1. CSIT 1999: General Co-Chairs opening
address by Vice-Chair of the RFBR Prof. Oleg Siountiourenko
Dear CSIT Workshop participants,
Modern time is a time of changes. The society has reached a post industrial stage taking a
lot of complicated problems which are difficult to solve in ecology, power energetic,
demography, food etc. Their solutions, saving the rate of growth for both fundamental and
applied science, are in a considerable degree dependent on the level of informatisation in
an area of science and education.
The information methods and approaches are becoming wider used in research and
development. Informatisation, convergence of computing and telecommunication technologies,
large scaled usage of modern Information Systems in an area of science and education
enable the new qualitative level of knowledge acquisition and generalisation, the spread
of learning and knowledge, and its using. The most important problems in a scientific area
seam as follows:
- developing the integrated environment for technology of Data WareHouse;
- developing the interoperable intermediate level and implementing the "open"
object-oriented systems with the abilities to support the interoperable environments for
heterogeneous information resources;
- developing and implementing the high-end telecommunication technologies based on ATM
and Frame Relay, as well as the
new kinds of services: videoconferences, multicasting etc.;
- developing scalable and high performance distributed supercomputer systems with extended
multiaccess;
- developing and implementation of methods and facilities for information authorization
(security).
The scientific community has a greatly changeable dynamics with respect to solve the
problems of informatisation: a) open
and accessible information resources; b) high skill of users; c) necessity and sensitivity
towards the advanced technologies; d) growing demands to prevent the information loss and
corruption etc.
The Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), following the trends and tendencies of
the world science, granted previously and now the funding on the competitive basis for the
research projects aimed to the developing of the modern information infrastructure for
science and education. The important branch of RFBR activity is to support the
interdisciplinary research and development and newly arose research directions such as
distant investigation of physical and biological entities (e.g., telemedicine), systems of
complex support for proper functioning of territorial distributed workgroups,
virtual scientific collectives, computer support systems for monitoring of large scaled natural and
technical objects, electronic libraries and repositories.
The success of this CSIT'99 Workshop which is supported by the RFBR is a contribution to
IT advance and applications to influence the information society of 21st century.