Daidalos Project Kicks-Off
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
€14.5 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 TSSG and the thrust of our 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.
And the other two new projects?
“As well as our ongoing projects and programmes, we’ve got two more confirmed new ones�, says Dr.
Willie Donnelly, Director of the TSSG and newly appointed Head of
Research and Innovation at Waterford Institute of Technology. “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�.
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