Unimas plan to have a workshop on Pinger when Les comes in December. Unimas will invite participants from universities in West Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak, (Brunei and Kalimantan could be added). The idea is to establish regional agreement for types of studies that can be undertaken, the sharing of data and exploration of future projects.
Unimas will send a formal invite to Les to visit Unimas for the order of a week or more to coincide with the Unimas 20 year anniversary celebrations on December 12th, 2012. Johari sent email to VC to get suitable dates. The visit will be 3-4 days. The idea is Les arrives on Wednesday 12th December, the full day workshop is on Thursday 13th, follwed by meetings with specific researchers on Friday 14th. The weekend is free. then on Monday 17th there are technical discussions. Bebo suggested that since the flight to Kuching will go through Kuala Lumpur, Les should visit MIMAS and give a talk. Johari will discuss this with Nara.
During the last week of October 2012, Les met with the Muhammad Asghar the Rector of the Pakistan National University of Science and Technology (NUST) and Dr. Arshad Ali the Director General (DG) of the NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS). They were excited to hear of the upcoming roadmap. Arshad visited he University of Malaysia in KL (UM) in October 2011 and the VC of the UM recently visited NUST. Both sides are keen to reach out to one another. As a result of this they (NUST/SEECS) are interested in looking at how to engage a collaboration of NUST/SEECS, UNIMAS and SLAC on PingER. Possible ways to advance would include:
- Inviting one or two people from NUST/SEECS who have been collaborating on PingER for some years, have set up a PingER archiving site and manage multiple PingER monitors in Pakistan.
- They could make valuable presentations on hands-on experiences (both technical, political and social) with building the archive site, managing multiple monitoring sites, mining the data, engaging customers (monitor sites contacts and decision makers, the network providers PERN (Pakistan Educational and Research Network), the funding agency (Higher Education Commission), preparing reports for the customers, and the benefits ensuing etc.
- Putting together a joint proposal (UNIMAS, NUST/SEECS, SLAC, possibly another Malaysian university such as UM) to a funding source for a joint project to set up a monitoring infrastructure for Malaysia educational sites.
- Arshad is also putting together a letter to the VC of UM.
- We could set up a 3 way Skype meeting to discuss this further, this time of day works for all sites.
- If NUST funds their people this should be no problem. Otherwise Johari will need to discuss with Nara and engage the VC to see whether UNIMAS can fund them.
- Unfortunately the Pakistani HEC funding for the project has expired and NUST has submitted new proposal which is under review. Till new proposal is approved, funding any travel is not possible. However, NUST shall extend all possible support for this initiative.
- Nara will try to source for funds to bring a speaker from Pakistan. He will let us know the outcome.