin, Amazon
  • Tim Manik, Internet2
  • Shane Heivly, PSU


(subscribers)

05/21/2024

NET+ GCP Strat Call - Grant AI, GenAI-Powered Grant Discovery & Analysis

Gemini Large Language Models (LLMs) trained in scientific literature are unlocking a tremendous potential to help researchers to win more grant funding. Please join us to learn about Grant AI, a solution developed with Gemini LLMs that helps researchers to:

  • Find and prioritize the grants they are more likely to win based on their own profile, and find the right collaborator for them
  • Automate the analysis/review of scientific papers at scale
  • Use the same tools they use today (e.g Colab) to connect to run analysis at scale based on the insights given by GrantAI


  • Who: Cloud professionals, RCD professionals, Researchers
  • When: Tuesday, April 23, 12 pm PDT / 3 pm EDT
  • Chris Daugherty, Google

(open)

05/15/2024

NET+ AWS Strat Call - Lessons and observations from a greenfield implementation using the AWS Landing Zone Accelerator

While Tufts University already had a small legacy AWS presence, the institution was looking to scale this up drastically across the university. The goal was to create an environment that could serve the diverse needs of the entire university community, incorporate relevant industry best practices and security, and keep the management overhead in check through the use of consistent, scalable patterns and automation. Tufts engaged with AWS Professional Services ("Proserv") in order to benefit from their experience working with other customers in higher education and their ability to interface directly with product teams at AWS. The end result is a multi-account environment built on top of the AWS Landing Zone Accelerator ("LZA") for Education. Join your NET+ peers as we hear from Ron Canepa, Tufts Senior System Administrator, about their challenges, experiences and lessons learned.

  • Who: Cloud administrators, cloud security, cloud developers
  • When: Wednesday, May 15, 11 am PDT / 2 pm EDT
  • Ron Canepa, Tufts

(open)

04/23/2024

NET+ GCP Town Hall - Google NEXT Recap

Google NEXT '24 just took place in Las Vegas. It broke previous attendance records and delivered a number of interesting, and even a few exciting, announcements.

Google's US Education Practice Lead, Jeff Nessen will walk us through the announcements identified by research and education attendees as the most relevant to our community. This session will provide an opportunity to discuss these announcements, put them into context for you organization, and learn how to act on those you deem worth pursuing.

Join us to learn about what is NEXT for Google Cloud.

  • Jeff Nessen, Google


(subscribers)

04/17/2024

NET+ AWS Town Hall - Research and Engineering Studio and HPC on AWS

AWS Announced Research and Engineering Studio at Re:Invent 2023. This open source, easy-to-use web-based portal helps administrators create and manage secure cloud-based research and engineering environments. Join Evan Bollig, Ph.D. Principal Specialist Solutions Architect for high performance computing to learn about this exciting tool and about how AWS supports High Performance Computing in the cloud and bring your Research IT colleagues!


  • Evan Bolling, AWS


(open)

03/27/2024

NET+ AWS Tech Jam - Quiz the Users: What Challenges is Kion Solving for You?

At the 2/21 bi-weekly Tech Share, there was a question about how someone on the call was using Kion to do something in their AWS environment. This resulted in enough back and forth about how people were using Kion that we thought it would make a good Tech Jam topic for the month.

We're inviting schools using Kion to come just share what they use it for and to share their opinions. We'll also have a tech resource from Kion (but no sales!) to get into the weeds if you want. I hope you'll join us.

  • Tim Champ, UMBC
  • Dan Landerman, Northwestern
  • Rick Rhoades, PSU
  • Randy Shore, Kion

(subscribers)

03/26/2024

NET+ GCP Tech Jam - Strategies for aggregating network traffic flow logs for all your GCP projects

This quarter's Tech Jam gets into logging and networking. WashU's John Bailey once again finds himself in the hot seat. (More appropriately the "help seat.") Here's what he's dealing with:

"We want to gather network flow log data for all GCP workloads (VMs, containers, anything else that can send and receive network packets) across all GCP projects, and send that flow log data to a central location in a single GCP project (that central IT could pay for) where it could then be reviewed by Infosec or moved along to Splunk or another log storage location."

Joining us to Jam on these issues are Google security analyst Travis Newshott and networking engineer Kurt Radecki. They are going to dig into John's challenge and talk about:

  • Enabling, collecting, filtering/optimizing, and exporting logs.
  • Types of network logs with an emphasis on VPC Flow Logs, eg 5-tuple, aggregation interval, and metadata.
  • Components involved in log collection and log export.
  • Using the Google Chronicle Security Operations platform to give your security team the ability to operationalize Netflow data in your investigations and incident response.


