Summary

  • Gergana Petrova's RIPE NCC account says the 2021 RACI travel budget was redirected to research when meetings stayed online. RIPE NCC received 22 applications from 14 countries, interviewed three finalists and awarded two projects €24,000 each.
  • A funded project's work reached RIPE 85 in 2022 with findings on bias in Atlas probes and RIS route collectors. RIPE 88 minutes record a later tool for examining Atlas probe use and ASN representation.

The flight money was sitting in the wrong queue. RACI normally helped young academics travel to RIPE meetings and present their work. In 2021 the meetings were online. Petrova wrote that the RIPE NCC kept the money's purpose—bringing research closer to operators—and changed its route. The call went out in mid-April for work using public measurement data such as RIPE Atlas, RIS and RIPEstat.

The budget came with a clock. The institution needed to spend it within the financial year. Petrova counted backward: choose in June, sign contracts in July, start work in August, pay half at the start and half after an early progress report. Universities might need to hire researchers before they could produce anything. Applicants had a little over a month. Her team expected perhaps five to ten proposals. Twenty-two arrived from fourteen countries.

RIPE NCC interviewed three candidates and funded two. AI4NetMon, led by Pavlos Sermpezis and Athena Vakali, asked where network monitors should sit and how a lopsided set of monitors might tilt a measurement. A second team set out to map connectivity in Central Asia, concentrating on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Each award was €24,000. These were grants to investigate questions, not certificates that the answers had already been found.

The first project's question was awkward in the best way. If more probes live in one place than another, a tidy global chart can inherit the geography of its instruments. RIPE's routing collectors and Atlas probes may be excellent tools; choosing where to look still changes what one sees. A grant designed to interrogate that choice turned leftover travel into a test of the measuring system itself.

The public trail continued. At RIPE 85, Sermpezis presented AI4NetMon findings on bias in Atlas probe and RIS collector deployment. At RIPE 88, the Measurement, Analysis and Tools working group heard about a tool examining patterns of Atlas probe use and ASN representation. That tool studies the choice of instruments, rather than pretending one measurement's answer settles the matter.

Petrova did not manufacture a research outcome by booking two awards. She helped turn a stranded line item into a selection, a question and public work that operators could inspect. The most useful thing the missed flights bought was permission to ask whether the map had been drawn from the right windows.