Embedded Intelligence CONTENTS

European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics Number 67, October 2006 www.ercim.org

Special: Embedded Intelligence CONTENTS

JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS SPECIAL THEME: EMBEDDED INTELLIGENCE

4 CoreGRID Summer School 2006 - First Steps in Next Introduction to the Special Theme Generation Grid Technologies 14 Embedded Intelligence by Stephan Springstubbe and Wolfgang Ziegler, Fraunhofer SCAI, by Erwin Schoitsch, ARC Seibersdorf research / AARIT, Austria Germany and Amund Skavhaug, NTNU, Norway

5 Cor Baayen Award 2006 for Oliver Heckmann Embedded Systems Applications 16 Autonomous Systems - Safety Critical Embedded Systems 6 Net-WMS - Towards a New Generation of Networked and Intelligence Warehouse Management Systems by Erwin Schoitsch and Wilfried Kubinger, ARC Seibersdorf by Bruno Le Dantec, ERCIM office research / AARIT, Austria

7 Joint DELOS – MUSCLE Summer School on Multimedia 18 Automotive Visions beyond In-Car Driver Assistance: Digital Libraries Integrated Traffic Management with Coopers by Remi Ronchaud, ERCIM office by Thomas Gruber and Erwin Schoitsch, ARC Seibersdorf research / AARIT, Austria 8 ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution Spawns Local

Chapters 19 Embedded Intelligence for Ambient Assisted Living by Tom Mens; University of Mons-Hainaut, Belgium; Jean-Marie by Frank Bomarius, Martin Becker and Thomas Kleinberger, Favre and Salah Sadou, IMAG, France Fraunhofer IESE, Germany

8 ERCIM Environmental Modelling Workshop 21 iCat - A Friendly Robot that Helps Children and Grown-Ups by Thomas Lux, Fraunhofer FIRST, Germany by Bernt Meerbeek, Jettie Hoonhout, Peter Bingley, and Albert van Breemen, Philips Research Europe, The Netherlands 9 FMICS 2006 - 11th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems Design, Development, Programming by Luboš Brim, Masaryk University / CRCIM, Czech Republic, and 22 The DECOS Tool-Chain: Model-Based Development of Martin Leucker, Technical University Munich, Germany Distributed Embedded Safety-Critical Real-Time Systems by Wolfgang Herzner, ARC Seibersdorf research/AARIT, Austria; EUROPEAN SCENE Bernhard Huber, Vienna University of Technology, Austria; and György Csertan, Andras Balogh, Budapest University of 10 A Security and Dependability Strategic Research Agenda Technology and Economics for Europe by Jim Clarke, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland 24 Ambient Hardware: Embedded Architectures on Demand by Kjetil Svarstad, NTNU, Norway 11 European Research Advances in Embedded Intelligence 25 System-Level Design of Fault-Tolerant Embedded Systems NEWS FROM W3C by Alain Girault, INRIA, France

12 W3C Workshop on Mobile Web in Developing Countries 27 New Tool to Design the Behaviour of Embedded Systems by Jan Friso Groote, CWI, The Netherlands 12 Latest W3C Recommendations 28 Reactive Processing for Reactive Systems 12 W3C Launched Secure Browsing Initiative by Reinhard von Hanxleden, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu 12 W3C Workshop on XSL-FO 2.0 Requirements Kiel, Germany; Xin Li, Partha Roop, University of Auckland, New Zealand, Zoran Salcic and Li Hsien Yoong, 13 COPRAS 'ICT Research and Standardization' Conference 30 TPC: Tagged Procedure Calls 13 W3C Mobile Web Seminar in Paris by Konstantinos Kapelonis, Sven Karsson, and Angelos Bilas, 13 First W3C Webinar on Mobile Web Design ICS-FORTH, Greece

Ambient Intelligence Systems 31 A European Ambient Intelligence Research Facility at ICS- FORTH by Constantine Stephanidis, ICS-FORTH, Greece

32 Ecological Approach to Smart Environments by Veikko Ikonen, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland

33 Ambiance: A Platform for Macroprogramming Personalised Ambient Services by Reza Razavi, University of Luxembourg / FNR, Luxembourg

35 Towards a Platform for Widespread Embedded Intelligence by Simon Dobson, Steve Neely, Graeme Stevenson, Lorcan Coyle and Paddy Nixon, University College Dublin / IUA, Ireland

36 Networking Semantic Services for Pervasive Computing by Valerie Issarny, Nikolaos Georgantas and Sonia Ben Mokhtar

Cover illustration by Pertti Jarla

2 ERCIM News No. 66, July 2007 37 Materials with Intelligence 56 Digital Libraries by Simon Dobson and Kieran Delaney, University College Dublin BELIEF: Bringing Europe's Electronic Infrastructures to / IUA, Ireland Expanding Frontiers by Federico Biagini, Pasquale Pagano and Franco Zoppi, ISTI- Wireless sensor networks CNR, Italy 39 The CRUISE Project - Network Initiative for Creating 58 Electromagnetic Radiation Ubiquitos Intelligent Sensing Environments Cell Phone Danger by Gabriele Kotsis, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria; by Martin Röösli, Unversity of Bern, and Harry Rudin, Consultant, Anelia Mitseva and Neeli R. Prasad, Aalborg University, Denmark Switzerland

40 IntelliSense RFID - An RFID Platform for Ambient Intelligence 60 Satellite Communication Services with Sensors Integration Capabilities SAFE: Satellites for Epidemiology and Health Early Warning by Ovidiu Vermesan, Nadine Pesonen, Cristina Rusu, Aarne Oja, by Catherine Chronaki, ICS-FORTH and Laurent Braak, Peter Enoksson and Helge Rustad, SINTEF ICT, Norway 61 Satellite Devices Planck Mission 70 GHz Receivers 42 Collaborative Capture: A New Perspective for Sensor by Jussi Varis, MilliLab-Millimetre Wave Laboratory of Finland Networks 62 Detector Technology by Paul Couderc, INRIA-IRISA, France Data Acquisition in Scientific Applications Resources by Rob Halsall, CCLC, UK 43 Autarkic Power Generation for Networked Systems 63 Security by Eberhard Mueller and Ulrich Hofman, Salzburg Research Network Anomaly Detection by Means of Machine Learning GmbH, Austria by Roland Kwitt, Salzburg Research GmbH, Austria 64 Web 2.0 and Novel Interaction 45 Formally Bounded Embedded Systems From Solitary Podcasting by Kevin Hammond, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK to Ambient Pondcasting Massively Deployed Embedded Systems: Trust and security by Emmanuel Frécon and Pär Hansson, SICS 46 Adaptable and Context-Aware Trustworthiness Evaluation by Gabriele Lenzini, Telematica Instituut, The Netherlands; EVENTS Santtu Toivonen and Ilkka Uusitalo, VTT Technical Research Reports Center of Finland 66 EPoSS – A new European Technology Platform on Smart 47 Digital Identity in Ambient Environments Systems Integration by Ben Schouten, CWI, The Netherlands and Onkar Ambekar, by Erwin Schoitsch, ARC Seibersdorf research / AARIT, Austria ARC Seibersdorf research / AARIT, Austria 67 ECDL 2006 - 10th European Conference on Digital Libraries 52 Trust4All enhances Trustworthiness of Embedded by M.Felisa Verdejo, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Component-based Systems Distancia, Spain by Gabriele Lenzini, Andrew Tokmakoff, Telematica Instituut; and Johan Muskens, Eindhoven University of Technology, The 68 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum - CLEF 2006 Netherlands by Carol Peters, ISTI-CNR, Italy

70 ARTEMIS Annual Conference 2006 by Erwin Schoitsch, ARC Seibersdorf research / AARIT, Austria

R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER 71 XP2006 - Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in

50 Nanotechnology Software Engineering Single Molecule Switch and Memory Element by Outi Salo andPekka Abrahamsson, VTT Technical Research by Emanuel Lörtscher and Heike Riel, IBM Zurich Research Lab, Center of Finland Switzerland 72 Announcements 52 Mobile Hybrid Wireless Networks HyMN: A Self-Organizing System for Interest-based Data 73 Euro Legal Distribution in Mobile Hybrid Wireless Networks 75 In Brief by Steffen Rothkugel, Matthias R. Brust and Adrian Andronache, University of Luxembourg 53 Visualization Visualization of Colour Information on Highly Detailed 3D Models by Matteo Dellepiane and Marco Callieri, ISTI-CNR, Italy 55 Databases Modular Access to Large Socio-Economic Databases - the Sedo Project in Luxembourg by Uwe Warner, Centre d'Etude de Population, de Pauvreté et de Politiques Socio-Economiques, and Thomas Tamisier and Fernand Feltz Centre de Recherche Public - Gabriel Lippmann, Luxembourg Next issue: January 2007 Special theme: Traffic Planning and Logistics

ERCIM News No. 65, April 2006 3 JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS

CoreGRID Summer School 2006 - First Steps in Next Generation Grid Technologies

by Stephan Springstubbe and Wolfgang Ziegler

The CoreGRID Summer School 2006 (CSS'06) took place in Bonn, Germany from for computing power, data and specific 24 to 28 July. Organising the yearly summer school, CoreGRID - The European services in the Life Sciences and, for Research Network on Foundations, Software Infrastructures and Applications example, the pharmaceutical industry, for large-scale distributed GRID and Peer-to-Peer Technologies - aims at providing which until now may only be covered the possibility of advanced training to students and researchers in a trend-setting using supercomputers. Hence, this domain of computer science, which is currently under-represented in the curricula aspect of student training has a strategic of universities. CoreGRID summer schools are organised by a different CoreGRID impact and helps in assuring competitive partner each year and take place in distinct European cities. advantages.

CSS'06 was organised by the indicated on their evaluation forms that Experience gained during this summer Department of Bioinformatics of the they were very satisfied with the event. school and from the previous CSS point Fraunhofer Institute SCAI and hosted by to the creation of initial networks the Bonn-Aachen International Centre CSS'06 will have a bearing on several between participants from different for Information Technology (B-IT). The levels, the most important being the cur- European institutions and the lecturers. B-IT generously supported the event, riculum of the B-IT, the further integra- Participants and lecturers normally con- providing their whole infrastructure. tion of the European Grid research and tinue maintaining these networks after development, the transfer of knowledge the event, thus advancing the integration The 80 participants included 55 students to their home institutions via the students of the European Grid research and devel- and researchers from 12 countries and 25 and researchers and, most importantly, opment which is - together with excellence - the main objective of CoreGRID. CoreGRID summer In the home institutions of the partici- school pants, the awareness of research and participants. development around Grid technologies is increasing through the imminent transfer of knowledge by the participants.

Finally, the result of the training of scientists and students across the three levels mentioned helps to support the broader use of Grid technologies in different research disciplines and industry in the future.

The CoreGRID Network of Excellence is administrated by ERCIM. international experts from eight coun- the growing support for a broader use of tries, with approximately two out of Grid technologies. Links: three of the participants coming from CoreGRID: http://www.coregrid.net institutions involved in CoreGRID. They For the B-IT the CSS'06 marks the 2006 Summer School: worked on 35 course units focusing on launch of a Grid curriculum. For the first http://www.coregrid.net/mambo/content/ Grid Resource Management, Scheduling time, starting with the winter semester view/231/221/ and Monitoring, Grid Application in Life 2006/07, a course will be offered which Sciences and Industry, as well as Future is designed as an introduction to Grid Please contact: Generation Grids. These course units technologies and applications. For the Stephan Springstubbe also included the results of the most following semesters more in-depth Fraunhofer-Institute for Algorithms important European Grid projects and courses are planned, in particular and Scientific Computing (SCAI) two half-day hands-on exercises. CSS'06 addressing the application of Grid tech- Tel: +49 2241 14 2337 was financially supported by IBM and nology in the Life Sciences. Researchers E-mail: SUN, allowing it to maintain a registra- of the B-IT expect that Grid technologies [email protected] tion fee appropriate for students, who will help satisfy the enormous demand

