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| Status of implementation of project activities |
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Major projects include the following:
e-Macao
e-Macao is a project to build a foundation for Electronic Government in Macao through readiness assessment, software research and development, and capacity-building for government workforce.
The e-Macao project began in July 2004, and until June 2006 it completed a comprehensive survey of 44 agencies of Macao Government, developed three prototype systems to deliver representative public services online, trained close to 200 government staff in relevant technical and management skills, and organized 22 seminars and workshops to raise the level of awareness about Electronic Governance in Macao. During 2006, project activities concentrated on building prototype software infrastructure for e-Government, supporting rapid development and run-time execution of various Electronic Public Services (EPS). Five main infrastructure components were identified, specified and implemented based on the concrete experience building three representative EPS earlier during the project.
The first phase of the project was officially completed on 30 June 2006. The funding of the project was from the Macao Government via the Macao Foundation, with a total of 747,879 USD for the partners, with UNU-IIST as lead partner obtaining 603,476 USD. The second phase of the project has been approved by the Government, promoted to a program framework, and extended to last for three more years until end of 2009. The multi-annual funding has been approved with UNU-IIST share between 1,125,000USD and 1,350,000USD depending on the annual project portfolios. Besides managing and executing its own portfolio, UNU-IIST's role is to provide advice to the e-Macao Program on e-Government development in Macao and chair its Technical Committee.
More information can be found from the project portal at www.emacao.gov.mo.
UNeGOV.net
The UNeGov.net - Community of Practice for Electronic Governance initiative was established in order to transfer the experience gained through the e-Macao Project to other parts of the world, particularly to developing countries. The aim is to build a global Community of Practice, comprising experts and practitioners interested in developing, sharing and applying concrete solutions for Electronic Governance.
This initiative was announced at the World Summit for the Information Society in Tunis during 2005. Additional network-building workshops have since been held in Bethlehem (Palestine), San Luis (Argentina), Bahia Blanca (Argentina), Kathmandu (Nepal), Abuja (Nigeria) and Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia). Some workshops were followed by a three-day school on foundations of electronic governance. More workshops and schools are planned with an international conference on e-government to be hosted by UNU-IIST in Macao during 2007.
Presentations on the initiative were made during 2006 at international conferences and visits in San Diego, Guangzhou, Santiago de Chile, Beijing and Singapore. UNeGov.net, along with the Global Desktop Project (see below) and UNU-ONY co-organized an event "eGovernance and Free Software: How They are Changing Developing Countries" in the UN Headquarters in New York in March. The event was attended by about 100 members of permanent missions and other international organizations.
During 2006, UNeGov.net has developed four thematic areas resulting in new research, development and organizational transformation projects: Strategic IT Planning for Public Organizations, a collaboration with Macao Institute for Tourism Studies; Semantic Interoperability for Electronic Government, a collaboration with Microsoft; Software Infrastructure Development for e-Government, a collaboration with Macao Government; and Software for Communities of Practice. Most of the projects are also part of the UNU-IIST project portfolio for the new e-Macao Program.
Contributions to develop particular thematic areas have been obtained from Microsoft (50,000USD) and Macao Institute for Tourism Studies (18,000USD). UNU-IIST is also discussing major e-government initiatives with governments in Mongolia, Nepal and Nigeria.
More information can be found from the community portal at www.unegov.net.
Open Source Software, such as the Linux operating system and the Apache web server, is rapidly gaining in use and significance. It is of particular relevance to developing countries both in terms of cost and self-determination in the building of a software infrastructure.
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.
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.
To date the Global Desktop Project has partnered with 17 organizations in Macau and China including government agencies, universities, industry consortia and commercial companies. In addition to the 17 signed partnerships, the project has pending partnerships with several notable universities in China including Tsinghua University, Peking University, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Jilin University, South China University of Technology, and Zhonshan University. In addition to universities in China, the project has a pending partnership with the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and is in talks with other universities in East Asia. All pending partnerships will be finalized upon the full funding of the project.
