Crises in countries on the fringes of Europe dominate world
news: Ukraine, Syria, Libya and Egypt have replaced Kosovo, Georgia and
Lebanon in the headlines in past years. What these countries have in common is
not only border and ethnic conflict, but a limited ability to develop advanced
economies due to (amongst other factors) a crippled and underfunded education
and research sector. This leads not only to an isolation from global scientific
communities, but to a generation of students without the skills needed to build
the high-value SMEs and start-ups essential for a vibrant and globally-engaged
economy.
It is well known that the developing world suffers what has
long been termed the ‘digital divide’. This term has typically referred to the
historical lack of availability of internet bandwidth in geographically
isolated countries in the grip of incumbent telecommunication monopolies. Although
this situation persists in many countries (even in some EU member states), the
price of Internet connectivity has plummeted in a number of countries
previously badly impacted –Ukraine and Turkey are two examples where wholesale internet
connectivity is available at less than €1/Mbps/Month –comparable with pricing
in Western Europe.
So, it is certainly encouraging to see widespread access to
the Internet –but unfortunately this does not equate to good access to
scientific data and facilities. Open Data is a hot topic in certain sectors of
the scientific community, but its impact will not reach beyond leading
scientific nations if high-quality infrastructure is not available for research
and education. This infrastructure comprises not only internet networks (at a
higher quality and capacity than commoditised services) but also computing and data
storage facilities.
The European Commission has recently signed an €13.7M contract
to deliver a high speed academic network for Eastern European and the Caucasus –based
upon feasibility work conducted in my team at GÉANT. This will go a long way
towards building essential capacity –both technical and human –but the focus
needs to be wider. CERN is building partnerships in developing regions –notably
for this discussion, the Caucasus and North Africa. This promises to begin to
spread the benefits of global scientific collaboration to developing countries –in
terms of access to the world’s most advanced (and expensive to produce)
scientific data, but also in beginning to build local data infrastructures to
exploit the data. This is a great step forward, but if genomics, climate and
agricultural data can also be accessed through the same pathways, and
locally-relevant analysis can be computed, then the societal impact will be
more immediately tangible. Given the recent dramatic flooding in Tbilisi, the
relevance of data-centric disciplines such as climate-modelling cannot be in doubt.
