If its Monday, This must be Berlin

By: <a href=”javascript:mail(‘mgrene’)Margaret Grene
Monday, Berlin, 10th November last saw another milestone for the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG). This was the day of the kick-off meeting for a project titled Designing Advanced Interfaces for the Delivery and Administration of Location-independent Optimised personal Services, or to use its acronym DAIDALOS. This is the first of three new projects awarded to the TSSG under the European Commission’s current round of funding known as the Sixth Framework.
As one of the core partners, the TSSG is playing a major role in this EUR14.5 million project. The aim of DAIDALOS is to create an open, scalable and seamless architecture of heterogeneous network technologies.
To a non-technical person what does this mean?
Imagine a scenario where you’re watching a film on your TV screen at home in the evening, you stop it, and the following morning resume watching it on your hand-held computer while traveling on an inter-country train journey across Europe, picking up at exactly where you left off the evening before, switching to different mobile networks as you travel and even cheaper billing rates depending on the network.
To the uninitiated this may sound quite simple but in fact the promise of this kind of service points to a profound shift in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry, evolving and converging to create a new breed of integrated computing and communications. This is exactly the kind of seamless and pervasive computing that is envisaged at the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) at Waterford Institute of Technology and the thrust of their research is now firmly focussed on this shift.
It is this kind of mobility that the DAIDALOS project will focus on. Mobility has become a central aspect of our lives – in business, education, and leisure. Due to rapid technological and societal changes, there has been a bewildering proliferation of technologies and services for mobile users. This has created a complex and confusing communications environment for both users and network operators, and the problem will be compounded by the addition of new ones. This necessitates a re-thinking of fundamental technological issues in order to create user-centred and manageable communication infrastructures for the future. And this is where DAIDALOS comes in.
Research and Development offers a safeguard against any possible downturn in the Information and Communications Technology sector, which employs almost 100,000 people in 980 companies in the country.
If our traditional IT companies move their activities to lower cost locations, research and development ensures that we have the technology and the expertise to produce the new breed of converged applications and platforms, says Dr. Willie Donnelly, Director of the TSSG and newly appointed Head of Research, Development and Innovation at Waterford Institute of Technology, this is our mandate.
And the other two new projects?
As well as our ongoing projects and programmes, we’ve also got two more confirmed new ones, says Donnelly. One of them, the Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) project is aimed at providing Europe with a recognised advantage in innovative software application development by its SME industry; and the second one, the Security Expert Initiative (SEINIT) will focus on the important issue of Internet security. We’ve also got several more projects in the pipeline.