SA-French cooperation boosted at conference in Paris

3 July 2006

Dr Dave Walwyn, CSIR Group Manager: R&D, and Laurens Cloete of the CSIR's Meraka Institute participated in a workshop on South African-French research cooperation in Paris on 13 and 14 June. The workshop, arranged by CNRS (the French national research centre), took place at the Marie Curie Auditorium at CNRS's headquarters in Paris.

South Africa's Ambassador to France, Ms NM Sibanda-Thusi, was a speaker at the Plenary Session opened by the President of CNRS, Catherine Bréchignac. Walwyn represented the CSIR in a round table discussion on South-African research priorities and Cloete gave a presentation titled: "Franco-South African collaboration in ICT and Bioinformatics - status and prospects" that provided an overview of South African research and innovation strategies and the CSIR's research programmes in ICT. Dr Mandi Mzimba, Senior Science and Technology Representative, presented ESASTAP.

The CSIR participants reported that they were struck by the quality of the presentations by both the French and South African delegates. "The programme included a broad range of speakers, from government to research managers, as well as scientists talking about exciting collaborative efforts currently under way. I found that the extent of our research collaboration with France is much greater than I had been aware of. Both countries clearly view this collaboration as very important and mutually beneficial," comments Cloete.

"In the case of ICT, the collaboration with France is relatively new. However, excellent links were forged between French and South African scientists earlier this year and I used this opportunity to extend these contacts. We expect to collaborate in the areas of ICT in disability, wireless communication and human language technologies," he says.

"After the workshop I visited LIMSI-CNRS in Orsay, south of Paris, for a day of presentations and discussions on LIMSI's research areas. LIMSI is a world-renowned laboratory and working with them will accelerate the achievement of human capital development, research and innovation objectives of the Meraka Institute," concludes Cloete.