Dr Simon Dobson
Dr Simon Dobson of the School of Computer Science and Informatics has been appointed to the Board of Directors of ERCIM - the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, which coordinates a number of multi-million, multi-country EU projects. ERCIM aims to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase co-operation with European industry.
“ERCIM is a highly influential organisation in ICT, being the contact point for EU-NSF collaborations amongst other things, and Simon's appointment to the board is a significant achievement”, said Professor Paddy Nixon, Head of the Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science and Informatics.
Leading research institutes from seventeen European countries are members of ERCIM, and in Ireland’s case it was the Irish Universities Association that joined as the national ERCIM member. ERCIM runs working groups in areas such as the semantic web, dependable systems and e-learning, building and maintaining a network of researchers, organising workshops, and preparing common project proposals.
Dr Dobson formerly worked in the CLRC Rutherford Appleton laboratory in Oxford, the ERCIM lab in the UK. “Membership of ERCIM makes it easier to conduct collaborative, cross-border research. It gives Ireland another route into the organisations that can run this scale of project effectively – the big players and the big labs”, he says.
An important ERCIM remit is to help prioritise the themes for future funded research. The recently concluded ERCIM project Beyond-The-Horizons "Anticipating Future and Emerging Information Society Technologies" was funded under the EU 6th Framework Programme. “ERCIM is now gearing up to participate in the key research areas that should be funded in Framework 7”, said Dr Dobson.
For further information see: http://www.ercim.org/contacts/bod/
