Milan, May '99
INTAS 'IA-96-03' Final Report
by the Co-ordinator Mariano Maistrello

to the kind attention of:
                   Mr Luc HIERGENS [ INTAS Finance Manager, Brussels (BE) ]
 and, c.c. to:
                   Mr Ruben VARDAPETIAN [ INTAS Officer, Brussels (BE) ]
                   Mr Hermann ZEYEN [ UNI - Paris (F), EU Partner ]
                   Mr Yuri YUROV [ SPETSGEOFIZIKA - Moscow (RU), Russian Partner ]
                   Mr Valentin GEYKO [ IGPH-NASU- Kiev (UA), Ukrainian Partner ]
                   Mrs Maria Luisa RISPOLI [ CNR - DCRIRE (Rome, Italy) ]

   index :
RESEARCH
MANAGEMENT
FINANCES
SUMMARY of
  RESULTS
ROLE & IMPACT
od INTAS
RECOMMENDATIONS
to INTAS
ANNEXES
 1.1  Objectives   2.1  Meetings and visits  3.1 This Grant
 1.2  Activities   2.2  Collaborations
 1.3  Achieved results   2.3  Time schedule
 1.4  Applications   2.4  Problems encountered
  2.5  Action requested
  2.6  Manpower invested

This Final-Report concerns the INTAS-IA-96-03 Infrastructure Action:
 

Establishment of two dedicated EDP Centres (in Moscow & Kiev) for the retrieval and processing of the old photographic records of Crustal and Lithospheric seismic Profiles
The two dedicated seismic Labs. in Moscow and Kiev have been successfully established in the planned time. The last one (Kiev Lab) has been completed during the last February '99, after solving the last payments problem.

This Report summarises the various aspects of the new computing centres (the technical activity for their implementations, the various management aspects, the several financial problematic points) and underlines the effective achievements. Furthermore it indicates the first results and suggests some useful hints for the best future hard work of digitising and processing the DSS data, using the new technologies just established in the two NIS sites.


But, first of all, and as already done in my Periodic Report of last year, let me recall some general points. The INTAS most important Workshops on the West-East RTD collaboration have been:
  1. "Overcoming obstacles to Co-operation" (Brussels, September,1994);
  2. "Tuning into efficient scientific co-operation" (Brussels, April '97);
  3. "Financing scientific co-operation with the NIS" (INTAS/ISCONIS, Vienna, December '97)
  4. "Monitoring and Evaluation of Scientific Research with the NIS" (INTAS/ISCONIS, Stockholm, February '98)
The whole frame is well designed, as one can see: 4 increasing levels of RTD policy. Perhaps these workshops were specific and only selected people have been invited. In any case I would like to know from INTAS and/or ISCONIS Officers: how is now the true banking system in the NIS Countries? After those important 4 meetings, and if the monitoring action should alert some of Intas members, should we think on a possible feed-back action by which modulate the future collaborations?. In our experience, I suspect that regarding our Russian Partner sometimes we often were only at the 1st basic level, and many obstacles to the co-operation still exist due to financial difficulties in Russia. Question: is his case unique or quite a common one in the still open Russian INTAS  Projects? And what kind of contribution can the INTAS or ISCONIS members make in front of such a global NIS economical crisis?

The description of this Final Report will follow more or less the Intas 'Guidelines' style.

1. - RESEARCH

1.1 Objectives

As described in the Work-Programme, the main goal of our Action was to retrieve lots of important scientific seismic data in some of the NIS Countries, that would most likely have gone lost otherwise.

To accomplish our objectives, two important tools were planned:

