south african ict research and innovation programmes...

South African

ICT Research and Innovation

Programmes and

Collaboration Opportunities

for Europeans

Dr Barend Taute

Manager: ICT Contract R&D

CSIR Meraka Institute

January 2012

Broadband is coming to Africa

What characterises the ICT market?

(South) African ICT Trends that define the need for innovation:

• Penetration of Mobiles – Mobile penetration has reached 100% in South Africa - livelihood, access information and connect

• Increased Spend on Entertainment – interested in Mobile Gaming, Ringtones, Images, and other products and services that can be utilised and accessed via a mobile device;

• Companies targeting Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) Markets – provide the most reliable source of growth in the ICT market.

• Importance of Social Issues – Poverty Reduction, Service Delivery Efficiency, Job Creation much more important than wealth creation;

• Affordability and Localisation – Technologies must be affordable and localised, as most consumers can not afford to follow the latest trend in technology

• Younger Population – This influences technology needs and requirements

From ICT Roadmap,

Dept of Science and Technology, South Africa

Who we are

What we do

Current collaboration

Vision for future collaboration

Specific areas of importance

The CSIR mandate 'The objects of the CSIR are, through directed and particularly

multidisciplinary research and

technological innovation, to foster, in

the national interest and in the fields

which in its opinion should receive

preference, industrial and scientific

development, either by itself or in co-

operation with principals from private or

public sectors, and thereby to contribute

to the improvement of the quality of

life of the people of the Republic...'

(Scientific Research Council Act 46 of 1988, amended by Act 71 of 1990)‏

Our line department is the Department of Science and Technology‏ (DST)‏

directed multidisciplinary research

technological innovation

industrial and scientific

development

quality of life

Facts and figures: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR, since 1945)

• 2354 members of staff • 1551 in Science/Engineering • 457 with Masters’ • 286 with PhDs • 53% of base black • 33% of base female

• Parliamentary Grant - Baseline Grant: R480m - Ring fenced: R83m

• Contract Research: R873m • Royalties: R36m • Total operating income: R1 472m

People and demographics

Financials

© CSIR 2011 www.csir.co.za

CSIR Units and Centres

through multidisciplinary research addressing challenges in

health, energy, the built environment, the natural

environment, manufacturing and the information society

Operating Units

Biosciences

Built Environment

Meraka Institute (Information and Communication Technology)

Defence, Peace, Safety and Security

Modelling and Digital Science

Material and manufacturing

Natural Resources and the Environment

National Research Centres

National Laser Centre

Emerging Research Areas

Mobile Intelligent Autonomous Systems

Nano-technology

Photonics

CSIR Consulting and Analytical

Services

Main ICT R&D

http://www.csir.co.za/


CSIR Meraka Institute

• Focussed on information and communication technology

• Established in April 2005

• Largest concentration of ICT Researchers in South Africa

• 247 staff and students, mainly in Pretoria and Cape Town

• Dept Science & Technology as primary stakeholder

- ICT research and development implementation

• Active R&D Collaboration

- Depts Communications, Arts/Culture, Education, Health, …

- South African universities and industry

- Africa, Europe, the Americas, Asia



MERAKA VISION

We aim to accelerate South Africa's development towards an

information society through our excellent research,

development and innovation.



Competence Areas, Research Groups and Cross-cutting Initiatives

Centre for High Performance Computing

Very Large Scale

databases

Real-Time Video Coding

Wireless Computing and

Networks

Advanced Sensor Networks

ICT for Earth Observation

Remote Sensing Research

eoApps

Speech technologies

Speech Applications

Integrative systems,

platforms and technologies

Next Generation ICT and Mobile Architectures

Internet of Things

Trusted Network

Infrastructures and Platforms

Living Labs and methodologies

Cyber-infrastructure

Networks and Media

Earth Observation Science and Information Technology

Human language technologies

& Knowledge

technologies

Knowledge Representation &

Reasoning

Enterprise Knowledge

Engineering and Management

SANReN

SAGrid

ICT for Service delivery

ICT for Rural development

Education/Mobile learning

ICT for Health



Human Language technologies

and knowledge technologies

the processing of data, information and knowledge

in natural or artificial languages

Human Language Technologies

• Speech Technology Speech synthesis, machine learning and automatic speech recognition

• Speech Applications Speech dialogue systems, application discovery

• GOOGLE VOICE

Knowledge Technologies:

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Domain representation through ontology engineering and reasoning, description logics.

Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research - joint venture with the University of KwaZulu-Natal

• Enterprise Knowledge Engineering and Management With special focus on human factors issues


Lwazi Project

• Automatic Speech Recognition: – achieving speaker-independent accuracies of

greater than 80%

• Text To Speech: – Natural-sounding for all official South African

languages


Networks and Media

Wireless Computing and Networks

Wireless mesh networks, cognitive radio and smart antennas for energy-efficient wireless communication networks

Real time video coding

Source coding and processing of video for real-time delivery over IP-networks

Advanced Sensor Networks

Applications in extreme and hazardous environments and platforms for decision and action on metropolitan service delivery.

enable ubiquitous networking and broadband

benefits over resource constrained environments



One example shared with the African

continent:

Wireless Networks and Broadband for All

Connecting the unconnected in the rural regions of the world

requires “exceptionally efficient and energy aware” and “predominantly self managing”

and “low cost” “wireless backhauls”

that can utilize “heterogeneous link layer technologies” of “integrated network

providers” as necessary.


Broadband for All in Rural Areas

Installation of Do-It-Yourself kit for wireless communications

Typical landscape in rural South Africa


Earth Observation Science and IT

Research Development and Innovation using Earth

Observation to monitor, detect and manage wide area

societal challenges

ICT for Earth Observation – open source based software architectures, middleware and spatial databases for collection and analysis of spatial data from remotely located sensors to solve wide ranging earth observation problems

Remote Sensing Research – research into advanced processing techniques of satellite and remotely sensed images and signals to solve earth observation problems

eoApps – prototyping and development of automated earth observation applications and services to meet market needs

Environment Urban Monitoring Fire


Automatic Fire Information Service

AFIS II (www.wamis.co.za)

Currently • National Control Grid Staff


Integrative systems, platforms

and technologies Extending the reach of ICT, enabling the inclusive

use of ICTs and supporting national priorities

through capabilities in Software, Web, Mobile, Cloud

Computing, Networking and Hardware technology

Next Generation ICT and Mobile Architectures Dependable scalable robust future proof architectures and solutions to enable an inclusive information society

Internet of Things Engineering Group Cloud computing for large scale computing & data manipulation combines with input & output modalities including “smart” devices, sensors and tags

Trusted Network Infrastructures and Platforms Network infrastructures with built-in security, dependability and privacy to support complex distributed systems and transactions.

Living Labs and methodologies User driven innovation and real world validation of technology



Cyberinfrastructure

coordinated aggregation of software, hardware and

other technologies as well as human expertise to

enable discoveries in science and engineering

and combining disparate resources to provide

an advanced integrated

computational and data infrastructure

Centre for High Performance Computing – Flagship supercomputing initiative including fastest supercomputer in Africa (TOP500 listed). Reconfigurable computing, importing codes, building capacity

SANReN – 10Gb/s National research network will soon connect 200+ facilities

Very Large Scale databases – emerging area dealing with hosting of very large scale data sets in different domains

SAGrid – middleware enabling collaboration; IAAS; Authorisation & Authentication Infrastructure



Centre for High Performance

Computing (CHPC)

Flagship projects

• Computational Space Physics and Astrophysics

• Large-scale simulations of energy storage materials

• Regional Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Modelling / Environmental and Geographical Science

• A South African High Performance Multi-physics Computational Fluid Dynamics Solver

• Electromagnetic Computer Simulation for the MeerKAT and Square Kilometre Array (SKA)

• Modelling HIV-1 evolution

• Modern South African Astronomy and Cosmology: Confronting the Simulated and the Observed Universe

• Monte Carlo simulations of technological tools for quantum information processing and communication

• Nuclear Collisions and Data Grid for the Physics Community



International R&D Collaboration

ICT Multinational Cooperation programme: SAP Research – technologies for emerging economies

Microsoft – enterprise development, innovation competition

Nokia and Nokia-Siemens networks

Intel, Dell – collaboration on future HPC architectures

Google – Voice search in local languages (Google Voice)

Collaboration with multilateral and donor organisations World Bank (InfoDev funded mLab SA)

UNICEF

Growing African ICT research collaboration


European Union Projects - FP7 ICT theme

EuroAfrica-ICT

Supporting policy dialogues and strengthening cooperation between Europe and Sub-

Saharan Africa on ICT Research

EuroAfrica-P8

Supporting policy dialogues and cooperation with Africa to enhance ICT cooperative

research links between Europe and Africa in the framework of the “Africa-EU Strategic

