Master on New Technology Using Services (MONTUS), an Erasmus + Capacity Building project was concluded in November. A closing workshop was held at VNU, Hanoi, Vietnam, from 7 to 9 November 2022.
MONTUS (2018-2022) brought together the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès (UT2J, France), Toulouse National School of Architecture (ENSA Toulouse, France), International School of Information Processing Sciences (CYU, Pau campus, France), University of Ferrara in Italy, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB, Belgium), Faculty of Engineering and Technology of Vietnam National University (VNU, Vietnam), Hanoi Architectural University (HAU, Vietnam), Nong Lam University – Ho Chi Minh City (NLU, Vietnam), University of Danang (UD, Vietnam) the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT, Thailand), Walailak University (Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand), Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA, Cambodia), Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC, Cambodia) and HUPI cloud computing society (France).
Prof. Kim Oanh; Assoc. Prof. Ekbordin Winijkul, Dr. Lai Nguyen Huy, and Mr. Chaiyaporn Imsapsangworn attended the workshop. Activities at AIT were presented and discussed by Prof. Kim Oanh and the team focusing on a project final management, plan for using the cloud system at AIT for air quality modeling research and teaching, and the new master program and future projects cooperation.
Some critical remarks were highlighted at the workshop. Anchored in themes that are crucial to our society, the originality of MONTUS was to both develop and implement training courses and pedagogical materials at the interface of Cloud Computing/Big Data/Artificial Intelligence and environmental sciences and to promote their education in a new specific Master’s degree at the University of Engineering and Technologies at VNU in Hanoi, Vietnam.
The project addressed the fact that to be able to process large volumes of data, IT has had to evolve to find solutions to store and process massive data by dynamically allocating storage and/or processing resources according to user needs via the Internet network and online
services. At the same time, environmental sciences have evolved to put data at the center of their practice. However, few scientists, engineers, and technicians could master Big Data, Cloud Computing, or Artificial Intelligence techniques for applications to environmental data aimed at sustainable development. The ambition of our project was, therefore, to promote exchanges between these different scientific communities, to produce pedagogical resources for their understanding of these various fields and increase mutual competencies, and to perpetuate this work with the integration of courses on these themes in a new Master’s degree at VNU which will open in 2023.
To make this possible, the 13 institutions involved have worked closely together for four years. Despite the pandemic, seven face-to-face workshops were held in Europe and Asia. One workshop was held online as well as numerous meetings. More than 100 people worked for MONTUS.
During the project, over a hundred training sessions on scientific and managerial issues were given by partners to partners and students present during eight workshops. A model of a Master’s program and the syllabus for all the courses were proposed. Similarly, an online pedagogical material (written chapters and videos) on the Foundations of environmental sciences, Data and management tools for ecological sciences and Computing for environmental sciences was produced. A GPU cluster server was also financed, delivered, and installed and is currently working at the Institute of Technology of Cambodia. Case studies dedicated to environmental sciences have been deployed on the server.
“All partners are proud of the results and have been enriched by this interdisciplinary and intercultural project. We are currently working on a new project with a majority of partners to promote the sustainability of the results obtained and extend their impact,” said Prof. Kim Oanh.
Details on MONTUS project is available at https://cloud-montus.com/
