Cloud Computing is the First Approved Project for the Russian Silicon Valley

For those who don’t know about the Russian Big Project aimed at driving national modernization and innovation processes, I quote some introductory lines from “Russia has a wealth of engineering talent, but needs to put a lot more in place” by David Talbot:

Russia is finalizing plans to launch a Silicon Valley-like "innovation center" near Moscow. The Kremlin has selected a patch of farmland near a private business school, has set aside funding, and this week named a Nobel laureate, the physicist Zhores Alferov, as the project's science advisor. Now comes the hard part: making it work.

Yesterday, a Russian business oriented daily Vedomosti announced that according to A.Dvorkovitch, a Russian Presidential aide on economy and the secretary of Commission on Modernization, the first project already selected for Skolkovo (native name of location of the future innovation center) is a project of a Russian investment fund Almaz Capital to create business incubators in the field of cloud programming. It is alleged that besides cloud computing, the same project, under the same funding will develop computer speech recognition and technology transfer of 3D-images through the Internet.

Speech Recognition and efficient 3D images transfer are obviously respectable and fundamental projects, so combining them into one package with a symbolic funding of about 30-35 million dollars, in my opinion, seems strange, to put it mildly. Most likely, two additional projects are included to make the application more clear for decision makers: in these situations, in Soviet times, when unable to estimate the fundamental scientific and technological significance of proposals, such decision makers severely asked: “What does it give to our national economy?”. By the way, as the article quotes, "half (of those $30-35 M), will hopefully be given by the government "...

One of the experts mentioned in the article noted that major Western companies (e.g. IBM or HP) have already invested billions of dollars - likely without close correlation with computer speech recognition. Another expert believes it would be more reasonable to use existing Western results and adapt them to the Skolkovo project under the requirements of Russian consumers, in particular taking open-source software as the basis.

Finally I want to remind of my earlier post Clouds in Russia and give a link to the web site of the first Cloud Computing Congress - the first international event on this topic in Russia which will be held in a week in Moscow with a strategic partnership of Microsoft. In September COFES-Russia, in one of its working groups, will discuss cloud computing in CAD/PLM.

Source: Vedomosti article

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Dassault Systèmes Chooses Restaurant "Pushkin" to Explain What is Life-like Experience

PR agency Fleishman-Hillard Vanguard on behalf of Dassault Systemes Russia invited isicad.ru/net to attend a media breakfast in one of the best Moscow restaurants "Pushkin". The invitation announced that Laurent Couillard, VP Sales EMEA at Dassault Systèmes, will tell about V6, in particular:

• V6 PLM Express for SMB

• Communities and life-like experience with V6

• Success stories

• Alliance of Dassault Systèmes and IBM.

Seems I can be proud to get this invitation since it was likely sent to 5 top CAD/PLM-related Russian language media: among them isicad is the only without-paper edition. The problem is that isicad is based in Novosibirsk, 4 hours by plane from Moscow... That's why I asked my close partner from Moscow - Dmitry Movchan, the director and founder of a publishing house DMK-press, specialized in IT, including a lot of CAD/PLM books, in particular a series "CAD: From A to Z" supported by isicad. Thanks to Dmitry, isicad readers can now take a look at the pictures below and get a flavour of the meeting, restaurant, participants, and perhaps V6:).

Note that I am completely responsible for the comments...

At the picture above, Mr.Laurent Couillard and his intepreter are making reconnaissance.

At last, all is ready and Mr.Couillard can start.

What happened then (16 more photoes), can be found here .

One More Section at COFES-Russia, Now on AEC/BIM

After a preliminary program of COFES-Russia was announced, some people and companies reproached the organizers for the Seminar's focus on (M)CAD and lack of AEC/BIM. There is a dozen of obviously important actors in the Russian market that consider AEC or AEC+BIM as an important if not the key part of their business.

Therefore we added one more Working Group (WG-7) which is characterized as follows.

Perspectives of Building Information Modeling and its impact on AEC market

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a process of generation and management of building/construction data during its lifecycle. BIM uses AEC CAD tools for creating common information model of a building/construction that is shared for collaborative development by several teams of architects and engineers. The building information model consists of the description of geometry, spatial relations, geographic data, material properties, etc. Participants of this workgroup will discuss new tools and technologies for creating and managing BIM data.

Topics:
- Parametric building modeling
- 4D technology
- Green design
- Computer-aided engineering for AEC
- Collaborative development
- AEC design data standards
- Employment of new technologies in the Russian AEC market
- PLM and BIM: twins?

The latest version of the agenda can be found here.

I will appreciate any proposals to improve a summary of the domain and the list of potential topics for discussion.
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Autodesk Forum-2010 in Moscow: How Many New Gimmicks?

Recent news on Twitter Autodesk_CIS: “We are pleased to announce that this year the Autodesk Forum will take place on September 22-23 in Moscow. Make sure you mark these dates in your diary:)”. As the editor of isicad.ru/isicad.net, I sought further details from Anastasia Morozova, Field Marketing Area Team Manager, Autodesk Russia and CIS.

Аnastasia Мorozova: Yes, now we can confirm that the Autodesk Forum will be on September 22-23 in Moscow. For the first time it is planned to continue for two days. All previous Forums were good but every time us, as the organizers, and participants suffered because one day was only enough to get a cursory view of the problems. The two-day format should help us to make this event interesting and above all practically useful for all our traditional clients – representatives of manufacturers and architecture-and-construction industry. This year for the first time we will have special sections for animators and graphic designers.

Typically Autodesk Forums have all kinds of cool surprises like giving a lift to the attendees by Hummers … … Probably two days will accommodate twice as many cool things as usual?

Certainly, the objective of our Forum is very clear – to deliver useful information and sensations that our clients don’t get in their daily working routine. With Internet popularity it is becoming a more and more difficult task but we are also getting smarter and more inventive.

This year we have a who-o-ole bunch of interesting ideas which we are now working on. From demonstrating hardware technologies and various equipment that they write a lot about but not everybody has had a possibility to see it with one’s own eyes, ask questions to the experts and see if it fits their company, to completely crazy ideas about demonstrating new computer games developed in Autodesk products. I think that for many of our clients it will be interesting to see how someone uses the products, which they employ to visualize their projects, for development of the most popular FPS or air-simulators. And if combined with powerful stereo-effects and state-of-the-art equipment... Actually, it’s better to see this for oneself.

Two full days… You don’t mean that everything will come down to specifics and bigger entertainment? Or you will engage some new formats after all?

New formats definitely will be present. First of all, two days finally give us an opportunity to include many presentations by our clients into the program. Typically, demonstrating already proven user experience is a much expected part of the event. Also, apart from the primary flow of presentations in the main auditorium, we are organizing several additional flows with presentations focused on implementation technology, lessons learnt and product uses, new software – those products that are at the stage of development... There definitely will be a session for programmers – who develop applications for our products. Obviously we plan a series of presentations for educations institutions. Many presentations will be given by our authorized partners. So participants will not only be able to get valuable information but also select a future supplier on the basis of the level of competence shown by the specialists of a particular partner. Certainly there will be special presentations by our partner - HP. This year NVIDIA also has become a Forum partner.

As you understand the Program is not finalized yet. More details can be found in July on our web site.

See full version at isicad.net