We are pleased to announce that in the frame of the All4R&D project's second open call 26 courses in 6 categories are offered, as well as 4 innovative practices, free of charge. The courses are tailored-made, based on the assessed needs of students and professionals, and trends in the industry. The courses are co-created and are offered in joint collaboration of academic and business organizations from 6 countries (Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Germany, Finland, and Austria).

All courses will be in English and employ innovative teaching methods.
More information about the organizations can be found here:
http://platform.all4rd.net/index.php/education/.

We are glad to invite you to join ‘Overcoming pandemic and distance with LoLa’ online distributed concert showing how cutting-edge, high-bandwidth networks and ‘LoLa’ technology seamlessly connect musicians, located in Marseille, France and Yerevan, Armenia, so they can perform together in real time despite their geographical distance.

This event demonstrates the potential of digital technologies to support harmonious cross-border collaboration.

The concert will take place at 16:30 Yerevan time, March 19 and streamed live on ASNET-AM Facebook page.

The productivity of pasture land, the presence of pollutants, and the impacts of natural phenomena such as erosion or droughts can all be measured remotely using airborne or satellite-based sensors. But dealing with the huge amount of resulting data requires innovative solutions and technical support, which in turn require collaborative partnerships. Thanks to networks and services provided through the EU-funded EaPConnect project, and to the project’s Armenian partner IIAP participating in an Armenian-Swiss collaboration on ‘Data Cube’ technology, valuable information is being generated about the environment in Armenia.

The Committee of Earth Observation Systems (CEOS) expects that more than 20 countries will implement Data Cube infrastructure by 2022. Armenia is one of few countries already developing a national-scale Data Cube. As one of the most industrialised post-Soviet countries it faces numerous environmental issues. Although the Armenian Data Cube is still under development, it has been successfully installed as a complete and up-to-date archive of Earth Observation data.

Game-changing technology
The Armenian Data Cube is a game-changing technology for remote sensing Earth Observation and national-level data visualisation, according to Shushanik Asmaryan, who is Head of the Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing Department at CENS (Center for Ecological-Noosphere Studies), which is part of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences (NAS). It promises continuous remote environmental monitoring that will enable Earth Observation scientists to determine trends, define present conditions, and inform the future.

“We’ll be able to talk about the full benefits when tangible results are achieved. But the main advantage of the national-scale Data Cube is that it encompasses the free national e-infrastructures and Cloud capacities to bring together data, analytical methods and application insights that are essential to promote and accelerate social, economic, and environmental sustainability.” Shushanik Asmaryan (CENS)

Long-term collaborative relationships
CENS and IIAP – the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems of NAS – are partners in ADC4SD – the Armenian Data Cube for Sustainable Development project, which is supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation. In this project, IIAP supports the storage, organisation, management and analysis of Earth Observation data. CENS and the third partner, the University of Geneva (UNIGE), provide the Earth Observation expertise. As the partners are keen to explain, this is a synergistic relationship.

“CENS has been actively using IIAP services since 2013, because the computational capacities at CENS were not enough for processing and visualising data derived from satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. In particular, IIAP’s cloud systems provide access to remote computing infrastructures for data storage, processing and visualisation. This paves the way to a long-lasting partnership between IIAP and CENS, to deploy distributed processing capacities for environmental geo-spatial and Earth Observation data in Armenia.” Shushanik Asmaryan

Gregory Giuliani, Senior Lecturer in Earth Observations at UNIGE, and head of the Digital Earth Unit at GRID-Geneva agrees:
“I think that this ADC4SD collaboration is extremely beneficial for the partners and is rooted in a long-lasting and friendly relationship between our three research centers and two countries that started almost 10 years ago. CENS and IIAP have benefited from our expertise and knowledge in Data Cube technology. And we have learned a lot from IIAP on High Performance Computing and distributed systems, and from CENS on environmental monitoring.” Gregory Giuliani (UNIGE)

Benefits for Armenia
Data Cube technology allows complex data to be explored in a multidimensional way. The Armenian Data Cube, anchored in the Swiss model’s best practices, uses the national e-infrastructure provided by IIAP, which consists of both communication and distributed computing infrastructures, providing a single computing environment where different advanced techniques such as Artificial Intelligence algorithms and High-Performance Computing can be used.

“To transfer the necessary knowledge, it is vital to develop new capacities. This helps to achieve adoption, acceptance, and commitment to this new technology, which will increase the capacity to access and use Earth Observation data,” says Hrachya Astsatryan, the director of IIAP.

“Thanks to the Data Cube technology, we are now able to do things that were almost impossible before. In particular, it has enabled us to move from simple diachronic (before/after) analysis to real-time-series analysis, allowing us to generate much more useful information on the dynamics of the various components of the environment. It also facilitates multi-sensor data fusion, to obtain richer information about land conditions and improve the accuracy of image classification,” says Gregory Giuliani.

