India-Saudi ICT centre to promote collaborative R&D: official

The India-Saudi Arabia Centre of Excellence in ICT, to come up in Riyadh under a pact signed during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit there, will help promote high-quality research, a senior official has said.

Mohammed Al-Suwaiyael, President of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) and Rajan T Joseph, Director General, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), had signed the agreement for setting up the centre.

Joseph said its activities will be in three major areas -- Research and Development, consultation on IT initiatives and the use of Information Technology and training.

"The exchange of scientists between India and Saudi Arabia will take place for a period of five years to guide them (scientific community) in conducting meaningful research," he told Saudi Gazette newspaper.

C-DAC will also conduct workshops and training programmes alternatively in India and Saudi Arabia to generate awareness and promote research for a period of five years, he said.

The centre will help Saudi Arabia to take advantage of developments in the field of IT from the grassroots level to the highly complex arena of software technologies, Joseph, who was part of Singh's high-level delegation, told the paper.

The basic objective of the project is to set up a resource centre for free or open source software and assist KACST in development, localisation, standardisation and creation of a knowledge base and facilitate collaborative R&D.

"The centre will serve as a core building block and a catalyst for the creation of high quality research and education in Saudi Arabia," Joseph said.