GRNET• Access to HPC-ARIS infrastructure for research related to COVID-19, via high priority-fast track review process.
• Extended offering of the existing ePresence.gr videoconferencing platform, as well as offering a new dedicated ePresence.gov.gr video conferencing platform to all Public Sector organizations, institutions and their users, facilitating high quality and interactive tele/video conference meetings from anywhere, anytime.
• Contribution to the Ministry of Digital Governance’s mission to re-design all core Public sector services: setup of www.gov.gr, a portal which will soon contain all Greek Public Sector services, helping Greece reach the goals of digital transformation. www.gov.gr was launched offering an electronically signed statutory declarations service, which would otherwise require physical verification.
• Launch of forma.gov.gr, where individuals can obtain movement permits in order to abide by the new government movement/traffic restrictions.
• Continued operation of the Panhellenic optical fiber network, connecting all institutions and organizations among the Greek Educational, Academic and Research community, offering high-quality connectivity to hundreds of thousands of users enabling the operation of Greek government e-learning platforms for online schools lessons, email, access to cloud research infrastructures, access to web video streaming services (live and on demand) on the existing GRNET DIAVLOS platform.
• Anticipates, based on members’ requests, joining and/or increasing capacity to GR-IX (www.gr-ix.gr), the only Internet Exchange in Greece. GR-IX constitutes an important national infrastructure as it interconnects Internet service providers and content providers. Traffic: https://www.gr-ix.gr/traffic/.
• Continued offering of e-voting platform Zeus via which institutions and their users can hold verifiable online elections, with anonymity guarantees provided by strong cryptographic protocols.
• Develop further eduMEET system to fulfil requirements of remote teaching - participation in openUp2U.
ATHENA• National level
i) Development and deployment of back-end services for monitoring and managing testing results (confidential).
ii) OpenAIRE Greek NOAD and RDA Greek Node webinar on COVID initiatives, practices, tools and national contact points to develop a complete national guide to be disseminated widely to research communities and other fora.
• European level with national interest
i)OpenAIRE (https://www.openaire.eu/) in collaboration with European partners and in particular the relevant scientific community around Zenodo at CERN, embarked on the creation of a Research Community Dashboard to bring together and publish all publications, datasets, protocols, software, other forms of research results around COVID-19. The Research Community Dashboard will launch within the next days and will be findable and exploitable from https://beta.connect.openaire.eu/.
ii)BIP! Finder for COVID-19 (https://bip.covid19.athenarc.gr/) was developed as a special feature in the context of BIP! Finder tool to ease the exploration of COVID19-related literature, based on the CORD-19 dataset released by Semantic Scholar. The tool provides the option to rank COVID19-related papers using different impact metrics helping researchers to prioritize their reading. All calculated metrics have been made available as an open dataset (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3723282) so others can build their own services on-top. Updates to the service and the data are planned in a weekly basis.
BRFAA – 3rd party to GRNET• Engaged in developing and performing diagnostic tests for COVID019 samples, which will be performed in BRFAA premises. More information in: https://www.facebook.com/BRFAA/videos/590602228197937/
• Engaging in informing the general public for the disease: https://youtu.be/OOjy2ewSrq8
IICT-BAS• IICT gives priority access to Avitohol (the largest HPC facility in Bulgaria) for COIVID-19 related research. The announcement has been made by Academician Revalski, the president of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, in his interview on Darik radio. This information is published on the website of BAS on 10.March 2020 and It was officially reported during the briefing of the National Operational Headquarters, 19.03.2020.
• IICT contacted the Digital Health and Innovation cluster Bulgaria (https://www.dhicluster.bg/?lang=en) and discussed how we can help them in the current situation.
• IICT contacted the Cyber Security Lab in Sofia Tech Park about developing of a cloud software platform to be used as training platform for crisis events.
SRCE• On 23rd March, SRCE issued the special COVID-19 call for the use of its advanced computing services, following similar initiatives from the EU e-infras: EGI, EUDAT, PRACE. Link :
https://www.srce.unizg.hr/vijesti/istrazivanja-protiv-covid-19-na-infrastrukturama-srca-za-napredno-racunanje/objav2020-03-23 (HRV language)
RBI• Ruđer Bošković Institute, Centre for Informatics and Computing Team is already acting in organised manner against COVID 19 research, by testing the effect of HIV drugs and their combinations (Drug Cocktails) on the SARS-COV-2 Spike glycoprotein by in silico method.
