Roadmapping for FP8, workshop on 31 March in Brussels

Coming Events

The Commission has on 9 February adopted a Green Paper 'From Challenges to Opportunities: Towards a Common Strategic Framework for EU research and innovation funding' (COM(2011)48). This Green Paper launches a public consultation on the key issues to be taken into account for future EU research and innovation funding programmes. The outcome of the consultation will subsequently feed into the preparation of the Commission's formal proposals for these programmes, which are due to be adopted before the end of 2011.
The consultation website is available at: http://ec.europa.eu/research/csfri/index_en.cfm. Submissions can be made until 20 May 2011.

Direct links to the parallel sessions summaries:

Future Internet Architecture

FIRE

Can the Cloud be Trusted?

Linked data

Smart infrastructures

Privacy and Citizenship

Smart Cities

Economics of Information

Search as an architectural component

Scenarios for Future Internet Business

The objective of this session was to present the activities of the FIArch group towards a Future Internet Architecture, collect feedback and comments from the FIA community and involve more experts presenting their point of view in the activities towards a Future Internet Architecture. The FIArch Experts Reference Group is composed of representatives of a number of FP7 research projects in relation to FI architectures and renowned experts from industry and academy covering in a complementarily way all areas related to the Future Internet Architecture. The session included presentations on the Rationale and Methodoly of FI (Dimitri Papadimitriou), the Fundamental Limitations of Current Internet (Theodore Zahariadis) and Innovation aspects of the Internet Architecture (Isidro Laso Ballesteros). Additionally a panel on FI Architecture related topics involving presentations from major companies and Universities was coordinated by Federico Alvarez from UPM. See http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/foi/research/fiarch/index_en.htm for more information about this work.

FIRE
Future Internet Research and Experimentation – FIRE, had two main events during FI week in Ghent in December.
1. FIRE Day, concentrated to successful use of current existing facilities based on use cases and experiments.
Summary report and all presentations available at http://www.ict-fire.eu/events/fire-conference-ghent.html, session videos at http://fire-ghent.fi-week.eu/video/
The FIRE brochure gives an insight into what is real and usable today in FIRE, downloadable at http://www.ict-fire.eu/home/publications.html
2. FIRE at FIA session concentrated on the new FIRE Integrated Projects having plans to call for innovative user experiments via Open Calls. Each selected experiment will receive up to 200,000 € funding under the EC funding rules to conduct the experiment. Overall the budget of all projects for user experiments should allow for more than 20 experiments.
Session report and presentations downloadable here.
As continuation for the FIRE at FIA session, the FIRESTATION support action project organized the FIRE Open Call info day in Brussels on Feb 9th, going more in details about the Open Call process, project offering etc. Summary and presentations available at http://www.ict-fire.eu/events/meetings/1st-fire-open-calls-information-day.html

Can the Cloud be Trusted?

The session entitled Can the Cloud be trusted? was one of the challenging thematic sessions that was highly popular for attendees at FIA Ghent in 2010. The session incorporated both a business viewpoint emphasizing on needs and customer requirements, and a technology viewpoint, emphasizing on technology enablers and the state of the art. The session speakers complemented both of these aspects in their presentations on (1)Business view on Cloud Security, (2)Security Challenges for the Cloud, (3) Trustworthy clouds in the Future Internet. An Active Q&A sessions ensued, sample questions posed included for example: The cloud is not transparent so how could it ever be trusted?, What dedicated hardware might be required for the Future Internet’s cloud based systems? How to migrate data from one cloud provider to another, and what implications does this have for standardization? A more detailed report on this session, including responses to the above selected questions, can be viewed via the following link
http://fi-ghent.fi-week.eu/files/2011/02/Can_the_cloud_be_trusted_report1.pdf

Linked Data

The ‘Future Internet architecture’ does not currently include means to achieve interoperability at the level of data. Perhaps this gap can be filled by existing technologies, for instance by Linked Data. This is becoming an accepted way of exchanging information in an interoperable and reusable fashion.
Given the growing importance of Linked Data, now is a good time to discuss how it can be built into the Future Internet architecture stack, together with other architectural components. This session focused on explaining what Linked Data is and we were particularly happy that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, explained to us some of the underlying mechanisms and benefits of Linked Data and of standardisation!

Smart infrastructures

The current internet has been described as “no longer fit for purpose” and “obtuse”. Smarter solutions and greater functionality is needed to meet changing, additional or increasing demands on internet infrastructure. A number of research topics are part of the smart infrastructure functionality including self-adaptation of the infrastructure, changing functionality on demand, pervasive and ubiquitous systems, energy efficiency and management, smart and embedded systems, and life-cycle management of the infrastructures. So the smarts will have extra significance for – and make extra demands on – internet infrastructure. This session has explored the relationship between the benefits and costs (in terms of requirements) for being smart.