4 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS

Cor Baayen Award 2006 for Oliver Heckmann The Cor Baayen Award

Oliver HeckmannOliver Heckmann from Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, The Cor Baayen Award is awarded and Google Labs Zürich, Switzerland, has been awarded the 2006 Cor Baayen each year to a most promising young Award for a most promising young researcher in computer science and applied researcher in computer science and mathematics by ERCIM. applied mathematics. The award was created in 1995 to honour Cor In a particularly tight competition, and Quality of Service for Internet Baayen, the first president of ERCIM. ERCIM has awarded Oliver Heckmann Service Providers". for the outstanding originality, high The award consists of a cheque for impact and quality of his work in the Oliver Heckmann studied applied eco- 5000 euro together with an award cer- field of network science. To put it in very nomics and electrical engineering at TU tificate. The award winner will be Darmstadt with award for excellence. He invited to the fall ERCIM meetings. did his PhD in computer science at TU Darmstadt with Prof. Ralf Steinmetz as Cor Baayen Award 2007 supervisor and Prof. Jon Crowcroft from Conditions: University Cambridge, UK as second • nominees must have carried out supervisor. His PhD thesis was awarded their work in one of the 'ERCIM the prestigious best dissertation award of countries': Austria, Belgium, Czech the German Computer Science Republic, Finland, France, Association for 2004. After his PhD, he Germany, Greece, Hungary, was working as an assistant professor / Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, research group head at the Multimedia Norway, Spain, Sweden, Communications Lab (KOM), leading a Switzerland, The Netherlands and team of 7 PhD student. Recently, he the United Kingdom joined Google Labs in Zürich, • nominees must have been awarded Switzerland, to continue working on their PhD (or equivalent) after 15 improving and innovating the Internet April 2004 and Internet services. • a person can only be nominated once for the Cor Baayen Award. Finalists 2006 According to the award rules, each insti- Submitting a nomination: tute was allowed to select up to two • nominations should be made by a Oliver Heckmann. finalists from its country. 19 finalists for staff member of the university or the 2006 Cor Baayen Award have been research institute where the nom- nominated by the ERCIM institutes: inee is undertaking research. Self • Alexandre Bergel, Ireland nominations are not accepted • Rickard Cöster, Sweden • to submit a nomination fill out the • Ton Dieker, The Netherlands Cor Baayen Award nomination simple words, Oliver Heckmann tries to • Guido Dornhege, Germany form at the ERCIM web site (see give Internet users better quality of ser- • Olivier Dousse, Switzerland URL below). vice for equal or lower costs. He strives • Sameh El-Ansary, Sweden to remove inefficiencies, optimise net- • Serge Fehr, The Netherlands Selection : works and achieve technological break- • Alain Frisch,France • the selection of the Cor Baayen throughs that improve quality of service • Tudor Gîrba, Switzerland award winner is the responsibility and/or costs for users. He also sheds light • Oliver Heckmann,Germany of the ERCIM Executive on the trade-off between these two goals. • András Kovács, Hungary Committee, who will consult expert The practical applicability of his results • Ivan Laptev,France opinion in reaching their decision. has put him in good contact with many • Taneli Mielikainen,Finland real providers, helped him in acquiring • Harald Øverby, Norway Deadline: funding, and also led to the recent publi- • Tom Schrijvers, Belgium • nominations must be submitted by cation of his book "The Competitive • Giuseppe Scarpa, Italy 15 April 2007. ISP" which also contains many results • Alkis Simitsis, Greece from his excellent PhD thesis "A • Vassilios Solachidis, Greece Link: System-oriented Approach to Efficiency • Gem Stapleton, United Kingdom. http://www.ercim.org/activity/cor-baayen.html

5 ERCIM News No. 66, Otober 2006 5 JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS

Net-WMS - Towards a New Generation of Networked Warehouse Management Systems

by Bruno Le Dantec

Net-WMS is a new project managed by ERCIM with the objective to integrate virtual reality and optimisation techniques in a new generation of networked businesses in Warehouse Management Systems under constraints. The project has been set up in the frame of the ERCIM Working Group 'Constraints'.

Warehouse Management Systems The added value and competitiveness a• set of interfaces will enable Net-WMS (WMS) are evolving from controlling increase of the Net-WMS solution will communication between several plan- goods movement and storage to light be characterised by shared expertise, ning components across a network.

Net-WMS-generated knowledge will be shared in networked warehouses, thanks to its interoperability and user friendly interface designed for plant level techni- cian users. Net-WMS optimisation developments will also be made available for the whole community through the enhancement of the Choco open- source system. The achieved optimisation technologies will enable 20% saving for packaging costs. The project gathers nine European organisations having a recognised expertise in logistical and packing problems as well as software development in supply chain optimisation. Net-WMS complementary and multidisciplinary consortium includes 3 SMEs, 2 large manufacturers and 4 aca- demics and research centres.

Net-WMS began in September and has a duration of three years. The project is Net-WMS project participants. partly funded by the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission. The project consortium is composed of nine partners from research and industry, including the ERCIM manufacturing, transportation and order easy deployment and maintenance, flexi- members SICS and INRIA. management. Demands from end users bility, interoperability, better resource are asking for WMS solutions with deci- handling and access to remote services. Link: sion-making applications and networked http://net-wms.ercim.org environment. The Net-WMS achieved prototype applications for processes in a networked Please contact: The Net-WMS project proposes a soft- WMS will include: Bruno Le Dantec, ERCIM office ware solution enabling the expected new • a packing modeller of items based on E-mail: [email protected] generation of networked businesses virtual reality and optimisation tech- WMS. Net-WMS will handle networked niques communication and co-operation pro- • a palletiser tool using optimisation cesses through the integration of deci- techniques sion-making technologies, generic 3D • a dispatcher with the virtualisation of a placement primitives, virtual reality for truckload 3D visualisation, interactivity to design packing models, knowledge modelling.

6 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 6 JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS

Joint DELOS – MUSCLE Summer School on Multimedia Digital Libraries

by Remi Ronchaud

For the first time, the DELOS and MUSCLE Networks of Excellence organised a joint summer school. The event was held in San Vincenzo, Italy from 12 to 17 June 2006 and the topic covered was Multimedia Digital Libraries.

About one hundred European universi- learning solutions that need minimal • Padraig Cunningham, Trinity College ties and research centres have been supervision in the field of new genera- Dublin involved over the last few years in initia- tions of digital libraries. • Jia Li, Pennsylvania State University tives addressing multimedia data anal- • Alan Smeaton – Dublin City ysis, computer vision and object recogni- Technologies for multimedia digital University. tion, multimedia management in large libraries span over many disciplines: audio and video collections. information systems, knowledge repre- This summer school highlighted leading sentation, computer vision, audio and research achievements and improved Currently, two Networks of Excellence, image processing, compression and general knowledge in these fields. It also MUSCLE and DELOS, are addressing storage, machine learning and informa- defined a common vision of future these subjects. The networks are par- tion retrieval, multimedia data mining, research orientations in multimedia tially funded by the European cross-media analysis, user interfaces and datamining, and provided a significant Commission within the sixth EU interoperability. opportunity to exchange experiences, Framework Programme, and coordi- share views and address common prob- nated by ERCIM. Highly qualified lecturers and interna- lems. Hopefully, this initiative will stim- tional researchers have been invited to ulate the emergence of new research col- In the scope of their respective dissemi- address theoretical approaches and prac- laborations. nation and training activities, MUSCLE tical solutions. Among the invited and DELOS organized a joint summer researchers were: Links: school in June in San Vincenzo, Italy, • James Wang, Pennsylvania State Presentations: with the support of CNR Pisa, INRIA, University http://www-rocq.inria.fr/imedia/ CWI and the University of Modena. • Fernando Pereira, Instituto Superior DelosMuscleSummerSchool2006/ Tècnico Lisboa MUSCLE: http://www.muscle-noe.org/ The summer school presented software • Nicu Sebe, University of Amsterdam DELOS: http://www.delos.info/ tools and research strategies to enable • Milind Naphade, IBM T J Watson users to move away from labor-intensive Research Center Please contact: case-by-case modelling of individual • Alex Hauptmann, Carnegie Mellon Remi Ronchaud, ERCIM office applications, and allow them to take full University E-mail: [email protected] advantage of generic adaptive and self-

Summer school participants.

Invited lecturer James Wang from Pennsylvania State University.

7 ERCIM News No. 66, Otober 2006 7 JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS

ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution Spawns Local Chapters

by Tom Mens, Jean-Marie Favre and Salah Sadou

The ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution has begun to establish some In June 2006, the official kick-off local chapters in order to achieve a better dissemination of results at a national meeting took place, as part of the level and to achieve a better interaction with local companies. This is important French days on Model-Driven since the language barrier is still an issue in many countries and the introduction Engineering (Ingénierie Dirigée par of national activities that are carried out in the native tongue address this problem. les Modèles – IDM). • In September 2006, during the first The first national chapter of the Working visualisation, and service-oriented archi- French-speaking Conference on Group, RIMEL (an acronym for Rétro- tecture to name but a few. Software Architectures in Nantes Ingénierie, Maintenance et Evolution (Conférence sur les Architectures des Logiciels), was set up in France in In 2006, RIMEL organised four impor- Logicielles - CAL), RIMEL organised spring 2006. Its main objective is to tant events in France in collaboration two working sessions devoted to archi- bring together French teams working on with the WG on Software Evolution: tectural evolution and software mainte- reverse engineering, maintenance and • In March 2006, a one-day workshop nance and re-engineering, respectively. software evolution. In France, RIMEL on software evolution took place, will become part of a national attached to the French-speaking con- RIMEL will continue to be very active in Groupement De Recherche (GDR) on ference Langages et Modèles à Objets the future, and we hope to exploit the Programming and Software (LMO) in Nîmes. The workshop's success of this initiative to start similar Engineering, an ongoing initiative. main goal was to provide PhD students initiatives in other European countries. RIMEL brings together more than 20 with the opportunity to present their groups from academia and five groups ongoing research in their mother Links: from industry. It promotes software evo- tongue. The workshop style gave Working Group web site: lution as a major topic in the French plenty of room for lively discussions. http://w3.umh.ac.be/evol/ research and education community, as • In April 2006, the main annual work- RIMEL website: http://planetmde.org/rimel well as in industry. In order to tackle the shop of the WG on Software Evolution many scientific challenges that arise in in Lille was organised in close collab- Please contact: this vast and important research domain, oration with some of the RIMEL Jean-Marie Favre, Laboratoire LSR, Institut RIMEL includes teams from various dis- members. As such, it attracted 14 d'Informatique et Mathématiques ciplines, for example database systems, French participants, making up more Appliquées de Grenoble model-driven engineering, software than one third of the total number of Tel: +33 4 76 63 55 71 participants. E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM Environmental Modelling Workshop

by Thomas Lux

The 13th workshop of the ERCIM Working Group Environmental Modelling was held on 31 August - 1 September 2006 at Fraunhofer FIRST, Berlin, Germany.

Members of the ERCIM Working Group air quality forecast, satellite data assimi- group which was quite exactly ten years Environmental Modelling participated lation for air quality forecast, modelling ago. along with researchers from Fraunhofer and simulation of processes in the soil FIRST and their co-operation partners in and groundwater zone, and especially Link: the 13th workshop in order to present current aspects of using Grids and Grid Working Group web site: their recent research work and to discuss workflows for different environmental http://wwwold.first.fhg.de/ercim/ the current trends and developments in applications. It was an enjoyable the field of environmental modelling. meeting with interesing scientific sub- Please contact: jects and fruitful discussions as well as a Achim Sydow, ERCIM Environmental Research issues that have been pleasant social event which gave reason Modelling Working Group coordinator addressed include: European operational to remember the founding of the working E-mail: [email protected]

8 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS

FMICS 2006 - 11th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems by Luboš Brim and Martin Leucker

The 11th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems of many administrative aspects, and (FMICS 06) was held in Bonn, Germany, on August 26-27, 2006 as a satellite event ERCIM for its financial support of the to the 17th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2006). workshop. Additionally, the organizers The workshop, being also an annual meeting of the ERCIM Working Group, would like to thank EASST (European continued successfully the aim of FMICS workshop series - to promote the use Association of Software Science and of formal methods for industrial applications, by supporting research in this area Technology), Faculty of Informatics, and its application in industry. The emphasis in these workshops is on the Masaryk University Brno and the exchange of ideas between researchers and practitioners, in both industry and Technical University Munich for sup- academia. porting this event.

Previous workshops were held in Oxford (March 1996), Cesena (July 1997), Amsterdam (May 1998), Trento (July 1999), Berlin (April 2000), Paris (July 2000), Malaga (July 2002), Trondheim (July 2003), Linz (September 2004), and Lisbon (July 2005). The 2006 workshop was organized by the Masaryk University Brno and the Technical University Munich. Forty two registered participants from academia and industry from about eleven countries attended the workshop.

This year the program committee received a record number of submissions. The 16 accepted regular contributions and 2 accepted tool papers, selected out of a total of 47 submissions, cover formal methodologies for handling large state spaces, model based testing, formal description and analysis techniques as well as a range of applications and case studies. Best paper award winners Michael Weber and Moritz Hammer.

The workshop program included two excellent invited talks, respectively by with the support of the European Link: Anna Slobodova from Intel on Association of Software Science and FMICS Working Group: 'Challenges for Formal Verification in Technology (EASST). http://www.inrialpes.fr/vasy/fmics/ Industrial Setting' and by Edward A. Lee from University of California at The final proceedings of the workshop Please contact: Berkeley on 'Making Concurrency will be published jointly with the 5th Pedro Merino Gómez, ERCIM FMICS Mainstream'. International workshop on Parallel and Working Group coordinator, Universidad de Distributed Methods in Verification Málaga / SpaRCIM The award for the best paper was granted (PDMC 2006) as post-proceedings in the Tel: +34 952 132752 this year to Michael Weber and Moritz Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer E-mail: [email protected] Hammer for their excellent paper 'To Science. Selected papers will be invited http://www.lcc.uma.es/~pedro Store or Not To Store' Reloaded: for publication in a special issue of the Reclaiming Memory on Demand" on the International Journal on Software Tools techniques for handling extremely large for Technology Transfer. The organizers state spaces in model checking of com- wish to thank CONCUR for hosting the puter systems. The award was granted FMICS 2006 workshop and taking care

ERCIM News No. 66, Otober 2006 9 EUROPEAN SCENE

A Security and Dependability Strategic Research Agenda for Europe

by Jim Clarke

Europe's research framework programmes are committed to the establishment with the preparation of a European of a solid security and dependability infrastructure. The IST-SecurIST project has strategic research agenda in the field of been charged with the preparation of a European strategic research agenda in ICT for Security and Dependability, for the field of ICT for Security and Dependability, for the upcoming 7th research the upcoming 7th research framework framework programme. programme (FP7, 2007–2013). In order to achieve this objective, the SecurIST The Internet and other digital networks a result, they find themselves in an project has established two fundamental have now become an integral part of our undesirable situation in which they must bodies: the European Security and economy and society. But as we are put ever more trust into environments in Dependability Task Force (STF), and rapidly adopting more information and which there is little or no way of under- the SecurIST Advisory Board. communication technologies (ICT) in standing or assessing them properly. services and commerce, private infor- The STF is currently comprised of 180 mation is at increasing risk and security To build an information society that will members spread across thirteen funda- and dependability problems become deliver growth and prosperity, we need mental thematic areas (initiatives) of research. It provides a forum for consoli- dation and consensus building. The thematic initiatives are shown in the figure, which provides a visual interpretation of how these initiatives are integrated and work together.

