The General Coordinator of the FCCN Unit of the Foundation for Science and Technology, João Nuno Ferreira, reviews 2022 and looks towards the new year with confidence.
Although the epidemiological situation caused by the pandemic has seen positive developments in the second half of 2022, the challenges facing FCCN remain varied and demanding.
The FCCN Unit continued its mission and offered a cross-cutting response and improvements in support services to different user communities.
The Academic Network has proven, in previous years, to be a resilient infrastructure with a good capacity to respond to special circumstances. However, the need for reinforcement had already been identified previously, framing an objective of making the more scalable network, both in terms of transmission capacity and in terms of increased redundancy and resilience to failures.
The network has a very broad coverage. In the Portuguese case, we support not only the Portuguese higher education system (particularly the public sector) and the national science and technology system, but also the organizational units of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education and the connectivity of schools and organizational units of the Ministry of Education. Thus, we cover not only the more administrative communities linked to these ministries, but also entities such as the non-higher education community and, more closely and with more services, the higher education and science and technology systems.
With a total investment of 17 million euros, 13 of which came from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the RCTS reinforcement initiative – RCTS100 Project – was central during 2022, the year in which its completion was scheduled due to the pandemic.
The thematic objective then inscribed in the project was simple and illustrative of its importance: “Strengthening research, technological development and innovation” and over the last five years, RCTS100 has expanded the fiber optic infrastructure of the national education and research network and ensured a technological update, with repercussions throughout the country.
The FCCN unit has been on a path towards also providing, centrally, computing, collaborative, security and knowledge services.
Regarding the computing pillar, through public tenders, resources for supercomputer research were allocated to more than 250 projects and RNCA saw the 1st artificial intelligence competition supported by Google has 11 candidate projects approved.
In June, researchers awarded resources on the Google Cloud platform met for an informal discussion on Artificial Intelligence, discussing the latest scientific advances in the field and the future of artificial intelligence in Portugal and worldwide. Elvira Fortunato, Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, and Fernando Pereira, Google's Vice President for Artificial Intelligence, renewed the collaboration between the FCT and Google, reinforcing its importance for technological advancement in Portugal.
2022 was also a landmark year for one of the FCCN Unit's digital preservation services. Arquivo.pt saw more 3 original and innovative works demonstrate the usefulness of the service, as well as the importance of preserving and using information published on the web.
The Arquivo.pt Award honored the project “Parliament Archives” – a web application that aggregates news and opinion articles extracted from Arquivo.pt based on open data from Parlamento.pt, the 2nd prize went to a work that developed a methodology for the automatic classification of stigmatizing articles on mental illness, present in Portuguese online news newspapers, through Artificial Intelligence – “Automatic classification of articles stigmatizing mental illness” and 3rd prize was awarded to the work “Public Archives” – a web application focused on content published on the Jornal Público website over time and preserved by Arquivo.pt.
Arquivo.pt was also considered the best digital service of 2022 according to Exame Informática receiving the award “The Best & Biggest in Technological Portugal”.
Also the NAU was awarded the ISCTE Public Policy Award 2022, in the Central Public Administration category, a distinction that recognizes the role that this platform, a pioneer at a national level, has played for more than three years in online teaching and training.
Already consolidated services such as eduroam, the Colibri, the b-On, the RCAAP, the RCTSCERT, they all show growth results. The Educast inaugurated the new look of the portal and added 5,000 more educational videos to the content collection, more than 11,600 new CVs were registered on the SCIENCEVITAE.
We move forward to 2023 convinced that we will continue to develop our services and strengthen technologies that accelerate knowledge.
For more information on how our services can help, simply visit www.fccn.pt or contact our specialized teams.
