Following on from work undertaken by DEST funded projects such as the eSecurity Framework (The University of Queensland/AusCERT) and Federated Identity and Access Management (Macquarie's MAMS project) for Australia's HE sector, DEST is funding the establishment of the Australian Access Federation (AAF). AAF infrastructure will combine policies and technologies to allow individuals across many different institutions to securely share and analyse data within a trusted environment. This project includes three broad areas of development:  Overall Governance & Policy, Public Key Infrastructure, and Shibboleth. The AAF workshop will cover each of these areas.

James Dalziel is Professor of Learning Technology and Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence (MELCOE) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. James leads a number of projects including: LAMS (Learning Activity Management System), including roles as a Director of the LAMS Foundation and LAMS International Pty Ltd; MAMS (Meta Access Management System), a national identity and access infrastructure project for the Australian higher education sector; RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities), a project investigating open standards authorisation and e-Research workflows, and ASK-OSS (the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software), a national advisory service on open source issues for the Australia higher education and research sector. Prior to his current roles, James helped lead the COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning and Information Services) project, was a Director of WebMCQ Pty Ltd, an e-learning and assessment company, and was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sydney.

Viviani Paz is the Security Assurance Manager for AusCERT (The Australian National Computer Emergency Response Team) based at The University of Queensland. Prior to joining AusCERT in 1995, Viviani worked in a range of IT areas including: system and network security; system programming and administration; and software testing and verification in the Commercial and Academic sectors for over a decade. Viviani is the Policy Designer and Project Manager for the eSecurity Framework Project, in which a PKI environment is being developed to assist Australian Universities' collaboration and interoperation. She is also the Project Manager for the Australian Access Federation Project (AAF). The AAF project will develop the federation policy framework and deploy the infrastructure required to enable access to online resources and services for the Australian higher education and research sector. The infrastructure deployed is based on two technologies: Shibboleth and Public Key Infrastructure.

Nick Tate is both Director of Information Technology Services at The University of Queensland and the Director of Australia’s National CERT, AusCERT (The Australian Computer Emergency Response Team), which is based at the University.  He is also a Director of Higher Ed Systems Pty Ltd, a Director of AARNet Pty Ltd, Chair of the Queensland Regional Network Organisation (QRNO), President of the Academic Board of the International Systems Security Professional Certification Scheme (ISSPCS), Chairman of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) in Queensland and a member of the executive and former Chair of the Council of Australian University Directors of IT (CAUDIT). Nick was the project lead/chief investigator of the Grangenet and DCITA funded CAUDIT PKI project, and currently leads the DEST funded MAPS (Middleware Action Plan and Strategy), eSecurity framework and Australian Access Federation (AAF) projects.

John Zornig has as a science and technology research background. He gained a B.Sc. from the University of Queensland, majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science, where he was employed as a tutor, research assistant, systems programmer and systems administrator. Over the following 25 years John worked as a Specialist Systems Engineer for Sun, Pyramid Technology, Network Solutions, Convex Supercomputer, Fujitsu including 10 years at Apple, Recently he has worked as an independent technology consultant and in 2006 he returned to the University of Queensland as a Specialist Systems Analyst in the Strategic Technology Group within ITS. John is working on projects involving middleware, PKI, federated authentication and grid computing. John is also studing for his B.Sc. Honours.