ERCIM News No.30 - July 1997

ERCIM Meetings in Rocquencourt

by Georges Nissen

INRIA, the French Research Institute for Informatics and Control, one of the founders of ERCIM, hosted the first ERCIM Board of Directors meeting of the year (the twenty first meeting since the foundation of ERCIM). Other ERCIM activities were organised at the same time.

On 21 May 97 an Executive Committee meeting took place. The topics discussed were ERCIM legal issues, internationalrRelations, European proposals, working group activities, the fellowship programme and new members.

On 22 May 97, at a Familiarisation Day, a number of talks and demonstrations presented some of INRIA's current activities. The day started with a general presentation of the Institute by its President, Bernard Larrouturou. Presentations were then given on:

The demonstrations were held after lunch. Antoine Rizk presented the Aquarelle project (a European project managed by ERCIM, with the participation of many of the ERCIM members). This project works on a distributed multimedia information system describing the European cultural heritage. Querying for different reference information was shown. Michel Parent co-ordinator of the PRAXITELE development action at INRIA, presented the results of his teams' work. They have developed a public centrally-managed electric individual car and are planning to experiment it in St.-Quentin-en-Yvelines and in the La Defense business areas. The visitors were able to test the cars themselves on the INRIA campus.

On 23 May 97 the Directors' Meeting took place. The 1997 budget was approved and a Progress Report was presented by the Executive Committee Chairman, Christos Nikolaou, followed by discussions on ERCIM's future lines of action.

The morning ended with a talk given by Jean-Pierre Euzen, head of the Telematics for Research Unit at the European Commission's DG13 (see below). The next Board of Directors meeting will take place in Copenhagen in November 1997.

Please contact:
Georges Nissen ­ INRIA
Tel: +33 1 3963 5513
E-mail: georges.nissen@inria.fr

Jean-Pierre Euzen, head of the Telematics for Research Unit at the European Commission DG13 gave a talk to the ERCIM Board of Directors entitled "Europe's Research Networking towards the Global Information Society"

Jean-Pierre Euzen presented the evolution of the Information Society initiatives launched by the European Commission, parti-cularly focusing on their implications in the Telematics for Research sector. He stressed the leading role the research community has as a pioneer in the Information Society and highlighted the activities of the joint DG3 and DG13 initiative TEN-34, with which ERCIM could be associated as a user. He also described the ACTS-JAMES project and gave some details on the other current projects in his sector and an overview of their inter-relations. The European Commission proposal for the 5th Framework Programme was also presented. Dr. Euzen illustrated its overall organisation and then provided details on the Information Society Programme and its relevance to Research Networks. It is planned to promote both infrastructure and applications development. With reference to infrastructures, high-capacity research networks, advanced services for researchers, and tools and services of infrastructural nature will be supported. The targeted areas for the development of applications are Education and Training, Multimedia content and High Performance Computing and Networking. The actions envisaged are a state of the art intranet for researchers and education in Europe (interconnection of national RTD networks at 622 Mbit/s towards gigabits/s), European Virtual Testbeds, Virtual Universities and Laboratories with real-time collaboration and knowledge sharing. Dr Euzen's talk was greatly appreciated by the ERCIM Directors and the other ERCIM delegates present.

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