Partnership 8 on Science, Information Society and Space

IST Africa

Regional Impact of Information Society Technologies in Africa

VOICES

VOIce-based Community-cEntric mobile Services for social development

EO2HEAVEN

Earth Observation and Environmental Modelling for the mitigation of Health Risks

OSIRIS

Towards an open and sustainable ICT research infrastructure strategy

BIC

Building international collaboration on trustworthy ICT

ProbeIT

Pursuing Roadmaps and Benchmarks for the Internet of Things

PAERIP

Promoting African-European Research Infrastructure Partnership

COST Actions: IntelliCIS – Intelligent Monitoring, Control & Security of Critical Infrastructure

Systems

Current ICT collaboration with Germany

• Fraunhofer

- Fokus, Heinrich Hertz Institute, Optronics, AICOS

- Wireless, LTE, students, free space optics, FP7 proposal

- Global Research Alliance backed work in Zambia: Green &Low-Cost Wireless

Communication Network for Africa (GRA ICT4D)

• SAP

- South Africa: SAP-Meraka Unit for Technology Development

- Technologies for emerging economies

• Afrika-Verein der deutschen Wirtschaft / German Africa Business Assoc.

- German-Africa ICT Forum (Nov 2011, Kenya)

• Münster University

- Earth Observation

• Global Fire Monitoring Centre

• iGSI - International Geospatial Services Institute

Vision for ICT R&D Collaboration with EU

• Priority areas

- DST ICT Roadmap

• Basic and Applied

- “Curiosity” + “demand driven” innovation and impact

• Basis

- Mutual Strength & Mutual Interest

• Partnering

- EU and SA universities, research organisations & industry (PPPs)

• Exchanging scientists

- Bilateral agreements, HCD, joint projects, joint supervision

• FP7 mechanisms

- Currently more Coordination and Support Actions

- Future more Collaboration, People, Capacities

• Including African partnerships

• Variety of instruments

- Institution ↔ Institution

- Research Chairs, National Research Foundation

- Technology Innovation Agency

Specific Proposed Collaboration Areas

• Future Internet Research

• Internet of Things

• Advanced Sensor Networks

• Wireless technologies

• Smart Living for All

• Cybersecurity / Trustworthy IC

Future Internet, Wireless, Sensors, Networks

Future Internet

• South African and African challenges wrt Future Internet

research:

• broadband access and services to large rural populations and other

under developed areas - this includes:

• services innovation and user driven innovation, trust in services

and end-to-end services

• enhancing service delivery at local government delivery through

smart city applications

• enhancing the robustness, energy efficiency and reducing the carbon

footprint of physical infrastructure

• critical infrastructure protection

• enabling industrial competitiveness through interventions in

manufacturing sector

• hosting global science projects (such as SKA) and integrating Africa

in the global science community

• lowering the cost of logistics and enhancing reliability through the

Internet of things

The SANReN network as a FIRE test-bed

- Dr Colin Wright • Largest and fastest network in Africa - 1 million users on

completion of phase II

• SANReN is IPv6 ready

• Future SANReN -> superfast research class networks, free to

users, accessible anywhere any time (including roaming, indoor

wireless, outdoor wireless and mobile through LTE)

• Requires some technical breakthroughs

• Collaboration between the NREN and Mobile operators

• Interconnection of major scientific infrastructures such as

• the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC)

• Science projects like SKA SALT etc.

• The SANREN networks, user base and dark fibre metro rings

represent physical infrastructure that can be leveraged for

experiments

Internet of Things Testbed (Dr Louis Coetzee)

• Developing a "landscape" report of IoT in South Africa to identify the most

likely applications using wireless connectivity and Living Labs

• IoT – Challenges:

– Number & heterogeneity of devices

– Information explosion, trust, security & privacy

– Importance of meta-data and business models

– Development of standards, interoperability, open architectures

• Our Activities:

– Developing reusable technology building blocks & platforms:

• BeachComber – protocol agnostic combiner (People & Things)

• ThingMemory – cyber representation of the Thing

• Visualization – view into IoT

– Demonstrating IoT application in different domains:

• Energy conversation & load optimization (M2M)

• Build environmental control and inclusion (P2M)

• Information dissemination to society (M2P)

• Natural environment and societal impact (Carbon)

Emerging Economies Path to Future Internet :

Heterogeneous Wireless Access Technologies

Dr Fisseha Mekuria

We developed a wireless mesh network platform with full support for

IPv6. Edge networks based on IPv4 are interconnected over the core

IPv6 network.