  • John Bailey, Washington University in St. Louis
  • Travis Newshott Google
  • Kurt Radecki, Google

(subscribers)

03/21/2024

Introducing the New NET+ AWS Contract with Four Points Technology

Internet2 has announced the availability of a new NET+ Amazon Web Services (AWS) agreement offered in collaboration with Four Points Technology. The new NET+ AWS agreement is the result of community requests and was selected via a competitive bid process involving community members from several public and private institutions. In this webinar Internet2 and Four Points Technology staff will discuss the requirements articulated by the community and the resulting agreement.

The NET+ AWS agreement is available to all U.S. Higher Education institutions, and Internet2 Higher Education Members, Affiliates, or Federal Affiliates. Please join us and bring your questions!

  • Dana Bean, Four Points
  • Bob Flynn, Internet2

(open)

02/27/2024

NET+ GCP Strategy Call - Best practices for running Google Cloud

Google Cloud Platform offers numerous tools and strategies to not only ensure your cloud environment is performing and properly secured, but that you are making the most of your cloud dollars.

 Committed Use Discounts can help you reduce the cost of predictable workloads. Subscription Agreements can bring certainty and peace of mind to less predictable workloads giving you room to explore without the fear of runaway costs. NIH STRIDES helps biomedical researchers make that precious research funding go further. 

Sometimes forgotten in your management of Google Cloud is your GCP account team. If you are not leveraging their expertise regularly to optimize your institution’s cloud work, then you are as good as leaving money on the table. You can bring them in for office hours for project owners, architectural consultations, and even to put on gamified training events like Cloud Heroes. 

Staying on top of your enterprise Google Cloud organization requires time in the console reviewing a lot of information, but also taking optimum advantage of the programs and people that Google provides. Don’t just sign the contract and retreat into your cave. This session will cover both the basic tools and information that should be regularly reviewed to manage the tech. We will also explain the strategies and opportunities you can use to ensure you aren't wasting money.

  • Jeff Nessen, Google

(subscribers)

02/21/2024

NET+ AWS Strategy Call - Maximizing your AWS Relationship: Don’t leave money on the table

Your experience with AWS through NET+ can and should go beyond access to the breadth and depth of AWS cloud services and solutions. Building a deeper relationship with the NET+ community and your AWS team unlocks opportunities for you, your colleagues, your leadership and your institution. 

In this session hear from Kari Robertson, Chief Technology Officer, University of California Office of the President about her experience and the benefits that relationship-building with her AWS account team has brought to UCoP. She and the team from AWS will share how you and your institution can engage with AWS to expand your team’s capabilities, gain access to additional resources, participate in custom and invitation-only experiences, and accelerate the impact of your work in AWS cloud.

  • Kari Robertson, Chief Technology Officer, University of California Office of the President

(subscribers)

01/23/2024

NET+ GCP Town Hall - Google Gemini AI: Charting Your Higher Ed Course with the Perfect Model

Ditch the guesswork and unlock the power of Google Gemini AI for your university. This town hall is your blueprint for navigating the diverse capabilities of Ultra, Pro, and Nano - Gemini's dynamic trio of language models and AI Studio to Vertex Studio.

Say goodbye to one-size-fits-all AI. We'll dissect the strengths and limitations of each model, demystifying their ideal use cases:

Ultra: The research powerhouse. Harness its vast knowledge and computational muscle for groundbreaking research and complex data analysis.
Pro: The versatile all-rounder. Streamline operations with automation, personalize learning pathways for students, and unlock a range of creative applications.
Nano: The nimble on-device champion. Empower mobile learning, enhance accessibility, and enable real-time interactions – all on local devices.
Ready to take the plunge? We'll equip you with practical guidance:

Identify your university's specific needs and challenges.
Match the right Gemini model to your goals, from research innovation to administrative efficiency.
Explore concrete implementation strategies and learn about available resources for getting started.
This session is your launchpad for joining the vanguard of AI-powered higher education. Join us, ask your questions, and discover how Gemini can propel your university beyond the horizon.

  • Charles Elliott, Google

(subscribers)

2023

DateTitleDescriptionSpeaker(s)Assets

12/13/2023

AWS Tech Jam - Murakoshi's Marvelous re:Invent re:Cap

It is that time again! The annual re:Invent re:Cap, a marathon recounting of all the announcements made at re:Invent that are relevant to the research and education community, enumerated, seemingly without intervening breaths, but AWS Principal Solutions Architect Kevin Murakoshi.

