News on HPCN and the European Commission - August/September 1997

This fall the EC organizes information events throughout Europe to further the interest in particularly the latter two topics of the current series of thematic calls: "IT for Learning and Training in Industry" and "Information Access and Interfaces". Experts and prospective submitters of proposals in these areas are invited to join the information event in their country.

On September 22, an Esprit Information day will be held in Prague, to inform Czech institutions and companies on the funding possibilities through this EC programme.

Last planned call by Esprit under the Fourth Framework Programme closes on 15 June 1998. Closing date for all proposals made both under the 17 March 1998 call and also under the continuous submission scheme . Calls for the Fifth Framework programme, which will not contain HPCN explicitely, will not before 1999.The call from 16 September 1997 will request HPCN proposals with a 16 October dead line.

On November 3-5, the European Multimedia, Microprocessor Systems and Electronic Commerce will be held in Florence Italy. The event, with a conference and an exhibiton, is supported by the European Commision.

A Dutch Esprit information da on September 16 in The Hague, will focus on the Esprit themes IT for training and learnin & Information Access and Interfaces.

Telemedicine is moving into an area where HPC, telematics and the Internet are working together to help physicians. EUROMED, a three year project supported by the European Commission which started out in January 1996, is reconciling HPCN technology to medical applications with increasing success. Physicians in the remotest areas of Europe are on the verge of stepping into the 'Brave New World' of Virtual Medical Worlds with a little help from a simple PC.

The European Commission has approved U.S. computer giant Compaq's acquisition of Tandem Computers. Tandem is a supplier of failsafe computer systems for operations in banks, stock exchanges. According to the EC the overlaps between the two companies' activities are not such as to give rise to competition concerns.

The TTN initative of the European Commission is taken shape. The twenty Technology Transfer Nodes (TTN's) spread al over Europe are installed and work with industry in some 80 projects to bring HPCN technology to smalle and medium sized companies. Their newly opened web site gives an overview of this major initative.

In September and October two Europort hands-on parallelisation workshops will be organised in Manchester and Orsay. Participants can work on various codes and also bring their own.

The first EURO-VR mini-conference on Virtual Reality will be held on 10 and 11 November 1997 in Amsterdam. The first day of the conference will be focussed on industrial applications of VR in Europe, while the second day will be research targeted and technology focussed.