ICT

Society is increasingly dependent on the proper functioning of the electric power system, which in turn supports most other critical infrastructures: water and sewage systems; telecommunications, internet and computing services; air traffic, railroads and other transportation. Many of these other infrastructures are able to operate without power for shorter periods of time, but larger power outages may be difficult and time consuming to restore. Such outages might thus lead to situations of fully non-functioning societies with devastating economical and humanitarian consequences.

The main goal of the CLONS project is to develop suitable technological solutions to increase the quality of life of people affected by vestibular disorders. Toward this aim, an innovative closed-loop sensory neural prosthesis will be developed and tested in animal models and in selected humans. This neural prosthesis will be able to restore vestibular information by stimulating the semicircular canals thanks to the information provided by inertial sensors embedded in a device attached to the head and donned by the user.

Amputation of a limb is a surgical intervention used as a last resort to remove irreparably damaged, diseased, or congenitally malformed limbs where retention of the limb is a threat to the well-being of the individual. The procedure traumatically alters the body image, but often leaves sensations that refer to the missing body part, the phantom limb. In 50-80% of cases, these sensations are painful and currently, there are no effective treatment modalities.

Individuals in the Information Society want to protect their autonomy and retain control over personal information, irrespective of their activities. Information technologies hardly consider those requirements, thereby putting the privacy of the citizen at risk. Today, the increasingly collaborative character of the Internet enables anyone to compose service and contribute and distribute information. Individuals will contribute throughout their life leaving a life-long trail of personal data.

Today's network architectures are stifling innovation, restricting it mostly to the application level while the need for structural change is increasingly evident. The absence of adequate facilities to design, optimise and interoperate new networks currently forces a convergence to an architecture that is suboptimal for many applications and that cannot support innovations within itself, the Internet.

Networks require greater degree of service-awareness. This implies that not only are all digital items pertaining to a service delivered, but also all relevant business goals are fulfilled, and network resources are used optimally. As a consequence the network's complexity grows with service abundance placing new requirements on network control and management as well as on Internet network resource usage.

BIOTACT will develop novel biomimetic computational methods and technologies for active touch sensing. The project is inspired by the functionality, morphology, and neural processing architectures of biological sensory systems that use tactile hairs known as whiskers or vibrissae. It will focus on two animals that are tactile specialists- the Norwegian rat and the Etruscan shrew. Both species make actively controlled sweeping movements of their facial whiskers ("whisking") as they explore their environments.

The aging of society is the single most important aspect of health care in the 21st century. Many intriguing ICT solutions are being developed within the EU, USA, and Japan for helping older people remain independent longer. However, these solutions tend to be fragmented and heterogeneous. The CAPSIL CSA team is a coalition of University and Industrial partners that already have extensive teams developing hardware/software/knowledge solutions to independent living based on established clinical requirements.

Standardisation, and associated regulations, in respect of RFID is of critical importance in realising open systems applications of global significance, such as supply chain traceability and logistics. Of parallel significance is the numbering and identification coding required facilitating global systems applications. While much of the emphasis of European attentions to RFID focuses upon electronic product code (EPC) and associated EPC-compliant data carriers it has to be recognised that other numbering systems exist and are being promoted for global applications.

Reproducing an act with sensorimotor means and using fine natural language for communicating the intentionality behind the act is what Aristotle called "Poetics". POETICON explores the "poetics of everyday life", i.e. the synthesis of sensorimotor representations and natural language in everyday human interaction. This is related to an old problem in Artificial Intelligence on how meaning emerges, which is approached here in a new way.