1.2 Activities Before starting any technical and computing action, the two NIS Partner sites needed some logistic intervention. The receiving Offices at Spetsgeofizika and IGPH have been completely renovated and provided with the necessary furniture and security accessories. Also we took care of the power safety, possible blackouts, and communication lines. Several technical steps were requested to assure the success to the whole operation, some essential, other optional. As agreed in the Work Programme, all the Participants have contributed to guarantee, at least, three essential steps: The core step of our Action was the design of the new seismic Labs. (Hardware and Software). After agreed on a few basic points, such as: quality, Intel-based PCs, A0 scanner and plotter, at least one SUN Work-Station and networking facilities, the actual realisation of the project underwent to the following steps:
  1. Selection, acquisition, implementation and check of the Hardware;
  2. The same as in 1. for the selected Software;
  3. Software and Hardware training;
  4. Effective beginning of the digital acquisition of the photographic records.
The first three of these steps have been the most time consuming ones, because of some heavy constraints in the ICT market in the NIS Countries, where our Partners found some local Providers but with western bank accounts. These problems strongly influenced our time schedule and the first EDP at Spetsgeofizika (Moscow) was installed only in July'98, nine months after the virtual beginning of the activity!!! Consequently we could establish the second one (at IGPH of NASU, in Kiev) only in December'98, and complete it in February '99. Therefore the Moscow Lab became operative only during the second half of 1998, and the Kiev Lab at the beginning of 1999. For this reason we asked Intas for a prolongation of our IA-96-03 Action which was agrred. The choice for the raster to vector software was also an important issue. Using Internet facilities, the EU Partners contacted many Providers. We discovered the Synapse company, in Moscow, that already developed an ad-hoc package (DGS), specific for the digitisation and processing of the old photographic seismic traces. The excellent qualities of this package, and the fact the software has already been tested by several users, shall play a fundamental part in the software post-selling services and assistance. The final essential step was the processing of the digitized wave forms. Taking into account the format of the DGS digital output data, and the necessity to produce a correct seismic section, both the distance and timing information had to be very carefully processed and computed. This has been done adding special software modules to the DGS main package (the SNDA module), which produced both the correct time processing (in order to obtain the true 0-time of the first samples) and the correct 'time-position' in the final digital section-film, using some seismic reduction-velocity value. Moreover the software package allows the conversion of the data in some standard format (e.g. SEG.Y). 1.3  Achieved Results The main results of our IA-96-03 Action can be summarised as follows: 1.4 Applications

In a near future the new digital seismic sections could be used to perform new interpretations on Crust and/or upper Mantle structures in some interesting Russian and Ukrainian areas. Such new scientific underground 'knowledge' could serve for many other social and scientific needs, such as natural resources new research, natural hazards investigations, etc. Advanced plans have already been made by the Moscow and Uppsala partners.
 
 

2. - MANAGEMENT

2.1 Meetings and visits
Most of the communication and/or information exchanges have been done without the necessity to travel, but using the Fax or the E-mail. As a consequence our meetings have been the bare necessities to assure the final success to the Action. However, during the first part of the project (beginning of '98) some 'informal' visits and contacts between Persons in the EUROPROBE frame helped very much in solving the first big Moscow financial problem (i.e., how to pay for the local Hardware Provider, with foreign Bank accounting). The meetings and visits have been: In the frame of an EUROPROBE Workshop (the 'Georift') at University of Zurich, Dr Y.Yurov, Dr H.Zeyen and myself have met. At the beginning Prof. D.Gee was also present. No INTAS funds have been used for this meeting, because of the possibility of its connection with an EUROPROBE Workshop. All the Partners participated at this fundamental ten-days operative meeting, in which the 1st Intas Lab. at Spetsgeofizika's offices was successfully established. The participants have been: M.Maistrello and A.Corsi from Milan; H.Zeyen from Uppsala; V.Geyko from Kiev, and the local Moscow Team (Y.Yurov et al.). During the meeting all the technical points have been checked and tested. We also collected the material for the realisation of our web-pages, and arranged for other very important meetings in Moscow, such as: At this second ten-days operative meeting only two Milan people went in Kiev: the Co-ordinator M.Maistrello assisted by A.Corsi. Together with the Kiev Team (V.Geyko et al.) they tested the available instrumentation and trained the use of Internet tools (browsers, mail, etc.). At that time the instrumentation were not all available at IGPH (the A0 Scanner, the DGS Software and some accessory didn't arrived yet).

3-days training stage, February '99.

Dr L.M.Haikin (Synapse) trained the Kiev's Team on the proper use of DGS package.

 2.2 Collaborations
In all the different steps of the Action the collaborations among the four Participants have always been rather high. Because of the modification in our first Co-operation Agreement, (which stated Kiev lab., first, secondary Moscow) related to the suspension of the international Agreement between Intas and Ukraine in the Autumn '97, we have experienced some difficulties with Moscow Partner. In that phase the contribution of the Uppsala Partner was very appreciated. Furthermore we must thank also the General Directors of the two NIS sites, Dr. R.Berzin (Spetsgeofizika) and Dr. V.Starostenko (IGPH) for their precious collaboration to comply with the new Labs requests.
Future possible collaborations: in the last part of the Action, I tried three times to contact the EUROPROBE 'Caucasus' Project Co-ordinator, to discuss with him a future possible joint co-operation, especially with our Moscow Partner with whom they could share some common seismic data. However I did not get any reply yet. Moscow and Uppsala have signed a contract for cooperation on the interpretation of the resulting digital data integrating also other data sets (gravity and magnetic data).

