News & Events

The eI4Africa and iMENTORS partnerships are very pleased to welcome a new associated organisation to the eI4Africa/iMentors joint conference on the theme “e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future” that will take place on October 29, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium, at Hotel Bloom. Click here to register!

Established in 2010, the FTTH Council Africa is an independent, not for profit organisation and active member of the Fibre Council Global Alliance (FCGA) alongside the FTTH Council Europe, Asia Pacific, North America, Middle East and North Africa. 
The work of the individual FTTH Council’s is funded through member contributions, and the FCGA has more than 550 individual member companies, all equally passionate about FTTH.

The 4^th eI4Africa Thematic Workshop ”High Performance Computing for Public Good” was successfully held in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania on June 3^rd, 2014. The workshop was organised under the aegis of the European Commission (EC, DG CONNECT) and in co-location with the Technology Transfer Alliance (TTA) Conference 2014.

The 4th eI4Africa Thematic Workshop is taking place on June 3rd, 2014, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania at the Peacock City Center. This thematic workshop is organised by DIT with the support of Sigma Orionis and all eI4Africa project partners. The workshop is co-hosted by the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH) and the Tanzania Research and Education Network (TERNET). It is en event organised under the aegis of the European Commission (EC, DG CONNECT) and in co-location with the Technology Transfer Alliance (TTA) Conference 2014.

Louis Papaemmanuel, Project Director of iMENTORS, SU, will present iMENTORS at the IST-Africa Conference during Session 8d: eInfrastructures (Thursday, May 08, 2014). He will explain how using iMENTORS and open aid data enhances the coherence of international aid. IST-Africa 2014 is taking place in Mauritius (06 - 09 May) and is the ninth in an annual series of Ministerial Level Technology Research Conferences.

iMENTORS (www.imentors.eu) is an interactive resource, the first of its kind, to contain  information about all known e-infrastructures in Africa in the past five years. Launched for public use and input in July 2013 iMENTORS provides you with the necessary tool to visualise e-infrastructures and all related projects in Africa.

Athina Vrakatseli, project Dissemination and Sustainability leader and Head of Policy Development Unit at Gov2u, was present at ICRI 2014. The 2nd International Conference on Research Infrastructures (2-4 April 2014 - Megaron Athens International Conference Centre) managed to highlight how global research infrastructures can respond to the grand challenges that the world is facing today, what lessons have been learned from the past, and what the priorities and directions are for the future.

“Plenary Session 1: Research Infrastructures for Global Challenges” set the tone for the whole conference while the other sessions discussed specific examples of challenges that need to be tackled for both single-site and distributed global facilities.

Research Infrastructures (RIs) play an increasingly central role in the advancement of scientific and technological knowledge. They are key instruments in bringing together a wide diversity of stakeholders to look for solutions to many of the challenges society is facing today. “We need intelligent openness”, said Geoffrey Boulton, Regius professor of Geology, University of Edinburgh, The Royal Society, UK.

According to an article published on Science|Business, there’s a long tradition of offering scientists prize money to solve specific problems. After making the first such payment – of €2M for a way of preserving vaccines without refrigeration - the EU is planning more prize give-aways.

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The EU is to go ahead with offering €20 million in prize money to scientists who deliver solutions to pressing and seemingly intractable problems, after making the first such award under a pilot project launched in 2012.   

Future prizes, to be announced and issued in 2015, are expected to cover health, transport, energy and materials, and renewable biological resources, with the money coming from the Horizon 2020 R&D budget.  

A paper presenting iMENTORS tool for analysis of contextual factors will be presented at the World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (WorldCIST) under the "Intelligent and Decision Support Systems" section, on the 15th April 2014 at Madeira Island, Portugal and will be published by Springer in a book of Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing series.

The paper is titled "Quantitative scenario-based assessment of contextual factors for ICT4D projects: Design And Implementation in a web based tool", written by iMENTORS team members: Anton Talantsev, Aron Larsson, Florence Nameere Kivunike, David Sundgren.

Image courtesy of sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

According to an article published on SciDev.Net, for scientists across Europe, last month marked the official start of a fresh wave of funding opportunities from the European Union (EU). On 11 December, the European Commission finally released the detailed topics and budgets available for the first two years of Horizon 2020, the EU’s eighth research and innovation funding package, worth nearly €80 billion (around US$110 billion) in total from 2014 to 2020.

Image courtesy of xedos4 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The iMENTORS e- newsletter keeps you abreast of any new project developments and relevant topics.

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iMENTORS statistics have now been completed for all data recorded up until Dec. 15th!  During the last recording period, we added a total of 1398 new organizations and 413 new projects to our database, an increase over the last recording period of approximately 67% and 290%, respectively.  In addition, we recorded 330 research infrastructures - a brand new category of information now uploaded and available for search in the iMENTORS database. 

Is your organization among the new additions to the iMENTORS database?  Check our map today!

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

PRACE has announced the keynote speakers for its 2014 Scientific and Industrial Conference. Organized around a theme of HPC for Innovation – when Science meets Industry, the event will take place in Barcelona May 20-22.

According to an article published on Science|Business, “It’s time to get down to business,” said EU Commissioner for Research and Innovation, Máire Geoghegan Quinn, launching the first calls under the EU seven year flagship R&D programme, Horizon 2020.

The last issue of the CHAIN-REDS e-Newsletter is now online!Click here to read it

Senior officials from the European and the African Union Commission and from Research and Innovation Ministries in Europe and Africa will discuss on future cooperation on STI between the two continents, also in view of the EU-Africa Summit 2014.

iMENTORS (also funded under FP7) has been busy recording the IST-Africa project and related FP7 projects. iMENTORS enables organizations to connect with each other, share resources and link their ICT4D project proposal to the past or on-going projects.

Science and technology is one of the main drivers of economic growth. Given the rapid pace of technological change, governments need reliable and precise data on research and development (R&D).

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics has produced a series of guidelines and documents to better reflect the situation in developing countries.