In January 2008 connectivity between the Research and Education Communities in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa was established with a 1 Gbps between the UbuntuNet Alliance and GÉANT.
Planet AE, Greece Conseil national de la recherche scientifique, Lebanon Ministère de l'industrie, du commerce et des nouvelles technologies, Morocco Palestinian academy for science and technology, West bank and Gaza strip Royal scientific society, Jordan Centre national de l'informatique, Tunisia Ministry of communications and technology, Syria Ministry of communications and information technology, Egypt IT Consult gmbh, Germany
* Establish a research agenda for the MPC together with the national bodies of the MPC that reflects their priorities and defines the strategic approach to a closer co-operation with the European Framework Programme. * Promote the thematic priority of IST in the new FP7 on a wide basis to the research community and IT industry in the MPC. * Identify promising research organisations and relevant private industry in the MPC that are suitable for participation in future IST research activities, and defining criteria for their selection. Tutoring/mentoring plans will be developed for each type of organisation based on their research profiles, describing their training needs and goals. * Provide mentoring / tutoring on IST programme opportunities and procedures to the identified organisations as well as familiarise them with the European R&D culture (i.e. both formal and informal aspects). * Facilitate the development of networks between research organisations and companies in the MPC and the EU in order to exchange ideas and pursue joint research collaboration.
Research activities carried and out and scientific data generated
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Principal outcomes and documentation (plus link to case studies)
MED-IST indentified the ICT research priorities in the MPC
* Looking at the region as a whole, the area of "Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures" has a clear top priority, followed by "Digital Libraries and Content". In some countries like Jordan and Lebanon "Digital Libraries and Content" are ranked top. * The most obvious research topic that is of mutual interest for Europe and the MPC and where research activities depend on collaboration with the MPC is the field of Human Language Technologies (HLT), with the focus on Semitic languages. HLT is not just an academic exercise but has a tremendous application and market potential in all e-technologies, but also in some core ICT fields like service infrastructures, self-learning machine translation, technology-enhanced learning, or patient safety. * Other high ranking priorities in specific countries are "ICT for Environmental Management and Energy Efficiency" (Jordan, Morocco, Egypt) and "Towards sustainable and personalised healthcare" (Tunisia, Lebanon, Egypt). * See the summary of MED-IST findings on-line or download the full report
MED-IST trained ITS future MPC research partners on understanding the FP procedure and writing proposals
* Nine Mentoring Workshops were held throughout the region, addressing around 300 ICT experts from academia and private industry. * The first day focused on the characteristics of collaborative projects, the ICT Workprogramme, open calls and the evaluation criteria. * The second focused on concrete proposal idea suggested by the participants: applying the evaluation criteria, profiling of the required partners, work breakdown structure, etc.
MED-IST established a cross-regional community through its MPC Directory
* One of the stumbling stones for collaborative projects is finding the right partners. While there are several partner search facilities in Europe, nothing existed for the MPC region. In MED-IST we created the MPC Directory on which by now more than 600 ICT experts have registered. * The Partner Search on MED-IST is based on the FP7 ICT Challenges, which makes it easy for you to find researchers that work in the same field as you are. In MED-IST new JOIN-MED project, this Directory will be extended to cover also European researchers and developers
Other potential application areas/ actual spillovers
