Final Report Summary - INARMERA-ICT (INTEGRATING ARMENIA INTO ERA: INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES)
Executive Summary:
The INARMERA-ICT Project aims at reinforcing cooperation capacity of the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems (IIAP) by the set of actions to improve its research activities in the areas of ICT thematic priorities of EC FP. Participation of IIAP in ERA-WIDE Call was endorsed by the Armenian Government due to an important role it assigned to the Institute in the process of country’s transition to innovative knowledge-based economy, due to its on-going active participation in the FP, and the responsibility the Institute bears in the development of ICT in Armenia and in the region as a whole. This process of reinforcing cooperation capacity of IIAP by implementing support actions on three levels: educational, research, analysis and policy.
Project Context and Objectives:
Objectives
The overall aim of reinforcing the cooperation capacity of IIAP in Armenia has been to implement support actions on three levels, each of them corresponding to a specific project objective:
1.Educational level: To deploy a set of supporting activities to enable development of training modules to build competency and facilitate the participation of IIAP in Framework Programmes.
2. Research level: To deploy a set of supporting activities to intensify contacts between IIAP and the research organisations in the Members States and Associated Countries to enable joint preparation of FP projects.
3. Analysis and Policy level: To deploy a set of supporting activities to enable development of a strategy for IIAP to increase its scale, and in particular its regional coverage, to improve responses to the socio-economic needs of Armenia and neighbouring Georgia.
Expected results
• Contribution to RTD capacity building and management in Armenia.
• Enhanced participation of Armenia in Horizon2020.
• Increased visibility and scope (regional coverage, subjects, and activities) of IIAP with increased linkage with the economic and social environment.
• Networking with research centres in Member States or Associated Countries (mobilizing the human and material resources existing in ICT, disseminating scientific information as well as the results of research, facilitating communication between the centres having similar scientific interests).
• Increased job opportunities that encourage gender equality in Armenia, in particular for young scientists (measures to avoid “brain drain” phenomena: better career opportunities, better work conditions, access to research infrastructures).
The Work Performed and Main Results Achieved
In educational level training modules, covering all relevant topics of Horizon2020, have been developed to further build IIAP’s competency in ICT and facilitate its participation in Horizon2020, as well as building skills needed for the successful participation. A number of training sessions have been organized in Yerevan, such as the “Horizon 2020 Eastern Partnership (EaP) Information Day - Research & Innovation in ICT” (September 2013, Yerevan) workshop organized in collaboration with the European Commission – DG CONNECT and the National Academy of Sciences of Republic of Armenia. A series of professional trainings and a summer school on Modern Information and Communication Technology have been organized in Yerevan, with trainers from IRIT and SZTAKI teams. A number of research seminars/workshops and lectures have been organized at IIAP on a regular basis with active participation of young researchers.
In research level a joint international virtual laboratory has been established by IIAP, IRIT and SZTAKI to explore potential future collaboration in the fields of high-performance computing and computational science. Different new EU proposals (SWM, MEGAN, MATH-GEAR, DISC, MOCA and others) have been prepared and submitted with the participation of the project partners. This impressive collection not only reflects the enormous investment in the implementation of these proposals, it also encompasses a wide range of highly valuable experiences, which can be reused in the future. INARMERA-ICT keeps strong relations with other organizations and projects carried out by IIAP. Various forms and channels of scientific collaboration have been explored, participation in conferences and workshops organized and sample means of international cooperation were tested.
In policy level the final strategic plan of IIAP for 2015-2020 has been developed to strengthen IIAP’s reputation as a regional ICT leading center and turning it into a committed partner in European programmes. Comprehensive report in English and Armenian summarizing the results of research assessment (self and external evaluation) of IIAP has been prepared and distributed. Key indicators have been developed based on quantitative and progressive indicators of AERES providing information on various aspects of the research production.
Significant results
WP2: Trainings
• Horizon2020 and FP7 Trainings: Training modules have been developed to further build IIAP’s competency in ICT and facilitated its participation in all relevant topics of Horizon2020. The training sessions were devoted to polishing the skills, writing better proposals, broadening contacts and networking, and to better understanding of the EU project management.
• Professional Training: In order to further build the competency of IIAP researchers, series of professional trainings were organized in Europe and in Armenia. For this purpose, leading experts from IRIT and SZTAKI gave lectures in Armenia for IIAP scientists on the latest achievements and methodologies in ICT. Both young scientists and the leading IIAP researchers had visits and trainings in France and Hungary under the guidance of the scientists from IRIT and SZTAKI. Tutorials were prepared and introduced during the summer school organized in Armenia, covering several scientific disciplines of mutual interest. It is planned to transform the current professional training materials to more efficient e-learning materials using state-of-the-art e-learning platforms, such as ILIAS.
WP3: Networking and Dissemination
The Networking and Dissemination Plan has been developed in order to guide IIAP in its networking with EU and regional research centres, thus allowing dissemination of scientific information, identification of partners and setting up joint experiments, also in the frame of new EU projects. Various forms and channels of scientific collaboration have been explored, participation in conferences and workshops organized and sample means of international cooperation were tested. Comprehensive reports were prepared to outline the key issues and results of networking and dissemination activities in Armenia and in Europe. Awareness of the INARMERA-ICT project was extended at various international events and conferences by distributing dissemination material about IIAP and the project. Dissemination material including newsletters, leaflets, project presentations, pilot project proposals, etc. was prepared and distributed during such meetings with potential partners.
WP4: Pilot Projects
The main result achieved is the real size research cooperation established between the members and departments of participating organizations. All IIAP Departments (after its restructuring in 2014) were involved in INARMERA-ICT cooperation through PPs. Minimally 2-3 proposal submissions were completed by each of the initial 4 PPs, and some of these proposals were accepted, including 2 FP7, 1 Horizon2020, 2 TEMPUS, several SCS Armenia and other Grants. These PPs helped with effective restructuring of IIAP that today consists of 4 research (R&D) departments, and 5 engineering (R&I) centers. Research portfolio at IIAP was enlarged and further developed in accordance with standards and requirements of International Programs. A large number of ROs (ICT in general and H2020) are addressed through the PP and PS (HPC, Security, Cognitive systems, PHC, NLP, BDR&I). A set of FP7 and other proposals have been prepared with participation and even with coordination by representatives of IIAP with support from IRIT, SZTAKI and EUROTEX.
WP5: Strategy and Recommendations
The Strategic Plan for 2015-2020 of IIAP has been developed that allows IIAP to increase its regional coverage and to improve responses to the socio-economic needs of Armenia and of the region. The strategic plan is based on the research assessment and self evaluation of IIAP to identify the strongest and weakest sides of IIAP, and satisfies the AERES and domestic criteria. The key indicators have been developed to provide information on various aspects of the research production. A Comprehensive report summarizing the results of research assessment of IIAP has been prepared in English and Armenian, and distributed to the EC covering the R&D cooperation with Armenia and the ways to increase its efficiency.
Project Results:
In the following pages, the list of main achievements of the project is reported.
Training
Trainings on EU FP for Research and Innovation
The first training session, with participation of 12 researchers of IIAP, took place in Armenia on 7-12 March 2012, covering the following topics: FP7 in brief, proposals and projects in FP7, how to submit a proposal, and aspects of the ICT programme.
The next training sessions took place in Yerevan, in January-February 2013, covering the following topics: applying for grants, evaluating proposals, administration of evaluation process for EU FP7, and preparation and testing EU FP7 proposal.
With a group of partners, IIAP NAS RA scientists selected a proper Call for Proposals (FP7-ICT-2013-11) and initiated discussions, preparation, and a formal submission through the EU’s Participants Portal of a STREP (Small and Medium Scale Focused Research Projects) proposal entitled “Smart Municipal Water Management Arrangements” (SWM HORIZON).
The training focused on the following aspects of the proposal writing:
• Support to the coordinator (IIAP) in the set up of the consortium;
• Communication tools;
• The relevance of the project objectives to the objectives of the Call;
• The right choice of deliverables, their types and numbers;
• Project management tools;
• The importance of identifying and properly describing the right impact;
• Writing a Successful Proposal;
• Strategies for Disseminating Research Projects Results;
• Financial and Legal Aspects in FP7: from the Project Management to the Reporting;
• The Consortium Agreement: Project Administration, Financial Management and IPR in FP7.
In the view of FP7 reaching its end soon and considering the initiation of Armenia’s accession into the new FP HORIZON 2020 (starting January 2014), series of trainings were organized for the scientists of IIAP NAS RA starting April 2013.
During the initial training. attended by 23 IIAP NAS RA researchers, following topics were covered:
• The current status of Armenia in FP7 and the results of its participation compared with other Eastern Partnership Countries (Moldova, Georgia, etc.),
• The advantages of Armenia’s association to H2020 compared with the current status of the International Partnership Country,
• Detailed Review of Horizon 2020 (PP Presentation) with accent on:
- Legal framework, discussions in the European Parliament,
- Priorities, Proposed distribution of Funds between different programmes,
- Proposed simplifications (compared with FP7 rules),
- Questions and answers.
The next training session, attended by 24 IIAP NAS RA researchers, was devoted to the acquisition of practical knowledge in the application to various EU calls for proposals. Students were given the task of submitting applications to the call MARIE CURIE INTERNATIONAL INCOMING FELLOWSHIPS published on 14 March 2013. The relevant Work Programme and the Guide for Applicants were presented to the students.
Horizon2020 Seminars Series were conducted for IIAP young researchers every Thursday in the period of August-December, 2013. Structure, scope and schedule of those seminars were discussed and developed. Information regarding the seminar series was disseminated among the young researchers of IIAP.
Attendance of IIAP young scientists was arranged in the “Horizon 2020 Eastern Partnership (EaP) Information Day - Research & Innovation in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)”, organized by the European Commission– DG CONNECT, the National Academy of Sciences of Republic of Armenia, IIAP (within its CSIT2013 Conference), the FP7 NCP’s Office in Armenia and the FP7 PICTURE project. The event took place on September 26, 2013 in Yerevan, Armenia at the following locations: National Academy of Sciences of Armenia; Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems Yerevan; Matenadaran Conference Hall.
A concluding training session on the subject of the EU FP for Research and Innovation was conducted in October 2013 and a comprehensive Guide to Horizon 2020 Work Programme was finalized.
A number of young scientists of IIAP participated in a webinar “Introducing Horizon 2020” in December 2013, which was conducted live online by a Hungarian company Europa Media Trainings.
In January 2014, a number of young scientists of IIAP participated in a web-streamed training, organized by The European Commission (DG EAC, Marie Curie Unit) in collaboration with the Research Executive Agency (REA). The training was focused on the two 2014 calls ITN (Innovative Training Networks) and RISE (Research and Innovation Staff Exchange) under the new Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions.
A two-day training on Horizon2020 was conducted as part of the Summer School on Information and Communication Technology organized by IIAP in Yerevan in the frame of the INARMERA-ICT project.
A training workshop was organized by IIAP and the East HORIZON project (Fostering Dialog and Cooperation between the EU and EECA in the Horizon2020 Perspective) at IIAP. Participants included the Coordinator of the East HORIZON project, PLANET S.A. (Greece) and project partner ENGINEERING – INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA SPA (Italy). Among other topics, details of proposal writing in Horizon2020 framework were discussed in great detail.
A seminar was organized as part of the Horizon2020 Trainings series, to review and discuss all relevant current and upcoming Horizon2020 calls on December 16th. Substantially all centers and departments of IIAP were represented during this seminar, while specifics of 39 calls were discussed in depth, to ensure that all participants have detailed information to disseminate further among their colleagues within their respective departments and centers.
Professional Trainings
Periodical research and professional trainings, as well as business trips, were organized throughout the life of the project. These activities were aimed at increasing the mobility of young IIAP researchers and included both short-term trainings and long-term research contracts at one of the partners’ facilities.
Professional Training events in Armenia
A series of professional trainings was organized in Yerevan throughout 2013, with trainers from IRIT and SZTAKI teams. The courses planned for training included Services Provided by Cloud Computing, Big Data and Data Mining, Network Security Audit, Real time Signal Processing, and Parallel Programming on GPU. A number of research seminars/workshops and lectures were organized at IIAP on a regular basis with the participation of young researchers. The topics covered the most current issues in the field and were in line with the research interests of IIAP.
All-day tutorials were organized by the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems (IIAP) in conjunction with the CSIT'2013 conference within the INARMERA-ICT Project. Tutorials took place on the premises of IIAP on the following dates:
• Introduction to Big Data (September 24, 2013), Presenters: Léa Laporte, Ricardo Barros Sampaio, under the supervision of Bernard Dousset, Prof. Josiane Mothe (IRIT, France);
• High Performance Computing (September 25, 2013), Presenters: Vladimir Gaiduchok, Ivan Gankevich (Saint Petersburg State University, Russia)
• Management Infrastructure of a Software as a Service (September 26, 2013), Presenter: Prof. Georges Da Costa (IRIT, France)
• Model-based Software Development, Presenter: Prof. Enn Tyugu (Estonia).
The Summer School on current issues in ICT was organized by IIAP in Yerevan in September, 2014 as a part of the INARMERA-ICT project. Following events and activities took place during the Summer School as part of Professional Training for IIAP staff:
• Developing e-Learning Training Materials in the ILIAS LCMS System. Presenters: Mr. Miklos Veres and Dr. Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI)
• Introduction to Mobile Application Development for iOS Platform. Presenters: Mr. Gabor Kaposi and Dr. Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI)
• Introduction to Ultrasound Medical Imaging. Presenter: Dr. Adrian Basarab (IRIT)
• Addressing Security Issues in Cloud Computing. Presenter: Dr. Carlos Aguilar (IRIT)
• Resource Management in Clouds. Presenter: Mr. Daniel Hagimont (IRIT)
• VHDL Language and FPGA Programming. Presenter: Dr. Ronan Guivarch (France)
• Testing the GUIDE@HAND Yerevan Mobile Application: Presenter: Mr.Miklos Veres (SZTAKI), Mr .Gabor Kaposi (Hungary), Dr. Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI)
Below is given brief information about the training events held in IIAP:
• Introduction to big data: Big data and some of the related challenges, main data analysis methods and the context in which they can be applied, Léa Laporte, Ricardo Barros Sampaio (IRIT), September 24, 2013
• High performance computing: Introduction to computer clusters, PBS basics, comparison with other approaches, Optimization questions for real scientific applications, Vladimir Gaiduchok, Ivan Gankevich (Saint Petersburg State University, Russia), September 25, 2013
• Management infrastructure of a software as a service: Introduction (definition, real case examples), generic methodology and more precise methodology for Open Nebula middleware, example of autonomous management of a three-tier application (web server-like), Georges Da Costa (IRIT), September 26, 2013
• Model-based software development: Using knowledge in model-based SW development, Enn Tyugu (Estonia), September 23, 2013
• Developing e-learning training materials in the ILIAS LCMS system: To enable students to create and maintain e-learning training materials in the framework of the ILIAS open source learning content management system, Miklos Veres, Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI), September 15-18, 2014
• Introduction to mobile application development for iOS platform: Basic information for beginners on how to design, implement and test applications for Apple mobile devices, Gabor Kaposi and Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI), September 15-18, 2014
• Introduction to ultrasound medical imaging: Basics of ultrasound image formation, as well as two signal and image processing related applications adapted to ultrasound imaging, Adrian Basarab (IRIT), September 15, 2014
• Addressing security issues in cloud computing: Abstract of addressing security issues in Cloud Computing, abstract of developing high performance cryptographic applications, Carlos Aguilar (IRIT), September 16, 2014
• Resource management in clouds: Dynamic processor frequency scaling, server consolidation and dynamic scalability in multitier applications, Daniel Hagimont (IRIT), September 16-18, 2014
• VHDL language and FPGA programming: VHDL Main concepts and instructions of the language, Ronan Guivarch (IRIT), September 17, 2014
• Testing the guide@ hand Yerevan mobile application: Software development and illustrations of guide@ hand Yerevan mobile application, Miklos Veres, Gabor Kaposi, Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI), September 20, 2014
Professional Training events in Europe
According to the professional training plan, 3 young researchers of IIAP were trained in Europe in May 2012, Nov.-Dec. 2012, and April 2013, in Paris at INRIA; in Leuven at University of Leuven; and in Geneva at University of Geneva.
