It is a great honour that six results from the EU Horizon 2020-funded Centre of Excellence for Research on AI- and Simulation-Based Engineering at Exascale (RAISE) result from University of Iceland were recognised by the EU as a 'key innovator' on the EU Innovation Radar website.
An example is LAMEC (Load AI Modules, Environments and Containers) that generates High-Performance Computing (HPC) job scripts. While job scripts are not rocket science, they are different for each HPC system and, in particular for newcomers, cumbersome to create. Therefore, LAMEC eases this with a few mouse-clicks using a web UI.
Another example is Scalable Hyperparameter Tuning to Accelerate AI Training in Reseach and Industry that directly relates to our PhD research Parallel and Scalable Hyperparameter Optimization for Distributed Deep Learning Methods on High-Performance Computing Systems
In fact, University of Iceland was involved in CoE RAISE and contributed to all of following results that are listed as innovations:
In late 2024, version 4 of the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) has been released. While this is not a textbook to teach Software Engineering, it covers the state of the Software Engineering knowledge, i.e. this is some sort of curriculum. I was one of the reviewers and can only recommend to download SWEBOK v4: it is valuable not only for teachers, but for everyone who wants to get a quick overview on a particular Software Engineering topic.
On Monday, 13.1.2025, 16:00, room M105 at Reykjavik University there will be an information meeting on the joint cybersecurity master's programme and cysec courses being offered at University of Iceland and Reykjavik University.
You can find more info here: https://uni.hi.is/helmut/cybersecurity/ -- there also the presented slides will be made available.
This joint cybersecurity master's programme would not be possible without funding from the University Collaboration Fund of the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Innovation and co-funding from the ECCC/EU for the projects ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).
To install a Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect VPN client on Debian Bookworm, the following should in principle be sufficient
apt install openconnect network-manager-openconnect network-manager-openconnect-gnome
However, this did not work with KDE/Plasma. I then tried logging in with Gnome as Desktop Environment and I got once shown the SSO (with MFA) web interface inside the the Openconnect window, but without further success, i.e. without establishing the VPN connection.
Then, I downloaded from the assets at https://github.com/yuezk/GlobalProtect-openconnect the most recent amd64 deb:
https://github.com/yuezk/GlobalProtect-openconnect/releases/download/v2.3.9/globalprotect-openconnect_2.3.9-1_amd64.deb
and installed a missing dependency using apt install libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 and then installed the downloaded deb.
I tried the graphical client (trial version working for 10 days only), but that did anyway not work. However, then the command line version finally worked:
sudo -E gpclient connect vpn.hi.is
It opens (probably using libwebkit2gtk that Debian had installed) a graphical Window for the SSO/MFA. Note that I had to re-run that command a couple of times until it finally worked.
Reykjavik University, University of Iceland, and University of Akureyri and applied together for funding in order to establish a joint Cybersecurity research centre. The Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation announced that the thre universities will together get for the project Rannsóknarsetur um netöryggisfræði get 67.3 million ISK funding over 2 years from the university collaboration fund (Samstarf háskóla). This is a continuation of a established collaboration that created the M.Sc. cybersecurity specialisations/emphasis that received previously 2 years of funding.
However, we envisaged a significantly higher grant and with that, the idea was to use the grant to introduce a new Ph.D. program, co-funding two Ph.D. student positions, to hold community engagement activities, to organise a "Defend the Flag" contest, and to create undergraduate and M.Sc research opportunities. Now, with the lower funding, we need to adjust our vision for the Cybersecurity research centre.
The grant will also be used as co-funding for cybersecurity Digital Europe Programme projects that are funded by the EU, however only at a 50% funding rate, so that the ministry funding is needed to provide part of the co-funding.
As we will have soon a new government in Iceland, we can expect that the ministries will get re-organised and we have to see what this means for this funding.
While I had never problems using Crossover Office on Debian, a fresh install on a fresh Debian 12 Bookworm revealed that 32 bit dynamic libraries were missing -- I got a message like:
Can't exec "bin/wineloader": No such file or directory at cxoffice/bin/wine line 1310.
wine:error: unable to start 'cxoffice/bin/wineloader': No such file or directory
To fix that, run:
cxoffice/bin/cxfix --auto
That should add the missing 32 bit libraries.
To check in addition for any other missing libraries: In the running crossover GUI:
Help -> System Information
to see if you are still missing any library. And indeed, still I needed to install apt install libcapi20-3 libosmesa6.
See also https://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/general?t=26;msg=215738
Just for the record: I have two different USB C to NVMe enclosures with different chipsets, one is crap, one is great:
- Crap: Icy box IB-1817M-C31 with with JMicron JMS583 PCIe-USB Bridge Controller chipset: read stalls (not so much when writing, though), no S.M.A.R.T. support, no M.2 SATA support -- AVOID!
- Sabrent EC-SNVE 10Gbps Tool-Free Enclosure with Realtek RTL9210 chipset: performant, with S.M.A.R.T. support, supports both M.2 SATA and NVMe, and the tool-free approach (i.e. no screws) is also nice, even though the case is smaller, it gets less hot than the other one (which could either mean that the heat transfer from the SSD to the case is bad, or that the bridge controller chipset gets less hot) -- RECOMMENDED!
But it seems that firmware versions matter a lot. But Sabrent has only an updating tool for Windows, maybe these images can be used as input for some Linux-based tool?
We have two research papers accepted at the 11th IEEE International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS-2024).
- Brynjólfur Stefánsson, Ásta Guðrún Helgadóttir, Martin Nizon-Deladoeuille, Helmut Neukirchen, Thomas Welsh: Understanding Trust in Authentication Methods for Icelandic Digital Public Services. IEEE SNAMS 2024: The 11th IEEE International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security, IEEE, to appear 2024 or 2025. Preprint DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2501.17548
- Martin Nizon-Deladoeuille, Brynjólfur Stefánsson, Helmut Neukirchen, Thomas Welsh.
Towards Supporting Penetration Testing Education with Large Language Models: an Evaluation and Comparison. IEEE SNAMS 2024: The 11th IEEE International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security, IEEE, to appear 2024 or 2025. Preprint DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2501.17539
The program lists only paper titles -- not authors nor presenters. Our student Brynjólfur Stefánsson presented both papers at the conference.
This research is in the context of our cybersecurity activities and the ECCC/EU co-funded projects ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).
On Friday, 1 November 2024, we had a we have a presentation (in Icelandic) on Cybersecurity at Þjóðarspegillinn 2024, the University of Iceland social science conference. This is to raise cybersecurity awareness, see also the NCC-IS and ICEDEF projects.
This talk is in the context of our cybersecurity activities and the ECCC/EU co-funded projects ICEDEF – Defend Iceland and Eyvör – the National Cybersecurity Coordination Centre of Iceland (NCC-IS).
As part of our IoT for buoys research, we had on 1. November 2024 a poster at the 2024 annual conference of Vegagerðin, the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration.
Click on the poster image for the full size PDF of the poster.