This glycoprotein is essential for the reproduction of SARS-COV-2 virus, and its inhibition opens up new avenues for the treatment of patients with COVID-19. We used the VINI in silico model on HPC, which uses Autodock Vina software as the basis for virtual drug screening, and whose high accuracy in finding effective drugs and their combinations was confirmed in vitro by comparison with existing results from the NCI-60 database and in vivo compared to existing clinical trial results.
• Our HPC/AI action against COVID 19 communicated on EU/EOSC-Hub level and we are ready to cooperate on COVID-19 Data science platform initiative, on integration HW & SW & IW resources.
KIFU• Provide our videoconferencing facility for the government and support for setup WebRTC videoconferencing for various educational institutions.
• Develop further eduMEET system to fulfil requirements of remote teaching - participation in openUp2U.
• Provide HPC capacity for simulation related to COVID-19 virus.
• Provide capacity for schools to share teaching materials for remote teaching.
• For a request of the government, KIFU is rapidly setting up a new site (high speed network connection) at a hospital directly involved in the fight against the epidemy for the benefit of a new medical research group.
DE• University of Debrecen University and National Library is trying to help the research community with resources on COVID-19. They are in contact with the national funder National Research Development and Innovation Office to help Hungarian researchers on FAIR data management.
• Hungarian institutions were asked, whether they already have some research results on COVID-19 and the following links were given: https://research.physcon.uni-obuda.hu/COVID19MagyarEpi/
https://github.com/tamas-ferenci/COVID19MagyarEpi
• Hungary joined the Hack the Crisis initiative as well (Hack the Crises Hungary), link: https://rendezveny.hwsw.hu/hackthecrisis/1/hack-the-crisis-hackhathon
ICI• ICI is member of the Council of National R&D Institutes. Last week the Council presented to the Prime Minister, all main Ministers and other high rank officials involved in the management of coronavirus crisis at the national level its offer regarding the full availability of member institutes to analyze and implement immediate actions for solving any request of support related with this crisis, according to their existing competences and available resources.
• As main administrator of the Romanian Top-Level Domain Registry ”.ro”, ICI contributes to the availability of national Internet services and resources, which have a strategic economic and social importance during this period.
• Through its Security Operations Center (SOC), ICI offers to both public administration and private sector units outsourced integrated security services for detecting and neutralizing cyber-attacks. Complementary to this offer the online version of cybersecurity courses is available, adapted to the homeworking regime implemented fully or partially by the large majority of public and private organizations.
UEFISCDI• Distributed computing and a call for collaborating among different scientists under the title »Citizen science and the battle against coronavirus«. The project is hosting by Central Technical Library of the University of Ljubljana, important partner of future Slovenian open science community. (link: http://koronavirus.ctk.uni-lj.si/skupnostna-znanost/)
UMUKM• Distributed computing and a call for collaborating among different scientists under the title »Citizen science and the battle against coronavirus«. The project is hosting by Central Technical Library of the University of Ljubljana, important partner of future Slovenian open science community. (link: http://koronavirus.ctk.uni-lj.si/skupnostna-znanost/)
IPB• Dr. Aleksandar Belic is appointed by the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development as a member of the working group responsible for the analysis and tracking of the emerging research results related to the ongoing studies of the COVID-19 virus.
• IPB's PARADOX cluster is open for the COIVID-19-related research projects through the dedicated, fast access call. Members of IPB's Scientific Computing Laboratory collect and locally store datasets produced by the Chinese National Centre for Bioinformatics, and are actively working to extend the PARADOX software stack with the tools that could support analysis of these datasets.
• Μembers of IPB's Environmental Physics Laboratory continue to measure and provide information on air pollution, in collaboration with Belgrade's public health authority, which will be later on analyzed to study effects of the decreased economic activity, as well as other measures taken to control the spread of the pandemic, on air pollution.
UOB• The University of Belgrade Computer Centre (NI4OS-Europe partner UoB) is currently intensively working on providing and supporting the use of a number of e-learning, media-sharing, distributed collaboration and cloud-based productivity platforms for its members and in some cases, other Serbian universities and research institutions.