6 leading researchers of IIAP participated in various scientific workshops and conferences in Europe in 2013. In addition to the scientific interests, the aims of visits were to participate in discussions of joint research possibilities, in preparation of new joint projects with colleagues from France, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and Georgia.
A Series of trainings took place in Kiev in 2013. Though outside the European Union, it was nevertheless an example of a typical successful ICT professional training of European level. The Kiev event consisted of 3 parts:
• CEENGINE (Central and Eastern European Networking Engine, FP7 Research Infrastructures) NRENs Users Workshop, 22nd May 2013,
• Horizon 2020 Eastern Partnership (EaP) Information Day Research & Innovation in Information and Communication Technologies, 23rd May 2013
• PICTURE (Policy dialogue in ICT to an Upper level for Reinforced EU-EECA Cooperation) project Workshop on “Content technologies and information management”, 24th May 2013.
The Armenian team was formed with an active support of IIAP and included 10 participants.
Meetings between the young scientists of IIAP and the IRIT team took place in November, 2014. The meetings were facilitated by UPS - IRIT and took place in Toulouse, France as part of the Professional Trainings program. Teams from SEPIA (Système d’exploitation, systems répartis, de l’intergiciel à l’architecture), CI (Traitement et Compréhension d’Images) and IRT (Ingénierie Réseaux et Télécommunications) departments of IRIT took part in the seminars. As a result of these meetings and seminars, following areas for potential interdepartmental cooperation were identified:
• Collaboration on the subject of new dynamic optimal distribution algorithms of the user tasks aiming to minimization of energy consumption and improvement of performance on clouds with SEPIA;
• Collaboration on the subject of the Ill-posed inverse problems in medical imaging with TCI;
• Collaboration on the subject of Cryptanalysis of lattice-based FHE schemes; Security proofs for alternative noise distributions in public key cryptosystems, and Fast polynomial operations (FFT and noise generation) in the lattice-cryptography setting with IRT;
• Collaboration on the subject of possibilities to implement the TUNE Package on the Armenian infrastructure, and investigation and implementation of the energy consumption software package (for power consumption monitoring) with SEPIA.
It was further agreed to work on joint articles on the subjects of a series of simulations using the memory of Infiniband available in Armenia and on Molecular Dynamics, Weather Forecasting and Satellite Image Processing scientific domains.
Meetings between the young scientists of IIAP and the SZTAKI team took place in January 2015. The meetings were facilitated by SZTAKI and took place in Budapest, Hungary as part of the Professional Trainings program. SZTAKI teams from Research Group of Operations Research and Decision Systems, Department of Network Security and Internet Technologies, and 3D Internet-based Control and Communications Research Laboratory took part in the seminars. As a result of these meetings and seminars, it was agreed to develop an interdepartmental cooperation in the following areas:
• Operations Research and Decision Making Theory;
• Design and cryptanalysis of block ciphers, Development of new, efficient public key encryption algorithm and digital signature, Research on problems connected with security of cloud computing, in particular related to the development of homomorphic encryption methods;
• Statistical analysis of medical data;
• A piece selection problem that arises, when layered video content is streaming over peer-to-peer networks;
• A hands gestures recognition problem;
• Development and implementation of identity-based encryption scheme based on symmetric cryptography with applications in DRM, key management, secure E-mail infrastructure and cloud computing;
• Reconstruction of 3D models of real world objects in real time, using different types of input devices, such as RGB cameras, 3D sensors, etc.
Long-term cooperation in the areas indicated above is expected, with strong prospects of publishing joint articles and participation in future conferences, including the upcoming CSIT-2015, which is being organized by IIAP in Yerevan in the fall of 2015. Potential participation in the upcoming relevant Horizon2020 projects is also expected and encouraged by all project partners.
Below it is given the list of professional training meetings:
1. Training of IIAP young specialists at the INRIA Paris May, 2012
2. Training of IIAP young specialists at the University of Leuven Leuven Nov.-Dec. 2012
3. Training of IIAP young specialists at the University of Geneva Geneva April, 2013
4. Visit of specialists from IRIT and SZTAKI to IIAP and training of IIAP young specialists Yerevan September, 2014
5. Training of IIAP young scientists at IRIT Toulouse November, 2014
6. Training of IIAP young scientists at SZTAKI Budapest January, 2015
Networking and Dissemination
The project partners disseminated the project materials at 9 events in Europe, 10 events in Armenia and 1 event in the USA. The events in Europe included both scientific conferences and workshops related to ICT and information days on preparing proposals, sharing best practices and finding project partners. The detailed list of the events can be found in the next section.
The events in Armenia included scientific conferences and events related to proposal preparation. Professional ICT lectures, Framework Program trainings and summer schools were also organized and the project was presented even at an ITC related expo. Most of the events organised in Armenia were of international nature and they could be used for establishing contacts with partners from other countries. Several events were organized by IIAP in Armenia and some of them also in Europe, which offered more opportunities for dissemination. For example CSIT is an international conference series held in Yerevan, where a whole workshop was organized to present the project in 2013.
The different types of events were suitable to meet people from different countries and from different domains of the society, e.g. scientific (academia, education), private (industry, commerce, service providers), public (local and domestic governments, research associations) and share the project materials with them.
The project established liaison with 7 other projects. This kind of dissemination covers partners from EU countries, the Black-Sea region and Switzerland. The projects are related to grid technology, high-performance computing, cloud computing, other communication technologies, etc. and also included networking associations and ICT policy forming co-operations. Liaison is an especially efficient way of project dissemination because it can be built on existing collaboration.
The list below it is given the HORIZON2020 calls proposals submitted with the participation of IIAP in period of 2012-2014
1 GN3+ (Multi-gigabit European research and education network and associated services, FP7 2013) - accepted
2 Smart Municipal Water Management Arrangements, FP7-ICT-2013-11 - rejected
3 MATH-GEAR (Modernization of Mathematics and Statistics curricula for Engineering and Natural Sciences studies in Georgian and Armenian Universities by introducing modern educational technologies, TEMPUS 2014) - accepted
4 DELPHUS (Development of E-Learning Promoted Higher Education User Services, TEMPUS 2014) - rejected
5 Off-site Radiological Emergency Management eInfrastructure on Armenia Nuclear Power Plant, NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme - under review
6 Development of Optimized Scientific Gateways based on Grid and Cloud Services, Bi-lateral CNRS - under review
7 Experimental Deployment of an Integrated Grid and Cloud Enabled Environment in BSEC Countries on the Base of g-Eclipse, BSEC (Black Sea Economic Cooperation) - accepted
8 VRE-3C (VRE - Complex Collaborative Computing, H2020-EINFRA-2015-1 ) - under review
9 VI-SEEM (VRE for regional Interdisciplinary communities in Southeast Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, H2020-EINFRA-2015-1) - under review
10 COVER (Collaborative Virtual Environments for Research, H2020-EINFRA-2015-1) - under review
11 RESINFRA (Supporting Multi - Lateral Cooperation between Research Infrastructures in European Neighborhood Policy and Western Balkan Countries with Research Infrastructures of Pan – European Interest, INFRASUPP 6) - rejected
12 DISC (Distributed ICT-based infrastructures and Services tackling societal Challenges, Marie-Sklodowska Curie – RISE) - rejected
13 EAST-HORIZON (Fostering Dialogue and Cooperation between the EU and EECA in the HORIZON 2020 perspective, FP7-ICT-2013-10) - accepted
14 EECA-2-HORIZON (Bringing the EU-EECA cooperation and policy dialogue in ICT in the HORIZON 2020 era, FP7-ICT-2013-10) - accepted
15 EU-BS AMR-NET (EU-Black Sea network to combat antimicrobial resistance, H2020-INT-INCO-2014) - rejected
16 MOCA (Measurable Obscurity in Computational Assets, H2020-FETOPEN-2014-201 5-RIA) - rejected
17 MEGAN (Mathematical Enhancement of Green Autonomous Networking, BMBF, Germany and SCS MES of Armenia) - accepted
INARMERA-ICT relations with other projects orginized and carried out by IIAP
• EU FP7 EGI-InSPIRE project (Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe) started on 1 May 2010. It is a collaborative effort involving more than 50 institutions in over 40 countries. Its mission is to establish a sustainable European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGI-InSPIRE is ideally placed to join various components of the new Distributed Computing Infrastructures such as clouds, supercomputing networks and desktop grids, for the benefit of user communities within the European Research Area.
• EU FP7 HP-SEE (High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for South East Europe’s Research Communities): HP-SEE links existing and upcoming HPC facilities in South East Europe in a common infrastructure, and it will provide operational solutions for it. As a complementary action, the project will establish and maintain a GÉANT link for Southern Caucasus.
• EU FP7 PICTURE (Policy dialogue in ICT to an Upper level for Reinforced EU-EECA Cooperation) is a support action project aimed at supporting policy dialogue between the European Union and Eastern Europe - Central Asia (EECA) countries and at fostering collaboration opportunities with EECA countries organizations in collaborative ICT R&D both under FP7 and under national/regional EECA programs.
• EU FP7 GN3+ and GN4: The vision of GN4 is to become the unified European Communications Commons, driving knowledge creation, innovation and learning by connecting and empowering research and education communities within Europe and, as the global hub for research networking excellence, elsewhere in other partner regions.
• EU FP7 CEENGINE (Central and Eastern European Networking Association) project aims at enforcing ad stimulating Central and Eastern European Association activities related to incubation and development of National Research and Education Networks in Central, Eastern, Southern Europe and Central Asia.
• Black Sea Economic Cooperation G-ECLIPSE Project, which is designed to deploy a regional integrated Grid and Cloud enabled environment based on Eclipse for the South East Europe including Romania, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. Users will access the resources with g-Eclipse in an easy and uniform way, instead of having to use application specific portals or specific Grid consoles. The proposed infrastructure will be used for further regional (environment, meteorology, seismology, astrophysics) projects.
• Swiss National Science Foundation ARPEGEO project, which is designed to establish a tripartite institutional partnership between Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva (ISE/UNIGE), the Center for Ecological-Noosphere Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (CENS), and the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (IIAP). The present Institutional Partnership project aims at building capacities in two leading Armenia Institutions in regard to the management, processing, and sharing of geospatial data in the environmental domain.
• EU FP7 PICTURE (Policy dialogue in ICT to an Upper level for Reinforced EU-EECA Cooperation) is a support action project aimed at supporting policy dialogue between the European Union and Eastern Europe - Central Asia (EECA) countries and at fostering collaboration opportunities with EECA countries organizations in collaborative ICT R&D both under FP7 and under national/regional EECA programs (Memorandum of understanding is signed).
Pilot Projects
It is well known that International Research Programmes reinforce science and technologies through critical mass integration, and technology transfer between the collaborating partner teams, and the educational component, synergies, and market share are additional factors of initiation and implementation of new research projects. Pilot projects are important and flexible means of reduction the risks in developing new research topics and learning more about the organizational and technical issues associated with the deployment of similar large scale engineering projects. A successful pilot project is also an effective instrument of building collaborative links and new practices to member teams of INARMERA-ICT consortium. The objective of WP4 “Pilot Projects” has been to carry out the 4 predefined PPs’ that address the ICT research priorities of Armenia for 2010-2015. The initial list of priorities was recommended by the FP7 Support Action Projects cluster (EXTEND, SCUBE, ISTOK-SOYUZ, IDEALIST) with the recommendations of ICT Experts from Armenia. The final determined priorities are in terms of Horizon2020 ICT Work Programme. The work done passed through the Tasks of PP Deployments and of PP Analysis.
PP1 on High performance computation and its applications
Initially the PP1 is titled as “Establishment of a joint virtual regional laboratory on scientific computations”. At the origins of INARMERA-ICT IIAP aimed just to set up a regional HPC Laboratory by PP1. The consortium was supposed to include IIAP, IRIT, SZTAKI, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (Oxfordshire, UK), National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (Bucharest, Romania), and Institute of Computational Mathematics, Georgian Technical University (Tbilisi, Georgia). PP1 was investigated intensively, presented its achievements in 19th September 2013 in a form of the Workshop “Scientific Computing Challenges”. Workshop invited as guests leading HPC scientists Prof. Jack Dongara (University of Tennessee, USA) and Dr. Per Oster (IT Center for Science, Finland). Workshop was attended by almost 70 specialists from Armenia, Georgia, Russia and several EU countries. INARMERA-ICT strategic position on HPC in Armenia was presented by its Coordinator Prof. Yuri Shoukourian in presentation “EU FP7 INARMERA-ICT: Straightening Scientific Computing Capacity in Armenia”. Starting with a review of existing HPC resources in Armenia, Prof. Shoukourian formed the vision that HPC environment can be the core of diverse state and societal programmes including economy, environment and emergencies, water management and weather forecast, even natural language processing, digital preservation and other tasks. He also mentioned that the other Pilot Projects at INARMERA-ICT can be viewed as individual tracks under the enlarged PP1 as the HPC environment at the centre. Adoption of this idea and the further actions in this line are presented by the 2 signed documents:
• Memorandum of Understanding between INARMERA-ICT partners: UPS, CNRS, SZTAKI and IIAP with the objective: expressing an intention to explore potential future collaboration between the Participants in the fields of high-performance computing and computational science.
• Memorandum on Cooperation “Establishment of Super-computational Centre in Armenia” between the National Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Education and Science of RA, the Ministry of Economy of RA, and the Ministry of Emergency Situations of RA.
The text below lists several particular actions under the PP1.
• Examples of Training for Pilots type activities (TEMPUS)
o MATH-GEAR Modernization of Mathematics and Statistics curricula for Engineering and Natural Sciences studies in Georgian and Armenian Universities by introducing modern educational technologies (MATH-GEAR, Coordinator - Universität des Saarlandes, Germany)
o DELPHUS Development of E-Learning Promoted Higher Education User Services (DELPHUS, Coordinator University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
• Smart Municipal Water Management Arrangements
The INARMERA-ICT face-to-face meeting in Toulouse in December 2012 determined that ICT Call 10 provides less opportunity for proposal preparations on HPC. Call 11 was used to submit the proposal on this Pilot topic, but the same Call 10 was used for other submissions such as Support Actions and INCO R&I receiving the projects EAST-HORIZON and EECA-2-Horizon. In Toulouse meeting a valuable input was presentations “DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) management in a virtualized Environment” by Christine Mayap Kamga, and Daniel Hagimont, and “Elastic resource management in a hosting center” by Giang Son Tran, and Daniel Hagimont. Valuable information exchange between the teams includes partner searches such as the http://ideal-ist.eu/ps-hu-79670 about the Media Cloud initiative.
