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The International Relations Department of MINCyT was the host of this Steering Board Meeting

Image 1: Silvia Bidart, Mónica Silenzi and Javier Orozco

Buenos Aires: On May 20^th, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation of Argentina hosted the fourth meeting of PLATA Technology Platform. The goal of the encounter was to debate the Future Internet Strategic Research Agenda (SRA), between Argentina and European Union,

The first to open the floor was Mrs. Monica Silenzi, Technical Coordinator of ABEST, International Cooperation Deparment of MINCyT, who explained the interest of the Ministry on the Technology Platforms, instrument that can strategically be used to cooperate in R&D activities with the European Union. Argentina has a privileged relation with EU since it can affects future European calls, as FP7, FP8 and other calls.

Before starting the SRA discussion, Dr. Silvia Bidart, FIRST Regional Coordinator, thanked ABEST for the collaboration with FIRST Project, raising this Program as leading case in the latam region. She also mentioned the importance of transparency in PLATA management: “Technology Platforms Governance and Structure, are based on meritocracy and dinamic evolution..”, and I invite all to mark in their agenda the General Assembly to be held next november. Mrs. Luz Ledesma, Coordinator of FIRST Argentina, explained the work plan for 2011: Strategic Research Agenda, Roadmap, visibility actions and the General Assembly: “PLATA Technology Platform is a channel to interact with European Technology Platforms”.

Mr. Javier Orozco, from Universidad Nacional del Sur and MINCyT Expert, was the moderator of the SRA discussion. He started by making a focus on the fact that PLATA need to clarify some methodological issues. A matrix with the list of priorities was distributed. The organizations marked their “interests”, which were the areas where they work or potential areas to research and develop. Mr. Orozco remarked that this could bring some confusion since for some companies, for instance, “interest” meant “areas that I need to develop my business”. Therefore, the conclusion was that “interest” means the first concept.

Afterwards, the leaders of NESSI (Mr. Gustavo Guaragna), ARTEMIS (Mr. Orozco) and ICT Components (Mr. Daniel Lupi) presented those Working Groups and the preliminary results of the contributions received. The groups that have the major portion of contributions were NEM and NESSI.

Some statements of the participants:

Regarding some assistants doubts, Mr. Mario Aguilera, from Levin Global and Universidad Nacional de Luján, explained: “The SRA is a collective answer towards the European interests in the field of ICT in order to discover the common R&D priorities between EU and our country”. Mr. Claudio Delrieux, from Universidad Nacional del Sur,  added that “it is a  very good exercise to identify the our priorities and be aware where Argentina is standing”.

Another subject that all the presents agreed was mentioned by one of NESSI leaders, Mr. Gustavo Guaragna from Snoop Consulting, that stated the importance of the amplifying the contributions to SRA: “It is important to identify more stakeholders that performs R&D activities and that have concerns about it. In NESSI group there are several concurrences between Industry and Academia, concurrences that can be higher if we increase the contributions”.

Mr. Luis Valle mentioned the importance of the sector Networked Electronic Media have in Argentina since recent policies such as Argentina Conectada, which is giving new opportunities for this sector stakeholders.

In the closing session, it was agreed that a new deadline was going to be set in order to receive more inputs.  Finally, Mr. Orozco requested to the leaders to try to translate the maximum knowledge into the document in order to represent national interests.

DOCS

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