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e-Macao is a two-year research, development and capacity-building project in the area of e-government. The aim of the project is to advance the state of e-government in Macao through software research and development, and specialised training of the government IT staff. The technical focus is on middleware support for e-services, delivered by government agencies to citizens (G2C), businesses (G2B) or government itself (G2G), and implemented using sound, rigorous software development methods.
Major achievements in 2005 include the completion of a comprehensive survey of 44 government departments in Macao, development of two prototype systems to deliver representative public services online, training of almost 200 Macao government staff in IT development skills, and organization of 11 seminars and workshops to raise the level of awareness about Electronic Governance in Macao.
The project consists of 20 tasks in five activity areas:
The project runs in the period from 1 July 2004 until 30 June 2006.
Here is the progress on individual tasks made during 2005:
UNeGov.net - Community of Practice for Electronic Governance is a new initiative of UNU-IIST, established in order to transfer the experience gained through the eMacao Project to other parts of the world, particularly to developing countries. The aim of UNeGov.net is to build a Community of Practice interested in developing, sharing and applying concrete solutions for Electronic Governance.
The initiative currently comprises seven activity areas to support and organize the work of the community: (1) a community portal based on semantic web, (2) a series of network-building workshops, (3) a framework of practice to carry out cooperative problem-solving, (4) development of country and thematic reports on the state of Electronic Governance based on community-wide cooperation, (5) development of a curriculum for training of public administration officials, including Chief Information Officers, on Electronic Governance, (6) organising capacity-building schools and courses on various aspects of Electronic Governance, and (7) an annual International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance.
As part of this initiative, five network-building workshops were organized in 2005, in: Tunis (Tunisia), Bethlehem (Palestine), San Luis (Argentina), Bahia Blanca (Argentina) and Kathmandu (Nepal). Courses were also organized following the workshops in: Bethlehem, San Luis and Bahia Blanca. Also, a portal was established at www.unegov.net.
The initiative started its operation on 1 October 2005.
Here is the progress on individual tasks made during 2005:
The range of topics considered at individual workshops varied according to specific concerns present in the host country and interests of the audience. Each workshop provided a forum: to raise particular societal needs, to present government-adopted measures to address such needs, along with the challenges faced, and to discuss possible solutions based on international and local experience in Electronic Government.
Plans for 2006 include:
The Global Desktop Project is a major effort to increase the number of open source software programmers in developing countries.
Developing countries are using more and more Linux and open source software in their technological infrastructure. However, these same countries are almost totally absent in the creation of open source software. Through the Global Desktop Project, UNU-IIST seeks to assist developing countries to shift from being consumers of imported open source technology to become creators of these same open source technologies, acting as peers in the global open source programming community.
By focusing efforts on the computer desktop, an interface that every computer user interacts with and understands, the Global Desktop Project is generating a huge amount of interest from groups involved in everything from application development to localization. This in turn will help further a developing nation's human infrastructure and accessibility to information technology.
The Global Desktop Project has three key components: an international engineering program; a partner program with Institutes of Higher Learning; and an outreach program for IT organizations in government and the private sector that are using, or considering, open source solutions.
Since its inception in April 2005 the Global Desktop Project has only been operating in a startup phase of seeking funding and building partnerships. To date, the Project has applied for a $3 million USD grant from the Macau Science and Technology Development Fund, which we have heard good feedback from. Additionally, the Project has received a pledge of $1.5 million USD of support from US based Red Hat Incorporated. Other IT vendors have shown interest in the Project and will likely follow through with funding and support, including Intel and IBM.
The idea of exploiting and reusing components to build and maintain systems is a standard and fundamental notion in all branches of engineering, but has been slow to mature in software engineering. The growing complexity of software is forcing software engineers to develop and use components. It is hoped that component-based development methods and tools will lead to a higher degree of automation in the software production process, and in particular a great increase in software productivity, quality and reliability of computer systems for safety critical applications. The research and development in computer science and software engineering and technology now encourage a worldwide collaboration to achieve this goal. Indeed, an international collaborating project on Verified Software, Theories, Tools and Experiences (VSTTE) is now being coordinated by the IFIP, in which the investigation of component-based development will play an important role.
We have established collaboration, contacts and joint projects with Macau University, Nanjing University (China), Aalborg University (Denmark), University of Leicester and University of Durham (UK), Tata Research and Design Development Centre (India), and the ARTIST Network (Europe).
