The event is taking place in Dakar, Senegal, on April 24-25, 2012, and it will be co-locaed with the CAAST-Net internal Workshop for Coordination & Support Actions (CSA), taking place on April 27, 2012.

This conference is hosted by the Ministry of Scientific Research of Senegal. Preparation and implementation of the conference is supported by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology of Kenya, the International Bureau of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and the Science and Technology Policy Research Institute, Ghana through the EU-funded project CAAST-Net.

Conceived as an opportunity to enrich and strengthen the Africa-Europe STI cooperation relationship through providing a forum for exchange of opinions, sharing and mutual learning between stakeholders and experts from Africa and Europe, the conference will explore a range of issues related to the role of innovation systems and policies in the context of bi-regional cooperation, with a view to enhancing the contributions of R&D to identifying solutions to global challenges.

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The event, taking place at the Stanhope Hotel in Brussels, Belgium on Dec. 5, 2011, aims at identifying the policy and business requirements that foster ICT-based entrepreneurship and bottom-up developments in Africa by looking at best practices examples. The debate will be based on the presentation of a study conducted by Hystra and Ashoka on the concrete contribution of technologies to social and economic development in developing countries.

The study called “Leveraging Information and Communication Technology for the Base of the Pyramid – Innovative business models in education, health, agriculture and financial services” was commissioned by Orange France Telecom, the French Agency for Development (AFD), Ericsson, TNO and the Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation (ICCO).

For further information, please contact the event organisers.

The SAFIPA Annual Conference is taking place on October 19-20, 2011 at the CSIR International Convention Centre in Pretoria, South Africa.

As the SAFIPA programme draws to a close in November 2011, this closing Conference, at which over 250 stakeholders are expected to converge, marks the end of what has been a highly successful initiative between South African and Finnish partners, aimed to support the development of the information society in South Africa. Themes supported within SAFIPA included innovative solutions for e-education, e-health and promoting access to information and initiatives aimed at addressing the Digital divide in South Africa. The initiative has been jointly funded by the Department of Science and Technology South Africa, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Finland, and hosted by the CSIR Meraka Institute.

The conference will provide SAFIPA partners and related stakeholders with the opportunity to interact with project leaders at the SAFIPA Project Exhibition and Showcase, provide a platform to network and engage with SAFIPA further.

The EuroAfrica-ICT partnership is very pleased to announce that the participants in the “4th Euro-Africa Cooperation Forum on ICT Research” will have the opportunity to visit the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) laboratories on November 15, 2011 in the afternoon (6:30 pm), just after the Forum.

The main objectives of the CHPC are to enable South Africa to become globally competitive and to accelerate Africa’s socio-economic upliftment through the effective application of high performance computing and digital data repository technology. The Centre has been mandated by the Department of Science and Technology to enhance significant research, address grand challenges, and grow computational research into a viable mode alongside experiment and theory across all academic disciplines.

The CHPC is Africa’s premier high performance computing facility with three super computer systems:

1. A Sun Constellation system with a hybrid cluster-SMP architecture consisting of three distributed memory clusters (1 rack of Intel ”Harpertown” Xeon CPUs, 384 cores, 768GB RAM, 3.7 Teraflops; 3 racks of ”Nehalem”, 2304 cores, 3.375TB, 24 Tflops; 1 rack of new “Westmere”, 1152 cores, 2.25TB, 13 Tflops) all connected by Infiniband, and a M9000 SMP system (Sun Sparc64 CPUs, 256 cores, 2TB RAM, 2 Tflops). In addition there is a specialised visualization node (4 Nvidia Quaddro GPUs), four IO nodes, two login nodes and two test nodes, and Sun storage array of 480TB over Lustre FS.
2. The IBM “Blue Gene for Africa” donation consisting of one rack of Blue Gene/P (IBM PPC440d, 4096 cores, 2TB, 11.5 Tflops) with IBM SAN of 90TB over GPFS.
3. A Microstore GPU cluster with 5 nodes (”Nehalem”, 40 cores, 200GB, 22 GPUs: 9x Nvidia C2070 “Fermi” + 13x Nvidia C1050 “Tesla”, 14 Tflops) with a very high speed 8x IO nodes storage server with 12TB.

All systems are housed in a state of the art data centre with air and water cooling, full power conditioning via two 500kVA uninteruptable power supply units backed up by a 1MVA diesel generator. The CHPC is fully connected to the SANReN highspeed network at 10Gbps and is a major node for the Western Cape.

The CHPC hosts over 400 users from a diverse range of scientific, engineering and industrial fields making use of its HPC systems to accelerate their simulations and computations.

During this visit an overview of the systems and infrastructure will be presented along with a tour of the facilities. Highlights will include a survey of the research undertaken at the CHPC and a demonstration of the 3D stereoscopic visualization studio. Guests will be able to ask questions to the scientific and technical staff of the Centre.

