Subject: [nmrg] [NMRG] Progress on Research challenges in IA doc

From: Jérôme François <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 15:38:30 +0100

Dear all,

In order to progress in the document regarding challenges in IA for network 
management, I would like to organize a dedicated webconf.
Anybody interested to contribute is so invited to fill out the following doodle

https://doodle.com/poll/n7kzbx64wpm88a7w?utm_source=poll&utm_medium=link

Thanks,
jerome

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From: Jérôme François <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2020 22:08:11 +0100

Hi,

In order to maximize the number of participants, two dedicated meetings are 
planned. You can participate to one or both of them if you want:
- Monday November 9th: 10h-11h UTC+1
- Wednesday November 11th: 18h-19h UTC+1

Meanwhile, you can have a look at the shared document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dQOzZustI2mkYr_omtiqu3FqUvoqLgaCp7nbRj4ZJyw/edit?usp=sharing

During the meetings, I propose to focus on the following items:
- Section 0  Difficult problems in NM: clearly define the scope of this section 
and its content (a initial proposition is in the document)
- Section I Goals of AI in NM: define the best way way to present these goals
- Section III Research challenges: organize challenges + refine the list (identify 
interested contributors for remaining challenges)

Webex details:

Network Management Research Group's Personal Room
https://ietf.webex.com/meet/nmrg | 640144808

Join by video system
Dial [email-masked] and enter your host PIN .
You can also dial 173.243.2.68 and enter your meeting number.

Join by phone
1-650-479-3208 Call-in number (US/Canada)
Access code: 640 144 808

Best regards,
jerome

Le 03/11/2020 à 15:38, Jérôme François a écrit :
> _______________________________________________
> nmrg mailing list
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> https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/nmrg

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From: Jérôme François <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2020 15:41:29 +0100

Dear all,

Below are the minutes of the meetings.
The document has been updated with two new tables in the beginning
- scope of the document: refinement of objectives and content of the document
- methods to motivate and justify the set of identified challenges
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dQOzZustI2mkYr_omtiqu3FqUvoqLgaCp7nbRj4ZJyw/edit?usp=sharing

They reflect the main points we discussed during the meetings and all feedback 
will be appreciated.
Of course, the scope is not fixed and any proposed modification/comment/question 
will be helpful. We would like to have this fixed in the next couple of weeks to 
progress then on other sections.

(do not forget to update the contributor list in first table if needed)

Best regards
jerome

Participants:
- Monday: Laurent, Marinos, Ramin, Jérôme
- Wednesday: Stenios, Albert, Jérôme

1) Introduce  AI in NM in the document introduction in regards to FCAPS or taxonomy:

* Highlight where AI fits into NM functional domain?
- At a high level point of view, AI could fit everywhere
- When considering a specific problem, we could be able to refine what type of AI 
is needed, i.e. what are the required specifications of AI solution we could 
expect (not necessarily a particular algorithm)
- what NM community expect from AI
- NM has relied on intelligent mechanisms for decades. Need to have a "taxonomy" 
of the intelligence to do the mapping with AI
- maybe AI can provide solutions to NM problems we never think about before)

* Focus on problems with highest impact? (where there is more value to apply AI)
- should be a general document
- however, highest impact problems can be motivating examples in intro

2) Need to define what is AI in the doc
- "Intelligent" mechanisms have been used for a while in our community: look how 
it fits to AI
- NM experts vs AI experts (cannot be expert in both) -> invite AI experts? (not 
only "users") but some in the discussions are already more AI-focused
- precise definition of terms -> rely on a documented AI taxonomy
- is AI limited to ML? not necessarily but we need to define the boundaries

3) Scope of the document & target audience:
- Not a use case documents (even if some will be described in the document afterwards)
- Should help the NM experts to simply try different AI techniques, compare and 
select the one that work best -> should bring a "method" to identify the NM 
problem properties that will have an impact on 1) answering if AI is a good fit 
for the considered problem and 2) what type of AI would work better
- Should identify the fundamental issues we have in NM where AI can help: 
generalized issues and so avoid use-case specific challenges
- The document is not only about challenges related to AI algorithms but also 
about enabling the use of AI (even if you identify the perfect AI algorithm, some 
obstacles may exists because you do not have necessary interfaces  between the AI 
and NM operations, too much complex to configure,...)

4) Challenge description:

* level of details in challenge description
- not 100% fixed at this time
- should be coherent among all challenges
- description of challenges focus on highlighting what are the main difficulties 
to overcome with some references to possible solutions (with low level of details) 
-> challenges do not describe solutions

* refine/re-arrange some challenges to make it more general. For example IBN 1 
challenge could be generalized into "AI for interfacing between OSS and NM 
operations" or "AI for management interfaces"

5) Next steps:
- redefine and agree on the scope of the document
-- "how to make the bridge between NM problems and AI solutions" was one of the 
main point that we discussed
--> from the scope we can define the method we want to rely on (for example by 
listing properties of NM problems vs AI technique properties)
- review challenges (see point 4 above)