The project is being funded by UNU-IIST while external funding is being sought. In 2006 the Global Desktop Project received a pledge of 900,000 USD from Intel and a Memorandum of Understanding was signed. This funding is conditional on substantial funding coming from the Chinese government. Additionally, UNU-IIST has signed a contract for 300,000 USD funding over three years with Canonical, Ltd. There is great interest in the project from other IT vendors. For example, Red Hat has committed 1.5 million USD of technical assistance.
Addendum: The Global Desktop Project was brought to UNU-IIST by Scott McNeil in 2005. Mr McNeil was given support until January, 2007, with the agreement that he had to bring in outside funds to extend the project beyond that date. To his credit, he brought in funds for preparation of course materials and other activities, and a MOU for significant funds from Intel. However, the Intel funds became conditional on matching support from the Chinese or Macau governments. Despite initial encouragement and considerable effort, including meetings with the Chief Executive in Macao and the Minister of Science and Technology in China, UNU-IIST was unable to obtain such matching support. Hence, due to budgetary constraints, Mr McNeil decided in January, 2007, to leave UNU-IIST and seek another home for his project. UNU-IIST remains committed to open source software development in developing countries. It is our plan to develop courses in this area and put them online. Our project with Microsoft on interoperability between open source and proprietary software is going well, and we will continue to look for further opportunities.
The sustainable exploitation of river and lake basins, both the water and the land draining into them, needs decision support systems (DSSs) that are very expensive to create.
UNU-IIST and UNU-INWEH are collaborating to create WaterBase, a generic decision-support tool, with supporting metadata structure. It will be used for educational and management purposes to advance the practice of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in developing countries. The project, begun in August, 2005 and to be completed over 18 months, comprises three elements: 1) development of a demonstrator system as proof of concept; 2) development of a generic metadata formatting system for IWRM information; and 3) creation of a training module in IWRM Informatics for inclusion in the distance education curriculum of UNU-INWEH's Water Virtual Learning Centre. The completed system 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.
The project is a collaboration between UNU-IIST and UNU-INWEH. Also involved are the universities of Guelph and Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and the University of Idaho and Texas A&M University in the US. The project is currently being funded by a grant of USD 45000 from the UNU Joint Activities and Innovative Capacity Development Funds. External funding will be sought for later phases.
UNU-IIST, UNU-INWEH, and UNU-ONY will host an event presenting this project in New York during 2007.
The "Grand Challenge" is a long-range global project proposed by Sir Tony Hoare (Turing award winner, Emeritus Professor of computer science at Oxford, and senior researcher at Microsoft). Essentially, the ultimate goal is to construct a program verifier that would use logical proof to give an automatic check to the correctness of programs submitted to it. It is anticipated that the project will last at least fifteen years, and consume over one thousand person-years of skilled scientific effort drawn from all over the world. The scale of the project is comparable to landing a man on the moon or the human genome project. A successful outcome would be of major benefit to the world. For example, The US Department of Commerce in 2002 estimated that the cost to the US economy of avoidable software errors is between 20 and 60 billion dollars each year. The possible human cost of failure in safety-critical software increases dramatically each year.
Work on the grand challenge project will require the development of new scientific theories, the production of new software tools, and many experiments on the implementation of these theories and tools. One benchmark for the project is to produce one million lines of automatically verified code for useful software.
During 2006, UNU-IIST has begun to position much of its research on work related to the grand challenge. Essentially, this simply offers a focus for the traditional areas of research done by UNU-IIST since its founding. The initial international meeting on the grand challenge, (the VSTTE conference - Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments) was held in Zurich in October of 2005 as a working conference of the International Federation for Information Processing. UNU-IIST presented two position papers at the conference.
