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Despite the massive growth in Internet connectivity and many discussions on the need to bridge digital divides, numerous higher education institutions in developing and transitional countries lacked access to up-to-date journals, databases, and other information resources. They were also challenged in their ability to communicate the results of their own research to local and global audiences.

AGRIS became operational in 1975 as an international initiative aiming to build a common information system for science and technology in agriculture and related subjects, based on a collaborative network of institutions. A database of almost 3 million bibliographic records has been accumulated over 30 years. An analysis of the AGRIS network in 2000 revealed some major constraints, such as limitations in the capacities of the member institutions, inaccessibility of the full text of documents, the incompleteness of the coverage of literature, and the emergence of several independent systems.

There are two striking facts about African universities and bandwidth. The first is that the average university in Africa has the same aggregate bandwidth as a single home user in North America or Europe. The second is that the average African university pays 50 or 100 times more for this bandwidth than its counterparts in Europe or North America. Cross Atlantic fiber for research and education networks is now being obtained for $1 /mbps/month, while African institutions must pay over $5,000/mbps/month or more for the same bandwidth to connect to their counterparts in developed countries.

Research on the social impacts of Internet technologies has garnered much attention and in some cases controversy over the past decade. Early studies sounded the alarm that the Internet was creating a nation of “netnerds”, accelerating the decline of social involvement in modern society. Others claimed that it may be exasperating the digital divide and thus increasing global economic inequality. Studies looking at its impact on research capacity are recent and more difficult to assess, since the Internet’s rise maps the explosion of western science and engineering over the last quarter century. The issue of the ‘egg or the chicken’ come to mind when determining which one drove which first. There is consensus though that the Internet has provided substantial support to cross-national collaborations in the west by reducing the problems associated with shared work over distances. It is also argued that digital archives and online publishing have facilitated, as they have accelerated, scientific productivity and communication. Recent studies have ventured outside the west, where the Internet was born and continues to be innovated, to the developing world and the newly democratized eastern European nations. Outside the west, methodological issues of causality become more manageable just as perhaps sampling and measurement become more contested.

The session that is reported in this chapter was organized by Zhiyong Liu for the the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The purpose of the session was to provide a forum for researchers, practitioners, and administrators in IT to exchange their information and ideas for research and development on IT. Four Chinese scientists gave presentations on the session. International colleagues participated this session. The following four abstracts included in this document introduce basic information for IT research (especially basic research) in China. In accordance with the purpose of the session, and due to the number of presentations that could be accepted in the session, the abstracts can only gave an outline of a small part of research (especially on communications and networking) on IT conducted in China. Still, from the abstracts readers can find valuable information for basic research on IT in China, as well as the policies of the states, various particular activities and research results.

The State of Kerala, in the southwestern part of India, was the only region that received a session in the whole conference. It was, indeed, well merited, given the distinctive position that the State of Kerala holds in the developmental map of the world. With a current population of 31,838,619 people living in 38,863 sq. km. area, Kerala continues to be the focus of attention for the Indian and international Scholarship as a region in the developing world with a unique pattern of development. The ‘Kerala Model’ of development has been a much-debated topic in the academic parlance, as it appeared to be paradoxical, exhibiting a developmental trajectory with high social achievements on a weak economic base.

One of the key objectives of the “Past, Present and Future” conference was to inject a note of realism in the run up to phase two of the World Summit on the Information Society. This might seem strange, given that the original sponsor of the event, the Society for Social Studies of Science, is an international, professional association whose members are often thought to advocate various forms of social constructivism. The conference brought together active scholars, who do research on global and national ICT issues, with policy makers, program managers, and senior organizational leaders. One of the constants throughout the three days of the meeting is not any particular theoretical, organizational, or ideological advocacy, but an overarching sense that the past, present, and future of in an information society must include not only innovations in information technologies themselves, but also the ways in which these technologies interact with and are constituted by the social, political, and developmental contexts in which they are embedded. The “seamless web” of science, technology, and society was never more apparent than in the variety of presentations that follow.