Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Welcoming Address at APRICOT-APAN 2011

This is the welcoming address that I delivered at the opening session of APRICOT-APAN 2011 in Hong Kong on February 21, 2011:

Dr [Vint] Cerf, Dr [Ya-Qin] Zhang, Permanent Sec [Elizabeth] Tse, our honored guests from all around Asia Pacific and the world, and locally from Hong Kong, welcome to the opening session of APRICOT-APAN 2011 in Hong Kong.


This year, APRICOT (Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies) is returning to Hong Kong for the first time since 1997, and for the first time, APAN (Asia Pacific Advanced Network) is held concurrently with APRICOT, bringing together the plumbers and engineers behind the net with the heaviest and most innovative users from the industry as well as the research and development community.


APRICOT-APAN is important for Hong Kong. As i said, this is the second time APRICOT was held in Hong Kong, and our Internet industry and community has come a long way since 1997. This event, APRICOT-APAN I hope will emphatically reaffirm Hong Kong's role as an Internet hub of Asia and indeed the world, and in fact an especially unique and important role as a gateway for China, the country with the largest Internet population today.


APRICOT-APAN is a two week event, and we are already into our second week. Last week, we held a series of very successful and well attended technical workshops in Hong Kong Cyberport, our Workshops Sponsor, and we thank Cyberport for their support, and this morning we already held a special section on DNSSEC the DNS Security Extensions, and now, we are reaching yet another climactic point with this keynote section with Dr Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist of Google one of the fathers of the internet, and Dr Ya-Qin Zhang, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft and Chairman of Microsoft Asia Pacific R&D Group.


But for a conference about innovative and ground breaking use of the internet technologies, how can I not tell you about the network infrastructure that we have set up for this event? For the first time for a conference of similar nature and scale in this venue, we have set up a network running up to 100 Gbps connecting you to the internet outside, enabling the live webcast and remote participation for many of our sessions, and we have set up 70 wi-fi access points all around the conference meeting rooms and 12 of them are serving you from right here in this room. And possibly for the first time in this facility, we have both IPv4 and IPv6 running on this network. I was joking with our crew that maybe we should leave the setup behind, and it will be a great showcase for this facility. We will send a bill to the convention center later :)


But seriously, if you have a chance to stop by the exhibits outside, please look for a little glass room that we have set up with racks of equipment with blinking lights that actually run the network here that you are using. Our IT infrastructure team made up of volunteers has been working day and night throughout the last weekend putting it up, and so many kudos for them for their great effort!


A few words about ourselves, Internet Society Hong Kong. At ISOC HK, we believe the Internet is for everyone, and we all can make a difference, that's why we like to say, don't ask what the internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the internet. And with this principle in mind, we have been and will continue to focus our attention on promoting the adoption of new technologies and standards, such as IPv6 and DNSSEC, and the protection of a healthy and free environment for the Internet to grow and expand, including participating and even driving locally and regionally the policy issues that affect how users use the Internet every day. And, we welcome all of you in Hong Kong to join us.


Last but not least, I want to thank all our sponsors and supporting organizations, although there are really too many for me to name one by one. But in particular, let me thank our co-hosts, the Hong Kong Internet Exchange, Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association, and the Joint Universities Computing Center. Our host fibre broadband service sponsor, PCCW, our Diamond Sponsor, Cisco. And our Platinum Sponsor, APNIC, and all our other sponsors and supporting organizations, thank you very much!


0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

-->