Projects_old

Cloud4SOA (C4S)

Cloud4SOA focuses on resolving the semantic interoperability issues that exist in current Clouds infrastructures and on introducing a user-centric approach for applications which are built upon and deployed using Cloud resources. To this end, Cloud4SOA aims to combine three fundamental and complementary computing paradigms, namely Cloud computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and lightweight semantics. The project will propose a reference architecture and deploy fully operational prototypes.

Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence (CONET)

The main goal of CONET is to build a strong community in the area of Cooperating Objects capable of conducting the needed research to achieve the vision of Mark Weiser. Therefore, the objectives of CONET are the following:

1. Create a visible and integrated community of researchers on the topics related to Cooperating Objects capable of driving the domain in the coming years.
2. Identify, arise awareneess and steer academic research efforts towards industry-relevant issues without forgetting fundamental scientific issues; make the community more reactive to novel issues and approaches, and to coordinate its efforts; establish tight relationships with the European industry, leveraging interactions with leading US institutions in the field.
3. Stimulate cooperation between researchers in order to achieve a lasting and sustainable architecture that is able to cope with the vision of Cooperating Objects.

COST Action IC0801 on Agreement Technologies (COST-AT)

The main objective of the Action is to support and promote the harmonization of nationallyfunded high-quality research towards a new paradigm for next-generation distributed systems based on the notion of agreement between computational agents, fostering research excellence and sowing the seeds for technology transfer to industry.
 
Primary objectives

•  European research excellence: to facilitate harmonization and improvement in the quality, profile, and industrial relevance of European research in the emerging field of Agreement Technologies, drawing on relevant prior work from related areas and disciplines;
• Technology transfer: to gain competitive advantage for the European ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) industry in open distributed software systems. 

Secondary objectives

• Joint Research: to promote innovative and pragmatic joint research across the community fractions related to Agreement Technologies in different COST member states, and worldwide;
• Interdisciplinary Research: to promote interdisciplinary research in the field of Agreement Technologies aimed at a robust understanding of the notion of agreement among computational entities;
• Early integration of young researchers: to promote a rapid integration and sustained involvement of early-stage researchers in the community building process;
• Capacity Building: to promote high-quality teaching in all aspects related to the Agreement Technology paradigm.
• Awareness: to raise awareness of the emerging field of Agreement Technologies technology among the target groups of the Action; and
• Early Adoption: to encourage the early adoption of Agreement Technologies and applications in industry.

digital.me (DIME)

This project aims at the integration and management of all personal data within a user’s personal sphere via a single user-controlled point of access: the digital.me userware. Disclosable,  privacy-aware and context-dependant personal information will be automatically shared with peers, services and social networks.

The use and disclosure of personal information for private, and business life is a major trend in information society. Advantages like enhancing social contacts, personalising services and products compromise with notable privacy risks arising from the user s loss of control over their personal data and digital footprints. Large amounts of scattered personal data lead to information overload, disorientation, loss of efficiency. digital.me aims at integrating all personal data in a personal sphere by a single, user-controlled point of access: the digital.me userware. This tool will run on the user s devices, and rely on scaleable peer-to-peer communication in order to avoid external storage of personal data as far as possible and to enhance data portability. External services (e.g. web-communities, enterprise systems) will be integrated via gateways. Communication to individuals and services will make use of digital faces, i.e. user data selected for a particular purpose and context.

An open trust, privacy, and security infrastructure will enable the user to securely use personal data. Trust metrics will guide the user to avoid risky behaviour. Anonymous data disclosure, data withdrawal and policies will foster privacy and trust.

A semantic core with data mining, semantic mapping and reasoning, will support an intelligent management of personal data and communication history including recommendations how to take advantage of the personal sphere. The main contribution by DERI to the project lies within the design of the semantic core.

Intelligent user interfaces on desktop and mobile devices will promote the intuitive usage of powerful semantic and privacy-technologies and will enable the user to monitor, control, and interpret personal data.

The project implements a user-driven design process. Usability and uptake will be monitored and improved by large-scale quantitative evaluations supporting a scaleable test-concept. Leading industrial partners will involve their customers for validating the project s artefacts with consumers and professional users.

Enhanced Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment (eCAALYX)

eCAALYX is a three-year project funded by the European Commission under the AAL Joint Programme (Strategic Objectives addressed: ICT-based Solutions for Prevention and Management of Chronic Conditions of Elderly People). The project builds on the strengths of the infrastructure and functionality already developed in the original CAALYX project (2007/2008).

GRANATUM

The vision of the GRANATUM project is to bridge the information, knowledge and collaboration gap among biomedical researchers in Europe (at least) ensuring that the biomedical scientific community has homogenized, integrated access to the globally available information and data resources needed to perform complex cancer chemoprevention experiments and conduct studies on large-scale datasets.

Líon 2

Systematic and human-centric access to knowledge is critical for solving today's problems – on individual, organisational and global levels. To develop new solutions and enable innovation, it is essential to interlink people, organisations and information in a "network of knowledge”. Although knowledge is inherently strongly interconnected, this interconnectedness is not reflected in the current structure of the Web and other information systems: the "information fabric” is not optimal for supporting the development of solutions and innovation. To develop the right tools and methods for enabling networked knowledge on a global scale is an enormous and extremely important challenge. Only by interconnecting this global knowledge and by creating the right collaboration methods can we hope to tackle current and future problems. Imagine a world with networked global knowledge and collaboration, where problems like climate change would be tackled far more effectively, resulting in proactive collective action.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) and its industry partners are taking on these challenges, executing a research agenda and outreach activities targeted at supporting people, organisations and systems to collaborate and interoperate on a global scale by enabling networked knowledge using Semantic Web technologies.

The Semantic Web is emerging with the availability of more formal data sources coming online. DERI is one of the main contributors to this work, and is now ready to tackle the next step. It is our hypothesis that networked knowledge can assist people, organisations and systems with their individual as well as collective problem solving, enabling innovation and increased productivity and also helping to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds through the inclusion of emerging sensor technologies as an additional source of knowledge about the real world. An application in the healthcare domain is remote patient monitoring and the integration of sensor measurements into a patient's health records, thus enabling their use and interpretation anywhere in the world.

We use the Web as a living laboratory to enable us to validate our approaches and hypothesis, and to have global impact by creating standards. True global networks of knowledge require a technological foundation and the engagement of many users, both of which are now available through the Web. Ireland has a unique opportunity to take the lead in this area, providing the key technologies to networked knowledge societies, whilst benefiting industry.

Líon 2 is an SFI funded Centre for Science, Engineering & Technology (CSET). It sets out an ambitious programme of consolidation, growth, collaboration and sustainability over five years, building on the results and achievements of the previous CSET grant (Líon-1). DERI is applying its research output across key application research domains including: Telecommunications, eBusiness & Financial Services, eLearning, Healthcare & Life Sciences, eScience and eGovernment.

A critical aspect of DERI's SFI-funded activities is the strong alignment between DERI's core research, and the research and development activities carried out by its industry partners. DERI has attracted eight industrial partners in this proposal for second-round funding, evidence of the value to industry of DERI's research. They are Cisco, Nortel, Ericsson, Storm, Cyntelix, OpenLink Software, Celtrak and Fidelity. These partners provide a cost share contribution to the research. DERI has created initiatives such as DERI LABS, DERI LAND and the DERI Entrepreneurial Forum, which help bridge the gap between research and its industrial application. The purpose of these initiatives is to create and encourage an environment where commercial ideas, market potential and likely routes to markets can be explored. DERI will extend these activities as part of this proposal to achieve a closer engagement with industry.

A key strategic element of the Irish government's and European Union's policies of creating a knowledge economy is investment in research. DERI is supporting Ireland's economic growth and competitiveness and is enabling its knowledge economy by developing collaborative networks and skilled people, e.g., fourth-level graduates. In addition DERI's Outreach Programme is increasing technology awareness through a comprehensive range of Internet courses, lectures and projects aimed at community groups, schools and third-level colleges.

LOD Around The Clock (LATC)

Supporting people and institutions to publish and consume Linked Data.

Multilingual Ontologies for Networked Knowledge (MONNET)

The Monnet project will provide a semantics-based solution for accessing information across language barriers. This is of growing importance to both industry and government, as exemplified by the Monnet use cases:

·         The SAP-XBRL use case concerns cross-lingual business intelligence on companies and financial services

·         The Be Informed use case concerns multilingual access to government services

The goals of the SAP-XBRL use case are:

·         To make financial information and business service descriptions available to be searched and queried in the language of choice of the user.

·         To enable the creation of reports that present the search and query results in the chosen language.

The goal of the Be Informed use case is:

To allow people to find their way through a government web site in their preferred language.

MUMIA

MUMIA fosters research and technology transfer between Machine Translation, Information Retrieval and Multifaceted Interactive Information Access with the domain of patent retrieval as selected use case, as it provides highly sophisticated and information intensive search tasks that have significant economic ramifications.

Net2

The wealth of information and services on today’s information infrastructures like the Internet and the Web has significantly changed everyday life and has substantially transformed the way in which business, public and private interactions are performed globally. The economic and social influence of the Web is enormous, enabling new business models and social change, and creating wealth. However, we have barely scratched the surface of what information technology can do for society. The Web has enabled information creation and dissemination, but has also opened the information floodgates. The enormous amount of information available has made it increasingly difficult to find, access, present and maintain the information required. As a consequence, we are drowning in information and starving for knowledge. The Net2 project and network is aiming – as part of a global effort – to remedy this situation by contributing to the emerging next generation of the World Wide Web, continuing to build on ideas from Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee on enabling systematic and access to explicitly represented and networked knowledge.

