European Parliament recognises GÉANT2's contribution to European competitiveness
GÉANT2 attended an exhibition at the European Parliament in Brussels on 15 and 16 June. GÉANT2 was selected by Commissioner Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, as a project which clearly illustrates the key contribution of IST to Europe's competitiveness.
The exhibition followed Commissioner Reding's announcement of the i2010 initiative to the European Parliament, and her address to the research committee. The aim of the event was to illustrate the essential contribution of ICT research to the revised Lisbon Strategy, and to demonstrate the benefits of funding research projects. Europe leads the world in many areas of ICT research, particularly in research networking. GÉANT2 is the first hybrid network deployed on an international scale and offers advanced network services to researchers. The project will keep Europe at the forefront of global research allowing users to realise their research potential. It is also essential to the EU’s vision of a European Research Area where researchers move freely across borders and have world-leading facilities at their fingertips.
One of the key foci of the EC’s new strategy “i2010 – European Information Society 2010” is the promotion of high-speed and secure broadband networks, as a platform for rich and diverse content. The i2010-strategy aims to promote growth and jobs through the use of ICT technologies. GÉANT2 will contribute to Europe’s economic competitiveness by serving as a seed bed and proving ground for technologies and services that will be adopted in the commercial marketplace in the future.
GÉANT2 offers European institutions access to a wider pool of resources and expertise through high capacity connections with research organisations in North America, Japan, Latin America, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and South Africa and plans an imminent connection to the Asia-Pacific region. It will vastly simplify the process of global collaboration whilst also creating the world’s largest interconnected community of researchers.
GÉANT2 co-exhibited with a select number of other EU-funded projects. These included DISMAR (Data Integration System for Marine Pollution and Water Quality), which is developing an advanced and intelligent information system which monitors and forecasts the marine environment on a European scale. Bringing together experts from across Europe, the project provides authorities, emergency services and industry with easy access to high quality data and services. It will enable them to make better decisions in a crisis, reducing environmental damage and economic losses from incidents such as oil spills.
Also present at the exhibition was CogViSys, a cognitive vision system that allows a computer to describe what it sees. The research has a number of important and diverse applications, including recognising and translating sign language into words; interpreting and annotating scenes in videos; and providing a textual description of traffic conditions using data from surveillance cameras.
Learn more about these projects via the links on the right.