• UoB Open Science Team is about to set up a specialised repository of publications, articles, presentations and similar outputs of Serbian researchers related to epidemics and emergency medicine - we had several analogous situations in the '70es and '90es.
• Our communication with relevant clinicians, who are extremely busy these days, has led to the conclusion that in the current acute phase it will be extremely difficult to get any relevant data at the source. The national outbreak response coordination has centralised collection of any COVID-19 related data; local ICT systems have been bypassed and all information recording is strictly done through the combination on a central reporting service managed by the Ministry of Health and paper-based medical histories, all of which also have to be upon the conclusion of the case must be delivered to the central authority. Therefore, the best that can be expected at this point is the information trickle-down from the central authorities. Fortunately, the Serbian Office for IT and eGovernment started to publish the epidemiological data on 26 March. This is still a work in progress, but I think we may start to promote these data:
i) https://covid19.data.gov.rs/ provides the statistics on the number of people infected by COVID-19 on the territory of the Republic of Serbia. Data are available on the daily basis and include the total number of infected persons, the number of persons in self-isolation, as well as visualization of these data by municipalities and cities from the moment when the first case of COVID-19 was officially recorded in Serbia. All data can be exported in XLSX and CSV format for further processing and visualization.
ii) https://data.gov.rs/sr/datasets/covid-19-zarazheni/ Covid 19 - infected ("Covid 19 - заражени") provides COVID 19 infection data, in XLSX and CSV formats.
iii) https://data.gov.rs/sr/datasets/covid-19-samoizolatsija/ Covid 19 - Self-Isolation ("Covid 19 - самоизолација") provides information about people in self-isolation, in XLSX and CSV formats.
UNIBL• Concentrating efforts on e-learning by opening their platform based on Moodle and BigBlueButton, providing support for less experienced institutions (many have had no experience with e-learning) and other members of our institution have created tutorials for those using Google Classroom.
• Reassigned a part of hardware resources temporarily from NI4OS to this use (but will be reverted it back to NI4OS).
UKIM• Supporting the Ministry of education to establish alternative forms of teaching for the primary and secondary education. Technical and organizational consulting toward the deployment and adoption of learning aids and platforms.
• Supporting the Ministry of health with in development of software for e-Health for tracking COVID spread and information.
• Supporting the University of Ss Cyril and Methodius in establishing a videoconferencing integration between AAI and Microsoft. Deployment of local videoconferencing system and integration with LMS.
• Operationalizing of the IXP.MK academic exchange to enable localization of the increased network traffic due to the adoption of on-line learning platforms and tools. Currently, the biggest telecom provider, along with several smaller providers are connected to the IXP.MK, run by UKIM, enabling significant impact on the traffic volume and quality of the voice and video communications used for teaching.
• Collaboration with Local Microsoft office in establishing a Microsoft Teams local access using the IXP
RENAM• RENAM informed the Ministry on Education, Culture and Research of the Republic of Moldova about its efforts in amplifying GEANT initiative in Moldova. We offer all disposable capacities to launch platform Up2U, as well as eduMEET service in universities and research institutions. It is important to have support of the ministry in promotion and coordination of the Up2U initiative and corresponding activities at the national level.
• RENAM plans to begin promotional activities (virtually) related to announcing and offering as a new service to interested educational institutions of GEANT Up2U platform and Wiki-edu resources.
Our plan comprises 2 stages approach:
1st stage the open platform with online tutorial and guidelines (step-by-step) – all tools will be open to individual users on a central platform and available at least until the end of school term and until the severity of the COVID-19 situation
2nd stage: create the national version of the Up2U platform in 2 stages (based on interest): 1. RENAM will provide access to the centralised Up2U instance for translation videos and texts. Providing info about contact persons who would offer technical support to end users. 2. After RENAM will begin preparations to install national Up2U instance.
• RENAM distributed to universities and research institutes info and recommendation to use available for NREN community remote working/event space (like eduMEET- a tool for online meetings supported and developing by GEANT project; also information about special availability of commercial platforms like Zoom VC tool and Webex for R&E institutions) that would help universities’ staff, scientists from research institutions to work easier remotely with national and international partners during pandemic days.
GRENAIncreased VM resources and access capacity to several media - news agencies providing information about COVID19 situation in the country and worldwide.