Community added value and contribution to EU policies. In view of the large degree of dispersion of pieces of art within Europe and the highly fragmented knowledge and management of the collections, REGNET offers the services to create a global view based on a contextual and thematic approach. Further more the high level of accessibility combined with various levels of consultation of the information will suit the requirements of the occasional visitor, educational institutions and scientists/researchers. The different views of the same information will range from a quick referential search towards educational purposes. The easy access and availability of this global information will boost the cross-cultural knowledge within European regions and stimulate Europeans to visit the objects in situ they discovered via the REGNET-service. This will substantially increase the culture stimuli of the citizen and at the same time contribute to a multicultural and more European awareness and feeling. REGNET intends to reach some basic aims: • The dissemination of the European Culture Heritage facilitating to European citizens the access to catalogues of intellectual, cultural and scientific heritage stored in archives, libraries and museums and galleries • Integration of e-business into the information systems used in Cultural Institutions • The development of new and exploitation of existing cultural infrastructures • The use of standards in the field of information structure, retrieval and e-business • The interoperability between systems (interoperable access to distributed resources/catalogues: cultural & scientific content and products & services) based on the complementarities of the capabilities of each partner (group). • The establishment of a service infrastructure which allows to develop a network of (cultural) service centres throughout Europe. Besides the relevance to EC policies in the area of science and research some initiatives are mentioned in the attachment:
1. eEurope - An Information Society For All".
2. Draft Recommendation No. R(98) ... on cultural work within the information society - New professional profiles and competencies for information professionals and knowledge workers operating in cultural industries and institutions".
3. Structural Funds (EFRE)
4. Culture 2000
Community added value and contribution to EU policies. Deaf people, who comprise an increasingly active and aware section of European society, are at a disadvantage compared to hearing people not only on account of their disability but as a consequence of their being prevented from engaging in services enjoyed by the community at large. ViSiCAST will improve the quality of life of Europe’s deaf citizens by offering them access to many of those services and facilities. It will do this by creating advanced tools for the synthetic generation, storage and transmission of European deaf sign languages. These tools will improve the integration of deaf individuals in society by allowing them access to widely available communications tools. This will in turn give them increased access to public services, commercial transactions, entertainment, educational and leisure opportunities, including broadcast television and the World-Wide Web. The ViSiCAST project will operate at European rather than national level because: It requires access to varied expertise and resources distributed around Europe.
(i) It requires detailed understanding and analysis of a number of European languages, both verbal and signed, which is only really available from individuals and organisations experienced in those languages as native speakers.
(ii) Product from the research element requires subjective and technical evaluation which will benefit from cross national testing to ensure that methodologies have not been adopted which are language or local culture specific.
(iii) It will generate new protocols and standards for the distribution of signed content via broadcast TV and the Internet which will require adoption at International level.
(iv) By addressing the particular requirements of the DVB/MPEG standards régimes, where appropriate, ViSiCAST will strengthen the international position and standing of European Commission-supported research. There is a relatively high proportion of UK participants within ViSiCAST. This is because the initial first-generation work on virtual signing was carried out as part of the ITC’s private out-sourced research programme. ViSiCAST represents the ‘export’ of this work to the wider European consortium and also brings in additional European expertise.
