News & Events

According to an article published on Science|Business, the European Parliament agreed the EU’s budget for 2014-2020, as well as the final seal on the Horizon 2020 legislative deal.

The overall EU budget for 2014 – 2020 has been voted through, securing a budget of €79 billion for Horizon 2020 and meaning the first calls can be launched as promised on December 11.

According to an article published on  iSGTW , iSGTW was at the EUDAT second conference in Rome, Italy. EUDAT, which is funded under the European Commission's FP7 scheme, seeks to support a collaborative data infrastructure which will allow researchers to share data within and between communities and enable them to carry out their research effectively. Now two years into the project, the EUDAT team is ready to provide solutions that will be affordable, trustworthy, robust, persistent, and easy to use. These solutions are B2SAFE to replicate research data safely, B2SHARE to store and share long-tail research data, B2FIND to find research data, and B2STAGE to get data to computation. These are also to be followed by new services, such as Dynamic Data and Semantic Annotation, which were discussed intensively during the conference.

Image courtesy of ddpavumba at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills, has placed great emphasis on the catalytic role of ICT in education and development. It was therefore a great opportunity for the participants to the Joint eI4Africa / CHAIN-REDS workshop to gather in Kigali, share their experiences and learn from each other and the local hosts.

The eI4Africa and CHAIN-REDS EU/FP7 projects have a common interest in promoting the adoption of consolidated standards, both in the e-Infrastructure and certification authorities and Federated Identity services domains, with the ultimate aim of widening the number of potential users of e-Infrastructures in Africa.

According to an article published on isgtw, last month, CERNplayed host to the 2nd Workshop on Energy for Sustainable Science at Research Infrastructures. Delegates discussed how various aspects of large-scale research infrastructures could be made more energy efficient, including the computing centers which underpin the science carried out.

A recent study published by GSMA Intelligence on the socio-economic impact of the mobile industry in Sub-Saharan Africa has revealed that mobile contributes over six per cent of the region’s GDP, making it the fastest growing region globally.

According to an article published on Primeur weekly magazine, at the e-IRG workshop in Vilnius, Bob Jones presented the vision of the EIROForum on the e-IRG proposed e-Infrastructure Commons. EIROForum is a collaboration between a number of large European Research Centres, including CERN, ESA, EFDA, and EMBL. EIROForum proposes to form "Research Accelerator Hubs" (ReAcH) that should be networked together. a ReAcH should be, in the vision of EIROForum, a sustainable, inclusive, flexible, integrated, innovative user driven e-Infrastructure. ReAcH can be owned and operated by a mixture of commercial companies and public organisations offering a portfolio of services.

According to an article published on Primeur weekly magazine, at the e-IRG Conference in Vilnius earlier this month, e-IRG Board member Arjen van Rijn introduced the e-Infrastructure Commons concept from the e-IRG White Paper. The idea is that e-infrastructures that serve science in Europe will design a set of Common Services that makes them interoperable. The advantage of the European scientist is that they do not have to learn and apply for and access different infrastructures. But of course, collaboration between the independent infrastructures is needed. Currently there are different organisations covering different e-Infrastructure areas, such as Geant for networking, PRACE for superercomputing, EGI for HPC, IDGF for volunteer crowd computing, EUDat for Big Data.

According to an article published on IT NEWS AFRICA, the Liquid Telecom Group today announced that it has built the first fibre optic link into Somalia connecting the country to its neighbours, the rest of the world and the undersea cables by fibre for the first time.

During the recent EGI Technical Forum, held in Madrid, Spain, September 16-20, 2013, Primeur Magazine had the opportunity to talk to Robert Lovas, project co-ordinator of the International Desktop Grid Federation Support Project (IDGF-SP).

Are you hoping to apply for Horizon 2020 grants and want to know what will be funded? Draft work programmes are circulating, but it seems only some research institutes and universities have access. Science|Business provided links to the documents

According to an article published on isgtw, cientific output is not just about academic papers. Datasets, along with other products of research, such as software and various forms of multimedia, also need to be made citable so that sharing and reuse can be facilitated, as well as tracked. In order to achieve this, these outputs must be given persistent identifiers similar to the digital object identifiers (DOIs) assigned to academic papers. Two weeks ago, the ODIN project held its first-year conference at CERN, with delegates discussing the barriers stakeholder groups encounter and how these could be resolved to enable an interoperable layer of persistent identification on both a European and a global scale.

On 15 October 2013 the Council of PRACE organized a networking reception at the Palais des Academies in Brussels under the motto “HPC @ Horizon2020”. The event also highlighted the publication of the special report “Supercomputers for all” supported by Science|Business. High-level personalities from European politics, national HPC players, science and industry contributed to the presentations and panel discussion.

 

According to an article published on iSGTW, last week iSGTW has been at the EUDAT Second Conference in Rome, Italy. EUDAT, which is funded under the European Commission's FP7 scheme, seeks to support a collaborative data infrastructure which will allow researchers to share data within and between communities and enable them to carry out their research effectively.

According to an article published on IT NEWS AFRICA, Nigerian development consultant Nnenna Nwakanma has joined the World Wide Web Foundation’s growing international network as Africa Regional Coordinator.

According to an article published on WIRED, For the first time ever, people can now buy equity, not just products, through startup crowdfunding sites like AngelList. Some in the VC industry have commented that this democratization “changes everything” — especially early-stage investments, in “unanticipated ways.”

But no one’s talking about whether people should invest.

According to an article published on Devex, two donor agencies, a United Nations agency and a multilateral organization all did a “very good” job making their aid data more available and usable this year.

But while the U.K. Department for International Development, the Millennium Challenge Corp., the GAVI Alliance and the U.N. Development Program excelled, another 58 entities did fair to very poorly in this year’s aid transparency index, which begs the question: Is the aid community — particularly donors — taking the aid transparency agenda seriously?

A 2012 e-IRG Roadmap outlined a vision for the future of e-Infrastructures in Europe. Now, the e-IRG has published its 2013 White Paper, which takes the discussion one step further and proposes specific next steps.

According to an article published on Devex, the world’s largest and most influential providers of aid reaffirmed their commitment to transparency this year. A United Nations panel advising on the framework to follow the Millennium Development Goals called for a “data revolution,” and G-8 members specifically committed to implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative, the only internationally agreed standard for publishing aid information.

According to an article published on The Next Web, Savvy founders don’t just focus on iterating their own products – they look to other industries and niches for inspiration and opportunity as well. Whether you’re looking for new ways to scale growth or simply trying to figure out where the competition’s headed, staying nimble is key.