Franco Accordino is the Assistant to the Director of “Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures” within the European Commission’s Information Society and Media Directorate-General. The Directorate’s main goals are: identifying new research paths beyond mainstream ICT research; developing new technologies, services and experimental facilities for the open and trustworthy internet of tomorrow; building and deploying the future European research and education infrastructures; fostering new initiatives for the promotion of a sustainable European research, education and innovation space.
In FP6 (2003-2006) he has been a scientific officer in the area on Grid technologies, Service Oriented Architectures and Network Centric Operating Systems. In FP7, he works mainly on the development of a vision and strategy for future ICT, with particular focus on future and emerging technologies (FET), e-Infrastructures and virtual research communities including research networks, grids and data infrastructures, new paradigms and experimental facilities for the future internet, ICT for trust and security.
Before joining the European Commission, he worked at the ETH/CSCS National Supercomputing Centre of Switzerland, at Consorzio Pisa Ricerche and at the National Research Council of Italy where he conducted research on formal methods, languages and tools for concurrent systems and protocol specification. He has a long-standing experience in several information technology fields, including formal methods and software engineering, grid and distributed systems, operating systems, web-based applications and services and knowledge discovery in databases.
We are in front of an epochal change in the way of doing science and education, enabled by high-speed research networks, increasingly powerful computers, grid technologies, data infrastructures and new tools enabling global virtual collaborations. Such unique tools, known as e-Infrastructures, allow generating and sharing knowledge at a global level. The advent of Web 2.0 and the Internet of multimedia content, services and “things” also marks a cultural change in the way knowledge is produced, disseminated and injected in the education systems and the innovation lifecycles. e-Infrastructures are designed to support these new “participative” paradigms enabling creativity, information sharing and collaboration. They are the catalysers of a new “Scientific Renaissance” which will set the base for future discoveries and will pave the way for a new educational, industrial and societal revolution.
Within the context of the EU Framework Programmes for Research and Technology Development, the European Commission has made significant investments in e Infrastructures along several dimensions, including research networks such as GÉANT, grid infrastructures, data repositories and supercomputing facilities. This presentation provides an overview of the EU research programmes to support e-Infrastructures and points out the challenges for future ICT-based infrastructures for research and education at the down of the 21st century.