Community added value and contribution to EU policies. The POET project proposal addresses the key vision statement of the IST 2000 workprogramme: "Start creating the ambient intelligence landscape for seamless delivery of services and applications in Europe relying also upon test-beds and open source software, develop user- friendliness, and develop and converge the networking infrastructure in Europe to world- class". The key enabling technologies for this vision are a wireless network infrastructure and the powerful mobile communication and computation terminals. Several of the WP2000 priorities to realise the vision are directly addressed by the POET project: To improve natural and personalised interactions with IST applications and services. This includes multi-lingual/multi-modal interaction systems that are adaptable to the user’s preferences and lifestyle (e.g. sensitivity to gender, age and culture). To xxxxxx the development and convergence of networking infrastructures and architectures including the integration of fixed, mobile, on-line and broadcasting technologies. To develop embedded technologies, their interconnections and their full integration into the service infrastructure, the workplace and business processes. To develop applications and services that take advantage of such systems. To reconsider service provisioning in the context of any-where/any-time access to services and ambient dialogue modes including public services and, mediation and commercial transaction systems. Further the proposal targets other objectives which strengthen the European industry and economy: It promotes the take-up of methodology and tools in industrial environments, by solving problems and bottlenecks in several application domains. It supports the development of design techniques that are useful and applicable to several application domains, in particular consumer and communication systems. It contributes to the dissemination of such technologies to small, medium and large European companies, by offering direct marketing channels in Europe. The vital importance of embedded systems for the telecom infrastructure has been generally acknowledged in the market. In our opinion, the project will substantially contribute to the implementation and evaluation of the above-mentioned objectives through the development of methods and tools to be used in the design of Systems-on-Chip (SoC). The power consumption of SoCs is one of the main limitations of the integration of additional functionality. It has a massive impact ...
Community added value and contribution to EU policies. The probabilistic approach to perception, inference, learning and action is an emerging research area. Its application to artefact development and construction is even more recent. Consequently, the qualified research groups are sparse. It is only at a European scale that a multidisciplinary consortium on this subject can be gathered. Cross fertilisation of different disciplines and transgression of academic frontiers are required conditions for important scientific and technological breakthrough. Consequently, EC policy is to encourage this kind of project especially in the FET program. The BIBA's consortium is a model of interdisciplinarity. It has been designed in order to use neurosciences and life sciences as the inspiration for information sciences and technology. Another main objective of EC is the improvement of human potential. The project B IBA plans to hire 6 young PhD or post-doctorate students. Coming from different scientific fields, they will have to work together and with senior researchers as a trans-disciplinary team. BIBA will be a unique experience for these 6 young interdisciplinary scientists. One of the deliverable of BIBA (WP5) is a flexible experimental mobile platform where a large variety of sensor and motor devices can be plugged to fit the needs of different experiments and to be capable of easy adaptation in different versions. We hope that others could use this platform for their own researches, experiments and developments either in life science or in information science. We also hope that this platform could be an encouragement for groups to repeat the work of others; reproducibility and falsification are two major requirement of sound scientific and technological progress. Finally, we hope that this experimental platform will stimulate exchange between European researchers .
Community added value and contribution to EU policies. The primary objective of this project is to build a framework to allow distributed online agents to share common languages for describing mathematical capabilities and mathematical objects. It is clear that such a framework can only succeed if it is used by multiple systems. It is an important feature of the project that it includes partners from several different mathematical traditions and geographical locations. Some examples of the benefits of European collaboration include: It is important to support the different national traditions that occur within the multi- lingual European community. At the level of typographic conventions for mathemat- ical notions, a semantically based markup language such as OpenMath or Content MathML allows the mathematical content to be conveyed whilst also allowing localised stylesheets. These stylesheets might provide different typographic presentations, or non visual presentations such as braille or speech. Similarly it is essential that European input is applied in the design of frameworks for e-learning. The educational traditions of Europe and North America, especially in mathematics, are quite distinct. The Consortium includes a number of partners with an interest in e-learning, who will ensure that XXXXX is a suitable framework in which to deliver courses which respect the differing educational methods used in different countries. The consortium includes partners from a number of different disciplines, Academic researchers, Mathematical software houses, specialists in Ontologies and Description languages, etc. It is necessary that all such disciplines are involved in the design of a framework such as MONET if it is to achieve its objectives of forming a common basis for the use of mathematical services in these disciplines. No single country can represent all the possible requirements of a framework such as MONET, and so it is vital that the development happens at a European level, together with wider coordination on a global level where appropriate. As discussed in the commercial exploitation section below, the specification of the MONET framework should allow smaller to medium size European enterprises to com- xxxx in the marketplace by offering specialised services to end-users, whilst allowing the users to be presented with a common interface to the different service providers. In addition to services offering specialised mathematical functionality, the MONET framework should make it cost effective to produce (f...
