Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the future where we shall be surrounded by electronic environments, sensitive and responsive to people. Ambient intelligence technologies are expected to combine concepts of ubiquitous computing and intelligent systems putting humans in the centre of technological developments. Ambient Intelligence represents a long-term objective for European research bringing together researchers across multiple disciplines: computer science, electronics and mechanical engineering, design, architecture, social sciences, software engineering, to name a few.

Following a successful first event last year, the 2nd European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence, was held in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, on November 8-10, 2004, aiming to provide a venue for an emerging multi-disciplinary community of researchers that work on Ambient Intelligence.

The annual European Commission's Information Society Technologies (IST) event took place in The Hague, the Netherlands.

This year's edition was organised under the EU's Dutch Presidency by the European Commission in partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. The event included a conference, an exhibition of research results and networking facilities for the about 3000 participants. The overall themes were "People" and "Economy".

What is MDA good for in embedded system design?
One of the special sessions at FDL'04 is organised by the ITEA project PROMPT2Implementation and focusses on Model Driven
Architecture applied to embedded system design.

The topic of this special session was to investigate how Model-Based System Level Design can fulfill the MDA program in the Distributed Real-Time Embedded Domain by providing concrete, sophisticated transformations with sound foundations inside a specific and industry-relevant domain.

FDL is the European forum to exchange experiences and learn about new trends in the application of languages and models for the specification and modeling of electronic or heterogeneous systems. Methods for modeling and specification push the development of new methodologies for design and verification especially at system level. The aim of FDL is to offer several co-located events, and to give an opportunity to gain up-to-date knowledge across these topics.

FDL'04 is the seventh event in a series and takes place at the University of Sciences and Technologies of Lille, France, 13-17 September 2004.

• Special session: Friday 17 September, 09:30 - 13:00
• FDL'04: 13-17 September 2004

The ITEA 5th annual Symposium was held on Thursday 7 and Friday 8 October 2004, in the magnificent Casino de la Exposición in Seville, Spain.

It provided a summary of a year with a very positive completion of ITEA's recent Mid-Term Assessment, the publication of the ITEA Report on Open Source Software, the 2nd edition of the ITEA Technology Roadmap for Software-Intensive Systems and the announcement of our seventh Call for Projects – our most successful so far.

On Thursday morning prior to the official opening an exhibitors forum was held for technical exchange of information between exhibitors. In parallel a special focus session was organised on the subject Technical Roadmapping.

In the afternoon Mr Victor Izequierdo Loyola of the Ministry of Science and Technology opened the Symposium and ITEA's executive team showed the current status of the ITEA programme and looked ahead to the future.

Three presentations of projects which achieved outstanding results and represented consecutive steps on “the road towards convergence” (described in the ITEA Roadmap): KLIMT, ADANETS and EAST-EEA.

On Friday, keynote speakers from Europe's leading companies and the public sector will highlighted the implications of the ITEA programme:
Dr. Ad Huijser, Executive Vice-President and CTO of Royal Philips Electronics, the Netherlands.
Dr. Rainer Kallenbach, Executive Vice-President Automotive Electronics at Robert Bosch, Germany.
Professor Gérard Roucairol, Chief Scientist at Bull, France.
Dr. Kari Tilli, Director Telecommunications and Electronics, National Technology Agency (Tekes) – Information and Communication Technologies, Finland.

During dinner on Thursday evening two awards were presented: The EAST-EEA project was the winner of the 2004 Achievement Award and the Roadmap 2 core team got the ITEA Excellence award (awarded previously on only one occasion, and reserved to reward work of exceptional merit).

For a full overview see: symposium.itea2.org/symposium2004

Thursday 7 and Friday 8 October 2004

The seminar presented the results of the investigating methodologies for embedded systems development.

The objective of the MOOSE project is to enable integration of software engineering technologies in industrial practice. The project team succeeded in bringing together a well-balanced set of practice-based presentations by key-people in the industry for this seminar.

10 -11 June 2004

"Research and Innovation – a European strategy for more growth and jobs” was the theme of the third European Business Summit, an FEB initiative (Belgian Business Federation) together with UNICE and the European Commission.

On March 11 and 12 more than a thousand participants (including more than 80 speakers) from the world of business, politics and academia along with NGOs met for an exchange of views and to exert their joint influence to build a stronger, more competitive Europe. More than 40 different nationalities were represented.

ITEA Chairman Paul Mehring was one of the speakers in the thematic session "The ICT challenge: Getting connected to an e-Europe", on Friday 12 March:
• PowerPoint presentation
• Speech (pdf file)

11 & 12 March 2004