In this way the PP1 activities lead to the SWM Horizon (Smart Municipal Water Management Arrangement) proposal, that was prepared and submitted by the initiative of IIAP team. Partner teams at the Toulouse meeting discussed the initial proposal idea. After Toulouse meeting a Partner Search was compiled and distributed through the IDEALIST project channel http://ideal-ist.eu/ps-am-86781 The proposed idea, very quickly, gained the IDEALIST Quality Label. Over 70 expressions of interest (EOI) were received. Politecnico di Milano, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Italy; EMAYA S.A. Water Supply Company, Spain; and Scientia Scripta, Industry – SME, UK; were invited to the Consortium. IIAP recommended Dr. Tigran Kalantaryan to lead the SWM research team. The team was enlarged also by engineer Ashot Minassyan, representing Bitlis group (SME, Armenia). Dr Kalantaryan prepared the SWM proposal draft and participated in Idealist proposal check event for call FP7-ICT-2013-11 in 11/12 March in Budapest. IRIT decided the candidature of Prof. Marie-Pierre Gleizes to lead the team for SWM. Assistant Professor Frédéric Migeon and Assistant Professor Jean-Pierre Georgé are the basic members of the team. All the team was composed and supported by the IRIT Director Prof. Michel Daydé. The SZTAKI side provided a similar activity. With very enthusiastic effort of Prof. Janos Demetrovics and Dr. György Szántó the team was composed under the lead of Dr. Ákos Zarándy together with researchers Szabolcs Tőkés and László Orzó. On Friday, June 28, 2013 the team was communicated the result of SVM HORIZON, FP7-ICT-2013-11, Objective 6.3 - Evaluation Summary Report - SWM HORIZON (619900). The proposal was not approved for funding.
Next step in PP1 was the Workshop in Yerevan, 26th September 2013, in framework of the CSIT 2013 Conference http://www.csit.am This Workshop analyzed not only SWM HORIZON but also all other ideas and proposals that fit the PP1 Objective addressing the issues of energy minimization in distributed and cloud applications. The recent state in this part was formed during the Toulouse meeting in November 2014: Action Plan presented by Wahi Narsisian, Ph.D. Student, Scientific Computing Centre at the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems: Distributed Resource (Cluster, Grid, Cloud) management, deployment and Energy consumption issues. Federated cloud infrastructure deployment in Armenia and beyond. Uniting the distributed resources of four countries (Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Romania) into a single oZone dashboard.
• Development of scientific gateways to the user communities: www.blacksea-cloud.net
o H. Astsatryan, A. Hayrapetyan, W. Narsisian, V. Sahakyan, Yu. Shoukourian, G. Neagu, and A. Stanciu, Environmental Science Federated Cloud Platform in the BSEC Region, International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, vol. 1, no.1 pp. 1130-1133, January 2014, ISSN 2229-5518.
• Design a web portal to server a specific scientific communities: http://93.187.165.125/gisservices
o Hrachya Astsatryan, Wahi Narsisian, Andranik Hayrapetyan, Albert Saribekyan, Shushanik Asmaryan, Vahagn Muradyan, Yaniss Guigoz, Gregory Giuliani, Nicolas Ray, An Interoperable Web Portal for Parallel Geoprocessing of Satellite Image Indices, Springer Earth Science Informatics, 2014, DOI: 10.1007/s12145-014-0165-3.
• Deployment of Cloud Storage for research communities: Providing a cloud storage for the researchers based on Synnefo and Pithos+ and Ceph OSD storage, insuring the duplicate of the data to not have data loose, and minimizing the upload/Download speed because the operations are done within a same network.
PP1 Action plan for collaboration was developed at the following project meetings:
• On the 5th of November 2014 the SEPIA team has introduced several scientific posters related to their work, there was a deep discussion about several new ideas and activities related the Energy optimization and Cloud virtual machines migration.
• On the 6th of November 2014 in a private meeting with Dr. Daniel Hagimont and Dr. Georges Da-Costa, IIAP group presented the IIAP vision on common interest and the work that can be done with the teams jointly.
Daniel Hagimont recommended:
• To investigate the possibilities to implement the TUNE Package on the Armenian infrastructure (Daniel Hagimont – send the detailed documentation description of the package, IIAP – analyze and answer). TUNE is a autonomic management system for energy management, servers crash recovery, etc. developed by Dr. Hagimont's team. It uses a UML as description mechanism for different cases of failures, and the system will response to those failures by running an automated task for recovery from the console.
• Investigate memory ballooning technology for further discussions (IIAP). Ballooning is a memory reclamation technique used when a virtual machine is running low on memory so we can provide an extra memory from the host to this machine, taking into account that the host and the remaining machines will not be effected by this operation, this idea will be investigated by IIAP team, some experiments will be done and depending on the result there will be a deep discussion with SEPIA team.
• To prepare a joint article on the series of simulations using the memory of Infiniband available in Armenia (Daniel Hagimont – send detail available description of the technology, IIAP – analyse and answer). The memory allocation experiment will be done on a Linux cluster which has an Infiniband network interconnection, and a joint article will be written about it.
Georges Da-Costa recommended:
• Investigate and implement energy consumption software package (for power consumption monitoring) developed by IRIT (Georges Da Costa – send detail available description of the package, IIAP – analyze and implement). Using the mentioned package will give IIAP team a possibility to obtain the CPU power consumption, temperature from the command line, which will avoid the team from using UPS or power consumption tools.
• To prepare papers based on Molecular Dynamics, Weather Forecasting and Satellite Image Processing scientific domains based on DVFS after finalizing the previous point (IIAP – prepare the draft owner). Three different packages will be used in this experiment, The Weather Research & Forecasting Model (WRF), Gromacs (package to perform molecular dynamics) and GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System), different benchmarks will be done taken into account different situation (idle system, CPU frequency modified system).
• Investigate DVFS governor on the kernel level and conduct the same experiments, and make some comparison between the default governance and the suggested one (after the finalizing the previous point). The default DVFS governor based on Linux kernel will be used, taking into account different approach (Performance, Powersave and On Demand), then the suggested governor will be used and there will a benchmarking and a comparison between these two, and the identification of their advantages and disadvantages.
• Implement VMs migration in a new environment and make a comparison between the suggested environment and the new one, taking into account which one is more easy to configure, to have a migration and the management of VMs one (after the finalizing the previous point). VAGRANT will be used as a cloud infrastructure deployment tool, which is very light and fast, there will be some investigation about writing some code for making an automated migration for cloud virtual machines, then the comparison will be done between OpenNebula and VAGRANT.
2 more teams met in a similar meeting in November 2014.
Young scientist Vahagn Poghosyan represented IIAP team on Automata theory. IRIT was represented by SMAC (Systèmes Multi-Agents Coopératifs), and SEPIA (Système d’exploitation, systèmes répartis, de l’intergiciel à l’architecture) teams, partners: Marie-Pierre Gleize (Professor), Georges da Costa (Assistant Professor). The teams decided:
• To prepare a joint paper on the elaboration of new dynamic optimal distribution algorithms of the user tasks aiming to minimization of energy consumption and improvement of performance on clouds. These algorithms will be based on the methods of the theory of self-organized systems (IIAP – prepare a draft one).
• To develop software packages for numerical modelling of discrete dynamic systems to confirm not only analytical results, but also conjectures, as well as to investigate the model characteristics if the appropriate analytical results are missed (after finalizing the previous point).
• Analytical research of the proposed systems will be conducted by using the methods of graph theory, combinatorics, and probability theory (after finalizing the previous point).
• In a VC meeting with the team of Mrs. Marie-Pierre Gleizes (November 24) to justify the action plan in domain of smart agents, gossip type information distribution and sand pile type statistical mechanics models.
Analysis of PP1, brought above, shows a sensitive progress in project planning and R&D that could in principle lead to generation of successful ideas, composition of strong consortia, educating and training young scientists and managers. Equivalently the lesson learned shows that many of the particular stages are to be fulfilled in more detail, in an appropriate level. In fact, this trial shows that main INARMERA-ICT organizations are able to provide high scientific and managerial potential for EC FP proposal preparations. The lack is in dynamic, concerted and mobile work inside the consortium and outside – the work to the ICT global community and to the users.
PP2 on Advanced networks
Initially PP2 was for “Performance and Security Enhancement for Wireless Sensor Networks”. The initial partnership included: IIAP, University of Geneva University (Geneva, Switzerland), Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Eindhoven, the Netherlands), University of Patras (Greece), Technical University of Madrid (Madrid, Spain), Royal Holloway University of London, (London, UK), Institute of Information Theories and Applications (Sofia, Bulgaria), and Yerevan State University (Yerevan, Armenia).
The real work on PP2 may be presented in 3 clusters as follows.
First track – PhD work
Include the whole project duration. It was composed on 2 PhD studies in WSN area. Hakob Aslanyan defended his thesis “Some Aspects of Interference Minimization, Mobile Data Propagation and Data Encryption in Wireless Sensor Network” in 30th March 2013 in Geneva University, Switzerland. Next to this Hamid Khosrave defended his thesis “Optimal Protocol for Desired Level of Coverage and Connectivity in Wireless Sensor Networks” in 14h November 2014 at IIAP, Yerevan.
Second track - information security issues
Include the work lead by Prof. Gurgen Khachatryan. This IIAP team is experienced in Error Correcting Codes and in Cryptography. They use to address the novel security problems in networks such as data protection in clouds and grids. WSN is a special target even before the INARMERA-ICT project. The initial target was the USA NSF programme and the Swiss program SCOPES.
• Proposal Title: Performance and security enhancement for Wireless sensor networks.
• Research Objective: WSN has no predefined infrastructure. Hence a WSN must be able to self-organize. Nodes cooperate for this self-organization, and it is very basic to this proposal that the cooperation is local – neighbourhood based in its nature. Current WSN models deal with this local analysis in a hidden mode, which doesn’t help achieving the best performance.
• Proposal Title: Enhancing the security and efficiency in cloud applications by Polynomials and White-box encryption, POLYBOX.
• Research Objective: Prototype a number of novel cryptographic means that help to fasten secure computations, security management and integration of secure applications. Special polynomials are one of the resources used. Cloud infrastructure provides the validation environment.
• Partner search procedure was initiated at the IDEALIST portal, received valuable responses and a consortium was formed but due to time limitations it was decided to come with preparations to the Societal Challenges Call for proposals of Horizon 2020 Programme.
• Finally the following very strong submission was completed by the idea POLIBOX:
• Proposal Title: Measurable Obscurity in Computational Assets, MOCA.
• Research objective: The goal of the project is to develop software tools, methodologies, measurements, and best practices in support of the engineering of code incorporating self protecting white-box cryptographic elements, yet producing secured code preserving the functionality of the original code.
• Proposal was rejected due to low evaluation mark for impact. It received 4.5 0f 5 marks for scientific excellence.
Third track - HW SW energy minimization
This track of PP2 has focused on energy minimization issues in networks. Two proposal submissions and two received grants are the result of these actions. One is a Local Armenian grant and the second is an Armenian-German bilateral grant. They are considered as a preparatory stage to a larger EU research framework proposal preparation. Here are clippings of these proposal submissions:
• Proposal Title: Mathematical Enhancement of Green Autonomous Networking, MEGAN.
Consortium
Lehrstuhl Diskrete Mathematik, Institut für Mathematik, Universität Rostock, Prof. Hans-Dietrich Gronau
IIAP, Prof. Levon Aslanyan
Research Objective: MEGAN aims at delivering mathematical structural and algorithmic enhancement of network management systems achieving energy reduction and effective functionality.
The MEGAN is adopted for funding by BMBF Germany and SCS MES Armenia for the period February 2015 – January 2016.
• Proposal Title: Investigation of closed accessible set systems and their applications. CASA.
Research Objective: The project puts together diverse researches in the specific field of discrete mathematics and applied information technologies: set systems, data mining and network management, enhancing and integrating existing pairwise synergies of these domains. Set systems are the very basic concept in discrete mathematics.
The CASA is adopted for funding by SCS MES Armenia for the period July 2013 – June 2015.
Analysis of PP2 activities shows that the research topics that were raised under the INARMERA-ICT meetings are attractive, the proof is the 2 submitted and accepted proposals, and that this can be a good start for EU research proposal preparations. The same time, at the moment the work done needs more integration between the IIAP, IRIT and SZTAKI. The critical mass for a large proposal can be combined only with involvement of all organizations. At this stage there are many points under discussion between collaborating teams and this will bring the cooperation in a new level serving as a ground for larger proposal preparations.
PP3 on Digital Preservation
The initial participants of PP3 are: IIAP, IRIT, SZTAKI, and Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia). In INARMERA-ICT kick-off meeting prof. Philippe Joly, IRIT, highlighted the issue of automated analysis of national mass media archives. Such huge repositories are an infinite source for ICT research – requiring ad hock filtering, compression, indexing, recognition and all these together provides a framework for effective Digital Preservation. Second important issue is the privacy preserved computation. Here it was promising the discussions with prof. Luis Farinas about the modal logic theory and applications. Seems it is prospective to apply and enlarge the LOTREC (Generic Tableau Prover) technique to the smart analysis and preserving of large multimodal content.
One more perspective direction of joint research in the area is related to the NLP and multilingualism. At IIAP there are 2 very strong components: OCR and UNL domain researches. IRIT can provide know how in speech modelling, analysis and recognition. SZTAKI provides technologies of semantic modelling, search and understanding. The topic itself is hard and composite; it needs time to bring all to the same concepts integrating things in a global model. The Workshop in Yerevan in September 2013 was pushing these proposals to the next higher stage. Let us bring the basic notes on activities related to the PP3 and FP7 ICT Call 9 for proposals.
First and the initial proposal based on PP2 was the BYZANTION proposal. The lead person in preparations was Dr. Uros Janko. His deep understanding of Digital Preservation could join several organizations around the general perspective of a proposal preparation.
• BYZANTION Proposal abstract: A wealth of historical, cultural and commercial assets is today at risk of loss within the next years, due either to manuscripts deterioration, equipment obsolescence and inappropriate management of manuscripts digitized collections. Tasks carried out by the BYZANTION partners address issues such as integrative preservation (a “workflow” of formal documents including sources, their structure and descriptions, annotations) for high-risk medieval manuscript collections, metadata extraction, storage, iconographic virtual canon definition, secure interaction, rights management and effective delivery systems for end-users. The proposal joined teams from 12 EU countries and Armenia was the only third country representative.