2.3 Time Schedule
Our Action requested 5 additional months to those planned in the Work Programme, in order to complete the second computing centre in Kiev. This is the same order of magnitude of the initial delay in the Moscow beginning of operations, mainly due to the following reasons:

The Kiev operations have been faster, and added no other delays to the timing plan. However we experienced the same problem concerning payments of the 'foreign' (i.e. Russian) Software company.

2.4 Problems encountered
The previous comments are self explaining for the problems encountered in completing our Action. The actual NIS situation is still not clear, and the banking system is generally not reliable (and in fact, the list of the banks in agreement with INTAS has been changed from our start-up time). To summarize we can say that our major problems have been

Example of problem & solution: Our Kiev Partner had to pay 3,000 USD for 3 licences of the DGS software packages. It was impossible to make an international payment order outside Ukraine (the limit is about 1,000 USD). It was simply solved using two safe 'travellers': one person from Synapse to Kiev for training (he got half the payment) and another one from Kiev to Moscow carrying the second half, in cash.
 

2.5 Actions required

    After this experience, and as I already told to the INTAS finance authorities, I see an urgent action which Intas could study and, possibly, do. The action concerns the delicate point of the NIS funds management. Each Intas Co-ordinator (who in his turn must inform his NIS Partners) should know how to solve the problem of the payment of the goods (machines and other). It should also be very well underlined that the NIS Partners must absolutely know what are the procedures of payment for the selected goods from a certain Provider (which can be 'local' physically, with his goods and shop, but very 'distant' with his Bank accounts…). In this way, the incredible funds-ballet should be avoided which occurred in our case (maybe also for our inexperience).
2.6 Manpower invested
Considering the whole of our Action, the following people have been involved
 
 
Site Name and Surname
Qual.
 Person-Years note
Milan (IT) Mariano MAISTRELLO
(CO)
  50%
Adelmo Corsi  10%
Roberto de Franco    5%
 
Uppsala (SE) Hermann ZEYEN
(CR) 
  30%
N.Davidova (from Moscow)    5%
Moscow (RU) Yuri YUROV
(CR) 
 100%   refunded with this grant
Konstantin Zavodnik     50%  (partial Intas grant up to 12/'98)
Mstislav Ravkin   50%   substitute of the above from 01/'99
Nikolai Zavodnik    50%  granted with this IA
Olga Orlova  50%    "         "         "
Olga Machova   50%    "         "         "
Natalia Subotcheva  50%    "         "         "
     
Kiev (UA)  Valentin GEYKO
(CR) 
 100%  refunded with this grant
T.A. Tsvetkova   60%   granted with this IA
L.P. Livanova  60%      "         "         "
N.P. Sannikova  40%      "         "         "
V.A. Dyadyura   65%     "         "         "
K.V. Geyko   60%      "         "         "
  D.N. Grin'  15%     "         "         "

3. - FINANCES (in ECU)

For our Action the global amount of Intas funds shall be of 180,000.00 ECU. At the moment the 'virtual' amount has been of 162,000.00 ECU (the 'real' amount being 162,000 ECU - 6,224 USD 1).
The following tables summarises our budget

Tab. 1: the financial statements
   
Intas ECU
Labour costs
Overheads
Travels & subsistence
Equipment
Consum.
Other costs
TOTAL
MILAN
IT
11,000.00
0.00
2,000.00
7,170.00
0.00
600.00
1,000.00
10,770.00
UPPSALA
SE
9,000.00
0.00
0.00
3,975.00
(*) 4,100.00
0.00
0.00
8,075.00
MOSCOW
RU
70,000.00
1,500.00
408.00
0.00
48,508.00
100.00
0.00
50,516.00
KIEV
UA
72,000.00
7,000.00
1000.00
1,400.00
58,623.00
3,519.00
330.00
71,872.00
TOTAL
  
162,000.00
8,500.00
3,408.00
12,545.00
111,231.00
4,219.00
1,330.00
141,233.00

(*) since the system in Paris is MAC-based, he needed a PC to be compatible with Moscow, especially in relation to future possible joint interpretation work.