For Shushanik Asmaryan, the national Data Cube will be a vital tool in helping Armenia to achieve internationally recognised sustainable development goals (SDGs):

“Reliable satellite-based monitoring of environmental SDGs requires Earth Observation systems with systematic acquisitions, free and accessible data, and unlimited high-performing computational resources in order to maintain, process, visualise and share the data at national scale. While greatly facilitating societal applications via the unlimited use of free satellite Earth Observation data, the Armenian Data Cube will support the achievement of SDGs at national level.” Shushanik Asmaryan

A change of focus, from physics to biophysics and scientometrics – brought new challenges and opportunities in the career of Dr. Shushanik Sargsyan. One opportunity – to participate in a 2019 training workshop organised by the EU-funded EaPconnect project - motivated her to get involved in the research and dissemination of the Open Science movement in Armenia. As the Head of the Center for Scientific Information Analysis and Monitoring at the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, as an associate professor at Yerevan State Medical University after Mkhitar Heratsi, and as the author of dozens of scientific publications, her career has seen several achievements. So, as part of the campaign “Celebrating Women in STEM Across the GÉANT Community”, which marks the International Day of Women & Girls in Science on February 11 and International Women’s Day on March 8, we asked Dr. Sargsyan about her experiences, and how she’s applying her new field to a study of women in science.

How did you make the transition from a background in physics to working in biophysics and this new field, scientometrics, the measurement and analysis of scholarly literature? 

I really love my first profession, which was my inspiration and devotion during my adulthood. That led me to defend my PhD thesis in biophysics and now I am a lecturer. I like educating my students and inspiring passion towards physics and evaluating the role of physics in medicine. 

In 2010, the Center for Scientific Information Analysis and Monitoring was opened at the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems and I was invited to lead a Department. The field was totally new for me and I started to research scientometrics from scratch. I loved the field from the beginning. Soon, I was offered the position as Head of the Center, which further deepened my interest in the field. I would like to mention that the Center is the only organisation in Armenia that is involved in this relatively young scientific field. I have participated in different trainings, summer schools and seminars in Europe, in the important hubs of scientometric research. 

I am usually asked why I have shifted from physics to scientometrics, and I answer in the words of my teacher in this field, Wolfgang Glanzel: “I was one of ‘the many’ in physics, while I am ‘the only’ in scientometrics”. 

Your participation in the EaPConnect project’s training workshop on the OpenAire European infrastructure for Open Science brought you to new activities. Tell us about your work in Open Science for Armenia. 

Open Science has become one of the trendy issues among the important topics in scientometric research. I came across the idea during my different seminars and trainings. The idea of open publications and open citations were among the main topics of discussion. My mission towards my country is to raise its visibility in the international community using all possible ways. I see three ways of internationalising Armenian science:

1. Creating national science citation indexes, further including them in regional and international systems;
2. Promoting national journals to be indexed in international scientific databases;
3. Developing the Open Science movement. 

For the realisation of the first point, we are working to create a unified platform of national science – the Armenian Science Citation Index (ASCI– funded by the Science Committee of RA). This is based on the example of similar international and regional or national platforms. We are developing a mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of Armenian scientific organisations, groups and individual scientists, and developing tools for evaluating the effectiveness of Armenian scientific journals using ASCI. This will be based on the Open Science idea, so the database will be open. 

On the second point, there are more than 120 scientific journals in Armenia, which conform to the standards of Open Science. However, only three of these are indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. We are working also with Armenian journals that are not indexed in the open repositories. 

The third direction is the promotion of the Open Science movement in Armenia. Several actions are being implemented. We are organizing or I am participating in various seminars and trainings to disseminate the idea of Open Science, its pros and cons.  

How is ASNET-AM of IIAP, the Armenian NREN, helping this Open Science development? 

The Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems has elaborated an open system repository, called the Armenian OpenAIRE NOAD, where all the scientific potential of Armenia will be collected. Later this is intended to be integrated into EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud. 

You are leading a project on Armenian Women in Science; how was this idea born and what is the project about?” 

I received a grant from the New-York based Armenian National Science and Education Fund (ANSEF), to carry out research on Armenian women in science. This was the third time in a row that I have received an ANSEF award. During last year’s award ceremony, when they were talking about the selection procedure, the organisers mentioned that they were looking for groups with women participants, with a view to encouraging them. That gave me the idea of researching the role and share of Armenian women in science in Armenia and globally, and I proposed the project. The aim of the project is to use scientometric / bibliometric methods to assess their research output on the local and international levels, the dynamics of their work, and their engagement in different scientific fields. We will compare the ratio of women and men involved in natural and social sciences and humanities, and compare this to the world standards. We will elaborate relevant databases with the collected information and give recommendations on gender policy in the science sector.

I think that the women’s potential should be reevaluated and wisely used for our development.