The SecurIST Advisory Board is composed of European experts in information security and dependability. The charter of the board is to oversee, review, enhance and promote results from the STF (see http://www.securitytaskforce.eu).

Recently, based on inputs from the STF, the SecurIST Advisory Board has issued a document presenting its recommendations for a future security and dependability research framework in Europe, for the period 2007-2013. Under the headline From 'Security and Dependability by Central Command and Security and Dependability Task Force initiatives integration. Control' to 'Security and Dependability by Empowerment', the Advisory Board is recommending the following nine key research areas: prevalent. Indeed, today people are to tailor ICTs to business and social 1.Empowerment of the stakeholders: becoming more and more concerned needs, and ensure that they become Stakeholders of the information about the increasing complexity of useful tools for economic and social society include individual citizens, information and communication sys- innovation. The starting point for industry and academia, non-govern- tems and the proliferation of privacy- making them useful is to foster trust and mental organisations and govern- invasive information gathering sources safeguard security in a networked ments. Empowerment of the stake- and techniques. In their online daily world. In this respect, Europe's research holder is vital as there is a clear tech- interactions, they often find themselves framework programmes are committed nological trend towards decentraliza- faced with high-profile losses of their to the establishment of a solid security tion of technology, as well as of its personal information and with viruses, and dependability infrastructure. The management and control. Respon- spam, phishing and other crimes of IST-SecurIST project (an IST sibility, authority and control have to growing severity and sophistication. As Coordination Action) has been charged move more towards the end user.

10 ERCIM News No. 66, October 2007 10 EUROPEAN SCENE

2.Europe-specific security and depend- involving security and dependability enterprises or states. It addresses the ability: Europe has a very specific het- technologies. problem of how to override the 'Big erogeneous culture and history and set 8.Security and dependability of service Brother' syndrome and 'dark security', of attitudes to trust and society that oriented architectures (SOA): The ie, the future assurance of digital requires specific research profiling. need to establish and maintain trust sovereignty and dignity for the various 3.Infrastructure robustness and avail- and manage policy regulations and stakeholders. ability: Further research efforts are service level agreements in an SOA 3.Objective and automated processes: needed for the assurance of ICT net- context, together with commensurate This challenge addresses the problem work and service infrastructures, as advances in software engineering to of how to attain a controllable and well as the robustness and availability deliver service expectations. manageable world of complex digital of critical infrastructure, such as 9.Technologies for security: Research is artefacts by 2015 and how to inject health, energy, transport or finance. needed to provide a higher assurance regular, quantitative techniques and 4.Interoperability: Research on the of trusted communication and han- engineering to make the field truly sci- interoperability between security and dling of digital information. entific. dependability technologies and stan- Cryptology and trusted functionality 4.Beyond the horizon: a new conver- dards. and computing need to be considered. gence: This last challenge deals with 5.Processes for developing secure and the preparation of a new convergence dependable systems: Research on the In addition to these nine key research at a horizon of 2020 and beyond, systematic improvement of secure and areas, four future grand challenges cov- which is the bio-nano-info-quantum dependable system development ering a 10-20 year vision are presented 'galaxy' and the new security and (including hardware and software) by the Advisory Board. They illustrate dependability challenges that will from their design phase. possible longer-term possibilities and emerge. 6.Security and dependability preserva- implications: tion: In an increasingly complex world 1.Countering vulnerabilities and threats Links: of evolving requirements, technolo- within digital urbanization: This chal- The full report of the SecurIST Advisory gies and systems, maintenance of lenge addresses open problems that we Board recommendations: effective system security and depend- will face in security and dependability http://www.securitytaskforce.eu/ ability is critical and is essential for from the expansion and globalization preserving user confidence. of digital convergence by 2010-2015. Please contact: 7.User-centric security and depend- 2.Duality between digital privacy and Jim Clarke, Waterford Institute of ability standardisation: Strengthen the collective security: digital dignity and Technology, Telecommunications Software structured involvement of end users sovereignty: This challenge deals with and Systems Group, SecurISTCoordinator and their respective representatives future privacy issues of all the stake- E-mail: [email protected] into relevant standardization activities holders, whether citizens, groups,

European Research Advances in Embedded Intelligence

The IST Results news service features numerous European ating objects in ten different European countries to focus on research organisations and industrial partners whose work on the development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and embedded intelligence has been funding under the European their applications, especially in the form of Cooperating Commission's Information Society Technologies (IST) R&D Objects (CO), to help develop a roadmap for innovative priority. future applications. • A new technology, dubbed Embedded and Communicating These research projects focus on many different applications Agents, has allowed researchers at Sony's Computer of embedded systems, for example: Science Laboratory in France to add a new level of intelligence to a robotic dog. Instead of teaching the dog new • the ASAP project team has produced an open source pro- tricks, the algorithms, design principles and mechanisms gramming, analysis and optimisation toolkit for pervasive developed by the ECAgents project allow the robotic pet to computing systems using Constraint Logic Programming learn new tricks itself and share its knowledge with others. (CLP) languages. It has been validated in a series of case studies and is expected to open the way to more effective For more examples of recent research results related to and efficient embedded systems development in the future. embedded intelligence and other current ICT themes, visit • The Embedded WiseNts project has brought together IST Results at http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu twelve partners from the top research institutions in wireless communication, distributed computing and cooper-

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 11 NEWS FROM W3C

W3C Workshop on Mobile Web W3C Launched Secure Browsing in Developing Countries Initiative

W3C invites experts to participate in the 'Mobile Web in Recognizing the challenges people face when browsing the Developing Countries' Workshop in Bangalore, India, on 5-6 Web, W3C launched an initiative to build a foundation for a December 2006. more secure Web. The new Web Security Context Working Group will propose standards that will enable browsers to do a Participants will discuss the challenges, requirements, and use much better job helping people make proper trust decisions. cases for mobile Web access in developing countries and thus help bridge the digital divide. The Workshop will bring Part of W3C's Security Activity, the group's mission is three- together experts in mobile Web technologies and specialists on fold: to build consensus around what information people need emerging countries and the digital divide. from browsers in order to understand their "security context," to find innovative ways to present this information and raise This public Workshop is part of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative, awareness, and to suggest ways to make browsers less suscep- which aims to identify and resolve challenges and issues of tible to spoofing of user interfaces that are used to convey crit- accessing the Web when on the move. ical security information to end users.

W3C invites support for this Workshop through a three-tier W3C chartered this new work after a successful Workshop on sponsorship program designed to support participation by Usability and Transparency of Web Authentication in March people or organizations who might otherwise not have the 2006. Per the charter, the group will conduct its technical work financial means to attend the meeting. in public and will operate under the W3C Royalty-Free Patent Policy. Organizations interested in security over the Web Sponsors reach those who are making decisions about the should join W3C to participate in this new Web Security future of the Web, as well as those in the public who have come Context group. to rely on the Web as critical infrastructure for development. Links: To participate in the Workshop, please submit a position paper Web Security Context Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2006/WSC/ by email before 1 November 2006. W3C Security Activity: http://www.w3.org/Security/ Join W3C: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership Links: CfP: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/MWI-EC/cfp.html Sponsorship Program: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/MWI-EC/sponsors.html

Latest W3C Recommendations

• XHTML-Print W3C Workshop on XSL-FO 2.0 20 September 2006, Jim Bigelow, Melinda Grant • Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition) Requirements 16 August 2006, Jean Paoli, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Tim Bray, François Yergeau, Eve Maler W3C is holding a Workshop to gather inspiration, needs and • Namespaces in XML 1.0 (Second Edition) techniques for a future version of XSL-FO, the formatting 16 August 2006, Dave Hollander, Tim Bray, Richard Tobin, specification on 18 October 2006 in Heidelberg, Germany. The Andrew Layman W3C XSL Working Group expects that the enhancements for • Namespaces in XML 1.1 (Second Edition) XSL-FO 2.0 will focus on layout-driven formatting, aug- 16 August 2006, Dave Hollander, Richard Tobin, Andrew menting the content-driven layout facilities already defined. Layman, Tim Bray The XSL Working Group is looking for experts in the field to • Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 (Second Edition) bring their knowledge, insight and experience, as well as for 16 August 2006, Eve Maler, Jean Paoli, C. M. Sperberg- use cases and representatives of user communities. McQueen, Tim Bray, François Yergeau, John Cowan

Link: A complete list of all W3C Technical Reports: http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/2006-Workshop/ http://www.w3.org/TR/

12 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 W3C Mobile Web Seminar in Paris

Paris, 16 November 2006

W3C announces a public seminar on the technical solutions for the special challenges of mobile Web adoption. The event will be held in central Paris, on Thursday 16 November 2006.

COPRAS 'ICT Research "People could access the Web at all times and in all situations, thanks to mobile devices, but Web sites aren't always ready for and Standardization' Conference the diverse range of devices," explains Philipp Hoschka, Mobile Web Initiative Leader. "W3C's Mobile Web Initiative Brussels, 17 January 2007 has already produced concrete results to help developers make their Web sites accessible to mobile devices. This seminar The Cooperation Platform for Research and Standardization gives a valuable opportunity to discuss those results and state of (COPRAS), together with its consortium partners CEN, CEN- the art techniques." ELEC, ETSI, W3C and The Open Group, will organize a major conference on ICT research and standardization, in the per- W3C's Mobile Web seminar is a public event which will focus spective of FP7 on Wednesday 17 January 2007. on current results produced by W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (MWI). The confirmed speakers include representatives from The conference will bring together all stakeholders involved in MWI sponsors such as France Telecom, Jataayu Software, the research/standards interfacing process, and will feature well MobileAware, Opera Software, and Vodafone. known speakers from both the research and the ICT standards communities, as well as representatives from the European This seminar is funded by the Web Beyond 3G (3GWeb) pro- Commission. Areas to be addressed include: ject, financed by the European Commission's FP6 IST pro- • how passing research output through standards processes gramme. Attendance to the seminar is free and and open to the supports innovation, and helps projects bringing their results public, but registration is required. to the market • what are the major challenges IST projects face when coop- Links: erating with standards organizations, and how these chal- Mobile Web Seminar: http://www.w3.org/2006/11/mwi-seminar.html lenges should be addressed Registration: http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/mwiparis/ • how should interfacing between research and standardization be organized in FP7, and what are the role and challenges for the European Technology Platforms in this respect • what are the main areas in ICT standardization where future closer cooperation with research projects in FP7 will be required • how can contributing to standards-making be made more First W3C Webinar attractive to research projects, and how this will contribute to Europe achieving itsoverall goal of furthering the on Mobile Web Design Information Society and its position in ICT development • what are the recommendations from FP6 for the W3C organized a W3C webinar on 26 July 2006, where research/standards interfacing process in FP7, and how can Cameron Moll, an expert in mobile Web design, spoke about COPRAS' results support improving cooperation between mobilizing Web content. This presentation took a look at the projects and standards organizations in the new Framework current state of the art, and how to best extend an existing or Programme. planned Web site to handheld devices with minimal repur- posing of code, content, and images. It also showed which ele- The conference will take place at the Bedford Hotel in ments of forward thinking design were needed to maintain con- Brussels, and participation will be free of charge on a first- sistency, regardless of where and how users access your con- come/first-served basis. Pre-registration for the conference is tent. As part of the 3GWeb project, W3C plans to organize possible at: http://www.w3.org/2004/copras/meetings/open07/ more webinars to be announced on the Mobile Web Initiative registration.html home page.