• Longtime Usability of Digital Content, LUDIC project abstract: Develop a complex system for the protection of digital information, specifically against alteration and partial or complete destruction, with the aim of ensuring the long term availability of the information, i.e. making the content readable, understandable and therefore useful even beyond our concept of time. However, the restriction must be admitted that the long-term concept is bound to the use and understandability of the currently prevailing scientific and thought paradigms (e.g. the structure of the binary code). Storage technologies far beyond our current understanding capability (such as those based on analog physical/chemical effects that are found in nature) will require a new design of the system, insofar as they find technical application in the distant future. Main participating organizations here are www.comback.de www.graudata.com and these teams generated the above descriptions. Unfortunately, late start of preparations was postponed and now the Calls in topic are envisioned in Horizon 2020 after one year.
• Data Mining and Statistical Disclosure Limitation for Social Science Data - HORIZON 2020-DS-2015-1, Digital security, Privacy and Trust
Project aims at: Creating of methods of assessing the risk of disclosure of sensitive attributes. This will be done by applying different data mining tools to the original data in different scenarios of data release. Scenarios will differ by the amount of information available to the intruder and general public about the data creating process and the data itself. These advances will lead to adjustments of disclosure limitation strategies, which will improve utility and quality of the masked data. Two PhD theses were defended by this topic:
Danoyan Hayk, Investigation of Discrete extremal problems. 01.01.09 defended on 12.05.13 044 Council. Topchyan Vardan, Privacy preserved computations. 05.13.05 defended on 13.06.2014 037 Council.
PP4 on Intelligent Information Management
PP4 is inspired by FP7 Health Call proposal MAMOSI. INARMERA-ICT member and other participants of this PP are: IIAP, Institute of Molecular Biology of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia), Royal Holloway University of London (London, UK), University of Catania (Catania, Italy).
• Proposal Title: Mathematical Algorithms and MOdels for Systems Immunology, MAMOSI
Research Objective: Biological function emerges from the interaction of processes acting across a range of spatio-temporal scales. Therefore understanding disease and developing potential therapeutic strategies requires studies that bridge across multiple levels. This requires a systems biology approach and the tools used must be based on effective mathematical algorithms and built by combining experimental and theoretical approaches, addressing concrete problems and clearly defined questions. MAMOSI is a project designed to take such an interdisciplinary approach and will develop a suite of mathematical algorithms to be used in research and clinic.
• Proposal Title: Intelligent Integrated Management System for Advanced Genetic Information, IMAGIN
Research Objective: The amount of genome sequencing data available worldwide is expected to reach exabytes in 2015 and zettabytes before 2020. The unified analysis of this information is crucial to make personalised medicine a reality but it is impossible as it stands today. IT challenges of this near future of medicine includes i) data integration to facilitate interoperability, ii) optimisation of transfer of sequences among the nodes of a global network, iii) privacy, security and IPR protection, iv) intelligent search and real time data retrieval from very large information sources, and v) facilitating the visualisation of the data and knowledge extraction.
• Proposal Title: EU-Black Sea network to combat antimicrobial resistance, EU-BS AMR-NET
Research Objective: The rise and rapid expansion of multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogens that results in unacceptably high morbidity and mortality rates and costs associated represents a major global societal challenge faced by the mankind. The global nature of this problem requires concerted synergistic actions of scientists, public and regulatory agencies, governments, clinicians, educators, stakeholders, and the general public. The main goal of this proposal is to consolidate the efforts at all these levels from the EU (Belgium, Denmark, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, and United Kingdom) and the Black Sea (BS) area (Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine) countries to combat the MDR superbugs via phage therapy.
At two meetings at Toulouse prof. Denis Kouame presented a Strategic topic: Computer Science for Health and Handicaps. This topic includes 5 areas: Biomedical data management and access and processing infrastructures, Modelling and simulation of living, Handicaps and autonomy, E-health, and Biomedical imaging. The envisioned objectives are in two areas – theoretical, algorithmic activities at IIAP and systemic, applied research at IRIT. The milestone was the Yerevan meeting and Workshop that initiated joint proposal ideas in bioinformatics domain. CSIT 2015 will provide individual Sessions to 4 pilot projects to accelerate the preparations. Third and the consecutive Calls of Horizon 2020 are the point where the ideas will be presented. The initial 3 cluster groups are as:
• Biological Pathway Modelling: An example collaborative link is between the teams lead by Luis Farinas at IRIT, and Levon Aslanyan at IIAP. Here are 2 publications of these groups that are under joint consideration and development.
A Logical Model for Molecular Interaction Maps, Robert Demolombe, Luis Fariñas del Cerro, and Naji Obeid, Université de Toulouse and CNRS, IRIT, Toulouse, France
The series of biochemical reactions that occur within a cell form what we call Metabolic Pathways . Most of them can be quite intricate, involving many proteins and enzymes. The work proposes a new logical model based on a fragment of first order logic capable of describing reactions that appear in a metabolic network.
On Knowledge-Based Gene Expression Data Analysis, Arakelyan, L. Aslanyan and A. Boyajyan Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems and Institute of Molecular Biology of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia
Nowadays, technology of the gene expression measurements raise new issues related to proper data analysis and accurate interpretation of results. The present work is focused on theoretical justification of the mentioned problem and proposes a solution through complementing of data-driven analysis with knowledge-based approaches.
• Smart Phone based Applications. The research team at SZTAKI lead by Dr. Zsolt Markus provide complete technological support to applications based on mobile devices. They provided their expertise at IIAP in different occasions: CSIT conference, Summer School, Workshops, etc. Dr. Markus leads a specific project on mobile applications guiding humans in different situations. Complementary, the IIAP team represented by Sahak Kaghyan and Gevorg Karapetyan develop mobile applications to classify the human behaviour and to acquire and control the human health conditions. The METROPOLIS project idea is an issue in this case:
METROPOLIS aims to develop wireless multimodal interfaces to enable a seamless communication between human and Metro (or other similar) infrastructure, offering a plethora of innovative enriched services based on the user’s preferences, their behaviour and the environmental context.
• The ill-posed inverse problems in medical imaging. The PP4 Meeting in IRIT between the TCI team members (http://www.irit.fr/-TCI-team-?lang=en) and the IIAP representatives addressed this issue. TCI team was presented by Denis Kouamé who is the head of the TCI team and A. Basarab who is a member of TCI laboratory. IIAP group research interest is: image inpainting, which deals with retrieving the missing pixels in digital images. This difficult problem is a classical inverse problem in image processing. Its ill-posed nature requires complex optimization routines with appropriate regularization terms.
Strategy and Recommendations
The development of the IIAP 5 Year Strategic Plan 2015-2020 (IIAP-SP20) was an intensive task during the 2 first years of the INARMERA-ICT project. The IIAP-SP20 implementation and evaluation process has been active during the last year of the project, with the goal to illustrate local, regional and national impacts of the research, innovation and education capabilities. The definition of a scientific strategy over the next 5 years is based on the processes of internal and external evaluation as well as the restructuring of the IIAP provide considerable advances which place this institute in the way of functioning collectively adopted at the international level. This evaluation gives an opportunity to better define how to improve the overall performances of activities supported by the Armenian Government, such as the state funding and collaborations to have them better matching with the priorities of National plans. For achieving this objective:
• Self and external evaluations will be a continual process that will involve all facets of the IIAP infrastructure.
• Evaluations will be based on the metrics and performance measures and indicators defined in the research strategy and reflected in the state plans.
• The evaluation process also recognizes unplanned or rapid-response activities that may also have a significant impact as well as administrative, financial, human potential and educational tracks, and provision of ICT expertise in the country.
• Department reports will be used to evaluate the progress against the three general research areas mentioned in IIAP-SP20 and the national performance measures.
• The implementation of IIAP-SP20 is based on a tight cooperation process between INARMERA-ICT and IIAP itself. Thus the action plan of IIAP-SP20 will be analyzed in terms of qualitative, quantitative and progressive indicators of AERES satisfying the National regulations. The Project partners will analyze all material during the annual site visits. In addition, following the completion of annual site visits, a Performance Review Panel (PRP) will conduct a retrospective evaluation of the impact of the programs relative to the strategic plan. The PRP will be composed of members drawn from the scientific council of IIAP and of representatives from academia, government, and industry.
• IIAP will meet in the fall of each year to discuss the progress of each program relative to its plan, and to identify potential areas for improvement.
The other great achievement of INARMERA-ICT is the MOU between IIAP, IRIT and SZTAKI, which provides a solid framework for the continuation of the cooperation between the partners of the projects. One of the first practical consequences is the establishment of a Virtual International Laboratory in charge of enhancing interaction between the partners via visits, co-supervision of PhD students, joint proposals to EU and national calls, etc.
The INARMERA-ICT partners may also contribute to the great challenge of setting up a Supercomputing Center in Armenia on the premises of IIAP by bringing the experience gained in their respective countries. As a result of INARMERA-ICT, a comprehensive report will be prepared and submitted to the European Commission and Armenian Stakeholders, which will include the key achievements and the message of the project.
Potential Impact:
Impact in reinforcing the cooperation capacity
Traditionally Armenia had a leading position in computer science and information technology sectors in the South Caucasus regional and beyond. The IIAP of the NAS RA coordinate the National e- infrastructure, developing the provision of services to the promotion of science and the social challenges. The one of key aim of the Project INARMERA -ICT Program was to strengthen the Scientific Computing Capacity of IIAP in the coming years. Main impact of the project in Scientific Commuting is to establish High Performance Computing and Research Data services environment center for selected target areas: Computational physics, chemistry, biology and medicine; The management of data and analysis for meteorological and air pollution monitoring; Creation of open linked data spaces by connecting data sets from diverse discipline. On 2014 September 19, at the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia was signed a memorandum of cooperation between the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the RA, Ministry of Education and Science, the Ministry of Economy and the National Academy of Sciences. Within the frames of cooperation a National Supercomputing Center will be established in Armenia. It will be located at the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems (IIAP) of NAS of the RA. Implementation this proposal will be essential step in forward to creation contemporary e-science infrastructure in Armenia and will be open new horisones for extension the collaborative research areas.
Impact in Analysis and Policy level
The development strategy for IIAP for increasing its scale and regional coverage and improving its responses to the socio-economic needs of Armenia and the region. During the implementation period the strategy will be preliminary evaluated during 2015 in order to prepare the concrete actions plans. The definition of a scientific strategy over the next 5 years is based on the processes of internal and external evaluation as well as the restructuring of the IIAP is considerable advances which place this institute in the way of functioning collectively adopted at the international level. This evaluation gives an opportunity to better define how improving the overall performances of activities supported by the Armenian Government, such as the state fundings and collaborations to have them better matching with the priorities of National plans.
Impact in Increasing the collaboration between EU and Armenia research organizations due new form collaborations
The creation of International Virtual Laboratory. Thanks to the technical exchanges and to the work performed within the INARMERA-ICT project, the Participants (IIAP, IRIT, SZTAKI) would like to continue collaboration in the future as a joint research activities in all areas related to Information Technology including: Computer science and applied mathematics ; Software Tools, networking and e-infrastructures; Implementation of ICT for state and social needs . The INARMERA-ICT project has also highlighted the complementary competencies of the different Participants needed to continue exploring these domains together. On these bases, the Participants have decided to sign a MOU defining the first framework where the implementation of the results obtained during the INARMERA-ICT project could start efficiently.
Starting the process of Joint (bilateral) supervision of young specialists and increasing the number of scientific publication with international co-authorship. Improving the education curricula to satisfy the international standards due TEMPUS programme.
Impact in Armenia
Extension the collaboration links between IIAP and Armenian ICT industry. During INARMERA-ICT was organized discussions on European priorities on development e-infrastructure and Horizon 2020 programme with Enterprise Incubator of Armenia, Union of Information Technologies of Armenia, Hylink and other firms in Armenia and created the agreements for implementation proposals on actual interests of all sides, the joint projects in software and cloud services.
Linkage of the INARMERA-ICT with other EU –Funded projects and initiatives
The INARMERA-ICT exploits the possible synergies with external contributors to the closer cooperation of EU and EECA countries. The following project proposals have links with activities of INARMERA-ICT.
• EU FP7 EGI-InSPIRE project (Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe) started on 1 May 2010. It is a collaborative effort involving more than 50 institutions in over 40 countries. Its mission is to establish a sustainable European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGI-InSPIRE is ideally placed to join various components of the new Distributed Computing Infrastructures such as clouds, supercomputing networks and desktop grids, for the benefit of user communities within the European Research Area.
• EU FP7 HP-SEE (High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for South East Europe’s Research Communities): HP-SEE links existing and upcoming HPC facilities in South East Europe in a common infrastructure, and it will provide operational solutions for it. As a complementary action, the project will establish and maintain a GÉANT link for Southern Caucasus.
• EU FP7 PICTURE (Policy dialogue in ICT to an Upper level for Reinforced EU-EECA Cooperation) is a support action project aimed at supporting policy dialogue between the European Union and Eastern Europe - Central Asia (EECA) countries and at fostering collaboration opportunities with EECA countries organizations in collaborative ICT R&D both under FP7 and under national/regional EECA programs.
• EU FP7 GN3+ and GN4: The vision of GN4 is to become the unified European Communications Commons, driving knowledge creation, innovation and learning by connecting and empowering research and education communities within Europe and, as the global hub for research networking excellence, elsewhere in other partner regions.
• EU FP7 CEENGINE (Central and Eastern European Networking Association) project aims at enforcing ad stimulating Central and Eastern European Association activities related to incubation and development of National Research and Education Networks in Central, Eastern, Southern Europe and Central Asia.
• Black Sea Economic Cooperation G-ECLIPSE Project, which is designed to deploy a regional integrated Grid and Cloud enabled environment based on Eclipse for the South East Europe including Romania, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. Users will access the resources with g-Eclipse in an easy and uniform way, instead of having to use application specific portals or specific Grid consoles. The proposed infrastructure will be used for further regional (environment, meteorology, seismology, astrophysics) projects.
• Swiss National Science Foundation ARPEGEO project, which is designed to establish a tripartite institutional partnership between Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva (ISE/UNIGE), the Center for Ecological-Noosphere Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (CENS), and the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (IIAP). The present Institutional Partnership project aims at building capacities in two leading Armenia Institutions in regard to the management, processing, and sharing of geospatial data in the environmental domain.
Exploitation of results of INARMERA-ICT
A post-project organisational structure namely Performance Review Panel (PRP) will conduct a retrospective evaluation of the impact of the programs relative to the strategic plan. The PRP will be composed of members drawn from the scientific council of IIAP and of representatives from academia, government, and industry. Specific support mechanisms will be made available to tackle the societal and scientific challenges. Contacts with potential funding organisations are carried out to provide longer-term funding opportunities. Active support and provision of training events to young scientists is planned. Strong auditing and monitoring mechanisms will be put in place for analyzing the Strategic Plan 2015-2020 in terms of qualitative, quantitative and progressive indicators of AERES satisfying the National regulations. It is planned to reinforce collaboration with local ICT enterprises, such as with the Enterprise Incubator Foundation (EIF, http://www.eif.am) PicsArt Ltd and Hylink Ltd.