This year we are upping the stakes. We thought about having a pool to bet on how few times Kevin would stop for breath, but then it was suggested we make One Bingo Card to Rule Them All, combining terms from the keynote watch party bingos we had during re:Invent. There is still AWS swag to be won!

You won't want to miss this fantastic send off of the cloud season.

  • Kevin Murakoshi, AWS

(subscribers)

12/11/2023

GCP Tech Jam - Answers About Google's AI Tools

Tech Jams are deep dives into a given issue. This quarter we have John Bailey (WUSTL), Damian Doyle (UMBC), and Walter Wong (CMU) in the hot seat to talk about their experimentation with Google's AI tools and to ask the Google expert about it. That expert will be Charles Elliott, Field CTO for Education at Google. He'll handle whatever they come up with, without a computer assist!

We will also be joined by Chris Daugherty, Education Strategy Lead for Google who will say a few words about Google's AI subscription offering.

Bring your popcorn, and your own questions, and we'll all learn a thing or two about AI in GCP.

  • Charles Elliott, Google
  • Chris Daugherty, Google

(subscribers)

11/15/2023

NET+ AWS Strategy Call - How Athletic Departments can use the Cloud to gain an advantage

Athletics departments are swimming in data - photos, videos, ticket sales, demographics, player stats and more. Much of these data are siloed, often trapped in servers sitting under desks. What if that data could be gathered together and analyzed to improve player success, team outcomes, engage fans and alumni, and improve the bottom-line? 

Join us to learn how the University of Pittsburgh is using AWS to create Fan360 - a database to better understand their university's fanbase, improve marketing, better target alumni outreach, and increase ticket sales.

Meeting Assets

  • Joe Mulford, Amazon
  • Richard Turnquist, University of Pittsburgh
  • Chad Burton, University of Pittsburgh
  • Brian Pasquini, University of Pittsburgh

(open)

11/7/2023

NET+ GCP Town Hall - HPC on CGP

Google Cloud provides a comprehensive and highly capable platform for scientific and high performance computing. In this session we will provide an overview of the platform, its unique capabilities as well as the partner ecosystem Google has built. Furthermore, we will discuss the substantial impact the platform can have on computationally-driven research across a variety of scientific domains.

  • Volker Eyrich, Google

(open)

10/18/2023

NET+ AWS Town Hall - Introduction to Amazon Security Lake

To celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we'll show how to centralize security data into a purpose-built data lake that's stored in your AWS account. We'll also use modern analytics tools to give a broad view of security posture across an entire organization.

  • Chris Kuehn, AWS

(subscribers)

10/18/2023

NET+ GCP Strategy Call - Advisory Board, Google NEXT Recap, and CoLab Bonus

At the end of August, Google held their annual Cloud NEXT conference in San Francisco. The NET+ GCP Service Advisory Board met with Google prior to the conference to discuss issues and priorities raised by the community.

In this meeting SAB members will recap the discussions with Google and NEXT attendees will relate their biggest take-aways from the conference.


Finally, in response to questions, we'll get an update on CoLab Enterprise from Colab Product Lead, Chris Perry. We hope you can join us.

  • NET+ GCP SAB members

(subscribers)

9/27/2023

NET+ AWS Tech Jam - All Along the Control Tower

When cloud poet Jimi Hendrix was asked about Control Tower, he voiced the sentiment many of us feel, “There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief.” Two of your NET+ AWS colleagues, Carlos Speranza from University of Utah and Rob Larmon from Loyola Marymount University, will come to the hot seat armed with questions about Control Tower in search of relief.  

Jimi did add, however, “No reason to get excited” and that’s because AWS’s Jason Moldan, Principal Solutions Architect for Public Sector will be there with all your answers.

  • Jason Moldan, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS

(subscribers)

8/16/2023

NET+ AWS Town Hall - Generative AI on AWS

The potential of Generative AI (Gen AI) is driving an unprecedented level of investment and excitement from companies around the world. In this talk, you will learn about Gen AI and how Amazon Web Services (AWS) is playing a key role in democratizing Machine Learning (ML) and making it accessible to anyone who wants to use it, including more than 100,000 customers of all sizes and industries. AWS is taking the same approach to generative AI in order to enable every company to innovate faster and reinvent their customer experiences and applications.

Join us to hear from Diksha Sharma, an AI/ML Specialist Solutions Architect in the Worldwide Specialist Organization. She works with public sector customers to help them architect efficient, secure and scalable machine learning applications including Generative AI solutions on AWS.

