I’ve recently returned from beautiful Tallinn where the weather was hot and the city was beautiful. I was in Estonia for two items one was the COST-ICT Annual Progress Conference and the other was the COST-ICT domain committee meeting.
Before getting into the conference and meetings a little info on COST. Set up to run as an intergovernmental framework for European cooperation in science and technology, it allows for the coordination of nationally-funded research on a European level. COST does not fund research itself but provides a platform for European scientists to cooperate on a particular project and exchange expertise. These projects are called “Actions”.
A slide set overview of COST can be seen at this link [pdf].
My most recent experience of a COST action has been throught the ICT Action IC0703 TMA. The purpose of TMA is to host a community of researchers around the area of data traffic monitoring and analysis particularly looking at the theory, techniques, tools and applications for future networks. I have seen this community in full effect when collecting and identifying network traffic trace collections. Also Alan Davy has benefited from participating in a short-term scientific mission (STSM) in October 2009.
Anyway back to the Annual Progress Conference and from it I learned about a much broader community of projects such as
- IC0701 | Formal Verification of Object-Oriented Software
- IC0804 | Energy efficiency in large scale distributed systems
- IC0805 | Open European Network for High Performance Computing on Complex Environments
- IC0806 | Intelligent Monitoring, Control and Security of Critical Infrastructure
It was great to see Irish involvement in these Actions with a particular stand out being IC0804 well I would say this as John McLaughlin (TSSG) is participating in this energy efficiency action.
Now to the second part of this meeting, the COST-ICT domain committee meeting. I’ve played many sports in my time, and I always held out the hope that one day I would get to represent my country, I should have know better. But in the area of ICT well I’ve finally managed it.
I was recently nominated to represent Ireland on the COST ICT domain committee, and during the Estonian meeting that nomination was ratified. It’s a four year term and during that time I’ll get to interact more closely with a very vibrant and forward looking community. There will be responsibilities towards reviewing ongoing actions, new actions and also advising existing actions on their potential progress. This assignment (voluntary) will be a nice complement to my existing role in the TSSG.
I am looking forward to this journey and it couldn’t have started in a nicer place than Tallinn, Estonia.