List of Websites:
INARMERA-ICT Web site: http://www.inarmera-ict.eu
The beneficiaries of INARMERA-ICT are:
• Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (Coordinator), Yuri Shoukourian Armenia
• Universite Paul Sabatier Toulouse III, France, Michel Dayde
• Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Számítastechnikai es Automatizálási Kutató Intézet, Hungary, Janos Demetrovics
• European Centre for Knowledge and Technology Transfer, Belgium, Ruben Vardapetyan
The INARMERA-ICT Project aims at reinforcing cooperation capacity of the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems (IIAP) by the set of actions to improve its research activities in the areas of ICT thematic priorities of EC FP. Participation of IIAP in ERA-WIDE Call was endorsed by the Armenian Government due to an important role it assigned to the Institute in the process of country’s transition to innovative knowledge-based economy, due to its on-going active participation in the FP, and the responsibility the Institute bears in the development of ICT in Armenia and in the region as a whole. This process of reinforcing cooperation capacity of IIAP by implementing support actions on three levels: educational, research, analysis and policy.
Project Context and Objectives:
Objectives
The overall aim of reinforcing the cooperation capacity of IIAP in Armenia has been to implement support actions on three levels, each of them corresponding to a specific project objective:
1.Educational level: To deploy a set of supporting activities to enable development of training modules to build competency and facilitate the participation of IIAP in Framework Programmes.
2. Research level: To deploy a set of supporting activities to intensify contacts between IIAP and the research organisations in the Members States and Associated Countries to enable joint preparation of FP projects.
3. Analysis and Policy level: To deploy a set of supporting activities to enable development of a strategy for IIAP to increase its scale, and in particular its regional coverage, to improve responses to the socio-economic needs of Armenia and neighbouring Georgia.
Expected results
• Contribution to RTD capacity building and management in Armenia.
• Enhanced participation of Armenia in Horizon2020.
• Increased visibility and scope (regional coverage, subjects, and activities) of IIAP with increased linkage with the economic and social environment.
• Networking with research centres in Member States or Associated Countries (mobilizing the human and material resources existing in ICT, disseminating scientific information as well as the results of research, facilitating communication between the centres having similar scientific interests).
• Increased job opportunities that encourage gender equality in Armenia, in particular for young scientists (measures to avoid “brain drain” phenomena: better career opportunities, better work conditions, access to research infrastructures).
The Work Performed and Main Results Achieved
In educational level training modules, covering all relevant topics of Horizon2020, have been developed to further build IIAP’s competency in ICT and facilitate its participation in Horizon2020, as well as building skills needed for the successful participation. A number of training sessions have been organized in Yerevan, such as the “Horizon 2020 Eastern Partnership (EaP) Information Day - Research & Innovation in ICT” (September 2013, Yerevan) workshop organized in collaboration with the European Commission – DG CONNECT and the National Academy of Sciences of Republic of Armenia. A series of professional trainings and a summer school on Modern Information and Communication Technology have been organized in Yerevan, with trainers from IRIT and SZTAKI teams. A number of research seminars/workshops and lectures have been organized at IIAP on a regular basis with active participation of young researchers.
In research level a joint international virtual laboratory has been established by IIAP, IRIT and SZTAKI to explore potential future collaboration in the fields of high-performance computing and computational science. Different new EU proposals (SWM, MEGAN, MATH-GEAR, DISC, MOCA and others) have been prepared and submitted with the participation of the project partners. This impressive collection not only reflects the enormous investment in the implementation of these proposals, it also encompasses a wide range of highly valuable experiences, which can be reused in the future. INARMERA-ICT keeps strong relations with other organizations and projects carried out by IIAP. Various forms and channels of scientific collaboration have been explored, participation in conferences and workshops organized and sample means of international cooperation were tested.
In policy level the final strategic plan of IIAP for 2015-2020 has been developed to strengthen IIAP’s reputation as a regional ICT leading center and turning it into a committed partner in European programmes. Comprehensive report in English and Armenian summarizing the results of research assessment (self and external evaluation) of IIAP has been prepared and distributed. Key indicators have been developed based on quantitative and progressive indicators of AERES providing information on various aspects of the research production.
Significant results
WP2: Trainings
• Horizon2020 and FP7 Trainings: Training modules have been developed to further build IIAP’s competency in ICT and facilitated its participation in all relevant topics of Horizon2020. The training sessions were devoted to polishing the skills, writing better proposals, broadening contacts and networking, and to better understanding of the EU project management.
• Professional Training: In order to further build the competency of IIAP researchers, series of professional trainings were organized in Europe and in Armenia. For this purpose, leading experts from IRIT and SZTAKI gave lectures in Armenia for IIAP scientists on the latest achievements and methodologies in ICT. Both young scientists and the leading IIAP researchers had visits and trainings in France and Hungary under the guidance of the scientists from IRIT and SZTAKI. Tutorials were prepared and introduced during the summer school organized in Armenia, covering several scientific disciplines of mutual interest. It is planned to transform the current professional training materials to more efficient e-learning materials using state-of-the-art e-learning platforms, such as ILIAS.
WP3: Networking and Dissemination
The Networking and Dissemination Plan has been developed in order to guide IIAP in its networking with EU and regional research centres, thus allowing dissemination of scientific information, identification of partners and setting up joint experiments, also in the frame of new EU projects. Various forms and channels of scientific collaboration have been explored, participation in conferences and workshops organized and sample means of international cooperation were tested. Comprehensive reports were prepared to outline the key issues and results of networking and dissemination activities in Armenia and in Europe. Awareness of the INARMERA-ICT project was extended at various international events and conferences by distributing dissemination material about IIAP and the project. Dissemination material including newsletters, leaflets, project presentations, pilot project proposals, etc. was prepared and distributed during such meetings with potential partners.
WP4: Pilot Projects
The main result achieved is the real size research cooperation established between the members and departments of participating organizations. All IIAP Departments (after its restructuring in 2014) were involved in INARMERA-ICT cooperation through PPs. Minimally 2-3 proposal submissions were completed by each of the initial 4 PPs, and some of these proposals were accepted, including 2 FP7, 1 Horizon2020, 2 TEMPUS, several SCS Armenia and other Grants. These PPs helped with effective restructuring of IIAP that today consists of 4 research (R&D) departments, and 5 engineering (R&I) centers. Research portfolio at IIAP was enlarged and further developed in accordance with standards and requirements of International Programs. A large number of ROs (ICT in general and H2020) are addressed through the PP and PS (HPC, Security, Cognitive systems, PHC, NLP, BDR&I). A set of FP7 and other proposals have been prepared with participation and even with coordination by representatives of IIAP with support from IRIT, SZTAKI and EUROTEX.
WP5: Strategy and Recommendations
The Strategic Plan for 2015-2020 of IIAP has been developed that allows IIAP to increase its regional coverage and to improve responses to the socio-economic needs of Armenia and of the region. The strategic plan is based on the research assessment and self evaluation of IIAP to identify the strongest and weakest sides of IIAP, and satisfies the AERES and domestic criteria. The key indicators have been developed to provide information on various aspects of the research production. A Comprehensive report summarizing the results of research assessment of IIAP has been prepared in English and Armenian, and distributed to the EC covering the R&D cooperation with Armenia and the ways to increase its efficiency.
Project Results:
In the following pages, the list of main achievements of the project is reported.
Training
Trainings on EU FP for Research and Innovation
The first training session, with participation of 12 researchers of IIAP, took place in Armenia on 7-12 March 2012, covering the following topics: FP7 in brief, proposals and projects in FP7, how to submit a proposal, and aspects of the ICT programme.
The next training sessions took place in Yerevan, in January-February 2013, covering the following topics: applying for grants, evaluating proposals, administration of evaluation process for EU FP7, and preparation and testing EU FP7 proposal.
With a group of partners, IIAP NAS RA scientists selected a proper Call for Proposals (FP7-ICT-2013-11) and initiated discussions, preparation, and a formal submission through the EU’s Participants Portal of a STREP (Small and Medium Scale Focused Research Projects) proposal entitled “Smart Municipal Water Management Arrangements” (SWM HORIZON).
The training focused on the following aspects of the proposal writing:
• Support to the coordinator (IIAP) in the set up of the consortium;
• Communication tools;
• The relevance of the project objectives to the objectives of the Call;
• The right choice of deliverables, their types and numbers;
• Project management tools;
• The importance of identifying and properly describing the right impact;
• Writing a Successful Proposal;
• Strategies for Disseminating Research Projects Results;
• Financial and Legal Aspects in FP7: from the Project Management to the Reporting;
• The Consortium Agreement: Project Administration, Financial Management and IPR in FP7.
In the view of FP7 reaching its end soon and considering the initiation of Armenia’s accession into the new FP HORIZON 2020 (starting January 2014), series of trainings were organized for the scientists of IIAP NAS RA starting April 2013.
During the initial training. attended by 23 IIAP NAS RA researchers, following topics were covered:
• The current status of Armenia in FP7 and the results of its participation compared with other Eastern Partnership Countries (Moldova, Georgia, etc.),
• The advantages of Armenia’s association to H2020 compared with the current status of the International Partnership Country,
• Detailed Review of Horizon 2020 (PP Presentation) with accent on:
- Legal framework, discussions in the European Parliament,
- Priorities, Proposed distribution of Funds between different programmes,
- Proposed simplifications (compared with FP7 rules),
- Questions and answers.
The next training session, attended by 24 IIAP NAS RA researchers, was devoted to the acquisition of practical knowledge in the application to various EU calls for proposals. Students were given the task of submitting applications to the call MARIE CURIE INTERNATIONAL INCOMING FELLOWSHIPS published on 14 March 2013. The relevant Work Programme and the Guide for Applicants were presented to the students.
Horizon2020 Seminars Series were conducted for IIAP young researchers every Thursday in the period of August-December, 2013. Structure, scope and schedule of those seminars were discussed and developed. Information regarding the seminar series was disseminated among the young researchers of IIAP.
Attendance of IIAP young scientists was arranged in the “Horizon 2020 Eastern Partnership (EaP) Information Day - Research & Innovation in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)”, organized by the European Commission– DG CONNECT, the National Academy of Sciences of Republic of Armenia, IIAP (within its CSIT2013 Conference), the FP7 NCP’s Office in Armenia and the FP7 PICTURE project. The event took place on September 26, 2013 in Yerevan, Armenia at the following locations: National Academy of Sciences of Armenia; Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems Yerevan; Matenadaran Conference Hall.
A concluding training session on the subject of the EU FP for Research and Innovation was conducted in October 2013 and a comprehensive Guide to Horizon 2020 Work Programme was finalized.
A number of young scientists of IIAP participated in a webinar “Introducing Horizon 2020” in December 2013, which was conducted live online by a Hungarian company Europa Media Trainings.
In January 2014, a number of young scientists of IIAP participated in a web-streamed training, organized by The European Commission (DG EAC, Marie Curie Unit) in collaboration with the Research Executive Agency (REA). The training was focused on the two 2014 calls ITN (Innovative Training Networks) and RISE (Research and Innovation Staff Exchange) under the new Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions.
A two-day training on Horizon2020 was conducted as part of the Summer School on Information and Communication Technology organized by IIAP in Yerevan in the frame of the INARMERA-ICT project.
A training workshop was organized by IIAP and the East HORIZON project (Fostering Dialog and Cooperation between the EU and EECA in the Horizon2020 Perspective) at IIAP. Participants included the Coordinator of the East HORIZON project, PLANET S.A. (Greece) and project partner ENGINEERING – INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA SPA (Italy). Among other topics, details of proposal writing in Horizon2020 framework were discussed in great detail.
A seminar was organized as part of the Horizon2020 Trainings series, to review and discuss all relevant current and upcoming Horizon2020 calls on December 16th. Substantially all centers and departments of IIAP were represented during this seminar, while specifics of 39 calls were discussed in depth, to ensure that all participants have detailed information to disseminate further among their colleagues within their respective departments and centers.
Professional Trainings
Periodical research and professional trainings, as well as business trips, were organized throughout the life of the project. These activities were aimed at increasing the mobility of young IIAP researchers and included both short-term trainings and long-term research contracts at one of the partners’ facilities.
Professional Training events in Armenia
A series of professional trainings was organized in Yerevan throughout 2013, with trainers from IRIT and SZTAKI teams. The courses planned for training included Services Provided by Cloud Computing, Big Data and Data Mining, Network Security Audit, Real time Signal Processing, and Parallel Programming on GPU. A number of research seminars/workshops and lectures were organized at IIAP on a regular basis with the participation of young researchers. The topics covered the most current issues in the field and were in line with the research interests of IIAP.
All-day tutorials were organized by the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems (IIAP) in conjunction with the CSIT'2013 conference within the INARMERA-ICT Project. Tutorials took place on the premises of IIAP on the following dates:
• Introduction to Big Data (September 24, 2013), Presenters: Léa Laporte, Ricardo Barros Sampaio, under the supervision of Bernard Dousset, Prof. Josiane Mothe (IRIT, France);
• High Performance Computing (September 25, 2013), Presenters: Vladimir Gaiduchok, Ivan Gankevich (Saint Petersburg State University, Russia)
• Management Infrastructure of a Software as a Service (September 26, 2013), Presenter: Prof. Georges Da Costa (IRIT, France)
• Model-based Software Development, Presenter: Prof. Enn Tyugu (Estonia).
The Summer School on current issues in ICT was organized by IIAP in Yerevan in September, 2014 as a part of the INARMERA-ICT project. Following events and activities took place during the Summer School as part of Professional Training for IIAP staff:
• Developing e-Learning Training Materials in the ILIAS LCMS System. Presenters: Mr. Miklos Veres and Dr. Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI)
• Introduction to Mobile Application Development for iOS Platform. Presenters: Mr. Gabor Kaposi and Dr. Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI)
• Introduction to Ultrasound Medical Imaging. Presenter: Dr. Adrian Basarab (IRIT)
• Addressing Security Issues in Cloud Computing. Presenter: Dr. Carlos Aguilar (IRIT)
• Resource Management in Clouds. Presenter: Mr. Daniel Hagimont (IRIT)
• VHDL Language and FPGA Programming. Presenter: Dr. Ronan Guivarch (France)
• Testing the GUIDE@HAND Yerevan Mobile Application: Presenter: Mr.Miklos Veres (SZTAKI), Mr .Gabor Kaposi (Hungary), Dr. Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI)
Below is given brief information about the training events held in IIAP:
• Introduction to big data: Big data and some of the related challenges, main data analysis methods and the context in which they can be applied, Léa Laporte, Ricardo Barros Sampaio (IRIT), September 24, 2013
• High performance computing: Introduction to computer clusters, PBS basics, comparison with other approaches, Optimization questions for real scientific applications, Vladimir Gaiduchok, Ivan Gankevich (Saint Petersburg State University, Russia), September 25, 2013
• Management infrastructure of a software as a service: Introduction (definition, real case examples), generic methodology and more precise methodology for Open Nebula middleware, example of autonomous management of a three-tier application (web server-like), Georges Da Costa (IRIT), September 26, 2013
• Model-based software development: Using knowledge in model-based SW development, Enn Tyugu (Estonia), September 23, 2013
• Developing e-learning training materials in the ILIAS LCMS system: To enable students to create and maintain e-learning training materials in the framework of the ILIAS open source learning content management system, Miklos Veres, Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI), September 15-18, 2014
• Introduction to mobile application development for iOS platform: Basic information for beginners on how to design, implement and test applications for Apple mobile devices, Gabor Kaposi and Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI), September 15-18, 2014
• Introduction to ultrasound medical imaging: Basics of ultrasound image formation, as well as two signal and image processing related applications adapted to ultrasound imaging, Adrian Basarab (IRIT), September 15, 2014
• Addressing security issues in cloud computing: Abstract of addressing security issues in Cloud Computing, abstract of developing high performance cryptographic applications, Carlos Aguilar (IRIT), September 16, 2014
• Resource management in clouds: Dynamic processor frequency scaling, server consolidation and dynamic scalability in multitier applications, Daniel Hagimont (IRIT), September 16-18, 2014
• VHDL language and FPGA programming: VHDL Main concepts and instructions of the language, Ronan Guivarch (IRIT), September 17, 2014
• Testing the guide@ hand Yerevan mobile application: Software development and illustrations of guide@ hand Yerevan mobile application, Miklos Veres, Gabor Kaposi, Zsolt Markus (SZTAKI), September 20, 2014
Professional Training events in Europe
According to the professional training plan, 3 young researchers of IIAP were trained in Europe in May 2012, Nov.-Dec. 2012, and April 2013, in Paris at INRIA; in Leuven at University of Leuven; and in Geneva at University of Geneva.
