Background
The European Commission (programme IST-Future and emerging technologies, represented by George Metakides) and the US National Science Foundation (CISE-NSF division, represented by J. Hartmanis) signed a Memorandum of Understanding entitled "Understanding on Co-operation in Information Technology" in August 1998.
This EU-US collaboration has been determined to comprise 2 major activities:
- series of strategic research workshops (to identify key research challenges and opportunities in Information Technologies). This activity will be supervised by a Strategic Workshop Review Committee (SWRC). The themes will emanate from the research community in itself.
- joint EU-US calls for proposals (to be launched in due time according to the opportunities of collaboration identified by the workshops)
ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) proposes to structure the work of the European actors involved in preparing and accompanying the first activity. It is likely that the NSF will mandate an outside organisation (hereby referred to as the "US partner organisation") to carry out the tasks to be executed on the American side and that ERCIM will then work in concertation with it.
The Strategic Workshop Review Committee will select the areas for joint research initiatives on criteria such as:
- long-term/high risk nature of the research involved, justifying risk sharing at international level
- high potential payoffs both in the EU and the US that make up for the long-term/high risk nature of research
- existence of sufficient scientific and technological bases in both the US and the EU to entail balanced research efforts
ERCIM will co-ordinate the European side by realising the following actions:
- the first year, solicit bottom-up ideas for high-level workshops from the European IT scientific community. The focus is on key emerging areas of mutual interest on which a world-class series of workshops would be relevant.
- evaluate and select a large group of topics that will be forwarded to the SWRC for final selection. The list to be constructed will include a short justification for each topic and will result from a concerted action with the US partner organisation. ERCIM will set up an ad-hoc scientific steering committee that will perform this task. The SWRC will then determine the different workshops to be launched and nominate their respective Programme Committees. In the following years, the SWRC will meet to determine the particular focus of the next workshops.
- organise the selected workshops to take place in Europe, and support (in non financial terms, except by channelling the payment of the travel for EU experts) those which will take place in the US. The organisation will be taken in charge by the ERCIM Office, in co-ordination with each workshop's Programme Committee. The Office will ensure the dissemination of the information on the workshop, the execution of the meetings and pilot the reporting associated with it.