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.
Why should African countries invest in developing e-Infrastructures in Africa? The EC’s 2007 Green Paper “The European Research Area: New Perspectives” points out that investing in e-Infrastructures can have significant benefits to a country, as it can enable the long-term sustainability of e-Infrastructures, as well as facilitate both industry involvement and the added-value to society that comes with the technology mix, the diversity of users and the local economic and social conditions. Accordingly, the eI4Africa project brings forward a set of recommendations and guidelines to developers and/or policy makers in Africa addressing the following four topics:
The above findings are presented in more detail in D3.2 ‘Recommendations for African e-Infrastructure development’ and can be discussed by emailing the project partnership at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
The next e-IRG open workshop will take place in Rome, Italy, under under the auspices of the Italian Presidency of the European Union. The event is planned from Monday 10 November 2014 at 11:00 to Tuesday 11 November 2014 at 13:00.
The opening session will include keynotes by the EC and ESFRI. The three plenary tracks are:
1. e-Infrastructure needs of the FET Flagship Initiatives in particular the Human Brain Project and the Graphene Flagship.
2. e-Infrastructure needs of ESFRI projects with examples from projects in ESFRI’s prioritisation list.
3. e-Methods addressing topics on methods and software in data management and exascale computing.
Each track will include a panel discussion providing ample opportunity for interaction with the audience. The event is open to all e-Infrastructure users, providers and policy makers. The preliminary programme of the workshop, registration and practical information can be found here.
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.
Muscat, Oman, December 10th – 11th, 2014
Under the Patronage of His Highness Sayyid Taimur Bin As’ad Al Said,the Arab States Research and Education Network – ASREN, is happy to announce its fourth annual event “4th International Platform on Integrating Arab e-Infrastructure in a Global Environment - e-AGE 2014” which will take place in 10-11 December 2014 in Muscat Oman. The platform will be hosted by The Research Council (TRC)of Oman.
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.
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.
The first of a series of e-infrastructure workshops were held from 16-20 June, in Sofia, Bulgaria, targeting countries in the Eastern Partnership region specifically. Almost 50 people from universities, libraries and NRENs (national research and education networks) from ten Partnership and other Eastern European countries participated. Further workshops will follow later in the year.
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 Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN) is happy to announce its fourth annual event “4thInternational Platform on Integrating Arab e-Infrastructure in a Global Environment – e-AGE 2014” that will take place on 10-11 December 2014 at Grand Hyatt Hotel, in Muscat, Oman. The platform will be hosted by The Research Council (TRC) of Oman and it will be held under the Patronage of His Highness Sayyid Taimur Bin As’ad Al Said.
Louis Papaemmanuel, Project Director of iMENTORS, SU, will present iMENTORS at the IST-Africa Conference during Session 8d: eInfrastructures (Thursday, May 08, 2014). He will explain how using iMENTORS and open aid data enhances the coherence of international aid. IST-Africa 2014 is taking place in Mauritius (06 - 09 May) and is the ninth in an annual series of Ministerial Level Technology Research Conferences.
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.
The next e-IRG Workshop under the Greek EU Presidency of the European Union will take place in Athens, Greece from Monday 9th until Tuesday 10th of June.
-- Registration is now open! --
The workshop will address important topics related to the e-Infrastructure Commons, data management, user aspects, and future e-Infrastructures.
The keynote in the opening session will be on the e-Infrastructure policy of the European Commission. The four plenary tracks are:
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.
Athina Vrakatseli, project Dissemination and Sustainability leader and Head of Policy Development Unit at Gov2u,will be present at ICRI 2014. The 2nd International Conference on Research Infrastructures (2-4 April 2014 - Megaron Athens International Conference Centre) offers a high level international forum where key stakeholders can meet, discuss and contribute to bringing forward global issues related to Research Infrastructures. Co-organised by the European Commission and the Greek EU Presidency of the European Union, it will take forward the recommendations of ICRI 2012, which took place in Denmark and the 3rd EU-Australia Research Infrastructure workshop that took place in Canberra in November 2013.
Image courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The conference is expected to attract more than 700 international participants during three days and will include an exhibition of demonstrations and videos of international research infrastructure projects. It will include intense deliberations, discussions and exchange of knowledge, opinions and ideas among the leading people in RI development today around the globe! And in just the right place: Greece, where science and research were raised to one of humanities most prominent and valuable pursuits!
The Summary Report of e-AGE 2013 is now available for consultation. e-AGE 2013 – 3rd “International Platform on Integrating Arab e-Infrastructure in a Global Environment” - was held on December 12-13, 2014 in Tunis, Tunisia under the patronage of His Excellency the Minister of Higher and Scientific Research of Tunisia and alongside the 5th annual meeting of the Arab Organization for Quality Assurance in Education (AROQA). The event attracted more than 80 high-profile participants from over 30 countries spanning all world regions.
iMENTORS is mapping terrestrial networks in Sub-Saharan Africa. The goal is to identify areas on the map underserved by network operators and providers. These areas also represent good opportunities for governments and the private sector to invest in e-infrastructure projects.
Image courtesy of ddpavumba / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Louis Papaemmanuel, Director of the iMENTORS project was invited to speak at the Headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, in the framework of the AUC Internet/ICT Week held on Dec. 2-6 2013. The week is part of a series of events organised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) / African Union (AU).
Image courtesy of Kookkai_nak at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
We are working on streamlining the user interaction process of the "what-if" analysis functionality, which allows investigating effects of contextual factors on ICT4D projects. We aim to make the developed simulation tool easy to comprehend and to use.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
This project has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 313203 