6 leading researchers of IIAP participated in various scientific workshops and conferences in Europe in 2013. In addition to the scientific interests, the aims of visits were to participate in discussions of joint research possibilities, in preparation of new joint projects with colleagues from France, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and Georgia.
A Series of trainings took place in Kiev in 2013. Though outside the European Union, it was nevertheless an example of a typical successful ICT professional training of European level. The Kiev event consisted of 3 parts:
• CEENGINE (Central and Eastern European Networking Engine, FP7 Research Infrastructures) NRENs Users Workshop, 22nd May 2013,
• Horizon 2020 Eastern Partnership (EaP) Information Day Research & Innovation in Information and Communication Technologies, 23rd May 2013
• PICTURE (Policy dialogue in ICT to an Upper level for Reinforced EU-EECA Cooperation) project Workshop on “Content technologies and information management”, 24th May 2013.
The Armenian team was formed with an active support of IIAP and included 10 participants.
Meetings between the young scientists of IIAP and the IRIT team took place in November, 2014. The meetings were facilitated by UPS - IRIT and took place in Toulouse, France as part of the Professional Trainings program. Teams from SEPIA (Système d’exploitation, systems répartis, de l’intergiciel à l’architecture), CI (Traitement et Compréhension d’Images) and IRT (Ingénierie Réseaux et Télécommunications) departments of IRIT took part in the seminars. As a result of these meetings and seminars, following areas for potential interdepartmental cooperation were identified:
• Collaboration on the subject of new dynamic optimal distribution algorithms of the user tasks aiming to minimization of energy consumption and improvement of performance on clouds with SEPIA;
• Collaboration on the subject of the Ill-posed inverse problems in medical imaging with TCI;
• Collaboration on the subject of Cryptanalysis of lattice-based FHE schemes; Security proofs for alternative noise distributions in public key cryptosystems, and Fast polynomial operations (FFT and noise generation) in the lattice-cryptography setting with IRT;
• Collaboration on the subject of possibilities to implement the TUNE Package on the Armenian infrastructure, and investigation and implementation of the energy consumption software package (for power consumption monitoring) with SEPIA.
It was further agreed to work on joint articles on the subjects of a series of simulations using the memory of Infiniband available in Armenia and on Molecular Dynamics, Weather Forecasting and Satellite Image Processing scientific domains.
Meetings between the young scientists of IIAP and the SZTAKI team took place in January 2015. The meetings were facilitated by SZTAKI and took place in Budapest, Hungary as part of the Professional Trainings program. SZTAKI teams from Research Group of Operations Research and Decision Systems, Department of Network Security and Internet Technologies, and 3D Internet-based Control and Communications Research Laboratory took part in the seminars. As a result of these meetings and seminars, it was agreed to develop an interdepartmental cooperation in the following areas:
• Operations Research and Decision Making Theory;
• Design and cryptanalysis of block ciphers, Development of new, efficient public key encryption algorithm and digital signature, Research on problems connected with security of cloud computing, in particular related to the development of homomorphic encryption methods;
• Statistical analysis of medical data;
• A piece selection problem that arises, when layered video content is streaming over peer-to-peer networks;
• A hands gestures recognition problem;
• Development and implementation of identity-based encryption scheme based on symmetric cryptography with applications in DRM, key management, secure E-mail infrastructure and cloud computing;
• Reconstruction of 3D models of real world objects in real time, using different types of input devices, such as RGB cameras, 3D sensors, etc.
Long-term cooperation in the areas indicated above is expected, with strong prospects of publishing joint articles and participation in future conferences, including the upcoming CSIT-2015, which is being organized by IIAP in Yerevan in the fall of 2015. Potential participation in the upcoming relevant Horizon2020 projects is also expected and encouraged by all project partners.
Below it is given the list of professional training meetings:
1. Training of IIAP young specialists at the INRIA Paris May, 2012
2. Training of IIAP young specialists at the University of Leuven Leuven Nov.-Dec. 2012
3. Training of IIAP young specialists at the University of Geneva Geneva April, 2013
4. Visit of specialists from IRIT and SZTAKI to IIAP and training of IIAP young specialists Yerevan September, 2014
5. Training of IIAP young scientists at IRIT Toulouse November, 2014
6. Training of IIAP young scientists at SZTAKI Budapest January, 2015
Networking and Dissemination
The project partners disseminated the project materials at 9 events in Europe, 10 events in Armenia and 1 event in the USA. The events in Europe included both scientific conferences and workshops related to ICT and information days on preparing proposals, sharing best practices and finding project partners. The detailed list of the events can be found in the next section.
The events in Armenia included scientific conferences and events related to proposal preparation. Professional ICT lectures, Framework Program trainings and summer schools were also organized and the project was presented even at an ITC related expo. Most of the events organised in Armenia were of international nature and they could be used for establishing contacts with partners from other countries. Several events were organized by IIAP in Armenia and some of them also in Europe, which offered more opportunities for dissemination. For example CSIT is an international conference series held in Yerevan, where a whole workshop was organized to present the project in 2013.
The different types of events were suitable to meet people from different countries and from different domains of the society, e.g. scientific (academia, education), private (industry, commerce, service providers), public (local and domestic governments, research associations) and share the project materials with them.
The project established liaison with 7 other projects. This kind of dissemination covers partners from EU countries, the Black-Sea region and Switzerland. The projects are related to grid technology, high-performance computing, cloud computing, other communication technologies, etc. and also included networking associations and ICT policy forming co-operations. Liaison is an especially efficient way of project dissemination because it can be built on existing collaboration.
The list below it is given the HORIZON2020 calls proposals submitted with the participation of IIAP in period of 2012-2014
1 GN3+ (Multi-gigabit European research and education network and associated services, FP7 2013) - accepted
2 Smart Municipal Water Management Arrangements, FP7-ICT-2013-11 - rejected
3 MATH-GEAR (Modernization of Mathematics and Statistics curricula for Engineering and Natural Sciences studies in Georgian and Armenian Universities by introducing modern educational technologies, TEMPUS 2014) - accepted
4 DELPHUS (Development of E-Learning Promoted Higher Education User Services, TEMPUS 2014) - rejected
5 Off-site Radiological Emergency Management eInfrastructure on Armenia Nuclear Power Plant, NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme - under review
6 Development of Optimized Scientific Gateways based on Grid and Cloud Services, Bi-lateral CNRS - under review
7 Experimental Deployment of an Integrated Grid and Cloud Enabled Environment in BSEC Countries on the Base of g-Eclipse, BSEC (Black Sea Economic Cooperation) - accepted
8 VRE-3C (VRE - Complex Collaborative Computing, H2020-EINFRA-2015-1 ) - under review
9 VI-SEEM (VRE for regional Interdisciplinary communities in Southeast Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, H2020-EINFRA-2015-1) - under review
10 COVER (Collaborative Virtual Environments for Research, H2020-EINFRA-2015-1) - under review
11 RESINFRA (Supporting Multi - Lateral Cooperation between Research Infrastructures in European Neighborhood Policy and Western Balkan Countries with Research Infrastructures of Pan – European Interest, INFRASUPP 6) - rejected
12 DISC (Distributed ICT-based infrastructures and Services tackling societal Challenges, Marie-Sklodowska Curie – RISE) - rejected
13 EAST-HORIZON (Fostering Dialogue and Cooperation between the EU and EECA in the HORIZON 2020 perspective, FP7-ICT-2013-10) - accepted
14 EECA-2-HORIZON (Bringing the EU-EECA cooperation and policy dialogue in ICT in the HORIZON 2020 era, FP7-ICT-2013-10) - accepted
15 EU-BS AMR-NET (EU-Black Sea network to combat antimicrobial resistance, H2020-INT-INCO-2014) - rejected
16 MOCA (Measurable Obscurity in Computational Assets, H2020-FETOPEN-2014-201 5-RIA) - rejected
17 MEGAN (Mathematical Enhancement of Green Autonomous Networking, BMBF, Germany and SCS MES of Armenia) - accepted
INARMERA-ICT relations with other projects orginized and carried out by IIAP
• EU FP7 EGI-InSPIRE project (Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe) started on 1 May 2010. It is a collaborative effort involving more than 50 institutions in over 40 countries. Its mission is to establish a sustainable European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGI-InSPIRE is ideally placed to join various components of the new Distributed Computing Infrastructures such as clouds, supercomputing networks and desktop grids, for the benefit of user communities within the European Research Area.
• EU FP7 HP-SEE (High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for South East Europe’s Research Communities): HP-SEE links existing and upcoming HPC facilities in South East Europe in a common infrastructure, and it will provide operational solutions for it. As a complementary action, the project will establish and maintain a GÉANT link for Southern Caucasus.
• EU FP7 PICTURE (Policy dialogue in ICT to an Upper level for Reinforced EU-EECA Cooperation) is a support action project aimed at supporting policy dialogue between the European Union and Eastern Europe - Central Asia (EECA) countries and at fostering collaboration opportunities with EECA countries organizations in collaborative ICT R&D both under FP7 and under national/regional EECA programs.
• EU FP7 GN3+ and GN4: The vision of GN4 is to become the unified European Communications Commons, driving knowledge creation, innovation and learning by connecting and empowering research and education communities within Europe and, as the global hub for research networking excellence, elsewhere in other partner regions.
• EU FP7 CEENGINE (Central and Eastern European Networking Association) project aims at enforcing ad stimulating Central and Eastern European Association activities related to incubation and development of National Research and Education Networks in Central, Eastern, Southern Europe and Central Asia.
• Black Sea Economic Cooperation G-ECLIPSE Project, which is designed to deploy a regional integrated Grid and Cloud enabled environment based on Eclipse for the South East Europe including Romania, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. Users will access the resources with g-Eclipse in an easy and uniform way, instead of having to use application specific portals or specific Grid consoles. The proposed infrastructure will be used for further regional (environment, meteorology, seismology, astrophysics) projects.
• Swiss National Science Foundation ARPEGEO project, which is designed to establish a tripartite institutional partnership between Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva (ISE/UNIGE), the Center for Ecological-Noosphere Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (CENS), and the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (IIAP). The present Institutional Partnership project aims at building capacities in two leading Armenia Institutions in regard to the management, processing, and sharing of geospatial data in the environmental domain.
• EU FP7 PICTURE (Policy dialogue in ICT to an Upper level for Reinforced EU-EECA Cooperation) is a support action project aimed at supporting policy dialogue between the European Union and Eastern Europe - Central Asia (EECA) countries and at fostering collaboration opportunities with EECA countries organizations in collaborative ICT R&D both under FP7 and under national/regional EECA programs (Memorandum of understanding is signed).
Pilot Projects
It is well known that International Research Programmes reinforce science and technologies through critical mass integration, and technology transfer between the collaborating partner teams, and the educational component, synergies, and market share are additional factors of initiation and implementation of new research projects. Pilot projects are important and flexible means of reduction the risks in developing new research topics and learning more about the organizational and technical issues associated with the deployment of similar large scale engineering projects. A successful pilot project is also an effective instrument of building collaborative links and new practices to member teams of INARMERA-ICT consortium. The objective of WP4 “Pilot Projects” has been to carry out the 4 predefined PPs’ that address the ICT research priorities of Armenia for 2010-2015. The initial list of priorities was recommended by the FP7 Support Action Projects cluster (EXTEND, SCUBE, ISTOK-SOYUZ, IDEALIST) with the recommendations of ICT Experts from Armenia. The final determined priorities are in terms of Horizon2020 ICT Work Programme. The work done passed through the Tasks of PP Deployments and of PP Analysis.
PP1 on High performance computation and its applications
Initially the PP1 is titled as “Establishment of a joint virtual regional laboratory on scientific computations”. At the origins of INARMERA-ICT IIAP aimed just to set up a regional HPC Laboratory by PP1. The consortium was supposed to include IIAP, IRIT, SZTAKI, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (Oxfordshire, UK), National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (Bucharest, Romania), and Institute of Computational Mathematics, Georgian Technical University (Tbilisi, Georgia). PP1 was investigated intensively, presented its achievements in 19th September 2013 in a form of the Workshop “Scientific Computing Challenges”. Workshop invited as guests leading HPC scientists Prof. Jack Dongara (University of Tennessee, USA) and Dr. Per Oster (IT Center for Science, Finland). Workshop was attended by almost 70 specialists from Armenia, Georgia, Russia and several EU countries. INARMERA-ICT strategic position on HPC in Armenia was presented by its Coordinator Prof. Yuri Shoukourian in presentation “EU FP7 INARMERA-ICT: Straightening Scientific Computing Capacity in Armenia”. Starting with a review of existing HPC resources in Armenia, Prof. Shoukourian formed the vision that HPC environment can be the core of diverse state and societal programmes including economy, environment and emergencies, water management and weather forecast, even natural language processing, digital preservation and other tasks. He also mentioned that the other Pilot Projects at INARMERA-ICT can be viewed as individual tracks under the enlarged PP1 as the HPC environment at the centre. Adoption of this idea and the further actions in this line are presented by the 2 signed documents:
• Memorandum of Understanding between INARMERA-ICT partners: UPS, CNRS, SZTAKI and IIAP with the objective: expressing an intention to explore potential future collaboration between the Participants in the fields of high-performance computing and computational science.
• Memorandum on Cooperation “Establishment of Super-computational Centre in Armenia” between the National Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Education and Science of RA, the Ministry of Economy of RA, and the Ministry of Emergency Situations of RA.
The text below lists several particular actions under the PP1.
• Examples of Training for Pilots type activities (TEMPUS)
o MATH-GEAR Modernization of Mathematics and Statistics curricula for Engineering and Natural Sciences studies in Georgian and Armenian Universities by introducing modern educational technologies (MATH-GEAR, Coordinator - Universität des Saarlandes, Germany)
o DELPHUS Development of E-Learning Promoted Higher Education User Services (DELPHUS, Coordinator University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
• Smart Municipal Water Management Arrangements
The INARMERA-ICT face-to-face meeting in Toulouse in December 2012 determined that ICT Call 10 provides less opportunity for proposal preparations on HPC. Call 11 was used to submit the proposal on this Pilot topic, but the same Call 10 was used for other submissions such as Support Actions and INCO R&I receiving the projects EAST-HORIZON and EECA-2-Horizon. In Toulouse meeting a valuable input was presentations “DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) management in a virtualized Environment” by Christine Mayap Kamga, and Daniel Hagimont, and “Elastic resource management in a hosting center” by Giang Son Tran, and Daniel Hagimont. Valuable information exchange between the teams includes partner searches such as the http://ideal-ist.eu/ps-hu-79670 about the Media Cloud initiative.
