Saudi Arabia and India will greatly benefit from the exchange of scientists program envisaged in one of the five agreements signed during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's landmark visit to the Kingdom which ended Monday. Dr. Mohammed I. Al-Suwaiyael, President of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), and Rajan T. Joseph, Director General, Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), government of India, signed an agreement to set up the India-Saudi Arabia Center of Excellence in ICT to be housed at KACST here. Joseph said the center's activities will be in three major areas: Research and Development, Consultation on IT initiatives and the use of Information Technology and Training. “The exchange of scientists between India and Saudi Arabia will take place for a period of five years to guide them (scientific community) in conducting meaningful research,” he said. C-DAC will also conduct workshops and training programs alternatively in India and Saudi Arabia to generate awareness and promote research for a period of five years, he said. The center will help Saudi Arabia to take advantage of developments in the field of IT from the grassroots level to the highly complex arena of software technologies, Joseph, who was part of Prime Minister Singh's high-level delegation, told Saudi Gazette after signing the agreement with the KACST president, Sunday. The basic objective of the project is to set up a Resource Center for Free/Open Source Software and assist KACST in development, localization, standardization (UNICODE, W3C & IDN) and creation of a knowledge base and facilitate collaborative R&D in areas, such as the development of a localized version of an operating system, applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and tools and technologies for Arabic language such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Joseph said. “The India-Saudi Center of Excellence in ICT to be based in Riyadh will also serve as a core building block and a catalyst for the creation of high quality research and education in Saudi Arabia,” he added. This will also help the Kingdom deliver quality IT education and enable the scientific community to have access to related areas, he said.
