Sina Institute was invited to present its EU cooperation, during December 12-13, 2012, at the 2nd International conference on Integrating Arab e-Infrastructure in a Global Environment (eAGE’12), held at Zayed University, Dubai, and organized by the Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN).
The director of the Sina Institute for Knowledge Engineering and Arabic Technologies, Dr. Mustafa Jarrar presented the institute’s experience in cooperating with Europe and overviewed the institute’s prior and ongoing projects, including the FP7-funded SIERA project on developing multilingual and multi-cultural knowledge sharing portal; the TEMPUS-funded PalGov project to establish the Palestinian e-Government Academy, the Google-funded Wojood project to develop tools and APIs for Arabic language processing, the Italian-funded GovSeer project on Interoperability of government services, among many other projects.
He also emphasized that connecting EU and Arab researchers is essential, in order to increase the economical and social cooperation and cultural exchange between the two regions; and that Birzeit University was the first Palestinian university which joined EUMED Connect (in 2007). Dr. Jarrar said that Palestine is an eligible country in most EU research funding programs (e.g., FP7, TEMPUS, Erasmus Mundus, among others); and despite of the political situation, Palestine is one of the most active Arab countries in such programs.
The conference was opened by H.H Sheikh Nahayan Mubarak Al-Nahayan, Minister of Higher Education & Scientific Research, UAE, HE Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, Chairman of ASREN, Jordan, H.E. Adam Kulach, Head of Delegation of the EU to Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, KSA, H.E Dr. Sultan Abu-Orabi, Secretary General, Association of Arab Universities, and by Mr. Fahem Al Nuaimi, CEO, Ankabut, UAE; where all of them stressed on the importance of advancing the research and education capacity of the Arab region within the knowledge age.
A draft of the status report on Arab e-Infrastructures is available both in Arabic and in English. All presentations can be downloaded from the conference program, the photos can be downloaded from the Conference’s Facebook page.
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