Joint European-US Strategic Workshops

by Jean-Eric Pin

The European Commission and the US National Science Foundation will be organising a series of strategic research workshops to identify key research challenges in Information Technologies.

The strategic workshops will be organised jointly under the auspices of the European Commission’s IST-FET programme and the US National Science Foundation CISE division. Focus is on key emerging areas of mutual interest on which a world-class series of workshops would be relevant. One outcome of each workshop will be recommendations for future joint European-US activities in the domains covered by the workshop.

ERCIM has been chosen to lead the European part of this activity and to solicit proposals from the European research community. ERCIM is interested in bottom-up ideas for high-level workshops from the European scientific community.

This activity is supervised by a Strategic Workshop Review Committee (SWRC) composed of high-level independent scientists from Europe and the US. The committee will select the themes by criteria such as:

• long-term/high risk nature of the research involved, justifying risk sharing at an 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.

Scientists interested in this co-operation can submit their suggestions by a short online questionnaire available at the ERCIM website.

Links:
EU-NSF Joint Strategic Workshops Initiative: http://www.ercim.eu/EU-NSF/