  • Diksha Sharma, AIML Specialist Solutions Architect, World Wide Public Sector, AWS

(subscribers)

7/25/2023

NET+ GCP Strategy Call - Preparing your GCP Org to Support RAD Lab for Research

RAD Lab (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/rad-lab) is a Google Cloud-based sandbox environment to help technology and research teams experiment and create cloud environments without the risk of affecting existing infrastructure. It enables users to deploy infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to support specific use cases. Infrastructure is created and managed through Terraform in conjunction with support scripts written in Python.

In order for researchers to install and run RAD Lab, assistance is needed by the institution’s Google Cloud administrators. In this quarter’s NET+ GCP Strategy Call, Google Practice Lead for Infrastructure and Application Modernization, Derek Oliver will give us an overview of RAD Lab and RAD Lab UI, then walk us through options for supporting your researchers’ use of RAD Lab in your Org.

  • Derek Oliver, Google

(subscribers)

7/19/2023

NET+ AWS Strategy Call - Managing change within AWS and the Cloud

We had a great discussion a few weeks ago on the bi-weekly tech call about valuable, actionable topics for us to cover in our upcoming quarterly calls. We took your feedback and put together a calendar for the coming months. As we did so, we realized that the September Tech Jam would fall during the I2 Technology Exchange, but the topic, moving old Landing Zones to modern Control Tower, was too good to skip. 

Consequently, we are combining it with our planned topic  about handling change in AWS services. That gives us a powerful set of topics. We hope you’ll join Kevin and some of his SA colleagues as they help us stay on track with change.

  • Kevin Murakoshi, AWS

(subscribers)

6/27/2023

NET+ GCP Tech Jam - Managing Abandoned Projects in GCP

What’s the state of your GCP Org? Would you be

embarrassed to have guests over? Would they see a lot of unsightly project build-up? Maybe even boxes of old projects lining the stairs because you’ve run out of places to put them? Does your Org look like the floor of the kids’ bedroom, with abandoned projects strewn about everywhere? This is why we can’t have nice things. Are you a project hoarder? Of course, you’re not! You want a tidy, clean, efficient, tech-debt-free GCP Org with all those old, abandoned projects taken by the kids when they move out or just hauled off to the dump. Maybe you are not shooting for cover of Better Orgs and Gardens, but you at least don’t want to have to explain to the CISO what all that extra risk is lying around your Org.

Join us for the Quarterly NET+ Tech Jam and attack those abandoned projects head on. That’s exactly what Ezequiel Gioia, Systems Analyst in research IT, and Tim Telkamp, Enterprise Infrastructure Manager in central IT, at the University of Central Florida are doing. They will be in the Tech Jam hot seat getting the dedicated assistance of noted Google Cloud Whisperer, Alok Vimawala. Alok will help them exercise those little demons from the UCF GCP Org so they can, well, so they can get on with their lives and stop worrying about them!

Join us to find out how to tackle this timeless problem.

  • Alok Vimawala, Google

(subscribers)

6/21/2023

 NET+ AWS Tech Jam - CMMC on AWS

Due to popular demand\, we will be talking about securing your environment for protecting CUI, specifically configuring AWS for the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification

 <https://dodcio.defense.gov/CMMC/> (CMMC). Kevin has invited Scott Friedman and Brian Stucker, two experts on the topic to help us work through it.

NOTE: Tech Jams always work best when we have one or two schools currently facing the problem willing to take the hot seat and talk through the challenge. 

  • Brian Stucker, AWS
  • Scott Friedman, AWS

(subscribers)

5/22/2023

NET+ GCP Town Hall  - The Cloud Team’s Role in Supporting Teaching & Learning on Google Cloud

Of the major cloud service providers Google Cloud is the most generous and flexible supporter of teaching & learning. It is also the easiest platform, sometimes too easy, for students, faculty and other members of your community to start projects in using introductory credits. This can all result in some nasty project build-up in all those hard-to-get-at-places.

Over the next two months we are going to provide strategies for heading off and addressing some of the unnecessary technical debt and risk. This month we are going to walk you through the Google Cloud’s programs for teaching and learning. Most of them are hosted by Google, so knowing when to direct faculty to them will reduce projects in your Org. This is great stuff and you should invite your faculty to attend if you can. Other times circumstances require that the projects be created in your Org. We will give tips and strategies for proactively supporting the faculty and keeping the resulting projects under control.

  • Carrie D’Ascoli, Google Cloud
  • Alan Walsh, Indiana University
  • Bob Flynn, Internet2

(subscribers)

5/17/2023

NET+ AWS Town Hall  - Introducing Amazon Lightsail for Research

The easy button for deploying research capable cloud resources.

