Opening Statement
Dr. Miklós Biró
Computer and Automation Institute
Hungarian Academy of Sciences

• Immediate Enabler:
  The Web4Groups Telematics Project funded by the European Commission with partners from Austria, Finland, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland.
• Historical Enablers
• Political
• Technological
• Sociological

• Foundation of Academies of Science
• Hungarian: Royal Patent in 1827
• Austrian: Imperial Patent in 1847
• Cooperation Agreement between the Austrian and the Hungarian Academies of Science signed in 1972.
  Results:
• Joint research in the framework of the scientific exchange program
• Joint Committees (History, Literature, Economics)

• New agreement from 1993.
• Exchange visits by invitation from institutions of the Academies only.
• Drastical decrease of mutual visits from
  120-160 to 20-25 per year.
• There are mutual initiatives for identifying new areas of joint interest,
  however the traffic until April 1997 stays low.
• EU projects and their accompanying activities open new horizons for scientific cooperation.

• 1989. Political and economical changes in Central and Eastern Europe triggered by the opening of the iron curtain from Hungary to Austria.
• 1994-1998. EU 4th Framework Programme Telematics for Research: one of the sectors of the Telematics Applications Programme.
• 4th Framework Programme open to CEE.
  (MTA SZTAKI participates in numerous European projects and organizations including ERCIM and ESI.)
• 1995. Austria becomes a member of the EU.

• 1858-1866. Atlantic cable in use for 100 years.
• 1957. President Eisenhower founds the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after the launch of Sputnik in the Soviet Union.
• 1968. Network presentation to ARPA.
• 1973. First international connections to the ARPANET: England and Norway.
• 1982. TCP/IP established for ARPANET.
• 1992. World-Wide Web released by CERN (Tim Berners-Lee).

• 1781. Borda discovers logical limits to
  democratic group decisions.
• 1951. Arrow‰s Impossibility Theorem.
• 1992. WWW connects people with different national cultures on a scale never experienced before (e.g. different attitudes towards power distance, uncertainty tolerance or avoidance, individualism-collectivism, masculinity-feminity).

One of the pioneers of this field is Web4Groups.