M-Zones: 1st Annual Workshop

On Thursday 11th December WIT hosted the first open workshop of the M-Zones programme. The event was formally opened by the newly appointed Head of Research & Innovation at WIT Willie Donnelly (who heads up the TSSG itself).

M-Zones is a research programme funded by the HEA PRTLI Cycle 3 with three partners: The Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (WIT), The Adaptive Wireless Group (CIT) and the Knowledge and Data Engineering Group (TCD). The workshop was composed of three sessions, each with an overview and three detailed presentations. The two speakers from WIT were Sven van der Meer and Mícheál Ó Foghlú; from CIT the speakers were Dirk Pesch, Fergus O'Reilly and John Barrett, and from TCD the speakers were Declan O'Sullivan, David Lewis and Owen Conlon. The event was attended by thirty researchers and industrialists, including staff from the WIT Schools Engineering and Science. The presentations were all based on papers in progress which will be published, after being reviewed based on feedback at the workshop, on the M-Zones website in January 2004. Already published on the website are a series of whitepapers laying the foundations of the research programme.

The core theme of M-Zones is the development of software architectures to manage the new phenomenon of smart spaces (software services for wireless devices that adapt in various "smart" ways to their user's context). The presentations reflected the various skill sets and research interests of the M-Zones partners: adaptive hypermedia, policy-based management systems, context-aware systems, location-based services, mobile Internet architectures, ad-hoc network address allocation and routing and hardware design for smart sensors. The aim is for the M-Zones workshop to be an annual event for the duration of the project (another 3 years) so watch this space for further announcements.