UC Berkeley CIO: Shelton Waggener

Dan Farber: Shelton, Thanks for joining me.

Shelton Waggener: Thanks for having me today.

Dan Farber: Now you've spent your career outside of academia. You were at Lucent, Alcatel, and Sybase and in 2003 you went to the University of California, Berkeley. What made you decide to go into Academia?

Shelton Waggener: Well I think throughout my career I have been drawn to producers of technology, companies and organizations that focus on the development of solutions through technology and the time at Lucent really solidified that in working with folks from Bell Labs and many different backgrounds at Lucent. And while I was there, it was the support of pure research that really intrigued me and when Berkeley called looking for someone to come support their research initiatives and develop new infrastructures and technologies, to support that, it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

Dan Farber: Now you have about 35,000 students and those students have probably mostly grew up on digital technology. So their expectation coming into the university is that they are gonna be able to connect anytime, anywhere, anyplace. Is that a function that you can provide?

Shelton Waggener: We embarked thankfully many years ago on quite a robust networking re-engineering program. Many institutions around the country, high rate institutions, experimented for a long time with different networking technology. Berkeley embraced IP early on and we standardized our network and as a result we were able to embrace moving to wireless. Soon we received a large grant from HP to do some innovative programs in our classrooms and with our students and so we have a pretty broad deployment of wireless for our students and then it's a question of what are the applications you provide them to use over wireless. We see for example at the noon hour, just as students are released from class, there is an enormous spike in access to many student oriented applications, which we didn't use to see because the students would take their time to go back to the dorms, go to the labs to log in. Well everybody logs in simultaneously now as soon as there are breaks in the classes.

Dan Farber: So how do you manage all that peak demand at this point? Do you just have to have an extreme amount of capacity on the back end?

Shelton Waggener: It's more a matter of predicting the future than it is the current demand. We're constantly challenged with meeting today's demand. I'm more concerned about what the students coming in tomorrow are going to need because often the ramp-up time is considerable to put those technologies into place. So for example it wasn't very long ago that much of the dorm infrastructure was based on long distance revenues and providing a phone line. Well we have Ethernet to every pillow, provide a wired connection to every dorm room and we do that not because wireless isn't robust but because of the amount of data the students move around on campus. All of our undergraduates have access to researchers and so they do real research and they want access to those graduate students and researchers. As a result we work with student groups to predict what's coming what's next down the line. Many of our students today are asking for us to expand the campus wireless network into the surrounding neighborhoods because we have so many students that live in apartments off campus. Either that or they live in the coffee shops surrounding the campus asking for full campus services as well.

Dan Farber: Now when you're providing that kind of access to the students, obviously security is one of those issues as well so how do you kind of marry up this notion of 'let's provide access anytime anywhere,' with security, especially given the variety of devices, and I would assume that a lot of those devices are basically unmanaged?

Shelton Waggener: The devices that are unmanaged are the student devices but when they arrive on campus we put them through a computing boot camp, we provide them with lots of training and education about legal uses of technology, about being a good net citizen, and what does it mean to use the campus as an environment and we also run their computers through a pretty rigorous hygiene program to ensure that they don't introduce viruses or other problems into the network. And then beyond that we have computing standards set that supports security across the campus. So any device that connects to the campus network, be it your own as a visitor, or somebody who is on the campus regularly, is provided with the tools to clean your computer and ensure that it maintains an appropriate community standard.

Dan Farber: And are those community standards effectively enforced?

Shelton Waggener: They are. They are enforced if we have student or community member whose computer is causing problems on the network, by Mac address we will restrict that computer and quarantine it until they have the opportunity to go through and take care of the necessary steps to ensure that their computers are protected. Very often students are unaware that they have downloaded spyware or malicious software that could cause problems and because we are an open network, because we don't provide all the devices, and lock down all the devices, that's just part of the job is being able to manage that kind of diversity.

Dan Farber: And how does privacy play into your role? Obviously it's a big concern to students, to faculty, and certainly there's a lot of awareness at this point about all the data that's being dropped onto the internet and what rights do students have to it.

Shelton Waggener: Well the biggest aspect of that is the shift from simple focus on security, protecting everything, to a recognition that even if you protect everything, how it is used and how that large set of data that historically has been segmented in a way that made it difficult to bring together is increasingly available to everyone. So we have moved to a model where we are working very closely with our Boalt School of Law. There is a very high level of interest in law in privacy and technology and the intersection. The Pan Samuelson Clinic there is a leader in this area nationwide and we work closely with them. We will be hiring a chief privacy officer for the campus that will report to me and I will have the responsibility of helping with all the privacy policies that an institution like Berkeley needs to lead in. Berkeley has a commitment to open environments and we certainly with the free speech legacy that the campus has and our commitment to community, we want to make sure that we don't solve the privacy aspects by locking things down because we don't think that that's the right approach. We think education and layers of division of data will help solve some of those problems.

Dan Farber: Now you had mentioned the free speech movement related to Berkeley and Berkeley is very well known of being a very liberal campus and it's also very well known for its computer science department. So I was wondering, now computer science, hackers; what's in place to prevent those very enterprising computer science students from hacking your systems?