A shuttle will be arranged from the conference venue to CHPC laboratories: places will be limited to 60 persons maximum.

The agenda of the “4th Euro-Africa Cooperation Forum” is available here.

]]> http://euroafrica-ict.org/2011/10/12/lab-visits-4th-euro-africa-cooperation-forum-on-ict-research/feed/ 0 http://euroafrica-ict.org/2011/10/03/acp-europe-ict-roundtable-2011/ http://euroafrica-ict.org/2011/10/03/acp-europe-ict-roundtable-2011/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:13:27 +0000 Website editor http://euroafrica-ict.org/?p=5134 October 20, 2011October 21, 2011

Organised by the ACP Secretariat and the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO), the event is taking place in Brussels, Belgium on October 20-21, 2011.

This closed door meeting on “Broadband for Delivering e-Society” will be attended by the Head’s of Regulatory Affairs ,Director General , Permanent Secretaries from 79 ACP Member countries.  As per the private sector, this is a closed door round table discussion based on invitations only.

This Roundtable aims to:

• help create enabling policy and regulatory environments for Broadband rollout in ACP Countries;
• facilitate policy and regulatory harmonisation across regions;
• provide guidance on optimising the positive impact of Broadband through innovative applications and services;
• act as a platform for the sharing of knowledge about collaboration, harmonisation, infrastructure sharing, spectrum management, competition and pricing, as well as increasing the uptake of Mobile Broadband.

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The University of Manchester in collaboration with the Association for Progressive Communications will be holding an international workshop “ICTs, Climate Change and Development: Awareness, Action, Agenda” in Johannesburg, South Africa on January 23-24, 2012, with the funding support of Canada’s International Development Research Centre.

The workshop aims at raising awareness of the role ICTs can play vis-à-vis climate change in developing countries.

Participants in the event include key individuals with strategic responsibilities in ICT or climate change in development organisations in the NGO, public and private sector. If you are interested in attending the event, please contact the event organisers by October 17, 2011.

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The Conference is taking place at the ACP House  in Brussels (Belgium) on October 26-28, 2011.

The event is set up in three days and will cover various thematic sessions, in an interactive way, with presentations from project participants and invited speakers followed by open discussions:

• the first day will be dedicated to EDULINK themes.
• the second day will address common themes shared by the two programmes.
• the third day will focus on specific ACP Science and Technology Programme issues.

Bilateral meetings between the Management Units of the two programmes, the European Commission and the representatives of the beneficiary projects will be arranged during the whole conference
The conference languages will be English and French and simultaneous translation will be provided.

The registration form is available here. Deadline: October 14, 2011

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The International Conference on ICT for Africa is an annual conference that brings together stakeholders of the educational and industrial sectors in Africa.The 4th edition is taking place in Kampala, Uganda on March 21-24, 2012.

Mobile platform, cloud computing and software as a service will be examined in the context of green computing or green ICT. As a follow-up to the three previous conferences, this event will bring together some of Africa’s leaders in this area to discuss creation of culturally sensitive applications that are applicable in the African context.

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The next open e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) Workshop will be held on October 12-13, 2011 in Poznan, Poland. The workshop will be organized by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education under the auspices of the Polish Presidency of the European Union.

The first day of the workshop will present political, financial and international aspects of e-Infrastructure in Europe. The main topics will be: Sustainable e-Infrastructure fostering international and multidisciplinary cooperation; Synergies between structural funds, EU and national funding; Polish feedback for sustainable and reliable local infrastructure.

On the second day the focus will be Technology aspects. Presentations about ESFRI requirements and Grand Challenges of different applications will be given as well as a session on Data Infrastructures with presentations from existing data related projects. After lunch a panel discussion will follow about how to integrate the data infrastructure with the existing grid and HPC infrastructures and a panel discussion about users and infrastructure providers demands vs. offers. Special attention will be put on the new EC approach to build a sustainable Data e-Infrastructure in Europe.

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The Namibia Open Learning Network Trust (NOLNet) is extending an open invitation to all interested parties to attend the Second Open and Distance Learning Conference to be held at the Safari Hotel and Conference Centre, in Windhoek, Namibia, on October 18-19, 2011.

The theme of the conference is “Open educational resources and the opportunity to expand open and distance learning”.

The conference is organized by NOLNet in collaboration with UNESCO, the Ministry of Education and the Namibian open and distance learning (ODL) institutions, namely: Namibian College of Open Learning (NAMCOL), National Institute of Educational Development (NIED), Polytechnic of Namibia (PON) and University of Namibia (UNAM). For more information please contact Dr Haaveshe Nekongo-Nielsen.