Members of ALTICORE project (Jerome Bouffard, Fabio Venuti and Ramiz Mamedov) participated in the INTAS South-Caucasus Scientific Workshop that took place in Tbilisi, Georgia on 28-30 March 2007. Their attendance was possible thanks to grants by INTAS workshop organization to cover travel and accommodation costs.  

The aim of this workshop was to promote the scientific co-operation with this region. It served as a brokerage event allowing European and Caucasian scientific communities’ representatives to meet and exchange their views and experience.   

In particular, Jerome Bouffard (LEGOS) presented a general talk about coastal altimetry, Fabio Venuti (NOCS) presented  Data Grids in coastal altimetry and finally Ramiz Mamedov (IG) focused on altimetry applied to Caspian Sea.  

What follows is a summary of the workshop by Fabio Venuti and Jerome Bouffard. ALTICORE members discussed with Martine Bonin (INTAS program manager) about the Alticore project. She told that the project is really well appreciated by the INTAS team in terms of scientific interest and cooperation.  Most people attending the workshop showed interest in the ALTICORE talks. Some project flyers were distributed during the event.

Among the various persons met, Fabio Venuti mentioned the discussion with Valerio Tramutoli, head of the Satellite Data Analysis Laboratory at the Università della Basilicata who is involved in remote sensing in the area of environmental hazard monitoring and was keen on establishing connections with ALTICORE teams.

During the event, some people presented grid applications in different scientific areas (e.g., astrophysics), which, however, would be a bit more complicated to link with ALTICORE. Given the broad spectrum of research fields involved in INTAS, most presentations did not go into much technical details (and those who did were probably not much appreciated). 

A lot of emphasis was put on what will happen after the end of INTAS. Especially researchers from Eastern Europe seemed to be concerned because, even if FP7 does provide a framework where collaborations with these countries are encouraged, they are more familiar with the context of INTAS projects and fear that the competition within FP7 will be much harder and FP7 won't be tailored for their situations and needs. 

Another problem that was pointed out was that the end of INTAS will make mobility of students from Eastern Europe more difficult, because they won't be able to establish useful contacts in the first place. During the question time, Fabio Venuti asked about why not fostering collaborations with industries rather than concentrating only on searching for funds from EU or governmental agencies but he didn’t get answer, even if Martine Bonin did try to bounce the question around. 

After the workshop, Fabio Venuti spent some days off and visited a seismological station in a remote area bordering Azerbaijan. It was a beautiful and very interesting experience and the only person at the station was extremely kind in sharing his food with him (as he was not expected). 

The ALTICORE consortium warmly thanks Martine Bonin, Piret Noukas, Tatiana Runge and all the other persons who contributed in the success of the workshop.  

The final program of the workshop can be found here 

The presentation of the ALTICORE team can be found here 

Here some photos of the workshop (click above to view real size)

From left to right, Prof. Mamedov close to ALTICORE poster, the workshop room, Fabio Venuti at workshop and after more relaxed, attendants visiting a place after workshop.