The International School of Information Science (ISIS) is a research institute affiliated to the BA. It acts as an incubator for digital and technological projects, thus promoting and nurturing innovation, which is the foundation of the BA’s mission. Guided by the goals of the BA, ISIS strives to preserve heritage for future generations in digital form, provide universal access to human knowledge, and promote the research and development of activities and projects related to building a universal digital library. ISIS received an Award of Merit and the Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement (OCEA) award from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2002.
Furthermore, ISIS aims to forge partnerships and collaborations with other institutions and IT centers, both locally and internationally, believing that these partnerships act as a catalyst for emerging new technologies in the IT domain. Collaboration with CNRS (the French national center for scientific research), the Library of Congress, Yale University, the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and others enriches research and implementation of pioneering digital ideas for the benefit of the international knowledge community.
In addition to partnerships, the BA through ISIS offers a platform for the collaboration of young scientists in Egypt and worldwide. This is made possible through ISIS’s ICT infrastructure which provides an environment conducive to research. This includes high bandwidth connectivity, a fully available data analysis facility (Virtual Immersive Science and Technology Applications), mass storage devices available for storing enormous amounts of data, and finally, the availability of a High Performance Computing Cluster, also known as the Supercomputer, that represents a new dimension in the scientific research domain. Its computational ability reaches a rate equivalent to trillions of operations per second.