Privacy and Citizenship

During the 2 hours allocated to this session, the participants discussed two main issues User/citizen issues related to privacy and (ii) Economics of privacy. The session participants included a complete range of stakeholders with a great deal of knowledge in these particular areas, including the European Data Protection Supervisor, representatives from the legal, economic, governmental, social networking industries and privacy research communities.
The main conclusion was that privacy and citizenship are intrinsically linked since these subjects are highly relevant as people are increasingly relying on ICTs where security, privacy and trust are key enablers. Tremendous amounts of data are being processed in today’s service-based economies and there is an unprecedented hunger for data (or “data deluge”). Privacy issues are set to become ever-more relevant.
When dealing with privacy and citizenship, we need to draw a careful balance to ensure that real security does not exist without privacy built in; and real privacy won’t exist without security built in.
With regard to privacy versus innovation, we need to strike a balance but not at the expense of fundamental rights of citizens. A detailed report on this session can be viewed via the following link http://fi-ghent.fi-week.eu/files/2011/02/Privacy_and_citizenship_report1.pdf

Smart Cities

This session aimed to bring interested members from the Future Internet and Smart Cities communities with those from the Living Labs domain, to underline common ground and methodologies, and any possible synergies.
Smart Cities were recognised as emerging realities and an important test-bed environment characterised by dedicated services, important infrastructure, and the provision of sustainable, ‘smart’ and open solutions which improve the quality of life of citizens living in urban environments.
The Future Internet was recognised as the technology provider capable of making Smart Cities a reality, connecting people, sensors and services, and enabling the exchange of information in an “open data” environment.
Living Labs, it was concluded, provide the missing elements, or the people factor. They involve society in the innovation process shaping and transforming regular cities into Smart Cities. Living Labs make change and innovation less scary, and help to leverage and further support the human and social capital needed for such transformations to be successful and accepted.
Governance issues, common values, real services, an open innovation ecosystem, and the involvement of both private and public stakeholders were all considered important to improving cooperation between Smart Cities and the Future Internet and Living Labs communities and boosting innovation for the benefit of the citizens.

Economics of Information

The Future Internet must be open to all and allow all stakeholders to derive benefit. At the micro-level, economic productivity and the sustainability of the digital industries (e.g. services and content) is a major concern. Today, the digital market is focused on the provision of services as a business model from the provider’s perspective rather than economic production processes in the traditional sense, i.e. based on revenue. This model of economic exchange is suited to the material economy but does not fit the knowledge economy, which often includes non-monetary exchanges. Much of the search for new business models in the digital landscape has tried to simulate the analogue manufacturing or mass media situation online by imposing artificial scarcity. A re-thinking of Future Internet business models is necessary to break out of the manufacturing and distribution paradigm.
This session aims to stimulate discussion about what lies beyond current approaches, not only because technology makes such artificial scarcity easy to circumvent, but also because it fails to understand the nature of information, attention, selection and why cultural experiences become meaningful. A business paradigm based on control and distribution of information counteracts its own purpose by not allowing users to freely form social contexts by using information as social objects that build communities.

Search as an architectural component

The Internet has become the most important medium for information exchange and the core communication environment for business relations as well as for social interactions. Millions of people all over the world use the Internet for finding, accessing and exchanging information, enjoying multimedia communications, taking advantage of added-valued software services, buying and selling, keeping in touch with family and friends, to name a few.
Moreover, in Future Internet, the content is and will be increasing exponentially. Internet traffic of 42 Exabytes (10^18) per month is expected to be generated every month in 2014, 56% of which will be Internet video, while the average monthly consumer Internet traffic will be equivalent to 32 million people streaming Avatar in 3D, continuously, for the entire month.
Within the Ghent session a number of invited speakers presented their view of searching in the FI. Some conclusions based on the discussions are that the term 'searching' has quite different usage and meaning in each stratum (networks, content, services). Moreover, there are quite different mechanisms to discover information, so we should be very careful as the term is evolving. On the other hand, it is obvious that discovery of resources should be inherently supported by the Future Internet Architecture.
Another important topic was the conflicting issues between privacy, data security, personalization and user aggregation. Everyone agrees that privacy and security are very important issues. Yet, in order to increase the personalized behavior of the Search Engine more info has to be extracted so privacy is challenged.

Scenarios for Future Internet Business

The objective of this session is to debate the potential and merits (and possible drawback) of a wide spectrum of scenarios for the future of businesses on the Internet, taking into account specific enabling FI technologies, in order to help pin-point:
• The more promising FI technologies and their application for specific businesses
• How those technologies meet and possibly transform business needs (existing, emerging, blue sky thinking)
• Paradigms of improvements to existing business as well as radical business transformation
• Gaps if any between FI priorities and business priorities and expectations and how those gaps may be bridged.