Funding for ELIXIR and FIN-CLARIN services
Academy of Finland has granted over EUR 16 million funding for Finnish research infrastructures. In total the Finnish Research Infrastructure (FIRI) Committee granted funds for 41 infrastructure projects. CSC is part in several of those FIRI projects.
ELIXIR is implementing a sustainable European infrastructure for biological information, supporting life science research and its translation to medicine, agriculture, bioindustries and society. Finland joined ELIXIR in September 2014 and has been a core member of the preparative work for six years. ELIXIR nodes across Europe serve data from resources of global significance like Ensembl, Uniprot, Human Protein Atlas and Protein Data Bank, and enable processing of data created by contemporary science.
With the support from FIRI, services of the ELIXIR Finland node hosted at CSC can be established in coordination with national stakeholders like the Finnish biocenters and the national counterparts of the European research infrastructure for biomedical sciences (e.g. biobanks). Funding will be used mostly for node coordination and expert work, i.e. keeping Finland actively involved in the European ELIXIR implementation, as well as upgrading and operating Finnish science-aware cloud, data access and training services for bioinformatics research that will become part of the European whole.
The FIN-CLARIN (Common Language Resource and Technology Infrastructure in Finland) project also received a FIRI grant. The funding is intended for upgrading the resources and national language tools for FIN-CLARIN. CSC is acting as the national technical center of FIN-CLARIN, aiming to become a certified CLARIN center during the granting period.
The main goal of FIN-CLARIN is to update and provide access to Language Bank of Finland, i.e. research tools and databases consisting of thousands of millions of words of Finnish language material to be used from the workstations of researchers. The coordinator of FIN-CLARIN is Helsinki University and CSC develops and maintains the technical infrastructure.
FIRI funding was also granted to the Finnish Grid and Cloud Infrastructure (FGCI), in which CSC participates as well (read the press release here). INAR RI (Integrated Atmospheric and Earth System Science Research Infrastructure), EU-OPENSCREEN (The European infrastructure of open screening platforms for chemical biology), EPOS (The European Plate Observing System), BBMRI (Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure) and EATRIS (European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine) projects also got funded, and CSC's role is to provide sustained information technology solutions for their services.
More information:
ELIXIR:
http://www.elixir-finland.org/
ELIXIR Finland Head of node Tommi Nyrönen, CSC, tel. +358 50 381 9511
FIN-CLARIN:
research.csc.fi/language-research
Director Antti Pursula, CSC, tel. +358 50 381 9537
Email: firstname.lastname(at)csc.fi
FIRI decisions on the Academy of Finland's website (pdf)