The Galileo Space Advisory Council has asked the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok to prepare a sustainability strategy for the next five years for the Southeast Asia Centre on GNSS.
The centre is being established under the SEAGAL (the South-East Asia centre on european GNSS for international cooperation And Local development ) project.
SEAGAL is funded by the European Union under the European Commission's Seventh Research Framework program. The first SEAGAL meeting took place in March, in Turin, Italy.
The main objective of the project is the definition of an implementation plan for a Galileo collaboration centre to support the educational, commercial and technical needs of South-East Asia.
A second workshop, led by Prof. Ha Manh Thu, was held at Hanoi University of Technology. The workshop was attended by the Vietnamese Vice Minister of Science and Technology and the rector of the university. The Italian ambassador was the guest speaker.
At least one decision to come out of the workshop was that the centre will be based in Hanoi and be fully operational by October 2010.
The partners in the project are AIT, Istituto Superior Mario Boella and Politcno Di Torino, both in Italy, the Spanish Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the French Universite, Franche-Comte as well as Hanoi University of Technology.
Dr. Nitin Tripathi, a lecturer in remote sensing and spatial sciences at AIT says that a report is being prepared for the European Union on the market potential of GNSS in Asia, a building has been allocated in Hanoi University of Technology, and the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology has agreed to join the university in sustaining the centre, partially through project work, once EU funding is withdrawn.