Links: Link: COPRAS Project: http://www.copras.org/ W3C Mobile Web Initiative: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/ COPRAS contact: [email protected]

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 13 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Introduction to the Special Theme and is sensitive, adaptive and responsive to their needs, habits, gestures and emotions." (ISTAG scenarios, and Embedded Intelligence Schoitsch, E., Bloomfield, R. et al. (2003), AMSD – Dependable Embedded Systems Roadmap, IST project 37553) . This applies not only for people-centred tasks, which, of course, seems the most exciting, science-fiction-type, aspect, but also for purely technical solutions like smart sensors, actuators and control systems, especially in safety related applications. Heterogeneity (of environment, applications, protocols, etc.), autonomy (self-awareness, self healing, self- organizing, etc.), nomadic mobility (ad hoc, unreliable, heterogeneous, etc.) and scale-less (number of users, geography, . a l r

a structure, etc.) are the new emerging J

i t t r e P

ARTEMIS embedded systems challenges (Neeraj y b

n o i

t (Advanced Suri, Keynote at DECOS Conference, a r t s u l l

I Research and ME’06 Conference, 2006). Technology for Embedded Intelligence and Systems) is a strong, This special theme fits in very well with industry-driven European Technology the current European framework and Platform (ETP) which aims to establish a strategic research discussions. The areas coherent, integrated European research addressed - with the related European and development strategy for embedded research projects are referenced in systems (http://www.artemis-office.org). brackets - include: by Erwin Schoitsch and Amund Skavhaug EPoSS, another ETP launched in July this Embedded Systems Applications year (see separate article by the author in This part provides an overview of four Embedded Systems are a key if Europe this edition) focuses on smart systems different, but nevertheless typical appli- is to remain in the forefront of digital integration, which is considered an cations of embedded systems, ie, some technology and as such they have been important emerging area. The key aspects work on autonomous systems, on intelli- classified as an important research area are building systems from components, gent road safety through co-operative for the European Union's Seventh interdisciplinarity, a holistic approach to networks (COOPERS); on ambient Framework Programme - the main pervasive and ubiquitous computing, fast assisted living support for the ‘aging financial tool through which the EU integration of a variety of technologies, society’ (BelAmI) and on an experiment supports research and development energy autonomy and networking with iCat, a personal robot platform with activities. The IST/FET (Future and (http://www.smart-systems-integration.org). emotional feedback. This wide spectrum Emerging Technologies) programme of projects is typical for the broad range 'Beyond the Horizon', coordinated by Several national research programmes in of foci addressed by the engineering of ERCIM, points out that Embedded Europe cover essential aspects of this AmI applications for the future intelli- Systems, in combination with pervasive theme, for example FIT-IT in Austria gent environment of people. - or ubiquitous - computing, (cognitive) (BMVIT, Federal Ministry for Transport, intelligence and software-intensive Innovation and Technology), with topics Embedded Systems Design systems, which in fact means such as Embedded Systems, System on and Development 'embedded intelligence', or 'smart Chip, Semantic Systems and Security, This provides an overview of the DECOS systems' in the broader context of focusing on radical innovations in these (EU-FP6 project) tool chain for the 'smart environments', are the most areas. development of dependable embedded important challenge for strategic, long- systems in a cost-efficient manner; of a term research, with a huge impact on 'Intelligence' takes account of autonomous project on reconfigurable hardware for society and the economy. The ITEA2 reasoning and acting in a co-operative 'Embedded Architectures on Demand' Roadmap (Information Technology for manner. 'Ambient Intelligence' refers to an (AHEAD); on system-level design of European Advancement) reaches the exciting new paradigm in information fault-tolerant systems (SynDEx); on a same conclusion - that Embedded technology, "in which people are tool to model the behaviour of embedded Systems are a crucial technology for empowered through a digital environment system designs (mCRL2); on reactive European competitiveness. that is aware of their presence and context processing for reactive embedded sys-

14 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 ARTICLES IN THIS SECTION

Introduction to the special theme 33 Ambiance: A Platform for 14 Embedded Intelligence Macroprogramming Personalised by Erwin Schoitsch and Amund Skavhaug Ambient Services tems and on a very specialised aspect of Embedded Systems Applications by Reza Razavi designing concurrent systems (tagged 16 Autonomous Systems - Safety Critical 35 Towards a Platform for Widespread procedure calls, TPC). This covers a Embedded Systems and Intelligence Embedded Intelligence broad range of system architecture, by Erwin Schoitsch and Wilfried Kubinger by Simon Dobson, Steve Neely, Graeme 18 Automotive Visions beyond In-Car Stevenson, Lorcan Coyle and Paddy design and development issues in the Driver Assistance: Integrated Traffic Nixon embedded systems area. Management with Coopers 36 Networking Semantic Services for by Thomas Gruber and Erwin Schoitsch Pervasive Computing Ambient Intelligence (AmI) 19 Embedded Intelligence for Ambient by Valerie Issarny, Nikolaos Georgantas Systems, Smart Environments, Assisted Living and Sonia Ben Mokhtar by Frank Bomarius, Martin Becker and 37 Materials with Intelligence Platforms and Services Thomas Kleinberger by Simon Dobson and Kieran Delaney The articles provide an overview of one 21 iCat - A Friendly Robot that Helps Wireless Sensor Networks ERCIM member's AmI research facility Children and Grown-Ups 39 The CRUISE Project - Network (FORTH); on a user-centred design by Bernt Meerbeek, Jettie Hoonhout, Initiative for Creating Ubiquitos Peter Bingley, and Albert van Breemen Intelligent Sensing Environments approach to smart environments (EASE); Design, Development, Programming by Gabriele Kotsis, Anelia Mitseva and on platforms for ambient services - span- 22 The DECOS Tool-Chain: Model-Based Neeli R. Prasad ning the gap between the issue of sensor Development of Distributed Embedded 40 IntelliSense RFID - An RFID Platform networks and adaptive applications - Safety-Critical Real-Time Systems for Ambient Intelligence with Sensors by Wolfgang Herzner, Bernhard Huber, Integration Capabilities (Ambiance, Construct); on Service- György Csertan and Andras Balogh by Ovidiu Vermesan, Nadine Pesonen, Oriented Architectures for pervasive 23 Ambient Hardware: Embedded Cristina Rusu, Aarne Oja, Peter computing environments (ARLES) and, Architectures on Demand Enoksson and Helge Rustad as a special case, intelligent materials for by Kjetil Svarstad 42 Collaborative Capture: A New 25 System-Level Design of Fault-Tolerant Perspective for Sensor Networks smart applications. This part should give a Embedded Systems by Paul Couderc feeling for the broad range of perspectives by Alain Girault Resources of 'ambiance' (vs. embedded systems in 27 New Tool to Design the Behaviour of 43 Autarkic Power Generation for technical engineering applications). Embedded Systems Networked Systems by Jan Friso Groote by Eberhard Mueller and Ulrich Hofman

28 Reactive Processing for Reactive 45 Formally Bounded Embedded Systems Further on, this special theme continues Systems by Kevin Hammond with articles covering specific key by Reinhard von Hanxleden, Xin Li, Massively Deployed Embedded aspects and technologies of embedded Partha Roop, Zoran Salcic and Li Hsien Systems: Trust and security Yoong 46 Adaptable and Context-Aware systems and ambiance implementations: Trustworthiness Evaluation 30 TPC: Tagged Procedure Calls by Gabriele Lenzini, Santtu Toivonen, by Konstantinos Kapelonis, Sven and Ilkka Uusitalo Wireless Sensor Networks Karsson, and Angelos Bilas 47 Digital Identity in Ambient Ambient Intelligence Systems Firstly, there is a description of a Environments 31 A European Ambient Intelligence Network of Excellence to overcome the by Ben Schouten and Onkar Ambekar Research Facility at FORTH - ICS fragmentation of research in this field by Constantine Stephanidis 48 Trust4All enhances Trustworthiness of Embedded Component-based Systems (CRUISE). Then two key aspects of 32 Ecological Approach to Smart by Gabriele Lenzini, Johan Muskens and Environments wireless sensor networks are high- Andrew Tokmakoff lighted: Intelligent RFID sensor integra- by Veikko Ikonen tion (IntelliSense RFID) and collaborative capture, linking information systems consumer confidence). The ITEA pro- In most cases, the articles are based on to real work by sensor networks (ACES). ject Trust4All project has written two reports of European research projects articles on different aspects of this and Networks of Excellence and thus Embedded Systems problem - research on context-aware provide a good overview of research and A key characteristic of embedded sys- trust in open environments as a basic applications in the areas addressed. tems is the use of restricted resources, a research issue and a trust management problem to be resolved beforehand by framework. The special problem of pro- Several ERCIM working groups and modelling. One article covers autarkic tecting privacy by providing separate many teams within ERCIM member power generation for networked digital identities depending on the con- institutes are involved in at least some of embedded systems (FIT-IT, Intermon), text of use in ambient environments is the aspects of this special theme, which another covers guarantees on resource handled in another article (BASIS). was suggested by the ERCIM Working usage bounds (EmBounded). group on Dependable Embedded These areas overlap in part, so overlap- Systems. We have tried to provide a Massively Deployed Embedded ping topics may be addressed as well. comprehensive overview on many dif- Systems: Trust and Security This theme should provide a vision of ferent aspects of this important theme. Massively deployed and networked the future for anyone interested in embedded systems are prone to security embedded systems and address the chal- Please contact: breaches leading to loss of safety or reli- lenges and risks for research, the Erwin Schoitsch, ARC Seibersdorf ability/availability of safety or loss of economy and society rather than research/AARIT, Austria business critical services (and loss of focusing on a single, isolated subtopic. E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 15 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Autonomous Systems - Safety Critical Embedded Systems and Intelligence

by Erwin Schoitsch and Wilfried Kubinger

Embedded systems are everywhere today and will be even more prevalent in the ling the traffic-flow by car-to-car com- future. Most of them perform simple control and support tasks on command in munication). a pre-programmed manner, but that's not the end of the line. Increasingly, they are designed to carry out autonomous tasks including 'intelligence' (smart ARC Seibersdorf research is doing systems). They are also designed to be able to decide, based on complex inputs research in the area of autonomous sys- and situation awareness, what to do under circumstances defined by an unreliable tems, especially in the area of automo- environment. Autonomous vehicles are the next step in this direction. tive and other mobile transportation systems, providing vision systems (optical Basic characteristics of embedded sys- domain and platform independent and laser light systems), advanced driver tems are that distributed, networked manner. assistance systems, recognition/identifi- electronic control units (ECUs) are inte- cation of, for example, traffic signs, grated into their technical or natural The next step on from a collection of demonstrations of platooning systems environment, linked to sensors and actu- 'intelligent embedded functions' is the (model cars) and with robots (partner in ators with properties like cognition and development of autonomous systems. the recently accepted robots@home pro- situation awareness and controlled by These are able to perform complex mis- posal, a STREP of FP6). robust algorithms which implies some sions in an autonomous manner, coping 'intelligence' (smart systems). with unexpected incidents and interac- DARPA Grand Challenge, Applications are to be found in many tions from the environment. They need Automotive Applications domains: safety-critical applications to meet two basic criteria in the range of A significant milestone in the develop- include aerospace, railways, automotive their activity, especially in case of inter- ment of autonomous vehicles was the applications, machinery and medical action with people: DARPA Grand Challenge (Defense systems, as well as entertainment. • a dependable, robust infrastructure as Advanced Research Projects Agency, Challenges relate to the dependability a basis of the system (as developed, for USA). The driverless vehicles had to (safety, reliability and security) of hard- example, by DECOS) complete a course over 132 miles ware, software and systems design, com- • robust and reliable algorithms, sensors (212 km), through desert land with off- munication technologies, sensors, actors, and actuators, situation awareness and road type terrain in the Mojave Desert, materials etc. The Integrated Project cognition. without any external support. DECOS is carrying out research into the design and development of holistic The next step would be co-operative sys- Figure 1 shows SciAutonics/Auburn dependable systems, providing the fun- tems consisting of an ad hoc set of Engineering's autonomous vehicle, damental architecture and services in a autonomous systems (eg autonomous RASCAL (Robust Autonomous Sensor platooning of cars on a highway, control- Controlled All-Terrain Land Vehicle). They invited ARC Seibersdorf research's Smart-Systems team to provide their embedded stereo vision module SMART EYE SVS (including all the algorithms for detection and identification of obstacles, lanes, tracks, etc.). The vision system performed beyond expectations: RASCAL was one of the fastest vehicles in the qualification event, where only 23 out of 40 (of more than 160 that applied) qualified for the final race. RASCAL came 16th in the end, because of a failing communication hub.

The 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge will take place in an urban environment. This means that if the mission cannot be ful- filled because of a closed lane, the Figure 1: RASCAL on track at DARPA Grand Challenge '05 (with stereo vision sensor). vehicle has to turn and autonomously

16 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Figure 2: TTIP - Time-Triggered Image Processing Prototype.

decide which alternative route to take, Autonomous Robots of challenges yet to be resolved: obeying traffic rules. Other short-distance vision systems in changing environment, tables and chairs industrial environments for autonomous with thin feet, glass objects, humans The embedded stereo vision sensor will robots have been tested with laser light crossing the way, different materials and be tested in other environments too (a systems. Figure 3 shows such a laser objects difficult to identify, unreliable concept car for advanced driver assis- light stereo system. environment. The robot needs to be able tance systems) and in a platooning to 'learn' a new environment in a natural experiment with model cars. The advantage of the laser light section manner by accompanying a person system, which was implemented in a fea- around a room, it needs to be able to Figure 2 shows another demonstration of sibility study for a mobile robot system classify objects and obstacles and react highly-dependable system technology – in an industrial environment, is its sim- to different stimuli - and all without the the TT Vision node application (Time- plicity and low price. owners doing some type of 'program- Triggered Vision node, applying TT ming' or 'configuration'. This open plat- technology to a demonstrator, avoiding a The smart systems team of ARC form is intended to be a building block crash by either stopping or speeding up Seibersdorf research is a partner in the for service and personal robots for many depending on the situation). STREP initiative 'robots@home' of the different home applications and ambient last IST Call 'Advanced Robotics'. The assisted living tasks. Autonomous vehicles are of primary goal is to develop an open mobile plat- importance in dangerous environments form that is able to navigate in the dif- The consortium is composed of teams where human drivers would be at risk of ferent home environments encountered from TU Vienna, ARC Seibersdorf their lives and will, in future, allow safer in European and international homes. research (Austria), ETH Zurich, transport on roads. The home environment poses another set BlueBotics, Securitas SA, Nestle Nespresso SA (Switzerland), Legrange SA (France), and Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH (Germany).

Links: http://www.smart-systems.at http://www.decos.at

Please contact: Wilfried Kubinger, Erwin Schoitsch, ARC Seibersdorf research/AARIT, Austria Tel: +43 50550 4200, 4117 E-mail: {wilfried.kubinger, Erwin.schoitsch}@arcs.ac.at

Figure 3: Laser Light Section System, example for mobile robot application.

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 17 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Automotive Visions beyond In-Car Driver Assistance: Integrated Traffic Management with Coopers

by Thomas Gruber and Erwin Schoitsch

Vehicles connected via continuous wireless communication with road concrete and more precise advice in case infrastructure on motorways, exchanging data and information relevant for the of situation-related dangers, are expen- specific road segment to increase overall road safety and enable co-operative sive and therefore rarely used. Currently, traffic management – this is the vision of the Coopers project. the high cost for VMS deployment pre- vents European road operators adopting In the Sixth Framework Programme of and since then the innovative work has this equipment for major road sections, the European Commission, one of the been driven by the partners in the areas so missing out on a huge safety gain. main themes deals with road traffic of system and service architecture, safety safety. Several projects funded by the analysis and assessment and evaluation Coopers is preparing the way for Sixth IST Framework Programme of technologies. improving road safety on motorways at address this topic, but Coopers takes a an affordable cost. Based on existing specific position with unique ways of Today, there exists a limited set of mea- technologies and infrastructure, the achieving a safety improvement through sures for improving road safety. Those driver is provided with real-time data on an intelligent network which exploits responsible introduce legal regulations the current traffic situation ahead of him. existing technologies for co-operative and mainly static roadside installations services. which warn drivers of bends, humps, narrowings and other static danger. But Coopers Mission: Some 38 partners from 15 European when it comes to accidents or traffic con- countries with industry, university and gestions, at present there is little guid- To define, develop and test new safety research institution backgrounds formed ance for the driver. Road traffic authori- related services, equipment and a consortium under the leadership of ties and road operators rely mainly on applications using two way communication Austria Tech, a company founded by the the driver's attention, experience and between road infrastructure and vehicles Austrian Ministry for Transport, capabilities. Radio traffic news is often from a traffic management perspective. Innovation and Technology for driving late and inaccurate in respect of the loca- COOPERS will build upon existing technological development. The kick-off tion of the event in question. VMS (vari- equipment and infrastructure as far as meeting took place in early spring 2006 able message signs), which could give possible to incorporate bi-directional infrastructure-vehicle links as an open standardised wireless communication technology. The role of motorway- operators in offering and retrieving safety relevant and traffic management information for specific road segments on European motorways based on infrastructure and in-vehicle data will be investigated. Work Areas in Coopers

• Safety related traffic management and information services • Roadside and vehicle based data acquisition • Traffic Control Centre – TCC Applications • Bi-directional I2V / V2I link • Roadside Transmitter • On Board Unit extension and integration Intelligent Infrastructure and Smart Cars plus individual location based services – I2V • Standardisation. and V2I communication.

18 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Each car is equipped with a receiver for allel to it, but in the reverse direction, ie • demonstrate results on important the I2V (infrastructure to vehicle) com- by a I2V (infrastructure to vehicle) link, European motorway sections with high munication encapsulated in an OBU (on- the real time communication can also be traffic density (Rotterdam-Antwerp, board unit) and a display gives informa- used for verifying infrastructure sensor Berlin/Darmstadt, Nuremberg- tion about accidents, traffic jams, road data using vehicles as floating sensors. Brenner-Verona) and increase devel- construction sites and other location and opment strategies. time related events. Only messages rele- Coopers has started with an assessment vant to the driver on a particular segment of existing technologies, of possible Coopers is compliant with the objective are passed on to him. There is no irrele- safety improvements and a selection of of sustainable transport and development vant data about traffic congestions or those services most appropriate for defined in the EC White Paper on accidents in remote areas of the country testing the new approach. The work plan Transport policy. As a result it will as happens with traffic news on the radio. comprises three steps for implementing demonstrate a prototype for future intel- The information is accurate and precise the I2V communication: ligent traffic management systems. both in terms of location and time. • improve road sensor infrastructure and traffic control applications for Links: Because the driver will be depending on more accurate traffic information with http://www.smart-systems.at the reliability and accuracy of informa- a infrastructure-to-vehicle communi- http://www.coopers-ip.eu/ tion, I2V will strongly increase the cation concept utilising a link to road responsibility and liability of the infras- tolling systems Please contact: tructure operator. The most effective use • develop adequate communication con- Thomas Gruber, Erwin Schoitsch, ARC of I2V communications is expected in cepts and applications ensuring relia- Seibersdorf research, Austria areas of dense traffic where the accident bility, real-time capability and robust- E-mail: {Thomas.Gruber, risk and the probability of traffic jams are ness considering different technolo- Erwin.Schoitsch}@arcs.ac.at very high. In addition to V2I and in par- gies like DAB or CALM.

Embedded Intelligence for Ambient Assisted Living by Frank Bomarius, Martin Becker and Thomas Kleinberger

Our aging societies are facing the problem that more and more elderly people By tracking vital parameters, such as want to live longer at home, in their preferred environment, despite diseases and indicators of dehydration, of an handicaps. We have a great opportunity to tackle this major demographical impending heart attack, of hypogly- problem by building embedded intelligence into systems for Ambient Assisted caemia, or a dangerously low body tem- Living (AAL). perature, potential health-induced emergency situations can be detected early Demographical and social changes have sive sensors which communicate wire- on. In this way we should be able to an enormous effect on health care, emer- lessly and are energy saving. We employ avoid or mitigate chronic health impair- gency and welfare services. As the sensors that can be easily installed in ment as a consequence of delayed treat- average age continues to rise, with a cor- elderly people's homes and need not be ment. This will effectively improve responding increase in chronic diseases, attached to the body, where possible. quality of life for the elderly and cut the there needs to be a dramatic growth in amiCA will reason on raw data series costs of health care by shortening or assistance and care, resulting in even from individual sensors as well as on avoiding hospitalisation and subsequent higher service costs, a decrease in combined sensor data to derive more rehabilitation measures. quality of service, or both. While today's accurate, reliable and/or more abstract commercially available emergency and data. Following a staged model, amiCA will care equipment and health and fitness call for early assistance from family, devices already cover a broad range of By tracking the data, the daily routine of friends, or care givers. It will provide features, they are mostly stand-alone the elderly can be learned and moni- doctors with tracks of vital parameters systems and are often just too difficult tored. Significant deviation from the typ- and thus improve the precision of diag- for the elderly to operate without assis- ical routine is used as a predictor of nosis and treatment. In case of an acute tance. potentially unhealthy behaviour, for emergency, such as a fall or heart attack, example forgetting to drink or eating an automatic call to an emergency call Our ambient intelligent care and assis- spoiled food due to dementia, or of dan- centre will be triggered without interven- tance (amiCA) system will increase gerous situations such as being too weak tion from the patient, who may not even quality of life by using small, unobtru- to get out of bed and call for help. be able to make the call.

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 19 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Approach In MonA, sensor data is col- We have identified major lected and model-based rea- problem areas for the elderly soning is performed. The by talking to care personnel, model base entails models of geriatricians, medical doctors the assisted person, their capa- and emergency centre staff and bilities and needs, and of the have then determined appro- person's daily routine, priate indicators that can be including recurring medical measured by sensors. Based on treatments, as well as models this, we set up our Ambient of the living environment, for Assisted Living Demonstrator example devices and their loca- Laboratory (AAL Lab), which tion and capabilities. aims to come up with embedded intelligence solu- Validation tions for elderly people living The impact of our solution will alone at home. be evaluated in several steps. The first step is the prototyp- The AAL Lab will be continu- ical development and integra- ously extended. In the first ver- tion in an apartment-like AAL sion, to be opened to the public Lab (late 2006). The second in October 2006, the following step is integration into a scenarios are just a few of those nursing home and with the which will be implemented: Ambient Intelligent Care and Assistance (amiCA). emergency call centre in Kaiserslautern (in 2007). The Monitored Drinking – third step is validation of emer- Dementia is a major reason for gency monitoring within the 6 moving the elderly into nursing homes. hours or days later. Gyro sensors built FP project EMERGE on a pan-European Dehydration exacerbates dementia and into wrist badges, walking aids, or other level (2006 – 2008). other health problems. Reminding the body-mounted devices can detect sudden elderly to drink enough is an important falls by a person and trigger a staged This work is part of the joint research function. Our computerised cup mea- emergency reaction of the AAL system. project BelAmI of Fraunhofer IESE, the sures the amount of fluids consumed First, the person is asked to reset the University of Kaiserslautern, the each day by the person handling the cup. device to rule out false positives. If the University of Budapest, the University Potential dehydration can thus be person fails to react, a telephone or of Szeged, and the Bay Zoltan Research detected. video-telephone connection will be initi- Foundation, Budapest. Recent achieve- ated. Based on location-tracking infor- ments are described in detail in the Monitoring Food Quality – Eating mation, communication devices in the paper: Nehmer, J.; Karshmer, A.; spoiled food is another source of health appropriate room will be activated to Becker, M.; Lamm, R.: "Living problems. An RFID-based system built establish a communication link between Assistance Systems – An Ambient into a refrigerator checks for expired the person in trouble and the emergency Intelligence Approach", in Proceedings food and issues warnings. Food related call centre. of the 28th International Conference on incidents can be prevented or can be Software Engineering (ICSE 2006), traced back to the root cause, allowing Our approach to reasoning on sensor Shanghai, China, 2006. for a better treatment. data raises the challenge of coping with inherently unreliable and imprecise data. Links: Location Tracking – Knowing the exact This is tackled by combining alternative BelAmi: http://www.belami-project.org location of a person enables a whole or redundant sources. For instance, loca- IESE: http://www.iese.fraunhofer.de range of location-aware services in the tion tracking can be fed from different University of Kaiserslautern research center AAL environment, such as switching the sensor systems (RFID, ultra-sonic, pres- on AmI website: lights on or off or activating those com- sure, etc.). http://www.eit.uni-kl.de/AmI/frame.html?en munication devices which are closest to the person. RFID labels embedded in the Furthermore, the system must evolve Please contact: carpet of the AAL Lab are read by a over time, so as to adapt to the specific Frank Bomarius, Martin Becker, Thomas walking aid, allowing the location of the conditions and demands of the assisted Kleinberger, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany person to be determined. person, as they acquire new diseases or Tel: +49 631 6800 1200 handicaps or recover from impairment. E-mail: {bomarius, mbecker, Fall Detection – A sudden fall is a strong kleinberger}@iese.fraunhofer.de indicator of an emergency situation and The central module of amiCA is MonA is often detected too late, sometimes (Monitoring and Assistance component).

20 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence iCat - A Friendly Robot that Helps Children and Grown-Ups by Bernt Meerbeek, Jettie Hoonhout, Peter Bingley and Albert van Breemen

Can a robot cat be a buddy for children and adults? Philips Research in the that can identify sounds, recognise Netherlands developed iCat, a prototype of an emotionally intelligent user-interface speech, and determine the direction of robot. It can be used as a game buddy for children or as a TV assistant, or play the sound source. A speaker in the many other roles. bottom can play sounds (WAV and MIDI files) and connected speech. iCat The AmI Paradigm robots with facial expressions; see can be connected to a home network to Ambient Intelligence (AmI) refers to Figure 1. control domestic appliances, and to the electronic environments that are sensi- Internet to obtain information. iCat can tive, adaptive, and responsive to the iCat is a 38cm tall cat-like robot char- sense touch through sensors in its feet. It presence of people. Its focus is not only acter. The head contains 13 servomotors can communicate information encoded the physical integration of electronics, that can move the head and different by coloured light through multi-color but also the creation and generation of parts of the face, including eyebrows, LEDs in its feet and ears. For instance, enhanced experiences. Intuitive interac- eyes, eyelids, and mouth. The servomo- the LEDs in the ears can indicate dif- tion and emotional user-interface robots tors can generate facial expressions, ferent modes of operation such as will play an important role in the realisa- which give the robot socially intelligent sleeping, awake, busy, and listening. tion of Ambient Intelligence. Philips features; see Figure 2. Through a camera Research developed iCat, a research pro- in the nose, iCat can recognise objects Psychology meets Technology totype of an emotionally intelligent robot and faces using computer vision tech- One of the key research questions for that can provide an easy to use and niques. Each foot contains a microphone iCat is to find out whether facial expres- enjoyable interaction style in AmI environments. Figure 1: iCat, here as a Developed in the late 1990s, the AmI game buddy for paradigm presents a vision for digital children. systems from 2010 onwards. Current technological developments enable the integration of electronics into the environment, thus providing people with the possibility to interact with their environment in a seamless, trustworthy and easy to use manner. This implies that embedding-through-miniaturisation is the main systems design objective from a hardware point of view. In software we study Figure 1: iCat, here as a game buddy for children. Picture: Philips. context awareness, ubiquitous access, and natural interaction. The user benefits . s p

are aimed at improving the quality of i l i h

iCat, here as a game buddy for children. Picture: Philips. P

Figure 1: f peoples' lives by creating a desired atmo- Figure 2: o

y s e t r sphere and providing appropriate func- iCat facial u o c

y b expressions. tionality by means of intelligent, person- s e r u t c alised and interconnected systems and i P services.

The iCat Concept Emotional robots are generally considered as a new and promising development for the intuitive interaction between users and AmI environments. iCat was developed as an open interactive robot platform with emotional feedback to investigate social interaction aspects between users and domestic

Figure 2: iCat facial expressions. Picture: Philips. ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 21

Figure 2: iCat facial expressions. Picture: Philips. SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

sions and a range of behaviours can give ality in iCat as a TV assistant. In this behaviours can have a significant effect the robot a personality and which type of study two personalities were combined on the way users perceive – and interact personality would be most appropriate with two levels of control. In the high with – robots. Moreover, users prefer to during interaction with users for certain control condition, iCat used a speech- interact with a socially-intelligent robot applications. Research with iCat has based command-and-control interaction for a range of applications, compared to focused on the evaluation of application style, whereas in the low control condi- more conventional interaction means. A concepts for iCat, for example as a game tion it used a speech-based, system-initi- range of further studies is planned. One buddy for children or as a TV assistant. ated natural language dialogue style. The of the questions that will be addressed is The research questions in these studies preferred combination was an extrovert how iCat should behave to inspire trust were: “What personality do users and friendly personality with low user- and compliance in users, important if prefer?” and “What level of control do control. one thinks of the robot cat as a personal they prefer?” (health) trainer, for example. One of the most interesting results was The results of the user study with the that the personality of the robot influ- Links: iCat as game buddy indicated that chil- enced the level of control that people http://www.hitech-projects.com/icat dren preferred to play games with the perceived. This is very relevant in the iCat rather than to play these same context of intelligent systems that work Please contact: games with a computer. They were able autonomously to take tedious tasks out Bernt Meerbeek, Philips Research Europe, to recognise differences in personalities of the hands of humans. It suggests that The Netherlands between differently programmed ver- the robot's personality can be used as a Tel: +31 40 27 47535 sions of iCat. Overall, the more extrovert means to increase the amount of control E-mail: [email protected] and sociable iCat was preferred to a that users perceive. more neutral personality. Albert van Breemen, Philips Research Conclusion Europe, The Netherlands Young and middle-aged adults were also The studies with iCat have shown that Tel: +31 40 27 47864 able to recognise differences in person- mechanically-rendered emotions and E-mail: [email protected]

The DECOS Tool-Chain: Model-Based Development of Distributed Embedded Safety-Critical Real-Time Systems

by Wolfgang Herzner, Bernhard Huber, György Csertan and Andras Balogh

'Smart systems' applications like adaptive cruise control or brake-by-wire, rely dependability of embedded applications on predictable and reliable embedded system platforms as infrastructure. For the in various application domains. development of such dependable applications, it is therefore of crucial interest 'Integrated' means, that several software to avoid faults during design and development. Besides intensive testing, an 'IP'-blocks (Intellectual Property) of dif- important way of minimising the risk of faults is by controlling the design and ferent criticality can be allocated to one development process, as well as maximising the coherence of the resulting system node (ECU – Electronic Control Unit) with the initial requirements. The model-based tool-chain developed by the DECOS without interfering with each other, ie, project is described. guaranteed encapsulation in space (memory) and time (each job has its Today, the development of embedded - approach implies at least increased hard- reserved time slot). and in particular safety-critical - systems ware costs, weight, and power consump- in general follows a customized design tion, last not least due to severely ham- DECOS presumes the existence of a core approach, resulting in rather isolated pering the sharing of resources like sen- architecture providing the core services: applications and little reuse of compo- sors among the different sub-systems. • deterministic and timely message nents and code across different applica- transport tion domains. For instance, in modern Therefore, the European project DECOS • fault tolerant clock synchronisation cars sub-systems like power-train con- aims at developing basic enabling tech- • strong fault isolation trol, advanced driver assistance systems nology for moving from federated to • consistent diagnosis of failing nodes. or the body electronic co-exist, each integrated distributed architectures in equipped with its own electronic hard- order to reduce development, validation Any core architecture providing these ware, communication cabling etc. This and maintenance costs, and increase the services (eg TTP/C, FlexRay, or Time-

22 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Triggered Ethernet) can be a basis for DECOS-based systems. On top of these core services, DECOS provides a set of architectural (or high-level) services: • virtual networks (VN) and gateways • an encapsulated execution environment (EEE) • diagnostics.

To minimize the dependency of application programming on a certain DECOS implementation, a Platform Interface layer (PIL) provides a techology invariant interface of the high level services for application tasks.

DECOS Tool-Chain A constituent element of such an enabling technology is a tool-chain, currently being developed by DECOS, which encompasses all embedded software design and development aspects, including configuration and testing. As illustrated in the figure, the DECOS tool- chain essentially consists of two vertical 'lanes': on the left side, the integrated system configuration is determined and middleware is generated, and on the right side the application functionality is developed. A third lane, containing tools for testing and verifying the various DECOS tool-chain basic steps. Boxes denote activities, and disk symbols denote data. (intermediate) results, is not shown. Grey elements address specification, yellow address design, green ones implementation, and the blue elements installation. The specification starts with the Platform Independent Models (PIMs) of the application sub-systems, defining their requirements with respect to communication (among the application tasks), performance, and dependability. Simulink models or modules written in (Hardware Specification Model), a meta conventional languages like C or Ada model which facilitates the validation PIMs serve two purposes: firstly, can be imported. After application code and reuse of resource models. together with the specification of the is generated from these models, the target cluster hardware and resources, results of both activities are integrated to Before generating the PSM, it is possible the Cluster Resource Description achieve the target executables, which to add information manually to the PIM (CRD), they are used to derive the can then be downloaded to the applica- (PIM marking), for example information Platform Specific Model (PSM), which tion cluster. on specific middleware requirements. contains allocation (of tasks to nodes) and other information relevant for the The purpose of the CRD (Cluster Jobs are assigned to nodes taking into successive steps. From PSM, configura- Resource Description) is to capture the account functional and non-functional tion files and schedules for both task characteristics of the platform relevant constraints. In the first phase of assign- execution and message transmission are for the software-hardware integration. ment, constraints are dealt with one by generated, as well as middleware like the This includes computational resources one. Since allocation is an NP-hard PIL. (CPU, memory), communication problem, in a second phase a multi-vari- resources and dependability properties. able optimisation approach is proposed. Secondly, PIMs are used to guide the A graphical domain-specific modeling development of jobs (ie application environment is developed, based on Scheduling is the next step, where a tool tasks), by modelling their behaviour with GME (Generic Modeling Environment). suite (TTplan, TTbuild) of TTTech (a SCADE (a tool set of Esterel The targeted modeling domain is DECOS partner developing time-trig- Technologies). If feasible, predefined described formally via the HSM gered systems) has been adapted to

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 23 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

handle resource restrictions and EEE is used for code generation. For linking development and validation of critical partitioning. Then, PIL is generated, pro- job code with PIL, so-called 'SCADE- 'smart' embedded applications. viding generic message transfer, global wrappers' are also generated. time service and membership service Links: (necessary to distribute information on The DECOS tool-chain comprises a http://www.smart-systems.at the state of nodes). wide variety of tools from model to http://www.decos.at deployment. To ease handling, a trans- For behaviour modelling, SCADE (by formation tool VIATRA, developed at Please contact: Esterel Technologies) has been chosen as Budapest University of Technology and Wolfgang Herzner, ARC Seibersdorf a primary tool for DECOS. SCADE is Economics, is used as backbone for research/AARIT, Austria based on a formally-defined data flow model transformations (from PIM to Tel: +43 50550 4132 notation. It offers strong typing, explicit PSM), PIL generation and domain-spe- E-mail: [email protected] initialisation, explicit time-management cific editors. Four tools are used for the and simple expression of concurrency. DECOS tool-chain: GME, VIATRA, Bernhard Huber, Vienna University of The PIMs are imported via the SCADE SCADE and TTplan/build; additionally, Technology, Austria, UML gateway, yielding empty job skele- commercial and target-platform specific E-mail: [email protected] tons with correct interfaces. Their tools are used for deployment (compila- behaviour is then directly modelled with tion, linking, download). This tool-chain György Csertan, Andras Balogh, Budapest SCADE, or Simulink models are imported is designed for efficient configuration, University of Technology and Economics to SCADE via another gateway. SCADE E-mail: {csertan, abalogh}@mit.bme.hu

Ambient Hardware: Embedded Architectures on Demand

by Kjetil Svarstad

Imagine you are at the airport, your flight is indefinitely delayed, you are bored, platform where small computers (tags) and your PDA-based chess program offers you no real challenge. Luckily, you in the environment are able to recon- have a machine description of the most powerful chess machine architecture figure themselves in order to fulfill the (like IBM's Deep Blue) available on your PDA which you download to the nearest combined hardware-software require- AHEAD-tag server, and then you can play Grand Master-level chess on the tag ments of a given task. The underlying with your PDA as client until your flight is finally called. architecture is tag computers equipped with reconfigurable coprocessors in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is consid- • Ambient Intelligence, the disap- terms of FPGAs. Physically the tag com- ered the next huge leap in computer and pearing computers being able to computer is also implemented on the FPGA, information technology. One research municate and in concert solve prob- and it reconfigures itself as the require- project in this area, 'Ambiesense', used lems in new ways. ments change as a result of clients and small computational tags serving mobile • Reconfigurable hardware, FPGA their tasks entering and leaving the clients with information and computa- (Field-Programmable Gate Array, a activity zone of the tag. tion via wireless services. Our project, type of logic chip that can be pro- AHEAD, integrates the concept of grammed), closing the gap between Although research projects and results reconfigurable electronics with the com- hardware and software, making func- abound in the areas of Ambient putational tags, enabling mobile clients tionality truly mobile between Intelligence and Reconfigurable to hold actual configuration data and machine and program. Computing, our objectives in AHEAD reconfigure the tags on demand through were best solved through practical a wireless service. In the AmI perspective computers will experiments to show which of our ideas be tightly embedded in the surrounding were sound, subsequently forming the The main idea of AHEAD - Ambient environment and the computational tasks underlying theories when we know Hardware: Embedded Architectures on and services adaptable to any and many specifically which architectures and Demand - is the combination of three different situations and thus architec- solutions are the most promising. technological evolutions: tures. Our project hypothesis extends Presently we are still in the experimental • Hardware or computational machines this view of embedding the hardware and stage of the project. becoming smaller and disappearing adapting the software into adaptable and into the surroundings. movable hardware, what we have chosen Our first objective was to choose a good to call 'Ambient Hardware'. This is a FPGA platform for our laboratory exper-

24 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

iments. We tested and evaluated several development boards for different FPGAs. However, the flexibility of reconfiguration was a limitation on most of them. In the end we chose a very simple and available FPGA board, the so-called 'Suzaku system', which was small and allowed us the flexibility of reconfiguration that we required. This system is really a Single Board Computer in an FPGA with an external flash memory for reconfiguration data and some communication controllers for LAN and serial line I/O. Media streaming execution. We are now at version 1.0 of our project roadmap. This is the first major version where the tags are independent of any development PCs or external computers. load new configurations either directly distribution over the net, but the com- The tag is now completely embedded on from itself or from any networked server plexity of decoding them is too the Suzaku board where the Xilinx holding properly defined system config- demanding for low performance and Spartan FPGA is configured with a urations. limited power devices such as PDAs and Microblaze CPU and devices for running Smartphones. The tag recodes the stream a Linux operating system variant. In order to test version 1.0 of the for less performance and power in Additionally, the tags are independent in AHEAD tag, we are currently devel- decoding, but the format will demand a the sense that they can reconfigure them- oping a demonstrator for MPEG re- higher bandwidth. This demand, how- selves. A simple web server is running coding and re-scaling. The objective is to ever, is not a problem since the tag and on the tag and, through a specific inter- configure the tag for receiving massively the client are very close and higher band- face, clients may download new configu- encoded media streams such as the widths are possible even with low rations for the FPGA, then the tag will MPEG4 format and to decode the power. We expect to test this tag-based reconfigure itself and come alive again stream, downscale it for a small screen recoder version of AHEAD by the end of with the basic CPU + Linux configura- low-resolution viewer such as a PDA or this year. tion plus the newly configured hardware a Smartphone and recode the stream in a architecture and the interconnections more easily decoded MPEG format (see Please contact: between these sub-systems. The web illustration). MPEG4-streams are of Kjetil Svarstad, NTNU, Norway server interface enables a client to down- course well suited to limited bandwidth E-mail: [email protected]

System-Level Design of Fault-Tolerant Embedded Systems by Alain Girault

Fault-tolerance is the ability of a system to maintain its functionality, even in the Also shown is a table giving the worst- presence of faults. With the advent of ubiquitous computing and distributed case execution time of each operation embedded systems, it is becoming an aspect more and more crucial. We have onto each processor and the worst-case provided new functionalities to the SynDEx system-level CAD software. SynDEx transmission time of each data-depen- is ideal for optimising distributed real-time embedded systems and our new dence onto each communication link. functionalities allow us to guarantee a specified fault-tolerance level for the The architecture being a priori heteroge- generated embeddable code. neous, these need not be identical. Below is an example of such a table for the Our contribution to research in the fault- ALG describing the algorithm of the operations of ALG. The infinity sign tolerant embedded systems consists of application and a graph ARC describing expresses the fact that the operation I several scheduling/distribution heuris- the target distributed architecture (see cannot be executed by the processor P3, tics. Their common feature is to take as figure). for instance, to account for the require- an input two graphs: a data-flow graph ment of certain dedicated hardware.

