Our blog is where you'll find all our project updates, highlights and achievements, as well as other news and events related to iMENTORS
Presentations of the e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future conference (October 29, 2014 – Brussels, Belgium) are now available via this link!
Videos of each session, including the referent panel discussions, are also available as a complement to the presentations. Please access the Video gallery of the conference.
The full programme of the day is available here.
This is the new iMENTORS banner on the ASREN homepage:
Have you used the iMENTORS opendata service and would like to share the news on your homepage?
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Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN) is the association of the Arab region National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), as well as their strategic partners, that aims to implement, manage and extend sustainable Pan-Arab e-Infrastructures dedicated for the Research and Education communities and to boost scientific research and cooperation in member countries through the provision of world-class e-infrastructures and e-services.
This is the new iMETORS banner on the Gov2u homepage:
Have you used the iMENTORS opendata service and would like to share the news on your homepage?
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The eI4Africa and iMENTORS partnerships are very pleased to welcome a new associated organisation to the eI4Africa/iMentors joint conference on the theme “e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future” that will take place on October 29, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium.
EUDAT is a project funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development and it started in October 2011 with a duration of 36 months.
The eI4Africa and iMENTORS partnerships are very pleased to welcome a new associated organisation to the eI4Africa/iMentors joint conference on the theme “e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future” that will take place on October 29, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium.
CAAST-Net Plus is a network of 25 partner organisations from all over Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, working together to support bi-regional cooperation in research and innovation. Building on the activities and outputs of the CAAST-Net project (2008-2012), CAAST-Net Plus aims to:
The eI4Africa and iMENTORS partnerships are very pleased to welcome a new associated organisation to the eI4Africa/iMENTORS joint conference on the theme “e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future” that will take place on October 29, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium.
The AFRICA BUILD (http://africabuild.eu) is a Coordination Action aiming to support and develop advanced Centres of Excellence in health care, education and research in the African countries, through Information Technologies. This project is supported by the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT). AFRICA BUILD started 1st August 2011 and will run for a period of 36 months.
The eI4Africa and iMENTORS partnerships are very pleased to welcome a new associated organisation to the eI4Africa/iMentors joint conference on the theme “e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future” that will take place on October 29, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium.
agINFRA is an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (I3) project that is pioneering the connection of Agricultural Data through an Open and Participatory Data Infrastructure. In particular, the project aims to design and develop a scientific data infrastructure for agricultural sciences that will facilitate the development of policies and the deployment of services that will promote sharing of data among agricultural scientists and develop trust within and among their communities. The agINFRA Vision White Paper summarises the project’s vision as follows: “To develop a shared infrastructure and computationally empowered services for agricultural research data that allow for producing and transferring scientific and technological results into effective agricultural practice. A key element is achieving a higher level of interoperability between agricultural and other data resources”.
iMENTORS has opened its data to all unregistered usersin its last six months of operation. It is important that donors provide information about the aid they give. More important though is for the information to be publicly available in a way that people can easily understand. iMENTORS (www.imentors.eu) is the most comprehensive data map on ICT investments in Africa and contains data across a multitude of entities, classified as organisations, research infrastructures, fibre networks and projects.
Theme: Infrastructure – Innovation – Inclusion
Authors are invited to submit 500 word abstracts for presentation at UbuntuNet-Connect 2014, the 7th Annual Conference of the UbuntuNet Alliance. The UbuntuNet-Connect series of conferences has been held for the past 6 years and is regarded as one of the premier conferences in Africa. This year the conference will take place from 13 to 14 November 2014 in Lusaka, Zambia and will be hosted by Zambia Research and Education Network (ZAMREN), the NREN of Zambia.
CONNECT is the magazine from the GÉANT community. The aim is to provide a regular update on the project and its vital work in supporting European research, as well as giving an insight into the users who depend on the network, and the community that makes GÉANT what it is.
The May issue of CONNECT, the magazine dedicated to research and education networking is out now!
