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 most important results that iMENTORS has achieved include:

·      A set of (collected and imported into the platform) data about more than 2.500 organizations, 250 projects, 150 networking infrastructures and 350 research infrastructures active in the e-infrastructure domain in the Sub- Saharan;

·      A useful, yet simple and applicable project evaluation and sustainability frameworks  closely interlinked with the decision support system;

·      A GIS-based powerful platform which helps to visualize different perspectives of the project findings; 

·      A community of interested participants built through a variety of dissemination activities in different countries and through collaboration with other projects.

Take a look at the map!

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 Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN) is the association of the Arab region National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), as well as their strategic partners, that aims to implement, manage and extend sustainable Pan-Arab e-Infrastructures dedicated for the Research and Education communities and to boost scientific research and cooperation in member countries through the provision of world-class e-infrastructures and e-services.

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.

AfricaConnect project aims to establish a high-capacity Internet network for research and education in Southern and Eastern Africa to provide the region with a gateway to global research collaboration. AfricaConnect builds on the roadmap prepared by the FEAST study. The project, which lasts four years, began in May 2011, and consists of two phases, the first of which is for the planning and procurement of the network, and the second is its operation.

In particular, AfricaConnect aims to:

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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.

OpenAIRE is the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe which supports open access to the research output of European funded projects. The substantial technical infrastructure operates on two levels:

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.

Registrations (free of charge) are now open!

Agenda at a glance | Information package | Event page

Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN) is the association of the Arab region National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), as well as their strategic partners, that aims to implement, manage and extend sustainable Pan-Arab e-Infrastructures dedicated for the Research and Education communities and to boost scientific research and cooperation in member countries through the provision of world-class e-infrastructures and e-services.

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.

CAAST-Net Plus is a network of 25 partner organisations from all over Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, working together to support bi-regional cooperation in research and innovation. Building on the activities and outputs of the CAAST-Net project (2008-2012), CAAST-Net Plus aims to:

• Encourage more and better bi-regional STI cooperation for enhanced outcomes around topics of mutual interest, and particularly in relation to the global societal challenges of climate change, food security and health.
• Foster discussion among stakeholders for gathering informed opinion and experience about the bi-regional cooperation process, formulating and disseminating it in such a way as to be admissible to the formal bi-regional STI policy dialogue process and to programme owners.

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.

The AFRICA BUILD (http://africabuild.eu) is a Coordination Action aiming to support and develop advanced Centres of Excellence in health care, education and research in the African countries, through Information Technologies. This project is supported by the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT). AFRICA BUILD started 1st August 2011 and will run for a period of 36 months.

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.

agINFRA is an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (I3) project that is pioneering the connection of Agricultural Data through an Open and Participatory Data Infrastructure. In particular, the project aims to design and develop a scientific data infrastructure for agricultural sciences that will facilitate the development of policies and the deployment of services that will promote sharing of data among agricultural scientists and develop trust within and among their communities. The agINFRA Vision White Paper summarises the project’s vision as follows: “To develop a shared infrastructure and computationally empowered services for agricultural research data that allow for producing and transferring scientific and technological results into effective agricultural practice. A key element is achieving a higher level of interoperability between agricultural and other data resources”.

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.

October 29, 2014

The eI4Africa and iMENTORS EU-funded projects are very pleased to invite you to their joint conference on “e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future”. Organised under the aegis of the European Commission (DG CONNECT) the conference will be held on October 29, 2014 in Brussels at the Hotel Bloom.

This major conference in the field will bring together policy and research stakeholders from both Europe and Africa, to discuss the status and perspectives of e-Infrastructures in Africa and to present the eI4Africa and iMENTORS main project outputs.

The eI4Africa project is very pleased to introduce its main project outcomes to date. They are significant and well acknowledged by the Africa-EU ICT/e-Infra community:

• SURVEY / Launch of an on-going e-Infrastructures in Africa state-of-the-art survey to collect data on established and emerging e-Infrastructure applications in Africa. The results revealed some extremely interesting findings, including 43 potential e-Infrastructure applications, with respect to the current state of e-Infrastructure uptake in Africa, and brought to the fore some important avenues that could be further explored.

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.

According to an article published on ei4africa.eu, e-Infrastructures enable the integration of software, data, high performance computing and other resources that researchers might need into a single convenient Science Gateway (for example the African Science Gateway). Other resources include remote sensors that can gather real-time data in a variety of settings.  It is entirely possible that a remote sensor could be mounted on a robot which could be remotely controlled to investigate and explore its environment.

The dawn of the final launch of a new and comprehensive database on einfrastructures across Africa is steadily approaching. After a successful initial round of data extraction and recording, the iMENTORS team has now embarked on the validation of the information, in addition to further data collection regarding any infrastructures that are not yet recorded in the system.

Image courtesy of Victor Habbick / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

iMENTORS is able to synchronize its data with other databases, fully utilizing Open Data and  Web 2.0 interconnectivity. Our development team has created API processes to include information from CORDIS and the World Bank database, in order to create the largest online repository of eInfrastructure data. 

Join us, learn about eInfrastructure projects in the area you are interested in and contribute your own information to our constantly growing database!

Image courtesy of cooldesign / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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

A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between the two projects to promote of activities to widen and simplify the access to e-Infrastructures worldwide and federation of data archives across continents.

ICRI 2014 will be held under the auspices of the forthcoming Greek Presidency of the European Union, co-organised and supported by the European Commission.

The conference is a forum for discussion and advancement of cooperation on research Infrastructures of global relevance. It builds on the conclusions of ICRI2012, as well as on the framework for International Cooperation for Global research infrastructures recently adopted by the G8 countries. The discussions will focus around: