Forum.org Newsletter September 2006

  Overview  

1. Introduction
2. News from the European Project Cluster on Ambient Intelligence for the Product Lifecycle (AITPL)
3. News 
4. Events

1. Introduction

Summertime is now over and we have gathered many news which are concerning our community entering in this active period before the launch of the new 7th European Research Framework Programme (FP7). For our members interested in the current FP7 draft programme, please refer to:

ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/docs/ec_fp7_amended_en.pdf

European research in the field of Enterprise Networking is grouped into four thematic project clusters.Today we give you a short overview on the AITPL cluster, which comprises projects addressing challenges related to supporting the product life-cycle. A number of new projects started in 2006, of which FLUID-WIN is introduced in more detail to give you some impression of the breadth of research and development in this field.

Last but not least, we are glad to inform our members that VE-Forum has recently applied for the Best IST Project Website contest sponsored by NOKIA, in association with IST2006, a competition open to projects funded under Framework Programme 6 of the IST Programme.

Therefore, as a VE-Forum member, you are all warmly invited to vote for the site, considering that the result of the vote from the general public will be based on four criteria:

1. Content
2. Design, structure and navigability
3. European aspects
4. Overall experience

All voting is anonymous, starts on 1st October and finishes on 31st October 2006. Over 150 project websites have been accepted for consideration for this award, so the competition will be high.

A jury composed of independent experts with experience in Web design, communications and EU research activities will examine the top ranked websites from the Internet vote. The jury will also apply the four Award Criteria above and select three finalists by the beginning of November.

So, please don’t miss this opportunity to show your interest and commitment with your VE-Forum community portal, and vote online at:

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/istevent/2006/cf/sitecontest-vote.cfm?vote_site=1273

2. News from the European Project Cluster on Ambient Intelligence for the Product Lifecycle (AITPL)

The AITPL cluster started its work in 2004 in order to enable projects to identify synergies, to focus strengths for a wide publicity of the cluster and to contribute to the consensus building process towards the seventh framework programme. The cluster works on different challenges linked to the product life cycle that include access to information and control of processes from different environments, with respect to geography, technical environment, stages of the life cycle, stages of the production (planning) cycle and many others.

For a broad community building, the cluster has organized a workshop in Brussels where the ambient intelligence topics have been discussed and evolved in three knowledge cafés. This approach was continued at a public forum at the ICE’06 conference in Milan (June 2006). The proceedings from the forum are in preparation, and expected to be published in late 2006.

Several new projects have joined the cluster in 2006, bringing new ideas and additional research impact. A specific focus was set by the IST-4 call to strengthen the European research in collaboration with the new member states. As one example, the FLUID-WIN project was started in January 2006. The project’s goal is to develop means that allow service providers from the logistic and finance sector to provide their services to manufacturing (B2B) networks as a whole. This will enable a new style of electronic business, which the contractors have called B2(B2B). Through the enormous amounts of information that are available in such platform, services can be made cheaper, faster, and sometimes even for the first time accessible to SMEs from the European new member states (NMS). This will give specific advantages to the NMS, as trust – which is one of the major issues to be solved for financial services – is mostly based on the availability of reliable information and knowledge about the potential partner, which up to now is frequently insufficient between the NMS and the OMS. Up to now, the FLUID-WIN project ran a detailed field study, involving companies from Spain, UK, Malta, Slovenia, Slovakia, Italy and Hungary which already delivered interesting and unexpected chances as well as potential barriers. Now, the project is defining the platform in detail, in order to have the first prototypes by summer 2007.

Such complex and multidisciplinary research challenges can not be solved by single enterprises, and are hard to be solved even by a well-organized consortium. Therefore, the AITPL cluster forms a base to exchange the thoughts and to identify potential synergies. However, it is still of utmost importance to widen the horizon outside the cluster. Therefore, the cluster intends to organize common presentations at the ICE’07 conference (www.ice-conference.org) in Sophia Antipolis (France) in summer 2007, to present results to the public and to involve the research community into the thoughts and further research goals.

Markus Rabe, Fraunhofer IPK

AITPL Cluster Chair

For further information, please refer to the AITPL Interest Group on the VE-Forum portal.

markus.rabe@ipk.fraunhofer.de

3. News

4. Events

4. Events

Note: as a registered user of VE-Forum you can suggest items to be included in subsequent newsletters by submitting news and event items directly in the “News & Events” section of VE-Forum (http://www.ve-forum.org). We would like to thank all the members for their useful contributions, which help us to deliver an interesting and comprehensive newsletter.
 
Best wishes,
 
The editorial team
Simona Barresi, Hermann Loeh, Olivier Rerolle, and Bernhard Katzy

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