Content about Africa

Feature - Rough waters: fighting modern-day pirates with technology

Map of reported pirate incidents in the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia. (Click for large, high-resolution version.) Image above courtesy of UNOSAT; image on front page courtesy of sxc.hu

In the past year, maritime shipping has suffered a resurgence of piracy, at a level that the world has not seen since the early 18th century. Sailors working off the Horn of Africa have been particularly hard hit: last year, records show that 125 ships were attacked and 45 seized.
Real numbers are likely much higher, as piracy is believed to be widely under-reported. One of the world's busiest shipping lanes, about 20,000 ships annually pass through the Gulf of Aden on their way to and from the Suez Canal — carrying a tenth of world trade.
Unlike the popular image of pirates seen in movies and books, modern pirates are more likely to wield machine guns than muskets; and the crime remains as difficult to fight as it ever

Link of the week - Wherever you roam, you can always log in at home You can always be plugged in.Photo courtesy eduroam ET, log in at homeSay that you’re an American researcher working in Wagga Wagga, Australia, far from home, and you want to log in to use the resources of the nearest research institution. Or, you’re in Vietnam and want to securely access the Internet from your host institution at the University of Hanoi.How do you do it with the fewest hassles about getting permissions, registering your laptop—or learning multiple sets of new usernames and passwords?Never fear, eduroam is here.Short for EDUcation ROAMing, this system allows users—such as researchers, teachers, students or staff—from participating institutions to access the ‘net from any participating institution, with user authentication done by your home institution, wherever you may be physically located.So, you log in to your same old account, using your same old user i.d and password. When it is received by the wireless

Announcement - Applications open: South African Grid School 2008, July, South Africa The University of the Witwatersand was founded in 1896 and is home to the oldest and largest university press in Africa.Image courtesy of University of the WitwatersrandRegistration for the South African Grid School, which will take place from 23-25 July 2008 at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, is now open.Participants will learn to use grids of thousands of processors and will be able to continue to use these resources for their research after the workshop.The workshop will focus on use of the Open Science Grid and will cover:An overview of distributed computing concepts and toolsConcepts, tools and techniques of grid computingDiscovering and using grid resourcesGrid scheduling and distributed data managementWeb service and grid service conceptsDistributed data miningTechniques for workflow and collaborationUndergraduate and graduate students, researchers, educators and professionals in engineering, computer scienc

Announcement - International Science Grid This Week celebrates one year iSGTW continues to cover the truly international effort behind grid computing.Image courtesy of GridPP, OSG and EGEEOn 14 November 2007 International Science Grid This Week will celebrate its one-year anniversary. Now with more than 3400 subscribers, iSGTW attracted over 70,000 visitors during October, an almost six-fold increase over the last six months. A collaboration between Open Science Grid in the U.S. and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE in Europe, iSGTW promotes the success of grid computing as a tool for scientists and researchers.Able to complete in minutes what might take an average PC many months, grid computing offers scientists a new level of computing power, allowing them to delve deeper in to research questions with big answers. Grid computing works by coordinating the power of ordinary computing resources, linking this power into massive multifunctional computing “grids.”Scientists are using grid computing to fight disease, develop n

  Announcement - IEEE T-ASE special issue on Scientific Workflow Management and Applications IEEE Transactions on Automation Science Engineering is calling for papers for a special issue on Scientific Workflow Management and Applications.Image courtesy of IEEE T-ASE IEEE Transactions on Automation Science Engineering is calling for papers for a special issue on Scientific Workflow Management and Applications, to be published in July 2009.Paper submissions are due 31 March 2008, with final manuscripts due 15 January 2009. Original and unpublished high-quality research results are solicited to explore and boost the new area. The special issue aims to systematically investigate and shape the special features, challenges and new techniques of scientific workflows, as well as corresponding applications and underlying computing infrastructures.  Topics for contributions include, but are not limited to:Special features of scientific workflows and their hints on new techniquesScientific workflow modeling, execution and scheduli

  Announcement - High Performance Computing Ph.D. Fellowship Program closes 30 October ACM/IEEE-CS HPC Ph.D. Fellows are awarded a certificate and a stipend of at least US5,000 dollars for one academic year. All ACM/IEEE-CS HPC Ph.D. Fellows are also invited to attend at least one SuperComputing conference.Image courtesy of SC '07 The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE-Computer Society and the SC Conference Series have announced the first year of the High Performance Computing Ph.D. Fellowship Program.  Fellowship applications are due 30 October 2007.The ACM/IEEE-CS HPC Ph.D. Fellowship Program honors exceptional Ph.D. students throughout the world with a focus on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. HPC covers computational sciences, computational engineering, and computer science using the most powerful computers available at a given time.Students must be nominated by a full-time faculty member at a Ph.D.-granting, accredited institution. They must be enrolled in a full-time Ph.D

  Feature - Reversing brain drain: grid computing does some innovative plumbing Members of the African Ministry and HP management celebrate the launch of the joint HP-UNESCO project “Piloting Solutions for Reversing Brain Drain into Brain Gain for Africa.”Image courtesy of HP “Before, if we funded researchers to work in laboratories abroad, we could not be sure if they would come back,” says Maiouf Behamel, director of Algeria’s Centre for the Development of Renewable Energies. “We hope that this project will set an example that others can follow.”The project Behamel speaks of is the creation of a virtual organization: a network of Algerian researchers—living all over the world—who will collaborate with and provide doctorate-level teaching to fellow students and scientists, making it possible for those who stay in Algeria to benefit from the expertise of those who leave, and providing the cyberinfrastructure to support and connect them to the rest of the global community.C