ERCIM News No.20 - January 1995
by David Boyd
During the ERCIM meeting in Barcelona in the first week of November, the Steering Committee of the Parallel Processing Network met under the chairmanship of Professor Nikolaou to review progress since June and to discuss future plans for Framework IV proposals and for the programme of the Network.
The meeting opened with an interesting presentation from Professor Valero on the work of CEPBA. The Committee then reviewed each of the proposal seeds initiated at the Network Workshop held in Crete in June. The intention was to see which of these had the potential to become viable Framework IV proposals. For several of the seeds good progress had been made in developing the ideas within the ERCIM partners although for a few there now appeared to be relatively little on-going collaborative interest. A common theme which emerged in the discussion was the need to identify appropriate end users who would be willing to work with the ERCIM members to demonstrate the commercial relevance of the proposed work and ensure its successful exploitation. For some of the ideas, where the problems being tackled were of a more fundamental nature, it was agreed that they would be most appropriately pursued as Long Term Research projects. Progress will continue under the active leadership of the seed "drivers".
Next the Committee turned to the future programme of the Network itself. It was agreed that a number of focused Technical Working Groups should be established based on the common research interests of the partners. A final decision on the topics of these would be agreed between the partners following the meeting. The collaborative research activities within the Working Groups would form the basis of a proposal to establish a Research Network under the new EC Training and Mobility of Researchers programme, thus providing support for young European researchers who wished to work in the ERCIM laboratories and assisting dissemination of the knowledge within ERCIM for the benefit of the European Community.
Plans were agreed to promote the activities of the Parallel Processing Network through the ERCIM World Wide Web pages. The Network will hold a further Workshop in Pisa, probably in May 1995, to progress the activities of the new Working Groups.
The Committee is grateful for the hospitality of Professor Valero and UPC in hosting their meeting.
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