Siegfried Reich

European Research Area: inventing our future together

… a nice brochure (“Green paper 04-04-2007″) on new perspectives of the European Research area. The features of ERA include

• an adequate flow of competent researchers
• world-class research infrastructures
• excellent research institutions
• effective knowledge-sharing
• well-coordinated research programmes and priorities
• a wide opening of the European Research Area into the world

An electronic version in English of the green paper is available here.

Add comment December 13th, 2007

Kaust – King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

On the homepage it says that KAUST will offer “uncommon freedom for pursuit of scholarship” to lecturers.

Add comment November 19th, 2007

Tagit

Tagit is a small dissemination project supported by Land Salzburg (Wissenschaftsressort). The innovation is in students/pupils themselves contributing to a virtual atlas on Salzburg. See tagit.salzburgresearch.at.

The first tag was set by Frau Landeshauptfrau.

Add comment November 14th, 2007

2nd Symposium on Innovation in Salzburg

… an event, organised by ITG-Salzburg, with excellent speakers: very innovative, witty and inspiring. The full program is available at ITG-Salzburg.

The list of speakers includes

• Dr. Gertraud Leimüller, director of winnovation consulting
• Andreas Wildberger, FFG
• Andreas Spechtler, director of RealNetworks Salzburg
• Andreas Neuhofer MIM, head of marketing, Orderman
• Manfred Perterer, editor of Salzburger Nachrichten
• Walter Ebner, director of Reststofftechnik

Add comment October 11th, 2007

Forschungsdialog – a dialogue on research

Federal Minister for science and research, Dr. Johannes Hahn, starts an exchange dialog between science and politics called “Forschungsdialog“. The kick-off event will take place Oct. 16th, 2007, in Vienna.

Add comment September 25th, 2007

Exzellenzstrategie

… the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development has recently published its strategy towards excellence. To be downloaded at www.rat-fte.at.

Amongst others, the study argues for more excellence on the “top” and more quality with respect to the “breadth”. I.e., additional support for the best (institutes) and more average quality mostly through improvements in methods and processes for the average research institute.

This is somehow natural, as the strive towards the “3.0% target” requires more research and the same time this implies that some researchers need to be “extra-excellent” as otherwise the average would decrease (too much – avoiding a decrease in average will IMHO be hard to achieve).

Add comment September 13th, 2007

Chinese Minister of Science

… I happened to hear this in a meeting last Friday: Chinas minister of science, Wan Gang, did his PhD at the University of Clausthal-Zellerfeld, he worked at Audi and is still member of the board of directors of Thyssen Krupp. So he is a symbol of the close cooperation (in science) between Germany and China. Even more interestingly, he is the first minister that has not been a member of the communist party. See an article in Die Zeit, May 2007.

Add comment July 30th, 2007

Proposal for an Austrian ICT Research Strategy

… proposed in a study that is now public, contracted by the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development. The study itself was done by EUTEMA.

Some findings

• Embedded systems, mobile computing, visual computing, knowledge-based systems (AI and semantic technologies) as well as electronics are seen as key areas
• There is need – if not today already at least midterm – for researchers
• Cooperation science industry is developed well

The study is available via http://www.rat-fte.at/UserFiles/File/Studie07_Eutema_Grundlagen-IKT-Strategie.pdf.

Add comment July 18th, 2007

Benchmarking of Austrian Universities

…. “Hochschulvergleich.at” offers various criteria and benchmarks for Austrian Universities. Quite interesting to see that Klagenfurt is doing pretty well in computer science and Linz is apparently only “medium”.

Add comment July 11th, 2007

2n IT-Businesstalk

… Frau Landeshauptfrau was giveb a domain for herself (landeshauptfrau.at) by Richard Wein and Sigi Reich.

Excellent event in an excellent location (Loft Salzburg). Themese were convergence/business models and IP-telephony; social web and user participation; location-based services.

Presentations see IT-Businesstalk.at.

Add comment June 14th, 2007