Puzzled by Policy (PbP)

Puzzled by Policy aims to help end the detachment and disillusionment of citizens in the policy making process of the EU by improving information resources and tools.  Current ways of informing citizens and allowing them to participate can be difficult to access, time consuming to use and yield little results. By providing citizens with an engaging and easy-to-use platform, where they can learn about and engage with policy issues, the initiative hopes to make participation in EU policy much easier.

Many Governments today recognise that to deliver effective public policy they need to enhance citizen and community involvement in the policy making process. Unfortunately, many citizens and communities feel that policy development is a process that they do not understand and have little control over. Policy making can be seen by many as an elitist process, taking place only amongst government and the more influential members of society; this project aims to dispel this belief.

The project combines mature methods enabling citizens to participate with new Web 2.0, social networking and mobile technologies. It will reduce the complexity of policy-making and legislative processes of EU and national governments and pro-actively engage citizens in the policy-making process. 

“Puzzled by Policy” is funded by the European Commission’s Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) – ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) with a total budget of €3.89 million. It has a consortium consisting of 12 partners from nine European Countries (Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and United Kingdom). It started in October 2010 and will run for 3 years.

ROBUST (ROBUST)

Online communities generate major economic value and form pivotal parts
of corporate expertise management, marketing, product support, CRM,
product innovation and advertising. Communities can exceed millions of
users and infrastructures must support hundreds of millions discussion
threads that link together billions of posts.

ROBUST is targeted at developing methods to understand and manage the
business, social and economic objectives of the users, providers and
hosts and to meet the challenges of scale and growth in large
communities. Hence, the objectives of ROBUST are to find solutions for
community risk management, large scale data management, models of
community polity and politics, community simulation and community data
analysis.

The objectives of ROBUST fall into the following categories:

• Risk Management: The identification and modelling of risks andopportunities in online communities will support the understanding andmanagement of these communities. In particular it will enablestakeholders to identify threats, support their decision making processand lead them in choosing proactively measures to counter risks or seize opportunities.
• Community Data Management: The volume of data created in online
  communities in the form of texts, the interaction between users or
  simply the interaction of users with the system itself demands for new
  technologies for large scale data management and processing.
• Community Polity and Politics: Understanding the behaviour and
  needs of users on a micro level requires detailed user models. This
  allows to classify users based on behaviour patterns and determine the
  role they play in a community, what is their status and what motivates
  their actions.
• Community Simulation: A model on a macro-level captures the
  dynamics of entire communities and their development. Understanding the
  effects of policies on a community can help to forecast the way the
  community is evolving and in which direction it is heading.
• Community Analysis: The ability to detect communities, find thetopics they are dealing with and to recognize patterns in massivecommunity data complements the other objectives.

Rural lnclusion

Rural Inclusion aims at adopting a state-of-art infrastructure (i.e. modelling approach and software environment) that will facilitate the offering of innovative services by public administration in rural areas. More specifically, the objective is to address a longstanding challenge by public administrations: reducing the administrative burden of enterprises in rural areas, by reducing the information elicitation process of businesses when they want to use a particular instance of some public service, or making more effective use of the resources. To achieve this, Rural Inclusion adopts, adapts, and deploys a Web infrastructure combining semantic services with a collaborative training and networking approach, in the rural setting of five European regions. It focuses on selected case studies of e-Government services that regional public authorities already offer, supports them by a rigorous and reusable service process analysis and modelling, and then deploys a semantic service that facilitates the disambiguation of the small businesses needs and requirements when trying to use the particular services. At the same time, the semantic service is complemented by a number of other Web-based services that support the creation of communities of learning and practice in rural settings, thus facilitating the communication between the rural businesses with the regional public authorities.

Semantic Service Provisioning for the Internet of Things using Future Internet Research by Experiment (SPITFIRE)

We are currently witnessing the integration of two long- lost relatives: on the one hand general purpose computing and its networking backbone, the Internet, and on the other hand embedded computing. However, the development of applications exploiting this merged infrastructure is currently exceedingly difficult. The goal of this project is hence to investigate unified concepts, methods, and software infrastructures that facilitate the efficient development of applications that span and integrate the Internet and the embedded world. The key metric of success for our project is the effort required for development of robust, interoperable, and scalable applications in the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Stokes

The Science Foundation Ireland Stokes Professorship and Lectureship Programme (briefly "The Stokes") is designed to support the strategic planning for increasing the number of research active faculty members in the short term. The Programme is named after Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903) the Irish mathematician and physicist who was born in Skreen, Co. Sligo. Stokes made several important contributions to fluid dynamics (c.f., Navier-Stokes equations), optics and maths physics (c.f., Stokes Theorem). Like Newton, Stokes was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a parliamentary representative for Cambridge University and a President of the Royal Society. Stokes made key contributions to the foundations of what we now call ICT and BIO.