In this way the PP1 activities lead to the SWM Horizon (Smart Municipal Water Management Arrangement) proposal, that was prepared and submitted by the initiative of IIAP team. Partner teams at the Toulouse meeting discussed the initial proposal idea. After Toulouse meeting a Partner Search was compiled and distributed through the IDEALIST project channel http://ideal-ist.eu/ps-am-86781 The proposed idea, very quickly, gained the IDEALIST Quality Label. Over 70 expressions of interest (EOI) were received. Politecnico di Milano, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Italy; EMAYA S.A. Water Supply Company, Spain; and Scientia Scripta, Industry – SME, UK; were invited to the Consortium. IIAP recommended Dr. Tigran Kalantaryan to lead the SWM research team. The team was enlarged also by engineer Ashot Minassyan, representing Bitlis group (SME, Armenia). Dr Kalantaryan prepared the SWM proposal draft and participated in Idealist proposal check event for call FP7-ICT-2013-11 in 11/12 March in Budapest. IRIT decided the candidature of Prof. Marie-Pierre Gleizes to lead the team for SWM. Assistant Professor Frédéric Migeon and Assistant Professor Jean-Pierre Georgé are the basic members of the team. All the team was composed and supported by the IRIT Director Prof. Michel Daydé. The SZTAKI side provided a similar activity. With very enthusiastic effort of Prof. Janos Demetrovics and Dr. György Szántó the team was composed under the lead of Dr. Ákos Zarándy together with researchers Szabolcs Tőkés and László Orzó. On Friday, June 28, 2013 the team was communicated the result of SVM HORIZON, FP7-ICT-2013-11, Objective 6.3 - Evaluation Summary Report - SWM HORIZON (619900). The proposal was not approved for funding.
Next step in PP1 was the Workshop in Yerevan, 26th September 2013, in framework of the CSIT 2013 Conference http://www.csit.am This Workshop analyzed not only SWM HORIZON but also all other ideas and proposals that fit the PP1 Objective addressing the issues of energy minimization in distributed and cloud applications. The recent state in this part was formed during the Toulouse meeting in November 2014: Action Plan presented by Wahi Narsisian, Ph.D. Student, Scientific Computing Centre at the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems: Distributed Resource (Cluster, Grid, Cloud) management, deployment and Energy consumption issues. Federated cloud infrastructure deployment in Armenia and beyond. Uniting the distributed resources of four countries (Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Romania) into a single oZone dashboard.
• Development of scientific gateways to the user communities: www.blacksea-cloud.net
o H. Astsatryan, A. Hayrapetyan, W. Narsisian, V. Sahakyan, Yu. Shoukourian, G. Neagu, and A. Stanciu, Environmental Science Federated Cloud Platform in the BSEC Region, International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, vol. 1, no.1 pp. 1130-1133, January 2014, ISSN 2229-5518.
• Design a web portal to server a specific scientific communities: http://93.187.165.125/gisservices
o Hrachya Astsatryan, Wahi Narsisian, Andranik Hayrapetyan, Albert Saribekyan, Shushanik Asmaryan, Vahagn Muradyan, Yaniss Guigoz, Gregory Giuliani, Nicolas Ray, An Interoperable Web Portal for Parallel Geoprocessing of Satellite Image Indices, Springer Earth Science Informatics, 2014, DOI: 10.1007/s12145-014-0165-3.
• Deployment of Cloud Storage for research communities: Providing a cloud storage for the researchers based on Synnefo and Pithos+ and Ceph OSD storage, insuring the duplicate of the data to not have data loose, and minimizing the upload/Download speed because the operations are done within a same network.
PP1 Action plan for collaboration was developed at the following project meetings:
• On the 5th of November 2014 the SEPIA team has introduced several scientific posters related to their work, there was a deep discussion about several new ideas and activities related the Energy optimization and Cloud virtual machines migration.
• On the 6th of November 2014 in a private meeting with Dr. Daniel Hagimont and Dr. Georges Da-Costa, IIAP group presented the IIAP vision on common interest and the work that can be done with the teams jointly.
Daniel Hagimont recommended:
• To investigate the possibilities to implement the TUNE Package on the Armenian infrastructure (Daniel Hagimont – send the detailed documentation description of the package, IIAP – analyze and answer). TUNE is a autonomic management system for energy management, servers crash recovery, etc. developed by Dr. Hagimont's team. It uses a UML as description mechanism for different cases of failures, and the system will response to those failures by running an automated task for recovery from the console.
• Investigate memory ballooning technology for further discussions (IIAP). Ballooning is a memory reclamation technique used when a virtual machine is running low on memory so we can provide an extra memory from the host to this machine, taking into account that the host and the remaining machines will not be effected by this operation, this idea will be investigated by IIAP team, some experiments will be done and depending on the result there will be a deep discussion with SEPIA team.
• To prepare a joint article on the series of simulations using the memory of Infiniband available in Armenia (Daniel Hagimont – send detail available description of the technology, IIAP – analyse and answer). The memory allocation experiment will be done on a Linux cluster which has an Infiniband network interconnection, and a joint article will be written about it.
Georges Da-Costa recommended:
• Investigate and implement energy consumption software package (for power consumption monitoring) developed by IRIT (Georges Da Costa – send detail available description of the package, IIAP – analyze and implement). Using the mentioned package will give IIAP team a possibility to obtain the CPU power consumption, temperature from the command line, which will avoid the team from using UPS or power consumption tools.
• To prepare papers based on Molecular Dynamics, Weather Forecasting and Satellite Image Processing scientific domains based on DVFS after finalizing the previous point (IIAP – prepare the draft owner). Three different packages will be used in this experiment, The Weather Research & Forecasting Model (WRF), Gromacs (package to perform molecular dynamics) and GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System), different benchmarks will be done taken into account different situation (idle system, CPU frequency modified system).
• Investigate DVFS governor on the kernel level and conduct the same experiments, and make some comparison between the default governance and the suggested one (after the finalizing the previous point). The default DVFS governor based on Linux kernel will be used, taking into account different approach (Performance, Powersave and On Demand), then the suggested governor will be used and there will a benchmarking and a comparison between these two, and the identification of their advantages and disadvantages.
• Implement VMs migration in a new environment and make a comparison between the suggested environment and the new one, taking into account which one is more easy to configure, to have a migration and the management of VMs one (after the finalizing the previous point). VAGRANT will be used as a cloud infrastructure deployment tool, which is very light and fast, there will be some investigation about writing some code for making an automated migration for cloud virtual machines, then the comparison will be done between OpenNebula and VAGRANT.
2 more teams met in a similar meeting in November 2014.
Young scientist Vahagn Poghosyan represented IIAP team on Automata theory. IRIT was represented by SMAC (Systèmes Multi-Agents Coopératifs), and SEPIA (Système d’exploitation, systèmes répartis, de l’intergiciel à l’architecture) teams, partners: Marie-Pierre Gleize (Professor), Georges da Costa (Assistant Professor). The teams decided:
• To prepare a joint paper on the elaboration of new dynamic optimal distribution algorithms of the user tasks aiming to minimization of energy consumption and improvement of performance on clouds. These algorithms will be based on the methods of the theory of self-organized systems (IIAP – prepare a draft one).
• To develop software packages for numerical modelling of discrete dynamic systems to confirm not only analytical results, but also conjectures, as well as to investigate the model characteristics if the appropriate analytical results are missed (after finalizing the previous point).
• Analytical research of the proposed systems will be conducted by using the methods of graph theory, combinatorics, and probability theory (after finalizing the previous point).
• In a VC meeting with the team of Mrs. Marie-Pierre Gleizes (November 24) to justify the action plan in domain of smart agents, gossip type information distribution and sand pile type statistical mechanics models.
Analysis of PP1, brought above, shows a sensitive progress in project planning and R&D that could in principle lead to generation of successful ideas, composition of strong consortia, educating and training young scientists and managers. Equivalently the lesson learned shows that many of the particular stages are to be fulfilled in more detail, in an appropriate level. In fact, this trial shows that main INARMERA-ICT organizations are able to provide high scientific and managerial potential for EC FP proposal preparations. The lack is in dynamic, concerted and mobile work inside the consortium and outside – the work to the ICT global community and to the users.
PP2 on Advanced networks
Initially PP2 was for “Performance and Security Enhancement for Wireless Sensor Networks”. The initial partnership included: IIAP, University of Geneva University (Geneva, Switzerland), Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Eindhoven, the Netherlands), University of Patras (Greece), Technical University of Madrid (Madrid, Spain), Royal Holloway University of London, (London, UK), Institute of Information Theories and Applications (Sofia, Bulgaria), and Yerevan State University (Yerevan, Armenia).
The real work on PP2 may be presented in 3 clusters as follows.
First track – PhD work
Include the whole project duration. It was composed on 2 PhD studies in WSN area. Hakob Aslanyan defended his thesis “Some Aspects of Interference Minimization, Mobile Data Propagation and Data Encryption in Wireless Sensor Network” in 30th March 2013 in Geneva University, Switzerland. Next to this Hamid Khosrave defended his thesis “Optimal Protocol for Desired Level of Coverage and Connectivity in Wireless Sensor Networks” in 14h November 2014 at IIAP, Yerevan.
Second track - information security issues
Include the work lead by Prof. Gurgen Khachatryan. This IIAP team is experienced in Error Correcting Codes and in Cryptography. They use to address the novel security problems in networks such as data protection in clouds and grids. WSN is a special target even before the INARMERA-ICT project. The initial target was the USA NSF programme and the Swiss program SCOPES.
• Proposal Title: Performance and security enhancement for Wireless sensor networks.
• Research Objective: WSN has no predefined infrastructure. Hence a WSN must be able to self-organize. Nodes cooperate for this self-organization, and it is very basic to this proposal that the cooperation is local – neighbourhood based in its nature. Current WSN models deal with this local analysis in a hidden mode, which doesn’t help achieving the best performance.
• Proposal Title: Enhancing the security and efficiency in cloud applications by Polynomials and White-box encryption, POLYBOX.
• Research Objective: Prototype a number of novel cryptographic means that help to fasten secure computations, security management and integration of secure applications. Special polynomials are one of the resources used. Cloud infrastructure provides the validation environment.
• Partner search procedure was initiated at the IDEALIST portal, received valuable responses and a consortium was formed but due to time limitations it was decided to come with preparations to the Societal Challenges Call for proposals of Horizon 2020 Programme.
• Finally the following very strong submission was completed by the idea POLIBOX:
• Proposal Title: Measurable Obscurity in Computational Assets, MOCA.
• Research objective: The goal of the project is to develop software tools, methodologies, measurements, and best practices in support of the engineering of code incorporating self protecting white-box cryptographic elements, yet producing secured code preserving the functionality of the original code.
• Proposal was rejected due to low evaluation mark for impact. It received 4.5 0f 5 marks for scientific excellence.
Third track - HW SW energy minimization
This track of PP2 has focused on energy minimization issues in networks. Two proposal submissions and two received grants are the result of these actions. One is a Local Armenian grant and the second is an Armenian-German bilateral grant. They are considered as a preparatory stage to a larger EU research framework proposal preparation. Here are clippings of these proposal submissions:
• Proposal Title: Mathematical Enhancement of Green Autonomous Networking, MEGAN.
Consortium
Lehrstuhl Diskrete Mathematik, Institut für Mathematik, Universität Rostock, Prof. Hans-Dietrich Gronau
IIAP, Prof. Levon Aslanyan
Research Objective: MEGAN aims at delivering mathematical structural and algorithmic enhancement of network management systems achieving energy reduction and effective functionality.
The MEGAN is adopted for funding by BMBF Germany and SCS MES Armenia for the period February 2015 – January 2016.
• Proposal Title: Investigation of closed accessible set systems and their applications. CASA.
Research Objective: The project puts together diverse researches in the specific field of discrete mathematics and applied information technologies: set systems, data mining and network management, enhancing and integrating existing pairwise synergies of these domains. Set systems are the very basic concept in discrete mathematics.
The CASA is adopted for funding by SCS MES Armenia for the period July 2013 – June 2015.
Analysis of PP2 activities shows that the research topics that were raised under the INARMERA-ICT meetings are attractive, the proof is the 2 submitted and accepted proposals, and that this can be a good start for EU research proposal preparations. The same time, at the moment the work done needs more integration between the IIAP, IRIT and SZTAKI. The critical mass for a large proposal can be combined only with involvement of all organizations. At this stage there are many points under discussion between collaborating teams and this will bring the cooperation in a new level serving as a ground for larger proposal preparations.
PP3 on Digital Preservation
The initial participants of PP3 are: IIAP, IRIT, SZTAKI, and Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia). In INARMERA-ICT kick-off meeting prof. Philippe Joly, IRIT, highlighted the issue of automated analysis of national mass media archives. Such huge repositories are an infinite source for ICT research – requiring ad hock filtering, compression, indexing, recognition and all these together provides a framework for effective Digital Preservation. Second important issue is the privacy preserved computation. Here it was promising the discussions with prof. Luis Farinas about the modal logic theory and applications. Seems it is prospective to apply and enlarge the LOTREC (Generic Tableau Prover) technique to the smart analysis and preserving of large multimodal content.
One more perspective direction of joint research in the area is related to the NLP and multilingualism. At IIAP there are 2 very strong components: OCR and UNL domain researches. IRIT can provide know how in speech modelling, analysis and recognition. SZTAKI provides technologies of semantic modelling, search and understanding. The topic itself is hard and composite; it needs time to bring all to the same concepts integrating things in a global model. The Workshop in Yerevan in September 2013 was pushing these proposals to the next higher stage. Let us bring the basic notes on activities related to the PP3 and FP7 ICT Call 9 for proposals.
First and the initial proposal based on PP2 was the BYZANTION proposal. The lead person in preparations was Dr. Uros Janko. His deep understanding of Digital Preservation could join several organizations around the general perspective of a proposal preparation.
• BYZANTION Proposal abstract: A wealth of historical, cultural and commercial assets is today at risk of loss within the next years, due either to manuscripts deterioration, equipment obsolescence and inappropriate management of manuscripts digitized collections. Tasks carried out by the BYZANTION partners address issues such as integrative preservation (a “workflow” of formal documents including sources, their structure and descriptions, annotations) for high-risk medieval manuscript collections, metadata extraction, storage, iconographic virtual canon definition, secure interaction, rights management and effective delivery systems for end-users. The proposal joined teams from 12 EU countries and Armenia was the only third country representative.
• Longtime Usability of Digital Content, LUDIC project abstract: Develop a complex system for the protection of digital information, specifically against alteration and partial or complete destruction, with the aim of ensuring the long term availability of the information, i.e. making the content readable, understandable and therefore useful even beyond our concept of time. However, the restriction must be admitted that the long-term concept is bound to the use and understandability of the currently prevailing scientific and thought paradigms (e.g. the structure of the binary code). Storage technologies far beyond our current understanding capability (such as those based on analog physical/chemical effects that are found in nature) will require a new design of the system, insofar as they find technical application in the distant future. Main participating organizations here are www.comback.de www.graudata.com and these teams generated the above descriptions. Unfortunately, late start of preparations was postponed and now the Calls in topic are envisioned in Horizon 2020 after one year.
