Table of Contents
The Green Paper of the Commission of the European Communities "Living
and Working in the Information Society" (Brussels, July 1966) says in
its Executive Summary:
"We are living through a historic period of technological change,
brought about by the development and widening of information and
communication technologies (ICTs). This process is both different
from, and faster than, anything we have seen before."
The establishment of the information society has a high priority both
in the EU and in Hungary which wants to restructure the organization
of the society to be conformed with the EU structures. Under such
cirumstances the higher education of technology should be
restructured, too in order to be able to train engineers who can
satisfy the requirements of the information society.
Distributed and network computing are key elements of this progress
leading to the information society. Therefore, we need urgently
engineers who are capable of understanding these new technologies and
are able to make use of and develop applications for distributed and
network computing like distributed business information systems,
multimedia systems, distributed administration systems, the use of
world wide web, etc.. Our project aims exactly at coping with this
challenge.
Elements of this modern knowledge of distributed information systems
are already taught in the Hungarian higher educational institutions of
technology but not in a well-structured systematic way. In the
framework of the proposed Tempus project a new comprehensive study
programme consisting of six relevant courses will be elaborated for
the Hungarian higher educational institutions of technology with the
help of the EU partner universities, the KFKI-MSZKI Research Institute
of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and two industrial partners: SUN
Microsystems Hungary Ltd. and Silicon Computers Ltd., which are highly
interested in promoting state-of-the- art knowledge of network
computing.
Distributed business and governmental administration information
systems are important areas where the knowledge of distributed and
network computing is highly necessary. Introducing such subject into
the curriculum of the Hungarian higher educational institutions of
technology is a must. This subject will open a new inter-disciplinary
professional profile for each Hungarian partner institutions.
The objective of our proposed project is to upgrade existing curricula
at higher educational institutions of technology by developing a
comprehensive study programme on "Distributed and network computing",
consisting of six relevant courses, detailed in the description part
of the application. Our project corresponds to two of the basic
principles of the Hungarian Tempus policy and three national Tempus
priorities as follows.
- Principle I.2: Tempus should contribute to prepare for Hungarian
accession to the EU. By considering the fact that since 1993 the EU
became increasingly responsive to the challenge of the emerging
Information Society and put considerable effort to cope with by means
of a series of policy papers, action plans and actions, obviously, the
accession of Hungary requires a corresponding preparation as well. Our
project fits into the series of preparatory actions by preparing
engineers for key technologies of the upcoming Information Society.
- Principle I.3: The proposed Tempus project will facilitate the
preparation of Hungarian higher education institutions for
participation in EU educational/training programs since a network
between large number of EU universities and Hungarian higher education
institutions will be established in the project. The joint elaboration
of www based teaching materials is a good preparatory action for the
participating Hungarian higher education institutions for further
participation in EU educational/training programs.
- Priority II. 1.A. (5): Application of modern technologies. Clearly,
our projects meets this priority as well. The project significantly
promotes the application of modern technologies since its main
objective is to prepare the Hungarian higher education institutions
for teaching the most recent achievements of information technology.
- Priority II.1.A. (7): Development of multi- and interdisciplinary
professional profiles. One of the targeted subjects "Distributed
business and administration information systems" aims at teaching the
business and administration applications of distributed systems for
engineers specialised in informatics. This subject contributes to the
development of inter-disciplinary professional profiles in the field
of distributed business and administration information systems with
the participation of one business school and three higher education
institutions of technology. Particularly: f) The project will
significantly contribute to the technology transfer of informatics and
information technology to the business and administration area where
distributed information systems are crucial.
- Priority B: Two leading companies of computer industry (SUN
Microsystems Hungary Ltd. and Silicon Computers Ltd.) will be
actively engaged in the project. These companies are international
flagships of network computing and more than that SUN was the first
initiator of network computing in the world. The participation of
these companies guarantees that the courses to be elaborated will
contain the most up-to-date information in the field. These companies
are ready to provide practical placements for the students and to
contribute to establish education centers of their machines in
Hungarian partner institutes. These education centers can play
significant role later in the development of continuing training
courses as well.
Many of the partners of the proposed project had already participated
in previous joint projects both in the field of teaching and
research. Most important among these previous cooperations is a
running Tempus project (SJEP 8333-94) under the title "Introducing
Parallel Processing into the Curriculum of the Hungarian Higher
Educational Institutions of Technology". Ten partners of the currently
proposed project are partners of that project, too. As a matter of
fact the proposed project could be considered as a logical
continuation and extension of that project towards distributed
systems, since many techniques used in parallel processors can easily
be adapted for distributed systems, too. For example, the most famous
network computing language, Java inherited many features from parallel
programming languages. Hence staff members of the partner institutions
who actively participated in the previous Tempus project are good
candidate to elaborate the necessary teaching materials in high
quality. Of course distributed and network computing contains many
techniques and fields that exceed parallel processing. As a
consequence new partners (mainly from the EU) who are experts in the
new fields, were requested to participate in the proposed new project.
