Personal Information

Name: Klaas Wierenga Address: <available upon request> City <available upon request> Tel.: <available upon request> Mobile: <available upon request> e-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Birthplace: Groningen, 9 March 1967

Objective

A position that allows me to use my experience and extensive knowledge in the fields of middleware and mobility to further advance networking.

Work Experience

October 2007 - Current: Corporate Development Consulting Engineer, Cisco Systems, San Jose (USA) 

September 2002 - September 2007: Manager Middleware Services, SURFnet bv, Utrecht

Responsible for assessing new technologies, developing new services and managing a number of projects in an international context. Highlights include.:

• Architect/founder/lead of eduroam, the international federation for roaming network access for higher education, with currently over 500 participating universities in over 30 countries in Europe, The United States, Asia and Australia (see: http://www.eduroam.nl and http://www.eduroam.org) (for this I was shortlisted for the Vosko-prize for young innovators in 2006).
• Architect of Culture-around-the-corner (see: http://www.cultuurindebuurt.nl), a location based information service for cultural information.

• Activity Leader of the roaming activity in the authorisation and roaming research activity of the Géant2 project, an EU 6th framework project that creates the next generation of the European research networks.
  
• Chair of the TERENA taskforce on mobility (see: http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-mobility/).
• Speaker, keynote speaker and instructor at many events in the Netherlands and abroad (see: http://www.wierenga.net/content/view/23/36/)
  
• (Co-)author of a number of publications in the areas of middleware and federations (see: http://www.wierenga.net/content/view/22/35/)
  
• Architect of the Netwerk Detective, a network diagnostics tool used by many research networks (see: http://detective.surfnet.nl)

March 2000 - September 2002: Innovation Manager, SURFnet bv, Utrecht

Active in the realisation of SURFnets innovation programme. Highlights include:

• Programme manager of the Freeband Testbed Project, a project that created an advanced infratructure for mobile communications in the Netherlands. Successes include the creation of the first operational GPRS-service in Europe, pre-commercial UMTS-trials at 2 Dutch universities and the creation of WiFi hotspots in 6 student cities.
• Co-designer of A-Select (http://www.a-select.org), the authentication middleware used in most Dutch universities and also the basis of DigiD, de digital identity of the Dutch governement. Designed the initial concept.
• Reviewed the backbone architecture of Vodafone Netherlands.

• Technical Officer of the DESIRE project, an EU 4th framework project, maintained the technical cohesion of the 8 workpackages distributed over 23 partners in 7 countries.
• Designed a network architecture for the Amsterdam Academic Hospital (AMC)
• Reviewed the I’M Europe website of European Union.
• Desgined an architecure for external access to the Heineken corporate network for employees working from home and abroad.

September 1992 - May 1995: Network Specialist, University of Groningen

Worked on setting up the first generation of web services. Set up the university Gopher server. Created for SURFnet an ARCHIE index of globally availble FTP-archives. Set up an repository for doctorate theses.

Main accomplishments

TF-Mobility

The area of mobility had been missing from the TERENA technical program. At the Technical Advisory Counsil (TAC) meeting at the TERENA conference in Antalya (2001) I have proposed to add this as a special interest area, which was approved by the TAC. After that I have organised a BOF session in Amsterdam and a workshop in Limerick to discuss the formation of a TERENA taskforce on mobility. I wrote a charter that concentrated on concrete work items and got the necessary support and that was consequently approved.

Today TF-Mobility is one of the most succesful taskforces of TERENA, of which I am the chair. Currently the emphasis is on improvements to the eduroam architecture by looking into the use of RADSec and integration with SAML-based federations.

Géant2 Joint Research Activity 5: Authoirisation and roaming

I have written the initial text and, after consulting middleware experts in Europe, the work plan for JRA5. JRA5 has attracted most European NRENs and is producing a number of high quality deliverables in the areas of federations, authentication&authorisation and roaming. See also below.

eduroam

Now 4 years ago I got the idea to combine a RADIUS-infrastructure for roaming with 802.1X-based access control. As the implementations of 802.1X standard were at the time quite immature I have engaged Twente University of Technology in a pilot. As a result of this pilot the campus in Twente became not only the largest hotspot in Europe but was also base on 802.1X technology. A spin-off of the project has been the development of the SecureW2 EAP-TTLS client that I commisioned and that is now worldwide the most used 802.1X supplicant.
The roaming that is possible with this combination of RADIUS and 802.1X is now called eduroam. I still lead the further development of eduroam that is by now done by many people in various countries. The success of eduroam has been enormous, now covering over 500 universities in over 30 countries in 4 continents.

On the policy side we have succeeded in creating a Europen eduroam-policy and I have set up a global working group to foster collaboration between the various regions.

eduGAIN

Because I was not happy with the initial architecture I have redesigned the eduGAIN architecture for federating the European research federations in order to allow for higher scalability and removing single points of failure. This redesign was accepted by the Géant2 joint research activity on authorisation and roaming (JRA5) and now forms the basis of the eduGAIN architecture that is in its pilot phase.

Education and qualifications

• Member of the Internet Society
• Representative for SURFnet at the national frequency allocation forum
• Member of the expert panel of EARNEST, a foresight study into the future of European research networking.
• Member of REFEDS the international academic federation expert panel.
  
• Chair of the TERENA taskforce on Mobility
• Founding member of ECAM, TERENA's European middleware coordination group for academic middleware
• Participant of the TERENA taskforce on middleware coordination (TF-EMC2)
• Representative for SURFnet at the TERENA Technical Advisory Council.
  
• Participant of the Internet2 Network Authentication working group (SALSA-NetAuth)
• Participant of the Internet2 Federated Wireless Network Access working group (SALSA-FWNA)
• Member of the programme committee of EuroCAMP (European Campus Middleware Workshop)
• Member of the programme committee of the TERENA Networking Conference (2004-2006)
• Member of the programme committee of the CESNet conference (2006)
  
• Representative of SURFnet in the World Wide Web Consortium Advisory Committee (1999-2003)
• Member of the review board of the Freeband Impuls project (2003-2004)
• Member of the review board of the EUNIS conference (2003)

Internet knowledge:

Good to excellent knowledge in the following areas:

Languages

Interests and additional information

• Curious, motivated, competent and interested in new technology and new applications of existing technology.
• Willing to travel.

References