Amazon Lightsail for Research is a new offering that makes it easy for researchers and students to create and manage a high-performance CPU or a GPU research computer in just a few clicks on the cloud. You can use your preferred integrated development environments (IDEs) like preinstalled Jupyter, RStudio, Scilab, VSCodium, or native Ubuntu operating system on your research computer. 

In this session, you'll learn how you no longer need to use your own research laptop or shared school computers for analyzing larger datasets or running complex simulations. You can create your own research environments and directly access the application running on the research computer remotely via a web browser. Also, you can easily upload data to and download from your research computer via a simple web interface.

This session is for those who support researchers to learn about how Lightsail for Research can accelerate time to science.

  • Scott Friedman, Ph.D., Principal Technical Business Development Manager,
    AWS Higher Education Research

(subscribers)

4/19/2023

NET+ AWS Strategy Call - AWS Marketplace for NET+ 

Due to concerns about 3rd party contract terms, the AWS Marketplace is generally underutilized in higher education. However, a private Marketplace has the potential to be a very valuable addition to your cloud funding, legal, security and compliance strategies, not to mention customer service.

In this quarter’s NET+ AWS Strategy Call, we are doing to meet with representatives of the Marketplace team. They would like to hear from you, how they could make Marketplace a piece of your cloud deployment and management strategy. Please join us to help shape the possibilities!

  • Eddie Lee, Principal BD, AWS Marketplace
  • Moshe Abramovitch, Senior Product Manager, AWS Marketplace

(subscribers)

3/15/2023

NET+ AWS Tech Jam - AWSome Authenticating AWS with SSO systems and more! 

It is Tech Jam time again. During a bi-weekly Tech Share call in January the suggestion was made to dive into the mysteries and frustrations of the artist formerly known as AWS SSO (now AWS IAM Identity Center). You asked and Kevin responded. He found us a specialist to dig into the topic with us.

Come bring your centralized authentication questions! Let’s talk about integrating AWS IAM Identity Center and IAM with tools like Shibboleth, Grouper, and AzureAD for AWS console access. We’ll talk about different authentication, provisioning, and management models for single sign-on in AWS. Speaker: Brad Dispensa is a principal security and compliance specialist for Amazon Web Services in the worldwide public sector group. Brad works as a subject matter expert in the AWS security group and specializes in security and compliance-based workloads.

  • Brad, AWS

(subscribers)

2/28/2023

NET+ GCP Strategy Call - CMMC

Security Command Center (SCC) and the numerous ill-fitting support plans have been hurdles to robust enterprise adoption of GCP. Together we have been working to improve the situation. Please join the first NET+ GCP Strategy (formerly “Subscriber”) Call of the year to learn about recent developments in the SCC model and to give your feedback on the various support models.
  • Anoop Kapoor, Google

(subscribers)

2/15/2023

NET+ AWS Town Hall - Transform Genomic and Biological Data Into insights with AWS Omics

Lee Pang, Principal Solutions Architect, Health AI at AWS presented at our quarterly NET+ AWS Town Hall on AWS Omics.  NET+ AWS Town Halls are typically a subscriber benefit, but periodically we open the Town Halls up to share interesting topics.

Amazon Omics helps healthcare and life science organizations and their software partners store, query, and analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data and then generate insights from that data to improve health and advance scientific discoveries.

In this session, you can learn how Amazon Omics provides scalable workflows and integrated tools for preparing and analyzing omics data and automatically provisions and scales the underlying infrastructure so that you can spend more time on research and innovation. Amazon Omics supports large-scale analysis and collaborative research.

This session is for research decision-makers, researchers, and RCD team members who want to learn how Amazon Omics can accelerate research, support large-scale analysis, and generate insights to improve health and advance scientific discoveries.

  • W. Lee Pang, Pr. Solutions Architect, HealthAI, AWS

(open)

1/18/2023

NET+ AWS Strategy Call - Building a CCoE (Cloud Center of Excellence)

On a Tech Share call just before the holidays, the topic of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) came up. 

When we had a last-minute speaker illness at TechEx, AWS’s Chris Kuehn was one of the speakers who leapt into the breach and gave a brief talk on CCoEs and the lessons he learned about setting them up when he worked at U of I and then later helping Notre Dame. He has some hard-won wisdom to share and we hope you’ll join us for this presentation and discussion. Please share the invitation with others at your institution.

  • Chris Kuehn, AWS Solutions Architect, EDU

(subscribers)

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