30/04/05 - A BULGARIAN WEEK FOR COST AND THE EUROPEAN SCIENCE

Professor Francesco Fedi, President of the COST Committee of Senior Officials, accompanied by Mr Van Rij Head of the COST Secretariat, participated in the “COST Information Day” organized in Plovdiv on 21 and 22 April 2005 by the Bulgarian COST National Coordinator Ms Albena Vutsova. After the welcome address of Professor Kamen Velev, Deputy Minister of Science, Professor Fedi illustrated the past, present and future of COST and Mr van Rij presented the last COST video prepared by the Council of the European Union. A series of presentations by Bulgarian scientists participating in various COST Actions, during which the Bulgarian contribution was underlined, took place. A very lively and fruitful discussion with the representatives of the Bulgarian scientific community, during which Professor Fedi, assisted by Mr van Rij and Ms Vutsova, answered the many questions posed, followed. “ I am really impressed” said Professor Fedi congratulating Ms Vutsova for the excellent organization of the COST Information Day “ by the high number of COST Actions in which Bulgaria participates and by the outstanding contribution of the Bulgarian scientists”.

The COST Information Day followed and was followed by other important events for the Bulgarian scientific community.

The visit of the President of the Republic of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, during which important programmes for scientific cooperation between Italy and Bulgaria were agreed.

The series of meetings between Mr. Giancarlo Caratti and other representatives of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission with prominent research organizations in Bulgaria to present recent achievements and future plans of JRC as well as opportunities for collaboration with the Bulgarian scientific community.

The Workshop on “Virtual observatories: Plate Content Digitization, Archive Mining and Image Sequence Processing” which took place in Sofia in the Scientists House of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences from 27 to 30 April 2005. The Workshop was organized under the auspices of COST Action 283 "Computational and information infrastructure in the Astronomical DataGrid" iAsro, the Space Research Institute and Institute of Astronomy of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the Department of Astronomy of the Sofia University. . About 70 scientists from Germany, Italy, France, Armenia, Hungary, Spain, United Kingdom, Russia, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Belgium, Ukraine, USA, as well as from Bulgaria and the neighbouring countries Romania, Serbia and Greece participated in the Workshop. Virtual observatories and scientific heritage preservation, astronomical archives, photograph digitization and image processing were the main topics discussed. The development of the new Grid technologies and their application to the various astronomical and related problems were examined. The Virtual observatories and their instrumentation in connection with the ICT applications provide new attempts for different tasks in astronomy and image data analysis and special attention was paid to the long term data storage. The current plate digitization main projects developed in USA (Harvard), Germany (Sonneberg, Bamberg), Italy (Asiago) and Sofia about the digitization of more than 140 000 astronomical wide field plates based on the new digitization technique were presented. During the Workshop the Bulgarian participation in the European Grid Operations implemented under the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science) was announced and this again underlined the important role of COST towards the scientific communities of the Balkan countries.