RWCP - International research partnership

Dionysios Tsichritzis Chairman, GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technology

Japan is traditionally a focus for international contacts and cooperation of GMD. The office in Tokyo, which ensures GMD's presence in Japan, exists now for more than 20 years. It keeps the contacts to all our partners in companies, research institutes, and universities and tries to establish new ones.

Therefore, GMD applied for membership in the Real World Computing Partnership (RWCP) and was honoured by being accepted to join it as first international partner. We are proudly participating with two projects. One in the field of Real World Intelligence and another one in the area of Parallel and Distributed Computing. Our committment to RWCP is also visible in the fact that for the first time in 1994 we sent a researcher to the Tsukuba Research Center. Since then there had been always one researcher from GMD working there together with his Japanese colleagues on research topics of the center.

In general, GMD is determined to keep and perhaps even increase its presence in Japan. GMD considers Japan as being an important and interesting research environment. Research is international. It already used to be so beforehand. Excellence on a worldwide scale is the criterion for the quality of research.

Nowadays, the concept of globalization is often mentioned. It implies a tremendous challenge: with the companies going global, research suddenly also has to compete on a worldwide basis. There is now a global market for research. So research has to be considered as a product and so -just like a product- it should be processed, presented and sold. That is the reason why excellence alone isn't sufficient anymore. Other criteria like image (a good PR is needed), speed (results must be ready in due time) and efficiency (research results must be obtained efficiently to attract industry to take up these results) have to be taken into account as well.

Due to size or other reasons many research centers can't go global all alone on themselves. But by cooperating with international partners, bridges can be built and partners can help each other. It has the consequence that international cooperation develops further and that in spite of all competition, cooperation is growing at the same time, too.

RWCP contributes to this development: it has a long term vision, offers the combination of industrial and academical research as well as the combination of basics with visions of applications. RWCP also takes into account the future main areas of information processing (learning from nature, parallelism and concurreny, and the natural communication between human beings and computers). Finally, RWCP has the potential that all partners and, by spreading the results, also the global society can benefit from its research.

Still there are always pitfalls. So it must be monitored that the partners cooperate close enough within the partnership to foster synergy effects. Also the development of the different projects within RWCP has to be watched closely to make sure that they are succesful. Keeping this in mind, the RWCP will be able to demonstrate that it improves fundamental technologies further and that its research leads to prototypical developments. Thus, as a successful model, the RWCP can also contribute to an increased international cooperation.