Tony Hoare visited UNU-IIST in May of 2006 to discuss the role of UNU-IIST within the grand challenge. In October of 2006, UNU-IIST hosted an Asia workshop devoted to building a community in Asia for work related to the project. UNU-IIST staff will also attend such workshops being organised in Europe and the US. In 2007, UNU-IIST and UNU-ONY together with Tony Hoare and others will host a major event at UN Headquarters in New York to present the project to the world press and funding agencies.
Current UNU-IIST research related to the grand challenge include:
Component Systems: The development of an integrated toolset towards automated correct software construction of component systems by verified design transformation. This is a joint project with Tata Consultancy Services in India and the University of Macau. Funding is provided by the partners together with a grant of 67,000 USD from the Macau Science and Technology Development Fund.
CREDO: This is an EU-funded project for the development and application of an integrated suite of tools for compositional modelling, testing, and validation of software for evolving networks of dynamically reconfigurable components. There are nine partners in the project with UNU-IIST receiving 200,000 euro over three years.
Model Checking: UNU-IIST is partnering with Oxford University for the development of the model checker FDR based on CSP. This includes two proposals to EPSRC in the UK. One component of this work is to build an European-Asian research network for the integration of tools for model checking. Current research on model checking at UNU-IIST includes the application of model checking techniques to real time systems, to security issues, and to the grand challenge project of verifying the Mondex Electronic Purse.
Verified Software Repository: This repository will contain a gradually expanding set of systems or components that have formal specifications plus designs and/or full implementations with proofs of correctness of designs and implementations against the specifications. UNU-IIST collaborated with groups in Europe and the USA during 2006 to specify and prove correct the design of the Mondex Electronic Purse. UNU-IIST used the RAISE language and tools, and completed the full correctness proof. Similar work will continue in 2007, probably involving electronic voting.
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 (16 fellows from 6 countries started fellowships during 2006), fellowships for computer science lecturers and for PhD students at universities in developing countries (10 fellows from 8 countries), and schools/courses/workshops in developing countries. In 2006, UNU-IIST, together with local partners, organised 10 such events in China, DPR Korea, Nigeria, Romania, Sudan, Tunisia, Vietnam, and Mongolia.
In 2006 we organised jointly with partners: SEFM 2006 in India, ICTAC in Tunis, FACS in the Czech Republic, ICFEM (with three associated events) in Macao, QAPL in Austria, two UNeGov.net events in Nigeria and Mongolia, and the UNU event on e-government and open source software in New York.
Dr Bernhard Aichernig decided to return to his position in Austria at the end of his appointment in February of 2006. Hence, since Professor He Jifeng retired in November of 2005, we sought to to recruit two new academic staff in 2006.
Dr Jeff Sanders of Oxford University was offered and has accepted a position of senior research fellow, and will take up the post in February of 2007. Dr Sanders has directed postgraduate studies in computer science at Oxford for more than ten years.
Dr Xu Wang of Birmingham University has been offered a position of assistant research fellow, with the expectation that after two years of successful work at UNU-IIST, he will become a research follow. Dr Wang joined UNU-IIST on 16 November 2006.
Scott McNeil has been appointed as a senior project manager to develop the global desktop project at UNU-IIST. Mr McNeil left UNU-IIST at the end of 2006 when this project came to an end.
Provided funding is forthcoming as expected for the e-Macao project, we expect to appoint a research fellow in the area of e-government during early 2007.
We have appointed two postdocs in 2006, and now have the EU funding to appoint a third.
UNU-IIST has also now appointed Professor Jifeng (China) and Professor Roscoe (UK) as senior associate research fellows, and Dr. Aichernig (Austria) and Dr Krishnan (Australia) as associate research fellows. Associate researchers are expected annually to offer courses to our fellows and to interact on joint research with the academic staff.
UNU-IIST has again had an extremely good set of 24 visitors this year: our Fellows have the benefit of courses and seminars from some of the best professors in the world.
During 2006, we received 150,000 USD from the Macao Foundation to renovate our facilities in Macao. This provided for soundproofing of seminar rooms, a secure computer server room, and the creation of private offices for academic staff, including the provision of seven new offices.
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