Abstract: Brice Lepape studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Grenoble where he worked as a researcher for several years. Thereafter he spent a few years in Morocco, working for Unesco, to come back to the University of Grenoble once again. Then he was contacted directly by someone working with the Research and Development (R&D) programme at the European level, who asked Brice Lepape if he would be interested in working there. So Brice Lepape took this opportunity to as he himself said “broaden his view, and take up more management responsibility”. Now he is coordinator of the Knowledge Engineering area which is one of the topics addressed in ESPRIT. The second phase of the ESPRIT-programme has been completed (last call January 1990) but a new Research and Development programme, called the Framework Programme, has now been approved and therefore several new R&D programmes covering various advanced technologies are in the process of being launched. One major activity within this Framework Programme deals with R&D for Information Technology and is managed within Directorate General (DG) XIII which is responsible for the Telecommunication, Information Industries and Innovation. The Director General of DGXIII is Michel Carpentier. DGXIII itself is organised in directorates, and one is the Information Technology - ESPRIT, the directorate A, which is managed by Jean Marie Cadiou. This directorate manages all the R&D activities for Information Technology. There is another directorate which manages for example the Telecommunication area. Within Directorate A there are several units, two of them are so called horizontal units (AI and A2). One looks mainly at the overall strategy to be developed within the Information Technology area and the other deals with administrative and organisational matters such as, organisation of ESPRIT Conferences, information dissemination, contracts, technology transfer and also the management of the Directorate. Besides these two horizontal units there are the technical units, the so called vertical units, each of which deal technical topic. A3 for micro electronics, A4 for Information Processing Systems, of which Knowledge Engineering is a sub-area. A5 for Office and Business Systems, A6 for Computer Integrated Manufacturing, and finally A7 for Basic Research. The Information Processing Systems (IPS) division covers four sub-areas: System Design, Knowledge Engineering, Advanced Architectures and Signal Understanding. We asked Brice Lepape to tell more about the functioning of the Research and Development Programme of the European Community.
