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| Status of implementation of project activities |
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| Executive Summary | ||||||
The e-Macao project to develop a basis for e-government in Macao, and to train government staff in the relevant technologies was formally inaugurated in July 2004. The project, funded by the Macao government, lasts for two years. It is now well under way: a project manager, post-doctoral fellow and three other project staff have been appointed, a Macao e-Government survey and a global e-Government survey have been completed, and intensive training of IT staff from the Macao Government has been taking place since October 2004.
The on-line repository of research materials has been established as a prototype at http://run.iist.unu.edu. So far it only contains UNU materials; we hope soon to attract other UN agencies.
We still hope to establish collaborative projects on water resource management (together with UNU-INWEH) and on the certification of open source software (with partners in Europe).
UNU-IIST needs to maintain its academic excellence through research. Current key research areas are internet computing, hardware/software co-design, object-oriented and component-based development, hybrid systems, testing, open-source software, electronic government, and formal methods tools and applications. The research projects have been very active this year, demonstrated by the large number of publications: 33. We have also produced 26 technical reports.
UNU-IIST's main concern is the development of software technology in developing countries, and it concentrates on capacity building through postgraduate training.
Training takes three forms: fellowships at UNU-IIST (17 fellows from 8 countries started fellowships during 2004), fellowships for computer science lecturers and for PhD students at universities in developed countries (5 fellows from 5 countries to 4 partner universities), and schools/courses in developing countries. Schools last 2-4 weeks, have regional participation, and involve a number of courses, some taught by UNU-IIST staff, some by experts from developed countries, and some by people from the host country. In 2004 UNU-IIST, together with local partners, organised 5 schools in Kazakhstan, Vietnam, China (2), and Brazil, and sponsored one in Slovakia. Training courses are usually taught by UNU-IIST staff, and in 2004 we organised 7 courses in Mozambique, Argentina (2), Peru, Nigeria, India, and China.
We have organised the first International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing (ICTAC) in Guizhou, China. The initiative aims to extend the traditional UNU-IIST training courses and schools, which may not be so attractive to young but established researchers. The colloquium includes both research oriented presentations and tutorials in order for us to reach out to meet those potential researchers from developing countries and to help them to establish links with researchers from developed countries. The response to the first such colloquium has been good, attracting some 111 papers from over 30 countries and regions, plus a number of excellent tutorials. We have already started planning the second ICTAC in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2005.
UNU-IIST has also sponsored SEFM 2004 in Beijing, and offered travel scholarships for people to attend.
The project "Development of Computer Science Departments in Developing Countries" sends young computer science lecturers from developing countries to partner universities in industrial countries for a semester to learn new courses and introduce them to their departments. This year, as well as surveying participants, we have organised two workshops, in Nigeria and Vietnam, to further disseminate the results and evaluate the project.
Chris George has been Director a.i. since March 2003. Prof Mike Reed has accepted the position and should start at the beginning of 2005.
Dr. Antonio Cerone joined UNU-IIST as a Research Fellow in February 2004. Antonio was previously at the Software Verification Research Centre at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is an expert in formal methods, particularly models for concurrency and model checking.
A second vacancy has been filled by the appointment of Dr. Tomasz Janowski, who was previously a Research Fellow during 1995-2002.
UNU-IIST has appointed its first post-doctoral fellow, Dr Adegboyega Ojo, who is working on the e-Macao project, and plans to appoint more such fellows on research projects in the near future.
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