info day 29997 MELARI NANO

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Future and Emerging Technologies (FET)
Leonardo Flores Añover Ramón Compañó
The roots of innovation
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Workprogramme 2001

• The OPEN scheme
• Proactive initiatives
• Global Computing cooperation of autonomous and
  mobile entities in mobile environments (new
  initiative)
• Nanotechnology Information Devices (follow-up
  call) Beyond-CMOS nanoelectronics and molecular
  computing
• Life-like Perception Systems (new initiative)

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The OPEN scheme

• Accept any idea of quality
• Widest possible spectrum
• Proposals submitted at any time
• Innovative work that could lead to breakthroughs
  or major advances
• Bold ideas involving high risks
• Longer term research
• Quality in FETs Innovative idea, with
  potential for strong impact, advancing the state
  of the art may be high risk or long term or
  combination of both

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The OPEN scheme Two steps Evaluation

• Entry point Short proposal (5 pages) - What and
  Why?
• Assessment phase (up to 1 year, 100kEuros)
• Full scale project (full proposals evaluated in
  second step)
• Full proposals What, Why and How (Follows
  standard format for RTD proposals)
• 13 success rate
• 3 to 4 Evaluations a year

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FET Proactive InitiativesWhat they are

• Take a lead in areas strategic for the future
• Focus on visionary, challenging goals
• critical mass, timeliness, impact
• Set trends for future RD
• Two pilot initiatives launched in 4th FP MEL
  ARI and i3
• Four initiatives launched in 1999 and 2000 (5th
  FP)

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FET Proactive InitiativesHow they work

• Coordinated project clusters
• Autonomous but complementary
• Common long term goals
• Shaping vision(s) of the future
• Integrated approach
• Collective negotiations
• Dovetailing projects
• Grouped reviews
• Adaptation of objectives
• Network of Excellence and Dynamic Roadmaps

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Global Computing

• Future and Emerging Technologies (FET)
• Proactive initiative to be launched in the area
  of
• Global Computing co-operation of autonomous and
  mobile entities in dynamic environments
• (What is FET and Whats a proactive initiative?)
• See
• http//www.cordis.lu/ist/fetintro.htm

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vision

• Everyday objects will have processors and
  embedded software
• Many will communicate with each other and
  interact with the environment'
• Developments in information technologies will
  lead to computational systems based entirely on
  available infrastructure and processing power
  around us.
• challenge
• define and exploit dynamically configured systems
  of mobile entities that interact in novel ways
  with their environment to achieve or control
  their computational tasks for.
• De

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Scientific goals

• Overall goal of the initiative is to obtain
  techniques
• models,
• frameworks,
• methods,
• algorithms
• for constructing systems that are flexible,
  dependable, secure, robust, efficient
• New paradigms of computer science may be needed
• dependable, secure, robust and efficient.

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Scientific goals

• Research to focus on systems of the following
  kind
• The systems are composed of autonomous
  computational entities where activity is not
  centrally controlled,
• The computational entities are mobile,
• The configuration varies over time.
• The systems operate with incomplete information
  about the environment.

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Focus of the research

• Fundamental issues with long-term impact
• Proposals should address one or more of these
  aspects
• the design of systems
• analysing and reasoning about their behaviour
• avoiding and/or detecting undesirable behaviour
  through control of the system and/or its
  environment
• understanding their limits and potential.

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Criteria of selection

• The research proposed should address
• foundational aspects contributing to scientific
  and engineering principles for the design of
  systems having the features outlined.
• issues of long-term concern with potential to
  lead to innovations in the theory and design of
  the described systems and that can potentially
  bring about breakthroughs in the creation of
  these systems.

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Criteria of selection (cont.)

• Teams with a clear common objective and partners
  complementing each other. Team composition should
  reflect the complementarity of the work.
• Experimental work, if included, should aim to
  shed light on the fundamental issues of the
  research or to validate ideas.
• Research that attacks the issues at a superficial
  level or that will lead to only minor incremental
  progress at the foundational level is less
  appropriate

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Examples of systems

• Mobile telephone system Mobile users will want
  the environment to create the computational
  processes they require, wherever they are and
  wherever they are going.
• Future road and air traffic management cars or
  planes will communicate among themselves and with
  devices in the environment in order to make
  efficient use of available road or air space
• Mobile entities over the internet global
  computation originates from the discussion of
  these future systems in computer science
• Information artefacts See the Disappearing
  Computer initiative

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Examples of Research issues

• At the foundational level, the following issues
  may be relevant (not prescriptive list)
• Openness
• What is the nature of tradeoffs between openness
  and issues like security and trust?
• Models of computation
• What is a suitable model of computation?
• What are the programming abstractions that
  "package" these models so as to enable ordinary
  programmers to construct reliable and robust
  applications?
• Efficiency and computational limits
• The choice of a particular model of computation
  has implications for the notion of performance
  and efficiency and may lead to limitations on
  computational power.

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Examples of Research issues (Cont.)

• Models of communication/interaction
• New and probably completely different way of
  dealing with co-ordination and network control
  than that investigated hitherto in the context of
  distributed computing. Novel assumptions may have
  to be made about the nature and/or quality of
  communication.
• Algorithms
• Coping with faulty and dynamic components is a
  known challenge in the design of robust
  algorithms. The lack of uniformity in the systems
  to be designed leads to new problems.
• Programming
• Well-engineered programming languages that
  provide direct but flexible support for building
  such systems need to be designed and implemented.
  
• Subsequently, many questions arise in the
  development, analysis and transformation/optimisat
  ion of programs in such languages.

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Examples of Research issues (Cont.)

• System development
• What is an appropriate logic for specifying and
  reasoning about such concepts?
• How do you understand a computation when you have
  only a partial view of it and your collaborators
  also have only (different) partial views?
• How does one test such a system?
• How does one organise distributed development of
  software?
• How does one define safety criteria and which
  architectures will meet them?

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Examples of Research issues (Cont.)

• Adaptability
• How can an entity adapt to the situation it finds
  itself in, given its lack of knowledge of the
  state of the computation and the configuration of
  the environment?
• Security
• Networks are partitioned into administrative
  domains by firewalls and other security barriers.
  Movement of entities through security barriers
  should be possible under appropriate
  circumstances, without undermining the security
  of the facilities or the entities.
• Resources
• How do entities become aware of the available
  resources and their cost?
• Should there be mechanisms for entities to secure
  resources temporarily?

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Information

• For further information
• Leonardo Flores Añover
• e-mail Leonardo.Flores_at_cec.eu.int
• David Pearce
• e-mail David.Pearce_at_cec.eu.int
• GC Web page
• http//www.cordis.lu/ist/fetgc.htm