1. Author: Krishna P.C. Madhavan And Sebastien Goasguen Saurabh Goyal Purnima Mandava

2. CONTENTS  Introduction  RE@L & Second Life  Theoretical Framework  Architecture  Remote Resources for RE@L  Preliminary Results  Strengths  Issues & Concerns  Critical Questions

3. Introduction  The main goal is to bridge the gap between research and education by using the middleware technologies.  This is done by utilizing middleware tools so that research and education are presented to students within the context of their daily lives, their technology choices, and their lifestyles.  The paper provides the foundation of the comprehensive application and extension of current middleware technologies within the context of social networks.

4. RE@L & Second Life  What is RE@L?  It is virtual organization for education within the social network and virtual environment second life. Re@l will serve as a prototype to study how to compute data and other remote resources can be utilized to place learning within environments familiar to students i.e. second life.  Why second life?  Placing teaching and learning where students are already looking increases the chances of enticing, inspiring and keeping the students better engaged in sciences, engineering and technology.

5. Theoretical Framework  Cyber infrastructure allowed an large number of millennial students to participate in the knowledge production and creation through extremely easy methods.  Advantage: - It provides tools and services to extremely large set of users, allowing them to interact and collaborate with each other in natural ways.  Advances in cyberinfrastuructre introduces new services like mySpace, Facebook, and Flickr.

6. Theoretical Framework

7. Continued….  Researchers working on pushing new tools that utilize the notion of semantic web in higher education.  What is required?  Cyber infrastructure-enabled applications that can better serve learners.  What it does not address?  Do not engage significant computational power within the application contexts

8. Architecture Environment used: Second life

9. Remote Resources for Re@l  RE@L access remote resources such as compute and storage services on TeraGrid, OSG etc.  Science Gateway Evolution: (a) Users have access to HPC resources through SSH access. (b) Uses standard Web portal like Open Grid Computing Environm. (c) Uses full 3-D environment e.g. second life.

10. Preliminary Results  First activity was to integrate with second life to show condor stats.  Developed.NET HTTP Interf- ace that parses all the data.  Possible Limitation is the size of the data packets.  Future Development is to build search engines, processing chemical structures.

11. Strength o It considered the security aspect by considering the X.509 certificates for authentication. o Placing teaching and learning where students are already looking increases the chances of enticing, inspiring and keeping the students better engaged in sciences, engineering and technology. o Shift of Tera Grid and Open Source Grid towards Virtual organization helps in management and provisioning of resources.

12. Concerns & Issues  Minimal importance placed on real-time social, behavioral functions.  Middleware technologies within social network has not been fully understood as it has bee developed form High Performance Computing perspective.  Devoid of the “real time “ social interaction and students do not able to utilize modern day IT tools and services.  Cannot invest significant amounts into computing.  Extremely difficult to bridge the gap between real world research search and learning that occurs in formal and informal settings lead to new term called “Digital Disconnect”.

13. Critical Questions  How can be efficient and fast response can be provided to user because second life call condor machine? Data throttling occurs at condors, so is it not going to delay the response?  There is no privacy and a confidentiality issue has not been discussed.  How can author declare that it provides the foundation of a cyberinfrastructure-enabled educational strategy that has all critical ingredients of cutting edge research.

14. THANK YOU!!