• Data Mining and Statistical Disclosure Limitation for Social Science Data - HORIZON 2020-DS-2015-1, Digital security, Privacy and Trust
Project aims at: Creating of methods of assessing the risk of disclosure of sensitive attributes. This will be done by applying different data mining tools to the original data in different scenarios of data release. Scenarios will differ by the amount of information available to the intruder and general public about the data creating process and the data itself. These advances will lead to adjustments of disclosure limitation strategies, which will improve utility and quality of the masked data. Two PhD theses were defended by this topic:
Danoyan Hayk, Investigation of Discrete extremal problems. 01.01.09 defended on 12.05.13 044 Council. Topchyan Vardan, Privacy preserved computations. 05.13.05 defended on 13.06.2014 037 Council.
PP4 on Intelligent Information Management
PP4 is inspired by FP7 Health Call proposal MAMOSI. INARMERA-ICT member and other participants of this PP are: IIAP, Institute of Molecular Biology of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia), Royal Holloway University of London (London, UK), University of Catania (Catania, Italy).
• Proposal Title: Mathematical Algorithms and MOdels for Systems Immunology, MAMOSI
Research Objective: Biological function emerges from the interaction of processes acting across a range of spatio-temporal scales. Therefore understanding disease and developing potential therapeutic strategies requires studies that bridge across multiple levels. This requires a systems biology approach and the tools used must be based on effective mathematical algorithms and built by combining experimental and theoretical approaches, addressing concrete problems and clearly defined questions. MAMOSI is a project designed to take such an interdisciplinary approach and will develop a suite of mathematical algorithms to be used in research and clinic.
• Proposal Title: Intelligent Integrated Management System for Advanced Genetic Information, IMAGIN
Research Objective: The amount of genome sequencing data available worldwide is expected to reach exabytes in 2015 and zettabytes before 2020. The unified analysis of this information is crucial to make personalised medicine a reality but it is impossible as it stands today. IT challenges of this near future of medicine includes i) data integration to facilitate interoperability, ii) optimisation of transfer of sequences among the nodes of a global network, iii) privacy, security and IPR protection, iv) intelligent search and real time data retrieval from very large information sources, and v) facilitating the visualisation of the data and knowledge extraction.
• Proposal Title: EU-Black Sea network to combat antimicrobial resistance, EU-BS AMR-NET
Research Objective: The rise and rapid expansion of multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogens that results in unacceptably high morbidity and mortality rates and costs associated represents a major global societal challenge faced by the mankind. The global nature of this problem requires concerted synergistic actions of scientists, public and regulatory agencies, governments, clinicians, educators, stakeholders, and the general public. The main goal of this proposal is to consolidate the efforts at all these levels from the EU (Belgium, Denmark, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, and United Kingdom) and the Black Sea (BS) area (Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine) countries to combat the MDR superbugs via phage therapy.
At two meetings at Toulouse prof. Denis Kouame presented a Strategic topic: Computer Science for Health and Handicaps. This topic includes 5 areas: Biomedical data management and access and processing infrastructures, Modelling and simulation of living, Handicaps and autonomy, E-health, and Biomedical imaging. The envisioned objectives are in two areas – theoretical, algorithmic activities at IIAP and systemic, applied research at IRIT. The milestone was the Yerevan meeting and Workshop that initiated joint proposal ideas in bioinformatics domain. CSIT 2015 will provide individual Sessions to 4 pilot projects to accelerate the preparations. Third and the consecutive Calls of Horizon 2020 are the point where the ideas will be presented. The initial 3 cluster groups are as:
• Biological Pathway Modelling: An example collaborative link is between the teams lead by Luis Farinas at IRIT, and Levon Aslanyan at IIAP. Here are 2 publications of these groups that are under joint consideration and development.
A Logical Model for Molecular Interaction Maps, Robert Demolombe, Luis Fariñas del Cerro, and Naji Obeid, Université de Toulouse and CNRS, IRIT, Toulouse, France
The series of biochemical reactions that occur within a cell form what we call Metabolic Pathways . Most of them can be quite intricate, involving many proteins and enzymes. The work proposes a new logical model based on a fragment of first order logic capable of describing reactions that appear in a metabolic network.
On Knowledge-Based Gene Expression Data Analysis, Arakelyan, L. Aslanyan and A. Boyajyan Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems and Institute of Molecular Biology of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia
Nowadays, technology of the gene expression measurements raise new issues related to proper data analysis and accurate interpretation of results. The present work is focused on theoretical justification of the mentioned problem and proposes a solution through complementing of data-driven analysis with knowledge-based approaches.
• Smart Phone based Applications. The research team at SZTAKI lead by Dr. Zsolt Markus provide complete technological support to applications based on mobile devices. They provided their expertise at IIAP in different occasions: CSIT conference, Summer School, Workshops, etc. Dr. Markus leads a specific project on mobile applications guiding humans in different situations. Complementary, the IIAP team represented by Sahak Kaghyan and Gevorg Karapetyan develop mobile applications to classify the human behaviour and to acquire and control the human health conditions. The METROPOLIS project idea is an issue in this case:
METROPOLIS aims to develop wireless multimodal interfaces to enable a seamless communication between human and Metro (or other similar) infrastructure, offering a plethora of innovative enriched services based on the user’s preferences, their behaviour and the environmental context.
• The ill-posed inverse problems in medical imaging. The PP4 Meeting in IRIT between the TCI team members (http://www.irit.fr/-TCI-team-?lang=en) and the IIAP representatives addressed this issue. TCI team was presented by Denis Kouamé who is the head of the TCI team and A. Basarab who is a member of TCI laboratory. IIAP group research interest is: image inpainting, which deals with retrieving the missing pixels in digital images. This difficult problem is a classical inverse problem in image processing. Its ill-posed nature requires complex optimization routines with appropriate regularization terms.
Strategy and Recommendations
The development of the IIAP 5 Year Strategic Plan 2015-2020 (IIAP-SP20) was an intensive task during the 2 first years of the INARMERA-ICT project. The IIAP-SP20 implementation and evaluation process has been active during the last year of the project, with the goal to illustrate local, regional and national impacts of the research, innovation and education capabilities. The definition of a scientific strategy over the next 5 years is based on the processes of internal and external evaluation as well as the restructuring of the IIAP provide considerable advances which place this institute in the way of functioning collectively adopted at the international level. This evaluation gives an opportunity to better define how to improve the overall performances of activities supported by the Armenian Government, such as the state funding and collaborations to have them better matching with the priorities of National plans. For achieving this objective:
• Self and external evaluations will be a continual process that will involve all facets of the IIAP infrastructure.
• Evaluations will be based on the metrics and performance measures and indicators defined in the research strategy and reflected in the state plans.
• The evaluation process also recognizes unplanned or rapid-response activities that may also have a significant impact as well as administrative, financial, human potential and educational tracks, and provision of ICT expertise in the country.
• Department reports will be used to evaluate the progress against the three general research areas mentioned in IIAP-SP20 and the national performance measures.
• The implementation of IIAP-SP20 is based on a tight cooperation process between INARMERA-ICT and IIAP itself. Thus the action plan of IIAP-SP20 will be analyzed in terms of qualitative, quantitative and progressive indicators of AERES satisfying the National regulations. The Project partners will analyze all material during the annual site visits. In addition, following the completion of annual site visits, a Performance Review Panel (PRP) will conduct a retrospective evaluation of the impact of the programs relative to the strategic plan. The PRP will be composed of members drawn from the scientific council of IIAP and of representatives from academia, government, and industry.
• IIAP will meet in the fall of each year to discuss the progress of each program relative to its plan, and to identify potential areas for improvement.
The other great achievement of INARMERA-ICT is the MOU between IIAP, IRIT and SZTAKI, which provides a solid framework for the continuation of the cooperation between the partners of the projects. One of the first practical consequences is the establishment of a Virtual International Laboratory in charge of enhancing interaction between the partners via visits, co-supervision of PhD students, joint proposals to EU and national calls, etc.
The INARMERA-ICT partners may also contribute to the great challenge of setting up a Supercomputing Center in Armenia on the premises of IIAP by bringing the experience gained in their respective countries. As a result of INARMERA-ICT, a comprehensive report will be prepared and submitted to the European Commission and Armenian Stakeholders, which will include the key achievements and the message of the project.
Potential Impact:
Impact in reinforcing the cooperation capacity
Traditionally Armenia had a leading position in computer science and information technology sectors in the South Caucasus regional and beyond. The IIAP of the NAS RA coordinate the National e- infrastructure, developing the provision of services to the promotion of science and the social challenges. The one of key aim of the Project INARMERA -ICT Program was to strengthen the Scientific Computing Capacity of IIAP in the coming years. Main impact of the project in Scientific Commuting is to establish High Performance Computing and Research Data services environment center for selected target areas: Computational physics, chemistry, biology and medicine; The management of data and analysis for meteorological and air pollution monitoring; Creation of open linked data spaces by connecting data sets from diverse discipline. On 2014 September 19, at the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia was signed a memorandum of cooperation between the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the RA, Ministry of Education and Science, the Ministry of Economy and the National Academy of Sciences. Within the frames of cooperation a National Supercomputing Center will be established in Armenia. It will be located at the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems (IIAP) of NAS of the RA. Implementation this proposal will be essential step in forward to creation contemporary e-science infrastructure in Armenia and will be open new horisones for extension the collaborative research areas.
Impact in Analysis and Policy level
The development strategy for IIAP for increasing its scale and regional coverage and improving its responses to the socio-economic needs of Armenia and the region. During the implementation period the strategy will be preliminary evaluated during 2015 in order to prepare the concrete actions plans. The definition of a scientific strategy over the next 5 years is based on the processes of internal and external evaluation as well as the restructuring of the IIAP is considerable advances which place this institute in the way of functioning collectively adopted at the international level. This evaluation gives an opportunity to better define how improving the overall performances of activities supported by the Armenian Government, such as the state fundings and collaborations to have them better matching with the priorities of National plans.
Impact in Increasing the collaboration between EU and Armenia research organizations due new form collaborations
The creation of International Virtual Laboratory. Thanks to the technical exchanges and to the work performed within the INARMERA-ICT project, the Participants (IIAP, IRIT, SZTAKI) would like to continue collaboration in the future as a joint research activities in all areas related to Information Technology including: Computer science and applied mathematics ; Software Tools, networking and e-infrastructures; Implementation of ICT for state and social needs . The INARMERA-ICT project has also highlighted the complementary competencies of the different Participants needed to continue exploring these domains together. On these bases, the Participants have decided to sign a MOU defining the first framework where the implementation of the results obtained during the INARMERA-ICT project could start efficiently.
Starting the process of Joint (bilateral) supervision of young specialists and increasing the number of scientific publication with international co-authorship. Improving the education curricula to satisfy the international standards due TEMPUS programme.
Impact in Armenia
Extension the collaboration links between IIAP and Armenian ICT industry. During INARMERA-ICT was organized discussions on European priorities on development e-infrastructure and Horizon 2020 programme with Enterprise Incubator of Armenia, Union of Information Technologies of Armenia, Hylink and other firms in Armenia and created the agreements for implementation proposals on actual interests of all sides, the joint projects in software and cloud services.
Linkage of the INARMERA-ICT with other EU –Funded projects and initiatives
The INARMERA-ICT exploits the possible synergies with external contributors to the closer cooperation of EU and EECA countries. The following project proposals have links with activities of INARMERA-ICT.
• EU FP7 EGI-InSPIRE project (Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe) started on 1 May 2010. It is a collaborative effort involving more than 50 institutions in over 40 countries. Its mission is to establish a sustainable European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGI-InSPIRE is ideally placed to join various components of the new Distributed Computing Infrastructures such as clouds, supercomputing networks and desktop grids, for the benefit of user communities within the European Research Area.
• EU FP7 HP-SEE (High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for South East Europe’s Research Communities): HP-SEE links existing and upcoming HPC facilities in South East Europe in a common infrastructure, and it will provide operational solutions for it. As a complementary action, the project will establish and maintain a GÉANT link for Southern Caucasus.
• EU FP7 PICTURE (Policy dialogue in ICT to an Upper level for Reinforced EU-EECA Cooperation) is a support action project aimed at supporting policy dialogue between the European Union and Eastern Europe - Central Asia (EECA) countries and at fostering collaboration opportunities with EECA countries organizations in collaborative ICT R&D both under FP7 and under national/regional EECA programs.
• EU FP7 GN3+ and GN4: The vision of GN4 is to become the unified European Communications Commons, driving knowledge creation, innovation and learning by connecting and empowering research and education communities within Europe and, as the global hub for research networking excellence, elsewhere in other partner regions.
• EU FP7 CEENGINE (Central and Eastern European Networking Association) project aims at enforcing ad stimulating Central and Eastern European Association activities related to incubation and development of National Research and Education Networks in Central, Eastern, Southern Europe and Central Asia.
• Black Sea Economic Cooperation G-ECLIPSE Project, which is designed to deploy a regional integrated Grid and Cloud enabled environment based on Eclipse for the South East Europe including Romania, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. Users will access the resources with g-Eclipse in an easy and uniform way, instead of having to use application specific portals or specific Grid consoles. The proposed infrastructure will be used for further regional (environment, meteorology, seismology, astrophysics) projects.
• Swiss National Science Foundation ARPEGEO project, which is designed to establish a tripartite institutional partnership between Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva (ISE/UNIGE), the Center for Ecological-Noosphere Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (CENS), and the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (IIAP). The present Institutional Partnership project aims at building capacities in two leading Armenia Institutions in regard to the management, processing, and sharing of geospatial data in the environmental domain.
Exploitation of results of INARMERA-ICT
A post-project organisational structure namely Performance Review Panel (PRP) will conduct a retrospective evaluation of the impact of the programs relative to the strategic plan. The PRP will be composed of members drawn from the scientific council of IIAP and of representatives from academia, government, and industry. Specific support mechanisms will be made available to tackle the societal and scientific challenges. Contacts with potential funding organisations are carried out to provide longer-term funding opportunities. Active support and provision of training events to young scientists is planned. Strong auditing and monitoring mechanisms will be put in place for analyzing the Strategic Plan 2015-2020 in terms of qualitative, quantitative and progressive indicators of AERES satisfying the National regulations. It is planned to reinforce collaboration with local ICT enterprises, such as with the Enterprise Incubator Foundation (EIF, http://www.eif.am) PicsArt Ltd and Hylink Ltd.
List of Websites:
INARMERA-ICT Web site: http://www.inarmera-ict.eu
The beneficiaries of INARMERA-ICT are:
• Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (Coordinator), Yuri Shoukourian Armenia
• Universite Paul Sabatier Toulouse III, France, Michel Dayde
• Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Számítastechnikai es Automatizálási Kutató Intézet, Hungary, Janos Demetrovics
• European Centre for Knowledge and Technology Transfer, Belgium, Ruben Vardapetyan