Shelton Waggener: Well our students are by and large unbelievably innovative in all disciplines, not just computer science so I think the first question is what's to prevent someone from doing that. Well we have a very high ethical standard amongst our student population and often I have students come to me and say 'have you considered this security implication if you were to implement a new technology' and the computer science students will come forward and talk to us before we've even implemented something about possible security impacts. We have law students that come forward and say 'have you thought about these privacy implications; so we're self governed by our students who are constantly pushing the envelope before we've even had a chance to implement things. And when something's in place, we have the occasional rogue student but our bigger challenge isn't our students on campus, it's the fact that we're an open network.

Dan Farber: What does it mean to be an open network?

Shelton Waggener: Well most enterprises would block much of the traffic at the border router that we allow through. I often comment on the ability to block spam. Well at Berkeley for many years, we attempted to provide people with just spam tagging because many of our researchers are doing things that would have been tagged as spam by the regular filters. It's very similar, we do research and connect to other institutions around the world so we try to main a level of connectivity that wouldn't be permitted in private sector mostly because the way you handle security in private sector is you lock everything down. Well if you're an open institution where the idea is to disseminate knowledge in the public service, you have an opposite mission. So how do you make everything open and accessible and still protect it? So we have a standard for example where we don't look at every packet for content, we look at every packet at the gateway router based on known viruses and known attack vectors but the remaining traffic is protected from intrusion by policy.

Dan Farber: Now I wanted to ask you as I was reading through some of your biographical material, one of the areas that was in there was balancing decisions against two factors. And one of those was innovation versus stability and reliability. So how do you balance those two things especially given you're in such a research intensive institution?

Shelton Waggener: Well I believe firmly that innovation is the practical use of discovery. And there's a lot of discovery all the time going on in a place like Berkeley. The challenge is not finding those discoveries and innovations; it's making use of them in an appropriate way. And if we embraced every innovation and put all of our resources behind every one it wouldn't be terribly effective because as the new networking standards come out and we're emerging into the next generation network, if Berkeley were to implement that cross the campus universally, we would have lower availability. Downtime would suffer. So what we tend to do is balance those decisions with pilot programs and departments that are willing to accept a bleeding edge environment and knowing what that means, with other departments needing a higher level of availability. So that tension between innovation and sustainability is something that we have to make a tradeoff everyday. But at the same time when wireless was first coming out and the new standards were being developed we had students that were doing all kinds of innovative things, trying to bounce wireless signals all over campus, and create new hot zones for wireless networks. This was before the standards had even been approved. So then it was a question of well was it doing any harm to anyone else and if not, then how do we capture that? How do you get lightning in a bottle and find a way to get the learnings from all those research projects?

Dan Farber: Well let me ask you about another one: centralized versus distributed. How do you think about those two poles?

Shelton Waggener: I'd like to think of the concept of glocalization, right, the global solutions and the local customization. So what is it that we are going to provide that is a framework globally that all of the campus will benefit from and how much do we leave flexibility in that framework for customization locally? And in our computer science department, they have a much greater level of autonomy because they need it. In our humanities department, what they need is reliability. So we have a challenge of ensuring those two things are happening and that means that we ask all of the departments to have some level of technical expertise in their department. We have 400-450 central IT staff. But there's another 600 IT staff supporting the very unique uses of technologies around the campus. So you can see it's not even a 50-50 mix. We support the distributed slightly more than we do the central. But that's through efficiencies. If we can't do central a little more efficient then why are we involved?

Dan Farber: Now how about proprietary versus open source. You mentioned before that you are using a lot of open source, community based software. How do you really think about that? I mean, do you have a policy that says we are moving toward open source?

Shelton Waggener: No, we have a policy towards access and availability I mean that extends from the student on through our technology. Berkeley fundamentally is as the world's premier public institution, one of our core missions is access. We want people to have access to the research to the education, to the public service that we provide. So that means to the code. That means to the cycles in the CPU. For example when we buy proprietary solutions, we'll often negotiate with the vendor to give free licenses to students so they can experiment with those technologies even if it's a proprietary solution. In the case of large clusters, where we have a big cluster for a project that's dedicated to gene therapy or a protein genomics

Dan Farber: This would be some grid based

Shelton Waggener: A grid based solution or a large cluster solution. We'll still carve out cycles for experimentation by students so that they can try new things within that large cluster. So we have large central environments that we could constrain. We try to make those open. So that leans our access directions towards acquiring community or open source software. We're engaged in many projects that are in partnership with many other higher education institutions. We recently implemented a project called Sakai with the University of Michigan, Stanford, Indiana, and others where we provide a classroom environment, a course management environment in an open source way, so we have a grade book, we have different components, and those were each built by those different institutions. We brought those together as a community package and now we have hundreds of courses at Berkeley where the instructor provides all of their content through this one portal.

Dan Farber: Now finally let me ask you about SETI which is the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence which comes out of the Berkeley campus and it's a distributed peer to peer network as I understand it. Have you found intelligent life yet?

Shelton Waggener: Well we know there to be intelligent life in many places around the world and we hope that Berkeley will help find the intelligent life in the other institutions so we're looking for the intergalactic Berkeley out there somewhere to respond. We've had tremendous success with that project. We're actually expanding the platform. There's another good example of something that was done for a specific project and now we're rolling out the Berkeley virtual super computer which is using the same technology to access cycles that are available on anybody's computer in higher education and make them available to different kinds of research projects.

Dan Farber: Well thanks very much for speaking with me Shelton.

Shelton Waggener: Thanks very much for having me today Dan. I appreciate it.

Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Shelton Waggener who is the CIO of the University of California, Berkeley. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.