News on HPCN and the European Commission March-May 1998

NEC Europe has opened its third C&C (Computers and Communications) Research Laboratories in Europe. The new Laboratories, located in the city of Heidelberg, will be focusing its research on high-speed communication protocol and middleware for multimedia communications network. The Heidelberg laboratories will expand NEC Europe's current research activities conducted by the C&C Research Laboratories in Bonn and Berlin.

Europe urgently needs a decent high-performance network infrastructure for research and education as the existing one is completely saturated. Various initiatives and projects within the European Commission (EC) are being undertaken to find our own original European answer to the huge telecommunication challenge. Unfortunately, the EC projects are limited in time, complex in administration and far too slow. The idea of involving industry has not quite matured yet in Europe because of the possible conflicting business interests. Meanwhile, time is running out on us, Mr. Hans-Peter Axmann of the Federal Ministry of Science and Transport in Austria anxiously warns the ITIS'98 audience, so "please, to join forces and keep up the pressure."

As a representative of the European Commission (EC), Dr. Massimo Luciolli highlighted the projects related to health care technology in the Fourth Framework Programme and tried to indicate the future direction of the telemedical share within the Fifth Framework Programme in his ITIS'98 lecture. The upcoming European R&D programmes show a general trend towards enhanced flexibility and increased integration, and are characterised by revised management procedures. Join us for a quick tour through the organisation of the Information Society Programme.

Within the European fourth framework programme, an operational infrastructure for networked image information is being developed under the project name ELISE II, referring to the Electronic Library Image Service for Europe. Coordinator of the initiative is Michael Adeyinka, director of the Laboratory for Biomedical Informatics (LBMI) in the Netherlands. At the ITIS Conference, he gave a short but stimulating account on the activities displayed in this three-year project, which are offering him a chance to delve into some new and fascinating research.

A meeting which discusses the establishment of a telemedical information society, sooner or later faces the concept of standardisation. Before an attentive ITIS'98-audience, Dr. Simon Smith, a European Commission representative from DG III Industry, gave a short introduction to the Information Society Initiatives in the Standardisation programme, referred to as ISIS. He invited possible project candidates to urgently submit their proposal for the recent call of this European programme. For the current year, the European Commission has assigned a funding capital of 3 million Ecu to the ISIS sponsoring activities.

The Institute of European Trade and Technology (IETT) is organising four one-day project management workshops, designed specifically for coordinators of European research and technological development projects. The IETT is a non-profit organisation whose main role is to promote European RTD collaboration and to assist UK organisations to participate in the EU's Framework Programmes for research and technological development.

An in-depth survey of the Esprit HPCN programme shows that for each ECU of European Commission funding, the projects supported generated 8.4 times that amount in direct business revenues and 2.8 times that amount in indirect effects, such as technology transfer. Large companies are far better (about ten times) in generating revenues from EC funding than SME's. The results, which recently became available, are based on a survey conducted for the EC by the French consultancy company Beta in the second half of 1996.

The European Electronic Component Manufacturers Association is collecting data on imports from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) semiconductors, to see if there is dumping on the EU market. The data collection on imports of 4, 16, and 64 megabyte DRAMs is scheduled to be completed by early April and has been reported to the industry in the three countries involved. It could lead to a complaint to the European Commission by the EECA and the opening of an anti-dumping investigation. A complaint would be 2-3 months from here.

The European Commission has cleared Compaq to acquire Digital Equipment Corp because the combined operation's position in a fast developing and lightly competitive market does not raise competition concerns. In particular important competitors, such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM were mentioned.

The CME symposium will bring together key personnel from industry and academia to discuss complex technical systems, engineering approaches, tools and methods and the impact of CME on the societies of the industrialised and developing countries. The symposium will be held in Bremen, Germany, from June 17-19.

Esprit put out its last call for proposals with respect to the Fourth Framework. Areas of interest are: Software Technologies (ST), for the task Specific Statistical Applications (0.4 MEcu); Technologies for Components and Subsystems (TCS), various tasks (10 MEcu); High-Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN), for all tasks in Areas 5 and 6 (16 MEcu); and Integration in Manufacturing (IiM), Area 1 (6 MEcu). All proposals will be evaluated in one step and must be sent to the Commission before 16 June 1998 at 5 p.m. The Fifth Framework does not contain an HPCN section.

The US Federal Department of Commerce and the European Commission will hold a partnership event between EU and US-based companies (chiefly small or medium-sized enterprises, SMEs) in Fort Worth, Texas, USA, on 14-16 April 1999. The event is to promote cooperation between US and EU SMEs in the areas of electronic commerce and multimedia technologies. About 200 SMEs from the EU will be selected to participate. Expressions of interest should be sent to the EC not later than 16 June 1998.

The Brussels-based magazine Eurinfotech reports that EU research ministers agreed on a compromise figure of 14 bln Ecu for the budget of the Fifth Framework, the next five-year EU R&D programme, including a 3.363 bln Ecu funding for the Information Society Technology (IST) theme. The R&D framework budget will be allocated in two stages: 3.1 bln Ecu for 1998-99, and a 'commitment' of 9.64 bln Ecu for 2000-2002. The remaining 1.26 bln Ecu is set aside for the Euratom programme.