You can view it view booklet style or you can download the PDF here. Printed copies are also available from
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Louis Papaemmanuel, Project Director of iMENTORS, SU, presented iMENTORS at the IST-Africa Conference (06 - 09 May, Mauritius) during Session 8d: eInfrastructures (08 May). IST-Africa 2014 focused on the Role of ICT for Africa's Development and specifically on Applied ICT research in the areas of eHealth, Technology Enhanced Learning and ICT Skills, Digital Libraries, Open Source Software, eInfrastructures, Societal Implications of Technology and eGovernment.
iMENTORS (www.imentors.eu) is an interactive resource, the first of its kind, to contain information about all known e-infrastructures in Africa in the past five years. Launched for public use and input in July 2013 iMENTORS provides you with the necessary tool to visualise e-infrastructures and all related projects in Africa.
Louis Papaemmanuel explained how using iMENTORS and open aid data enhances the coherence of international aid. Data acquisition and validation will continue to progress until the end of the project. By the end of the project the interactive system will contain at least 80% of all e-infrastructure available in Africa.
The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is a next-generation meso-scale numerical weather prediction system designed to serve both atmospheric research and operational forecasting needs. WRF has a large worldwide community counting more than 20,000 users in 130 countries and it has been specifically designed to be the state-of-the-art atmospheric simulation system being portable and running efficiently on available parallel computing platforms.
Africa as a region and as individual countries, is slowly making a steady progress towards establishing national and Regional Research and Educational Networks (RRENs). Although still in its infancy compared to other world regions such as Europe where each country has an active National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) with established regional networks such as TERENA, iMENTORS database provides evidence for tremendous progress over the past few years.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
According to an article published on ei4africa.eu, e-Infrastructures enable the integration of software, data, high performance computing and other resources that researchers might need into a single convenient Science Gateway (for example the African Science Gateway). Other resources include remote sensors that can gather real-time data in a variety of settings. It is entirely possible that a remote sensor could be mounted on a robot which could be remotely controlled to investigate and explore its environment.
Africa as a region and as individual countries, is slowly making a steady progress towards establishing national and Regional Research and Educational Networks (RRENs). Although still in its infancy compared to other world regions such as Europe where each country has an active National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) with established regional networks such as TERENA, iMENTORS database provides evidence for tremendous progress over the past few years.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
There are currently three RRENs in Africa namely; West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN), Ubuntu Alliance which consists of Eastern and Southern African countries, and the North African block which belongs to Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN).
Overal, iMENTORS has mapped 23 individual NRENs, 13 of which are members of Ubuntu Alliance, 6 WACREN members and 4 ASREN members. Check out our map!
The iMENTORS project is in the process of mapping e-infrastructure data across the Sub-Sahara African region. Data captured by iMENTORS aims to support bi-regional research cooperation through interactive information search tools. Check out our map!
Athina Vrakatseli, project Dissemination and Sustainability leader and Head of Policy Development Unit at Gov2u, was present at ICRI 2014. The 2nd International Conference on Research Infrastructures (2-4 April 2014 - Megaron Athens International Conference Centre) managed to highlight how global research infrastructures can respond to the grand challenges that the world is facing today, what lessons have been learned from the past, and what the priorities and directions are for the future.
“Plenary Session 1: Research Infrastructures for Global Challenges” set the tone for the whole conference while the other sessions discussed specific examples of challenges that need to be tackled for both single-site and distributed global facilities.
Research Infrastructures (RIs) play an increasingly central role in the advancement of scientific and technological knowledge. They are key instruments in bringing together a wide diversity of stakeholders to look for solutions to many of the challenges society is facing today. “We need intelligent openness”, said Geoffrey Boulton, Regius professor of Geology, University of Edinburgh, The Royal Society, UK.
Have you ever needed to transfer large amounts of data between different distributed computing infrastructure (DCI) storage resources? This is necessary if, for example, an experiment runs on an infrastructure that is different from the one where the data is stored. In such cases, the data needs to be transferred rapidly from the original storage location to the storage location of the compute resource.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 313203 