Tab.2 : the foreseen expenses
 
Rest of

Intas ECU
Next

Intas ECU
TOTAL
  
Labour Costs
Overheads
Travel & Subsistence
Equipm.
Consum.
Other

costs
MILAN
230.00
4,000.00
4,230.00
  
0.00
1,000.00
1,500.00
0.00
1,000.00
730.00
UPPS. (Paris)
925.00
3,000.00
3,925.00
  
0.00
425.00
3,000.00
0.00
500.00
0.00
MOSCOW
19,484.00
5,500.00
24,984.00
  
11,000.00
800.00
1,000.00
10,184.00
2,000.00
0.00
KIEV
128.00
5,500.00
5,628.00
  
5,128.00
0.00
0.00
0.00
500.00
0.00
TOTAL
20,767.00
18,000.00
38,767.00
  
16,128.00
2,225.00
5,500.00
10,184.00
4,000.00
730.00

 

At the end of this IA-96-03 Action all the INTAS funds will be spent and in good accordance with what foreseen in the Work Programme. Of course this will be valid only if the NIS Banks will be able to unfreeze the INTAS funds already deposited.

(1)  see the annexed note by Y.Yurov
 
 

4. - SUMMARY OF RESULTS

Title
 Establishment of two dedicated EDP Centres (in Moscow & Kiev) for the retrieval and processing of the old photographic records of Crustal and Lithospheric seismic profiles.
Intas reference N°.
 INTAS-IA-96-03
Period of the Action
 October 1st 1997 --- February 28th, 1999
Co-ordinator address
 Phone: +39 02 23699 254; Fax: +39 02 236 2946 / 266 80 987
e-mail: m.maistrello@irrs.mi.cnr.it
  • Two modern and similar computing centres have been installed at the sites of our NIS Partners: the Spetsgeofizika State research Enterprise (Russian Ministry of Natural Resources, Moscow, Russia), and the Seismic Tomography Group at the Geophysical Inst. of the NASU (National Science Academy, Ukraine), Kiev. Each Centre is provided with all the necessary hardware and software tools for the specialised work on old seismic data, and consists of: 3 work-places (2 Win-PC, 1 SUN WS), one A0 scanner, one A0 Plotter, Laser printer, Fax machine, LAN, Internet, and accessories. The target of these EDP will be the acquisition of old photographic data (seismograms) into raster-images, their conversion into vector-images, and the further dedicated processing using the Synapse software packages (DGS and SNDA);
  • Training and formation of two teams, using these computing facilities, under the guidance of the local scientific officers and software vendors, and in collaboration with Western geophysical partners; 
  • A closer co-operation with other geophysical data processing Specialists widely present in NIS States has been activated; 
  • First digital results are coming out from these first months of 'production' in both the Centres. So in a near future this basic Action could serve also to realise their Seismic digital DataBase, using standard formats; 
  • Thanks to the modern information technologies now available, new contacts have been activated and possible next active collaborations in some international Projects are under consideration;
  • The whole IA-96-03 Action is described in detail at the web address of the Co-ordinator: http://daphne.irrs.mi.cnr.it/~mariano. The new first digital results are shown at these addresses:

 

5. - ROLE AND IMPACT OF INTAS

Role of INTAS
Definitely YES
Rather yes
Rather not
Definitely NOT
Would the Action have been started without funding by INTAS ?
 .  .  . 
X
Would the Action have been carried out without funding by INTAS ?
 .  .  . 
X

 
Main achievement of the Action
Very
important
Quite
important
Less
important
Not
important
Exciting processing design
 .
X
 . .
New international contacts
 .
X
 . .
Additional prestige for my Lab
 . .
X
 .
Additional funds for my Lab
 .
X
 . .
Helping scientists in NIS
X
 . . .

 
6. - RECOMMENDATIONS TO INTAS
7. - ANNEXES
  1. Short last Reports from the Partners: H.Zeyen, V.Geyko and Y.Yurov;
  2. Requests for the final Intas Payments;
  3. A 'useful-links' page, which recalls some sites which have been useful for our 'Action'.
 Milan, Thursday, 27 May 1999