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 25 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

From these three inputs, the heuristic distributes the operations of ALG onto the processors of ARC and schedules them statically, together with the communications induced by these scheduling decisions. The output of the heuristic is therefore a static schedule from which embeddable code can be generated.

Our fault hypothesis is that the hardware components are fail silent, meaning that a component is either healthy and works fine, or is faulty and produces no output at all. Recent studies on modern hardware architectures have shown that a fail-silent behaviour can be achieved at a reasonable cost, so our fault hypothesis is reasonable.

Our contribution consists of the definition of several new scheduling/distribution heuristics in order to generate static schedules that are also tolerant of a fixed number of hardware components (processors and/or communication links) faults. They are implemented inside To the left is an example of an algorithm graph: it has nine operations (represented by SynDEx, as an alternative to its own circles) and 11 data-dependences (represented by green arrows). Among the default heuristics (called DSH: operations, one is a sensor operation (I), one is an actuator operation (O), while the Distribution Scheduling Heuristic): seven others are computations (A to G). Below to the right is an example of an architecture graph: it has three processors (P1, P2, and P3) and three point-to-point • FTBAR (Fault-Tolerant Based Active communication links (L1.2, L1.3, and L2.3). Replication) generates a static schedule that tolerates Npf processor • GRT + eDSH (Graph Redundancy fail simultaneously. Our method faults by replicating actively all the Transformation + extended Distribution involves two steps. First, for each fault operations of the algorithm graph Scheduling Heuristic) generates a pattern, we generate the corresponding ALG exactly Npf+1 times. It works static schedule that tolerates Npf pro- reduced architecture (the architecture with target architectures having either cessor faults and Nlf communication from which the pattern's component point-to-point communication links or link faults. It first transforms the algo- has been removed) and we generate a buses, but assumes that all the commu- rithm graph ALG into another data- static schedule of ALG onto this nication links are reliable. FTBAR flow graph ALG* by adding redun- reduced architecture (we use the basic tries to minimise the critical path of the dancy into it such that the required DSH heuristic of SYnDEx for this). obtained schedule w.r.t. the known number of hardware component faults From N fault patterns we therefore WCETs of the operations onto the var- will be tolerated. During this phase, it obtain N basic schedules. The second ious processors of the architecture. also generates exclusion relations step consists of the merging of these N • RBSA (Reliable Bicriteria Scheduling between subsets of operations that basic schedules into one static Algorithm) also generates a reliable must be scheduled onto distinct proces- schedule that will be, by construction, and static schedule by actively repli- sors, and subsets of data dependences tolerant to all the specified fault pat- cating the operations of the algorithm that must be routed through disjoint terns. graph. The difference with FTBAR is paths. Then it uses an extended version that the number of times an operation of the DSH heuristics to generate a Links: is replicated depends on the individual static schedule of ALG* onto ARC, Fault-tolerance: reliability of the processors it is sched- w.r.t. the exclusion relations generated http://pop-art.inrialpes.fr/~girault/Projets/FT/ uled on and on the overall reliability during the first phase. SynDEx: http://www.syndex.org level required by the user. RBSA tries • FPMH (Fault Patterns Merging both to minimise the critical path of Heuristic) is an original approach to Please contact: the obtained schedule and to maximise generate a static schedule of ALG onto Alain Girault, INRIA Rhône-Alpes its reliability (these are the two criteria ARC, tolerant to a given list of fault Tel: +33 476 61 53 51 of this heuristic). patterns. A fault pattern is a subset of E-mail: [email protected] the architecture's component that can

26 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

New Tool to Design the Behaviour of Embedded Systems by Jan Friso Groote

Can a car drive faster than the speed limit the cruise control indicates? Are At Eindhoven University of Technology, computerised protocols between planes and air traffic control safe? in close cooperation with CWI in Communication between software components in cars, planes and other intelligent Amsterdam, we are developing a mathe- embedded systems is often very complex and prone to errors. The Design and matical methodology accompanied with Analysis of Systems group at Eindhoven University of Technology is releasing tools to model and analyse the (discrete) a new toolset, mCRL2, to improve the quality of embedded system design. behaviour of embedded systems. The method is called mCRL2, where CRL An embedded system can roughly be sible that it orders twice the amount stands for Common Representation described as some piece of equipment needed due to message duplication? Language. The methodology is based on with one or more computer processors in process algebra, extended with data it. The processor allows this equipment The major challenge to answering such types. The method has been applied to to behave with an amazing level of intel- questions is the 'state space explosion'. almost all major embedded system ligence. Copiers order their own paper Even relatively simple behavioural industries within the Netherlands. and cars actively avoid accidents. The end of this is not in sight. The behaviour of such systems will become far more advanced than it is today.

The downside of this is that the behaviour of systems becomes so complex that we cannot easily understand it anymore. As a consequence, most features of contemporary equipment remain unused. But it is even worse. Because the system components are exhibiting more and more complex behaviour, they do not always understand each other. The consequence is that intelligent systems often behave erraticly. For modern TV sets a 'misunderstanding' between the components occurs every minute in each television. Much effort goes into building internal firewalls to restrain . these flaws so they are not noticed by e / U T

: e those watching TV. r u t c i P Now that the behaviour of systems is State spaces, visualized by the mCRL2 toolset. becoming so complex, it has become an important research topic. Just as in other engineering disciplines, complexity is tackled by making models. These behavioural models describe the potential behaviour of the system, ie which models give rise to millions of states. In Furthermore, it is being taught at several interactions can take place when. order to show that a system behaves cor- universities. Typical examples are sending messages, rectly, all these states must be investi- pressing buttons, activating actuators gated. It goes without saying that anal- The major idea underlying the method- and reading sensors. Questions that must ysis tools are essential here. It is impos- ology is to transform each model to a be answered are: are all messages prop- sible to carry out the analysis of an normal form, a so called linear process. erly processed; can a car ever be industrial behavioural model by hand, Due to its simple structure, a linear pro- instructed to drive faster than the speed but manual manipulation and human cess is very amenable to symbolic limit of the cruise control; does a copier insight is also essential to reduce it to a manipulation and simplification. For always order paper in time or is it pos- manageable size. instance, by detecting confluent

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 27 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

behaviour in a linear process, the associ- an insight into the behaviour of commercial use. A preliminary version ated state space is often exponentially embedded systems. These techniques of the toolset can be found at smaller than without the use of conflu- have been used more than once to detect www.mcrl2.org. A full first release is ence. Experience has shown that all symmetric or erroneous behaviour. They expected in the autumn of 2006 and will models can straightforwardly be trans- have also been very helpful in under- be available for Linux, Mac OS X and lated to linear form. Unfortunately, not standing the extent of problematic Windows. It will contain all available every form of analysis can be carried out behaviour compared with the overall modelling, analysis and visualisation on linear processes. For this state behaviour. tools. automata are needed, but these can not always be generated. The tools and techniques are being Please contact: developed in the scientific domain. This Jan Friso Groote, Eindhoven University of Besides the analysis tools, the toolset not only means that the ideas and tech- Technology, The Netherlands comes with several visualisation tools. In nologies being used are published within Tel: +31 40 2475003 particular, tools that can visualise the the scientific community (as is E-mail: [email protected] structure of state spaces of up to a mil- common), but also that the tools are an http://www.win.tue.nl/~jfg lion states are very helpful in obtaining open source, free for both scientific and

Reactive Processing for Reactive Systems

by Reinhard von Hanxleden, Xin Li, Partha Roop, Zoran Salcic and Li Hsien Yoong

Embedded real-time systems must react continuously to stimuli from their Recently, another alternative for synthe- environment. Therefore, their control-flow patterns differ from those of traditional sising Esterel has emerged, the reactive systems that transform a given input to an output at their own pace. Reactive processing approach. Here, the Esterel processors provide direct hardware support for reactive control flow, which keeps program is running on a processor that executables fast and compact and results in lower power consumption compared has been developed specifically for reac- to traditional architectures. tive systems. The instruction set of these reactive processors closely resembles the Many embedded systems belong to the To address these difficulties, the syn- constructs found in Esterel, such as class of reactive systems, which continu- chronous language Esterel has been waiting for the occurrence of a signal or ously react to inputs from the environ- developed to express reactive control abortion. A comparison highlighting the ment by generating corresponding out- flow patterns in a concise manner, with a main philosophical differences between puts. The programming of reactive sys- clear semantics that imposes determin- reactive processors and conventional tems typically requires the use of non- istic program behaviour under all cir- processors is outlined in Table 1. standard control flow constructs, such as cumstances. There are different options concurrency and exception handling. to synthesise an Esterel program into a The intention of reactive processors is to Most programming languages, including concrete system. In the software syn- unite the pros of both the software and languages such as C and Java that are thesis approach, the Esterel program is hardware synthesis approach while commonly used in embedded systems, translated by an Esterel compiler into a C avoiding most of the cons of both. We either do not support these constructs at program, which in turn runs on a COTS get from the software synthesis approach all, or their use induces non-determin- processor. Esterel can also be synthe- the easy programming process with istic program behaviour, regarding both sised directly into hardware, via some inexpensive testing and short turnaround functionality and timing. Furthermore, hardware description language such as times. From the hardware side, we gain the concurrent behaviour of reactive pro- VHDL. As a hybrid approach, Esterel low energy consumption and fast programs is typically very fine-grained. can also be used in HW/SW co-design. gram execution. The synchronous model Measurements indicate that it is not However, these classical synthesis of computation inherent in Esterel uncommon to have a context switch approaches suffer from the limitations of ensures deterministic behaviour. after, on average, fewer than five instruc- traditional processors, with their instructions. This makes traditional context tion-set architectures geared towards the Two strategies have been proposed to switch mechanisms, based on an oper- sequential von-Neumann execution design reactive processors, which ating system that consumes thousands of model, or they are very inflexible if HW mainly differ in the way they handle con- instructions per context switch, imprac- synthesis is involved. currency. Since Esterel is a synchronous tical. language, the operation of all concurrent

28 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

threads is based on the ticks of a single determine signal statuses. Both provide a constant logical tick rate and global clock. The principal challenge is approaches have their advantages and also detects internal timing over-runs. to schedule concurrent threads so that limitations. However, overall they per- This can serve to detect hardware fail- within a logical tick, event producers are form much better than conventional pro- ures and provides another safeguard, in executed before event consumers. The cessors while performing reactive com- addition to static analyses, so that real- EMPEROR processor, developed at the putations. time deadlines are met. University of Auckland, New Zealand, employs multi-processing and uses Apart from efficiency and determinism FPGA-based implementations of reac- dynamic scheduling of events. This concerns, another advantage of reactive tive processors have proved very com- allows it to handle many threads running processors is that due to their compara- petitive to classical processor designs. on a cyclic executive on a given pro- tively simple structure (no caches, no For a standard suite of Esterel bench- cessor or between concurrent threads pipelining) and their direct implementa- marks the code size is typically an order running on different processors. The tion of reactive control flow constructs, of magnitude smaller than that of the Kiel Esterel Processor (KEP) family, it becomes feasible to precisely charac- MicroBlaze, a 32-bit COTS RISC processor core. The worst case reaction time is typically improved four-fold and energy consumption is also typically Features Reactive Processors Conventional Processors reduced to a quarter.

In the five years since its inception, the Evolves in discrete Evolves continuously. reactive processing approach has thus Execution progression instants separated by “tick demonstrated its promise and its practi- delimiting instructions”. cality. However, much remains to be done. On the theoretical side, a precise characterisation of the reactive execution Accomplished through Accomplished through semantics is still missing and its relation- event reaction block with interrupt mechanism ship to other semantics needs to be Preemption implicit priority resolution requiring explicit priority investigated, in particular regarding and context switching in resolution, context saving causality issues. The reactive instruction hardware. and restoration in set architectures also pose interesting software. compiler challenges, for example, regarding the efficient mapping of con- Changes at discrete Changes continuously. currency with minimal context instants. Inputs are latched Inputs can be read at any switching. Finally, the derivation of View of the environment at the beginning and time, and outputs can be WCRT bounds is so far done very con- outputs are sustained till sustained for any duration. servatively - it should be feasible to the end of a “tick”. tighten these analyses further.