Next Generation Broadband Heterogeneous Wireless Network

Research Test-bed Crucial in the National Research Strategy:

R&D in Next Gen. Radio Network Technologies:

o Software Defined Radio, Cognitive Radio Networks: Dynamic

Spectrum Allocation, White Space Tech.(WST): IEEE 802.22.

o Intelligent & Dynamic Spectrum Allocation – ICASA

o Coexistence of Heterogeneous Wireless Networks & IoT.

o Secure & Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks (ASN).

o Intelligent Digital Services Node & Set Top Boxes – Dept of Comms

Test-bed facilitates Improved Collaboration for/with:

Postgraduate HCD & R&D capacity building

o SA & International Universities, Research Institutes.

o Regulatory & Standards Bodies

Antenna Mast Base Transceiver

Station (BTS)

Reconfigurable Radio

Base Station (Proposed)

Research in Cognitive Radio

Networks, (Existing).

Dynamic Spectrum Allocation

White Space Technology,

SANREN

Internet

Wireless Sensor Networks (M2M,

Energy Efficient & Smart Adhoc

Sensor Networks) (Emerging)

Energy & Spectrum Efficient

Wireless Mesh Network

(Existing)

Next Generation Wireless

Networking

(e.g. White Spaces, Femto-cells,

Cellular – 4G, LTE, WiMAX)

(Co-existence)

Next Generation Wireless Technology Research Infrastructure - NRF-RISP proposal

Gateway

& High Speed Router

Intelligent Set Top Box

DTT (DSN Flagship)

CHPCPartner

Institutions

Cloud Services

GLSD,WST

Cloud Services

GLSD,WST

Integrating next-generation network technologies with the mesh

networks in order to realise Future Internet infrastructures in rural areas

Advanced Sensor Networks – setting up an ASN Centre

• Creating local solutions with multi-disciplinary domain and technology

experts.

• Core technologies: very large databases, information security,

artificial intelligence, modelling and simulation, high performance

computing, geomatics, sensor development

• Technology drivers: increased computational power, enhanced

networking, reduction in size and power utilisation, availability of

sensors and actuators, connectivity added to more objects

• Market opportunities:

- Electricity Grid – bidirectional power flow, dynamic routing,

demand side management by users, innovation ecosystem

- Pipeline Network – underground monitoring

- Underground mine safety improvement

- Green economy – effective monitoring, verification and control

technologies for various carbon reduction measures, pollution

monitoring

• Local partners

- Univ of Pretoria + Eskom, TUT, CPUT, ..

Proposed New Flagship Initiative: Smart Living for All

• R&D of “smart” technology for the

built environment, energy

infrastructure and the natural

environment.

• Extract meaningful intelligence

• Improve efficiency, cost, safety,

planning, management, service

quality, forecasting

• Real life environment, Living Lab

methodology

• Collaboration with experienced

partners internationally

SENSE

UNDERSTAND

CHANGE

IMPLEMENT

•Cybersecurity

Reality - Malware receiving sites

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Vol. 10, Jul-Dec 2010

Copyright CSIR 2011

Canada US Korea Japan Australia EU

Security, Privacy & Trust in

Global Networks and Services

Partners Coordinator: Jim

Clarke, Waterford

Institute, Ireland (2011 – 2014)

http://www.bic-trust.eu/




Trustworthy ICT Research Topics from BIC Workshop in

South‏Africa,‏Aug’11

1. Trust management for techno-socio business ecosystems in the

context of emerging economies

- Technology + community controls

2. International cyber security research – African perspective

- Could Africa become home of the world’s worst cyber pandemic?

- Role of ISPs, communities, sector based alliances, data exchange

3. Financial infrastructure protection

- eBanking, data exchange, Computer Security Incident Response

4. Law enforcement approaches to deal with cyber crime

- Cross-border investigations and prosecution

5. Getting ready for Trust and Security in the Future Internet

- Physical/virtual integration, public-private partnerships

Emerging Economies USE CASE EXAMPLES

Mobile Services Platform for Very Small Enterprises (VSE) in Emerging

Economies

Thank you

Contact details: Dr Barend Taute Telephone +27 12 841 4063 Email [email protected] Web www.csir.co.za

south african ict research and innovation programmes...

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