Our main achievements include
We add to the specification of a method a time constraint which is a relation between the resource availability and the amount of time spent to perform the method. We define contract to include method specification, and define component as an implementation of a contract. Our model supports the separation between functional and non-functional requirements, and the formal compositional verification of component-based real-time systems [1][2]. This work has been presented and published in the proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT workshop "Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems FMICS 2005", 7-9 September 2005, Lisbon, Portugal, Taziana Margaria and Mieke Massink (eds), ACM Inc. 2005, pp 106-114.
We also develop a technique for checking linear duration invariants of timed automata [4] which is more powerful than the ones in the literature. We also develop a technique for checking a real-time system with untimed SPIN [5].
Two courses on the Foundations of Software Testing were given in Jakarta, Indonesia and at UNU-IIST.
In September, together with 8 European partners, we submitted a European Framework 6 research proposal on "Modeling and analysis of evolutionary structures for distributed services". The coordinating site is CWI, the Netherlands. We will be responsible for the testing framework. UNU-IIST's requested budget is 200,000 Euro over 3 years. The proposal is in the second round of evaluation, after it was ranked on place 6 acquiring 88,3% of the possible points.
In 2006 we are planning to organize an international workshop on this subject.
In January, we gave a 3 hours lecture on the role of "Open Source Software in e-Government" for the government of Macao.
This project (a) maintains and extends the tools for the RAISE formal method and (b) uses RAISE on application projects by fellows.
There have been three activities in 2005:
Environmental modelling to support water management has a proven success record but is very expensive: so expensive that it cannot be afforded in most places in developing countries. At the same time watersheds, rivers and lakes are under increasing stress from growing populations, industries, and agriculture which both consume water and pollute water resources. The aim of the WaterBase project is to create a generic model of water resources together with a decision support system intended for use in developing countries that is cheap to instantiate while being effective in operation. The system will support the modelling of existing situations as well as the generation and comparison of results for possible alternative scenarios. Thus it will support such activities as development planning, the exploration of ways to counteract environmental degradation, and the mitigation of events such as global warming, storms, or polluting accidents.
The system will be free, open source, and instantiable using GIS data freely available on the internet.
All data is held on a web server maintained by UNU-IIST and located in Macao. This centralised implementation will allow the repository to act as an archive for long-term protection of the data and provide robust and efficient access for users. Each collection can now be managed separately, with the data extended and edited remotely using on-line forms by the organisation that owns it.
This project aims to strengthen all aspects of computer science teaching in universities in developing countries.
Under the project, we are trying to arrange for (generally young) computer science lecturers or professors from universities in developing countries to learn new courses at partner universities in industrialised countries for one semester as a fellow, at the same time providing them with the supporting course materials. Then when they return to their own universities they use the knowledge they gain, together with the supporting course materials, as the basis for improving and updating existing courses or introducing new courses into the teaching curriculum of their own university. With our arrangement, the partner universities provide the use of their facilities free of charge and in particular without payment of tuition fees. UNU-IIST provides recommended text books for each of the courses the fellows study, and these text books become the property of the fellows' home department when they return.
We also continued to support one PhD candidate from Pakistan in her second year at Eindhoven.
Under the project IT Training Courses and Schools in Developing Countries, UNU-IIST aims to disseminate sound modern approaches to software development in developing countries. IT Schools and Courses are organised jointly with host institutions. The courses are in two categories: formal methods, and software engineering and system development.
Formal (mathematical) methods are being increasingly used in Europe and the USA and are starting to be important in developing countries. In particular, formal methods are becoming advised or even mandatory for the development of safety-critical and defence software.
The aim of the courses is to propagate research into and application of formal software development techniques, with the hope that developing countries can accelerate their progress in being self sufficient in software technology, and even become providers of services and products elsewhere.
The courses on software engineering and system development aim to introduce the advanced methods, techniques and tools that are widely used in industry for software development. They cover project management, object-oriented software development with UML and the Rational Unified Development Process, Component-Based Software Development, and Software Testing. These topics are often taught together with those on formal methods so that the participants can integrate formal methods and practical software engineering in their further study and practice.
IT Schools, however, have a wide range of topics in computer science not just in software technology, and consist of several courses. Courses in a school are taught by experts invited from universities and industries as well, not just by UNU-IIST staff.
In 2005, together with their host institutions, UNU-IIST organised or sponsored 9 training schools and courses in Argentina, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, China, and Fiji. About 270 participants from 6 developing countries attended. See appendix * for details.
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