The 54th Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN54) Meeting was held in Jinan, Shandong Province, China from the 22nd – 26thAugust, 2022. 

 

It has been 25 years since APAN was proposed and formed under a Memorandum of Understanding in 1997. With all the continuous support and efforts of APAN primary members and partners, APAN has become a very important community in the Asia Pacific Region for scholars, experts, teachers, engineers and students from or related to national academic network organizations to share ideas and experiences of Internet development, to face the challenges, and to explore collaboration opportunities. APAN meetings are held twice per year and provides an excellent platform for networking and for academics and scientists to work together to promote national, regional and international Internet development.

 

APAN54 had a range of exciting keynote speakers and different varieties of programmes including training, workshops, tutorials, presentations, demonstrations, conference sessions, and discussion panels.

 

Prof. Shahbaz khan, Director and Representative of UNESCO Beijing Office gave an online lecture “ Research and Education Networks (RENs) for Open Science Partnerships”  as the keynote presenter of the forum on 24th August.

 

During his presentation, Prof. Khan spoke on important themes including the introduction to UNESCO Open Science recommendation and the implementation strategy (including the preliminary direction from the infrastructure working group) and the regional mapping results and STEPAN Action Plan (2021-2025) taking five pilot countries in the Asia and the Pacific Region (Malaysia, South Korea, Pakistan, Samoa and Uzbekistan) as examples.

 

Besides, Prof. Khan emphasized the key role of RENs in developing communication network infrastructure and network services for researchers and educators, and shared the preliminary survey results based on the perception and possible role of RENs on open science. With the joint effort of UNESCO, SOI-Asia and APAN, we can better foster and enhance the Sustainable role of RENs for Open Science Implementation in Asia and the Pacific.

 

At the end of his lecture, Prof. Khan made insightful expectations and recommendations for future cooperation with STEPAN, UNESCO, SOI-Asia and APAN Joint Project.

 

Activity 1: A series of regional workshops

Activity 2: A multi-stakeholders’ dialogue

Activity 3: A series of training/capacity building online activities

 

And he sincerely invited all interested APAN members to define and implement the Open Engineering together.

Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jT7Z1IhmBCcC33WFxHGYsQ