Michael Stanton

Universidade Federal Fluminense

The National Education and Research Network (Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa – RNP) is the Brazilian infrastructure of advanced network for collaboration and communication in the fields of teaching and research. Besides connecting all federal institutions of higher education and research, this infrastructure provides a testbed for the experimental development of new applications and network services for the benefit of its users.

Also called RNP2 backbone, this infrastructure connects 329 Brazilian institutions among them and with foreign institutes, according to the census of the year 2000, making it possible for people and resources to interact through advanced applications.

RNP2 maintenance and updating is made by the Inter-ministerial Program of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science and Technology (Programa Interministerial dos Ministérios da Educação e da Ciência e Tecnologia – PI-MEC/MCT), through a contract signed between the RNP Association and the Ministry of Science and Technology. Besides receiving public resources, RNP, in its condition as a priority computer science program, gathers private resources by means of projects with computer science enterprises (Law number 8,248/91) and other organizations.

The RNP Association, a non-profit civil institution, was created in 1999 in order to follow the project made in 1989 by the Ministry of Science and Technology, subordinated to the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – CNPq). In 2002, the RNP Association was qualified as a Social Organization by the federal government.

Biography

Michael Stanton was born and brought up in England until he was 23. After two years of postgraduate study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, he moved to Brazil, and resides presently in Rio de Janeiro. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Cambridge University, and from 1972 onwards has been committed to the study, teaching and practice of computing and its applications. His present passion for communications networks dates from 1986, and he played an active role in the setting up of both Bitnet and Internet connectivity in Brazil, having served as coordinator of Rede-Rio (Rio de Janeiro state academic network) and as R&D coordinator of RNP (National Network for Research and Education) in their formative years. After long service as a professor of the Informatics Department at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), he now occupies the post of professor of computer networking at the Computing Institute of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Niterói. In 2002 he returned to serve RNP as Director of Innovation, responsible for oversight of R&D and RNP involvement in new networking and e-science projects. These include GIGA, an optical testbed network in southeast Brazil, MetroBel, a community-based optical metro network in the city of Belém, in northern Brazil, which has been the pilot for similar networks in 26 other Brazilian capital cities, and the European projects EELA and RINGrid. Since 2003, he has also been coordinator of the technical committee of CLARA, the association of Latin American research networks, which manages the regional network, RedCLARA.