The previous Tempus project demonstrated a strong collaboration
between the partners with mutual satisfaction of the results. This
claim is well demonstrated by the fact that six partner universities
(Technical Univ. of Budapest, Univ. of Miskolc, Westminster Univ.,
Univ. of Athen, Univ. Autonoma de Barcelona and the
Friedrich-Alexander-Univ. Erlangen-Nurnberg) of the previous project
established a joint EuroMSc programme in High Performance Computing
and Networking.
There exists a fruitful collaboration between the Graduate School of
Industrial Engineering and Management Science, Eindhoven University of
Technology (TUE) and the Department of Process Control, TUB. The
cooperation between them is developing continously on the basis of the
TEMPUS JEP 7771-94. The main goals of this collaboration are course
transfer and retraining of staff members on the field of software
engineering methodologies/CASE tools and software quality control and
assurance.
The Department of Automation of the University of Miskolc, the
Department of Measurement and Instrument Engineering of the Technical
University of Budapest and the Kando Polytechnics of Technology
participate in a TEMPUS SJEP 7759-94. The main goal of this
collaboration is to upgrade the Hungarian Higher Education in System
Modelling, Fault Diagnosis and Fuzzy Logic.
There were a fruitful collaboration in two Copernicus projects
between the Wesmintser University, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL),
KFKI-MSZKI Research Institute, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB)
and University of Miskolc. The first mentioned project is CP93:5383,
Software Enwironment for Paralel Programming, and the second one is
CP94:1233, High Performance Computing Tools for Industry. The outcome
of these projects were two software tools for Paralel Programming and
the main result was the establishment of a good relationship among the
partners.
We are witnessing an extraordinary fast progress in information
technology leading to the Information society. Novel communication and
information services such as e-mail or internet services changed in a
few years completely the way, intensity and turn around time of
information exchange. With the increasingly widespread use of networks
and with the advent of the Java language distributed and network
computing emerges. Considering the pace of the development and the
immense implications of these novel technologies we urgently require
engineers who are able to develop and apply distributed and network
computing. Recognising this need we set the objective to develop a new
comprehensive study programme on distributed and network computing and
upgrade existing degree programmes on informatics in Hungarian and EU
tertiary education. The comprehensive study programme covers the
following six courses:
- Distributed operating
systems
Hungarian elaborators:
University of Miskolc, Department
of Automation
Kando Polytechnics, Institute of Informatics
KFKI-MSZKI Research Institute
EU elaborators:
University of Westminster
University of Klagenfurt
University of Nova de Lisboa,
Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon
Univiversity Autonoma Barcelona
- Parallel and distributed database
systems
Hungarian elaborators:
KFKI-MSZKI Research Institute
Univeristy of Miskolc, Department of Information
Technology
EU elaborators:
University of Athen
Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon
University of Klagenfurt
University of Westminster
- Distributed Object-Oriented
Systems
Hungarian elaborators:
Techical University of Budapest,
Department of Process Control
KFKI-MSZKI Research Institute
EU elaborators:
University of Westminster
University Autonoma Barcelona
University of
Klagenfurt
- Security and fault tolerance in
distributed systems
Hungarian elaborator:
Techical University of Budapest,
Department of Measurement and Instrument Engineering
KFKI-MSZKI
EU elaborators:
University of Pisa
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nurnberg
University of Westminster
- Network computing
Hungarian elaborators:
Kandó Polytechnics, Institute of
Informatics
Kandó Polytechnics, Institute of Computer Engineering
University of Miskolc, Department of Automation
Univeristy of Miskolc, Department of Information
Technology
EU elaborators:
University of Westminster
University of Vienna
Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon
- Distributed business and
administration information systems
Hungarian elaborators:
Kandó Polytechnics, Institute of
Computer Engineering
Technical University of Budapest, Department of
Process Control
KFKI-MSZKI Research Institute
Kandó Polytechnics, Institute of
Informatics
EU elaborators:
University of Westminster
University of Cyprus
The first five courses cover both theoretical and practical aspects of
the subject, while the last one aims at the demonstration of practical
application of distributed and network computing in the field of
business and governmental administration information systems.