Community added value and contribution to EU policies. 10 7 Contribution to Community Social Objectives 11 8 Economic Development and Scientific and Technological Prospects 12 9 Workplan 13 9.1 General Description 13 9.2 Workpackage List 14 9.3 Workpackage Descriptions 15 9.4 Deliverables List 21 9.5 Project Planning and Timetable 22 9.6 Graphical Presentation of Project Components 22 9.7 Project management 23 10 Clustering 24 11 Other Contractual Conditions 25 A Consortium Description 26 A.1 Description of the Consortium 26 A.2 Description of the Participants 27 B Contract Preparation Forms 31 C References 32 The project will develop formalisms for dynamic assembly, reconfiguration and type-checking of complex distributed software systems, such as telephone and banking systems, that should be kept running as they evolve through patches or upgrades, and should be able to adapt to changes in the environment. Such formalisms will advance the state of the art in modeling the ”temporal” dimension of Global Computing (GC), where the ability to interleave meta-programming activities, like assembly and reconfiguration, with computational activities is a must. The development of these calculi will rely on decisive progress in three areas: calculi for dynamic assembly, calculi for object evolution and adaptation, flexible and compositional type systems. The project aims to advance the state of the art in modeling and programming software evolution while retaining safety. More specifically: - We will provide foundational calculi for dynamic assembly and reconfiguration which will be able to describe separate compilation, run-time code generation, dynamic linking and loading. - We will design foundational calculi supporting object capable of changing their behaviour, e.g. by changing class, as well as calculi that are environment adaptable, e.g. able to test existence of objects in the execution environment. - We will develop type systems that support ”compositional analysis” through the existence of ”principal typings”, show how to use such type systems for separate compilation and incremental type inference, and address the issue of combining dynamic type-checking with dynamic assembly and reconfiguration.
Community added value and contribution to EU policies. The emerging information technology and the internet in particular has quickly grown to become a key feature (if not the most important one) of modern society. The future social and economical development of any country (and Europe) will then depend also on their expertise and independence in handling these technologies. An essential feature of the internet technology is that the net is a highly dynamic system, in which components change and move continuously to cope with the quick evolution of reality. The availability of tools for the production of reliable flexible software, suitable to keep its consistency and efficiency through changes and movements, is then a basic expertise needed to keep Europe among the front runners. To develop such tools in a robust and professional way it is crucial to provide models, languages, and systems which allow friendly, robust, and secure uses of the devices arising from such a technology. The models of evolving software fragments aimed to be developed by the present project can be a milestone in this direction. The DART Consortium joining the University of Genova, the Heriot-Watt University, the Imperial College, and the University of Torino (with the University of Udine as subcontractor), is an ideal team for assuring the achievement of the described goals. All members of the consortium are leading researchers in the area of semantics and type theory for programming languages, but they are also complementary. The different teams have research experiences in different areas, which are of key importance for developing the present proposal, roughly: the team of Genova University in categorical semantics of programming languages and in design of modular and object-oriented languages; the team of Heriot-Watt University in applications of type systems and rewriting techniques to the design and implementation of efficient, scalable, secure, and reliable programming language systems, in particular in reasoning about type analysis and also about modules and linking; the team of Torino University in program analysis, synthesis, and transformation and in types for higher- order, concurrent, and object-oriented languages; the team of Udine University in logical frameworks and in formal verification of proofs, programs, and systems.
Community added value and contribution to EU policies. Europe is a hotbed of programming language research with many internationally respected experts both in semantic theory of programming languages and in implementation. One should not forget that all-pervasive paradigms such as object-orientation originated in Europe. The project exploits and strengthens the strong European theoretical expertise both in semantics of programming languages and in logic applied to computing. In particular, it will continue to exploit the advances made by the first APPSEM working group as well as the earlier ESPRIT Basic Research Action CLiCS (Categorical Logic in Computer Science). As before, there are close interactions with the EU Working Group TYPES. Virtually all of the results obtained in applied semantics within Europe have a clear international di- mension. They typically involve partners and expertise from different countries. The aims of the working group can thus not be achieved at a national level or through bilateral agreements.
Community added value and contribution to EU policies
