The first European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence was organised in conjunction with the second open workshop of the ITEA - AMBIENCE project.

The symposium brought together state-of-the-art research on Ambient Intelligence in Europe. Ambient Intelligence can be defined as the merger of technology advancements in ubiquitous computing with new insights in intelligent user interaction concepts.

Topics:

• Ubiquitous computing:
  wired-, wireless and ad-hoc networking, discovery mechanisms, software architectures, system integration and prototyping, portable devices
• Context Awareness:
  sensors, tracking and positioning, smart devices, wearables
• Intelligence:
  learning algorithms, user profiling, recommenders, autonomous intelligence
• Natural user - system interaction:
  ambient technologies, multimodal interaction, innovative interaction styles and concepts, studies on user system interaction

This year's symposium focused on major achievements during the first half of ITEA's innovative software programme and outlined exciting plans for the period ahead.

On Thursday 9 and Friday 10 October, 2003, 250 software experts, together with corporate and academic ICT policy-makers from all over Europe met in the impressive 700-year-old University Hall of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

The meeting marked the halfway point in ITEA's eight-year programme (1999 - 2007) and focussed on achievements so far and plans for the
period ahead, reflected in the symposium theme: ITEA - 4 MORE YEARS. ADVANCING SOFTWARE-INTENSIVE SYSTEMS.

The two full days of project demonstrations, presentations and keynote addresses once again proved that ITEA is at the heart of European and embedded distributed software development. "This unique programme will, I am sure, prove to be a cornerstone in positioning Europe at the top of the knowledge society" said Prince Filip of Belgium after his visit to the symposium.

Click here for an overview

The annual European Commission's Information Society Technologies event took place in Milan on 2-4 October, in partnership with SMAU, one of Europe's largest ICT events.

EUREKA / the EUREKA cluster programmes were present as follows:

• Attendance in a panel discussion on "Towards ERA in ICT" with the new EUREKA chairman Jean-Pierre Jacamon and ITEA's Chairman Paul Mehring (for the clusters) on the panel.
• A EUREKA session on "EUREKA clusters and actions in the IST Area".
• A networking session.
• A (small) EUREKA booth at the exhibition.

HomeNet2Run: Interconnect your home!

The ITEA project HomeNet2Run is a European research consortium with major players from the consumer electronics and information technology industries. After two and a half years, it has brought the realiation of the vision of the 'interconnected home' to reality.

At this year's IFA, HomeNet2Run showed solutions that effectively bridge the gaps caused by the heterogeneity of in-home networks.

The project demonstrated how the 'interconnected home' will give consumers more control, easier access to their content and more freedom to access that content from any place within or away from their own home. In doing so, HomeNet2Run shows how the 'interconnected home' will empower people to use their devices for room-to-room and home-to-home communication.

Realising the potential of home networking does not necessarily depend on a single product, vendor or networking standard.

HomeNet2Run believes its contributions have significantly progressed the 'heterogeneous-network approach'. Bridges have been successfully developed between wired networks (ethernet and IEEE 1394), wireless networks (IEEE 802.11 and HiperLAN2) and middleware (UPnP and HAVi) clusters, Internet Protocol solutions have been adopted for AV transport. This enables room-to-room, home-to-home and service connectivity of the PC and consumer-electronics worlds.

Project documentation:
- project leaflet
- folder
- website: http://www.homenet2run.org/

Press information

The third Dutch ICT Knowledge Congress was held September 4-5, 2003. Organised by the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NOW) and Senter, under the authority of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

Companies, universities en knowledge institutes presented the latest developments and status quo in ICT research. Lectures and demonstrations showed how ICT can support the innovative power of the Netherlands. Trusting blindly on artificial intelligence, ambulant monitoring of biomedical data, instinctive forms of communication with mobile computer systems and much more different other results of ICT research will be presented.

One of the themes of the congress was: Innovation- and curiosity-driven ICT research in Dutch and European perspective.

In a session on Friday 5 September - ICT and Policy in Europe - attention was paid to the most important European developments in relation to the chances (and threats) these developments form for the Dutch research climate. What is the status quo of the European Research Area (ERA)? Is there already a European Research Council? What are the possibilities of the new funding-instruments in FP6?

In this session the ITEA Office director Kees van Mourik gave a presentation on ITEA and the European Research Area (ERA).

4 - 5 September, 2003

http://www.ict-kenniscongres.nl/

Innovation Policy in Europe
Members of Parliament from the 34 EUREKA members emphasised the importance of the EUREKA Initiative in contributing to the objective set by European leaders in Barcelona last year of increasing investment in R&D to 3% of GDP by the year 2010.

The Conference urged that if the objective is to be met and the gap in innovation capacity between European and its main competitors such as the US and Japan is to be reduced, national policies in support of research and innovation should be better coordinated. In particular, the role of the European Research Area (ERA) was noted in developing complementarities between the different European level research programmes (EU Framework Programme, EUREKA and others) and national programmes with a view to creating larger European entities, integrated projects and clusters in strategic industrial sectors.

Building an Innovation Policy for Europe – a European industry viewpoint
This was the title of the speech of Paul Mehring, Chairman of the ITEA Board.

For the full speech click here (pdf file).

Copenhagen, June 23, 2003

Seven innovative EUREKA projects gave a presentation at CeBIT 2003 at the Innovation Relay Centres (IRC) future match:

• multimedia equipment
• e-learning
• embedded software systems
• laser technology networks
• microsystems
• electronic waste recycling and environmental performance of electronic products

A good opportunity to learn about these projects and for new project participants to join.

For more details, download the programme (pdf file).

Tuesday March 13, 2003

CeBIT 2003, Hannover, Germany

IRC Stand in Hall 11, Stand B14/1, from 9.30 to 17.00.

The aim of the ITEA SOPHOCLES project is to reach a conceptual validation of methodologies, platforms and technologies supporting the integration, validation and programming, over a distributed environment (Cyber Enterprise), of complex systems composed of heterogeneous Virtual Components.

The "Fringe Technical meetings" at DATE '03 of SOPHOCLES featured:

A technical session
Tuesday March 4, 19:00-21:00 - room 21b
* SOPHOCLES presentation
* MDA for SOC simulation
* Distributed KPN simulation techniques
* Architecture modelling & simulation

A demonstration session
Thursday March 6, 19:00 - 21:00 - room 21a
* Cyber Enterprise
* Heterogeneous simulation framework
* Performance evaluation
* Array-OL: Data parallel computations
* Architecture simulation with Ptolemy Discrete Events

Tuesday March 4 and Thursday March 6, 2003

Ambient Intelligent Environments can be characterised by their basic elements: ubiquity, awareness, intelligence, and natural interaction. It refers to the way we want to react to the surroundings in the future, in the upcoming all digital age. Ambient Intelligence is also the main research topic of the ITEA project AMBIENCE.

The seminar was intended to a wide audience consisting of researchers as well as managers of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence projects. It provided a unique opportunity to get an inside view of the topic presented by some of the top European experts in this domain. Speakers from the consortium partners presented their view and technology challenges on Ambient Intelligence. In addition, invited key experts from the Finnish industry and university gave a Finnish perspective on the topic. Besides the various talks, demonstrations on gesture recognition, novel user interfaces for PDAs, network traffic visualisation and preference-based browsing was available during the breaks.

For more information on the seminar: http://www.vtt.fi/ele/new/ambience.htm.

For more information about the Ambience project: http://www.extra.research.philips.com/euprojects/ambience/

Friday 10 January, 2003