For the record 30 May

30-05-2008

by Emmet Ryan

SFI calls in Doctor Love | European Software Association retains senior figures

Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) has appointed Dr Graham Love as special advisor with responsibility for strategy and planning to the SFI director general, Prof. Frank Gannon. In this role, Dr Love will develop SFI's strategic plan to enable delivery of the Government's Strategy for Science Technology and Innovation 2006-2013.

Dr Michael Murphy, president of UCC, has launched the 2008 edition of the Business Information Systems (BIS) Anthology. The anthology celebrates 10 years of student creativity. At a ceremony in UCC students were presented with this year's awards for their contributions in areas ranging from poetry to photography, art, short stories and essays. The 2008 edition of the BIS Anthology commemorates the 10th anniversary of the publication, featuring not only work by 2008 students but also some of the best art work submitted since the anthology first started in 1998.

The European Commission has unveiled a pilot project to ensure cross-border recognition of national electronic identity (eID) systems and enable easy access to public services in 13 Member States. Throughout the EU, some 30 million national eID cards are used by citizens to access a variety of public services such as claiming social security and unemployment benefits or filing tax returns. The Commission's project will enable EU citizens to prove their identity and use national electronic identity systems throughout the EU, not just in their home country. The plan is to align and link these systems without replacing existing ones. The project will run for three years and receive EUR10 million funding from the European Commission and an equal contribution from the participating partners. Ireland is not one of the states included in the project.

The European Software Association has announced the results of the election of its new board of directors and officers. The new board of directors comprises CEOs and senior executives of some of Europe's top software corporations. Jeremy Roche, Eilert Hanoa and Chris Ouwinga were all re-elected as chairman, vice chairman and treasurer respectively.

European operators have raised the price of roaming calls into the European Union as much as 163 percent since the introduction of the Eurotariff to compensate for the loss of roaming revenues within Europe, according to research by Informa Telecoms & Media. The analysis was based on the percentage change in aggregated roaming prices on a country-by-country basis between 2006 and 2008.