Synchronous parallel Asynchronous execution Links: execution and broadcast requiring explicit message http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/rtsys/kep Concurrency communication between passing/rendezvous for http://www.ece.auckland.ac.nz/~roop/page threads. communication between Gen.php?pageid=10 threads. Please contact: Table 1: Comparison between reactive and conventional processors. Reinhard von Hanxleden, Christian- Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany Tel: +49 431 880 7281 E-mail: [email protected]

Partha Roop, University of Auckland, New developed at Kiel University, Germany, terise their timing behaviour. In conjunc- Zealand handles concurrency via multi- tion with the synchronous model of com- Tel: +64 9 3737599 threading, which minimises overall putation, which discretises time into log- E-mail: [email protected] resource usage and easily scales up to ical ticks, it is possible to derive exact, very high degrees of concurrency. tight bounds on its Worst Case Reaction Unlike the dynamic self-scheduling of Time (WCRT), which tells how much threads in the EMPEROR approach, the time it takes the system to react to the KEP approach schedules all producers environment. The KEP processor series before consumer threads to uniquely is equipped with a Tick Manager that can

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 29 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

TPC: Tagged Procedure Calls

by Konstantinos Kapelonis, Sven Karsson, and Angelos Bilas

Tagged Procedure Calls (TPC) is a new approach addressing the problem of the Tags placed on procedure calls by the high programmer effort needed to achieve scalable execution. TPC is targeted at programmer define an abstract represen- architectures ranging from small embedded systems to large-scale multi-core tation of the required execution seman- processors and provides an efficient programming model easy to understand tics, see Figure 1. The programmer (a) and exploit. has to identify the available parallelism, (b) is urged to identify the data used A huge opportunity and challenge we • TPC require the programmer to during parallel computations and (c) has face today is the design of embedded specify parallelism through special, to specify how parts of the code will exe- systems that will support demanding tagged, asynchronous procedure calls. cute, eg as atomic or serializable regions. application domains. Current technology TPC also provide primitives that block However, they need not worry about trends in building such embedded sys- execution until certain procedure calls how this will be achieved. Finally, TPC tems advocate the use of parallel systems have completed, see Figure 1. aim at unifying intra- and inter-processor with (i) multi-core processors and (ii) • TPC discourage the programmer from programming models and dealing with tightly-coupled interconnects. However, accessing global data within tagged the inherent heterogeneity of future exploiting parallelism has traditionally procedures. embedded systems in a simple and intu- resulted in significant programmer • TPC allow the programmer to use itive manner. effort. The programming model plays an pointers to global data as arguments to important role in reducing this effort. procedures. TPC encourage the programmer to The main challenges in the programming specify parallelism and data used during model are to expose mechanisms that /* Function with OUT argument */ parallel execution, but do not expose the need to be used directly by the pro- void procedure(...){ underlying mechanisms for communica- grammer and to hide mechanisms that ... tion, synchronization, etc. We believe } can be used transparently. void main() that this balance between what the pro- { grammer needs to specify and what can It is predicted that multi-core processors /* Define a handle for function */ be done transparently will result in both TPC:DECL(hdl,procedure) will use the increasing number of transis- ... efficient execution and reduced pro- tors more efficiently than traditional /* call asynchronously procedure() grammer effort on future embedded sys- single-core processors and offer higher * it changes argument s */ tems. TPC:CALL(hdl,procedure,s) c,i performance. However, multi-core pro- /* Continue execution */ cessors require a large degree of paral- ... Our current work focuses on a prototype lelism that has traditionally demanded /* Use handle hdl to wait for implementation of TPC on an embedded * procedure() to complete */ additional programming effort. There is TPC:WAIT(hdl) platform. We are using an FPGA-proto- a need for an intuitive programming /* s can now be accessed */ type (see Figure 2) with multiple cores. model for multi-core processors. ... Using this implementation platform, we } are currently experimenting with the Moreover, future interconnects will play Figure 1: TPC example. Calling a function semantics of TPC. We are porting a an important role in such systems as they with consistency (c) and isolation (i) tags. number of existing parallel applications. interconnect all the cores in a system. To This effort will allow us to examine the be efficient, the programming model cost introduced by the runtime system must facilitate efficient use of the inter- when transparently dealing with commu- connect. nication and synchronization issues.

Tagged procedure calls (TPC), are a new This work has been partially supported programming model that re-draws the by the European Commission in the con- balance between what the programmer text of the SARC project. needs to specify and what the architecture should provide. Furthermore, TPC Please contact: aim at unifying intra- and inter-chip pro- Angelos Bilas, FORTH-ICS and University gramming abstractions. Informally, the of Crete, Greece main points behind TPC are: E-mail: [email protected] • TPC allow the programmer to aug- http://www.ics.forth.gr/~bilas/ ment procedure declarations and calls Figure 2. Current prototyping platform at with tags that control the way these FORTH-ICS. The depicted architecture is procedures will be executed. implemented using a Xilinx XUP board.

30 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

A European Ambient Intelligence Research Facility at FORTH - ICS by Constantine Stephanidis

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) presents a vision of tomorrow where 'intelligent' towards the European strategic priority environments react in an attentive, adaptive and active (sometimes proactive) way for "an Information Society that is inclu- to the presence and activities of humans and objects in order to provide appropriate sive, provides high-quality public ser- services to the inhabitants of these environments. It is an emerging field of research vices and promotes quality of life", while and development that is rapidly gaining wide attention from an increasing number also promoting synergies and knowledge of researchers and practitioners worldwide, particularly in Europe. diffusion in the context of relevant European research projects and actions. Ambient Intelligence technologies inte- towards an overall intelligent computing grate sensing capabilities, processing environment. The creation of this facility builds on the power, reasoning mechanisms, net- scientific know-how and technical working facilities, applications and ser- From a technological point of view, expertise of FORTH-ICS in a number of vices, digital content and actuating capa- Ambient Intelligence is a particularly contributing critical domains such as bilities distributed in the surrounding complex, multi-faceted and demanding Human-Computer Interaction, Universal environment. While a wide variety of scientific domain, requiring the presence Access, Artificial Intelligence, different technologies is involved, the and seamless integration of most of the Semantic-based Knowledge Systems, goal of Ambient Intelligence is to either key technologies existing today, thus Robotics, Computational Vision, entirely hide their presence from users or posing numerous challenges in several Networks and Telecommunications, to smoothly integrate them in their sur- research areas and requiring large scale Information Security, Distributed roundings as enhanced environment arti- experimentation. Systems, Computer architecture, facts rather than technological gadgets. Microelectronics, Sensors and This way, the computing-oriented con- The Institute of Computer Science (ICS) Biomedical Informatics. All notation of technology essentially fades of FORTH is in the process of creating a Laboratories of FORTH-ICS are actively out or even disappears in the environ- large-scale, state-of-the-art Ambient engaged in this effort, and collaborations ment, providing seamless and unobtru- Intelligence European Facility, which are promoted with other FORTH sive interaction paradigms. Therefore, will act as a research nexus for studying Institutes, as well as other organisations people and their social situation, ranging and developing, from a human-centred within and beyond ERCIM. from individuals to groups, be they work perspective, related technologies and for groups, families or friends and their cor- assessing their impact on the individual, In the context of promoting research in responding environments (office build- as well as on society as a whole. the domain of AmI, FORTH-ICS has ings, homes, public spaces, etc) are at the played a key role in the establishment of centre of the design considerations. Starting with the creation of an intelli- the new ERCIM working group: 'Smart gent home simulator, the AmI facility Environments and Systems for Ambient Ambient Intelligence brings a special will be expanded to address specific Intelligence'. The AmI Facility of perspective to the on-going research indoor and outdoor environments, rele- FORTH-ICS will promote and support associated with technical fields like vant application domains (eg housing, active collaboration and synergies ubiquitous computing, pervasive and work, health, security, education, trans- among the members of this ERCIM proactive computing, ambient com- portation and entertainment), as well as working group, by offering a technolog- puting, embedded computing, and smart their related physical, social and cultural ical platform and an experimental objects. Ambient Intelligence has characteristics. testbed for research and development become well-focused by putting people activities. and social contexts at the centre, while at The AmI Facility will also provide a the same time aiming to distribute, showcase for demonstrating the potential Links: embed, coordinate and interactively added-value and benefits of AmI tech- SESAMI Working Group: deliver computing intelligence within nologies in different aspects of everyday http://www.ics.forth.gr/sesami/ the surrounding environment. The life and activities. In this way, the AmI ICS-FORTH Ambient Intelligence notion of Ambient Intelligence, as Facility will foster the vision of Ambient Programme: http://www.ics.forth.gr/ami described above, is becoming a de facto Intelligence, facilitate multi-disciplinary key dimension of the emerging international collaborations and provide Please contact: Information Society, since many of the a focal point for technology transfer and Constantine Stephanidis, FORTH-ICS, new generation industrial digital prod- dissemination of know-how to European Greece ucts and services are clearly shifted industry, adding to its competitive Tel: +30 2810 391741 advantage. It will also contribute E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 31 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Ecological Approach to Smart Environments

by Veikko Ikonen

The project EASE (Ecological Approach to Smart Environments) aims to offer nological aspects as well as social, eth- more profound analysis and research-based evidence to support the design of ical and cultural issues. smart environments. Furthermore, the aim is to analyse the design issues related to the smart environments and offer some general guidelines for the With EASE, we have brought together design of smart environments in different application areas. participants from different fields in designing computerised smart environ- The technological shift of computing, Even though research in the area of tech- ments and especially those who deal including applications and services nologically-embedded intelligent envi- with human technology interaction in directed to two dimensions, embedded- ronments is expanding very fast, the this research area. The aim of the project ness and mobility, has already changed a development of design approaches, other is to identify, model and evaluate the lot about our relationship to our environ- than technology-driven ones, is still in its ecology of an intelligent environment ment (both social and technological). early stage. The methodologies com- from the perspectives of human, techno- monly used in designing and evaluating logical, environmental and different Technology has always been embedded information and communication tech- design methodologies. We are speci- in our living environment in some way. nologies have been quite goal-oriented, fying the attributes and characteristics of The technological infrastructure has but new approaches and methods have good smart environments as well as been fading from our sight as tech- been introduced and tested along the identifying and developing suitable nology has reached a more mature way. Design principles for intelligent methods for the design, implementation status. In the electronic and computer environments have been published, but and introduction of technologically- era the wires, base stations and servers in these statements the technological enhanced smart environments. The par- are usually hidden and we see only our issues are also emphasised to a greater ticipants make up an interdisciplinary personal technical appliances. However, extent. More profound co-operation team, which is vital in order to attain the embeddedness of technology is now shifting from particular, computer-situated spaces, towards a computers-everywhere philosophy. The idea that we have a place where our interaction with our environment is supported by computers is changing. Soon we will have technological components (communicating with each other) everywhere, out of our sight, obtaining and utilising . a information gathered from the environ- l r a J

i t t ment. r e P

y b

n o i t a r t

The increasing mobility of information s u l l and communication technologies has I also changed our relationship with our environment. With mobile computers we can carry lots of data with us (eg books, music and photos), but at the same time we can also create new expressions of ourselves and share this information Training with smart technologies. with others. This connection to the global network enables continuous information-sharing and communication in various ways. When these two dimen- between different designers, developers truly holistic knowledge of the phe- sions work together, when the person and researchers is needed in order to put nomena. The project pools the knowl- with mobile technology interacts with forward new theories and methodologies edge that research partners have accu- the situated smart environment, we are that will help to develop solutions that mulated in other projects. Our aim is to approaching the area of ubiquitous (or naturally support people in their living cultivate this know-how and to develop pervasive) computing, also called environment and take into account both and present it in a more general manner ambient intelligence. the complexity of the systems and tech- for designing future smart environments.

32 ERCIM News No. 66, July 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Ecology is defined by EASE as research again and give control over his comput- evaluate the concept is in the real-life of the dynamic interaction system erised environment back to the user. longitude studies and follow-up studies. between environment (eg technology in general) and people, in any relation to The technical development and consid- The timeframe of the project is January this technologically augmented environ- eration of technological issues of smart 2005 to December 2006 and it is funded ment. Users' actions with the smart environments is going to be a huge job through the Finnish Funding Agency for applications shape the environment, and for our global society. Equally important Technology and Innovation (Tekes), the smart environments produce effects is to consider cultural (including social VTT (Technical Research Centre of on the users and the usage which may and ethical) issues related to the techno- Finland) and TTL (Finnish Institute of even be reflected outside the actual logical progress of future computerised Occupational Health). Other project usage environment. The practise of this environments. User involvement and partners are the University of Lapland, dynamic relationship is in continuous contextual studies of human technology- Tampere University of Technology, transition although it seeks stability. interaction in general are going to be a University of Tampere, University of largely accepted curriculum of society in Oulu, Helsinki University of Future computerised smart environ- the near future. The great challenge is to Technology and University of Art and ments are a challenging design target. maintain a holistic or ecological Design Helsinki. The project is coordi- This issue is especially tricky when approach as a part of this curriculum, due nated by VTT. The steering group of the designing public places and multi-user to its multi-disciplinary nature. project consists of a wide range of enter- environments. Private or semi-private prises and organizations. spaces (ie, work, car, home) can be We want to test our approach in multi- adjusted more easily according to indi- faceted environments where contexts are Link: vidual users or a certain user group. It is overlaid, interruptions in simultaneous http://www.vtt.fi/proj/ease/ also easier to compose common rules tasks are more regulation than exception and regulations for workplaces than for and where various user groups, with dif- Please contact: public spaces, for example. One of the ferent skills and technologies, want to Veikko Ikonen great challenges and opportunities would accomplish their primary and secondary VTT - Technical Research Center of Finland be to integrate the designer and the user goals. Usually, the only valid way to Tel: +358 20 722 3351 E-mail: [email protected]

Ambiance: A Platform for Macroprogramming Personalised Ambient Services by Reza Razavi

A key enabling technology for Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is Wireless Sensor oping a platform which supports macro- Networks (WSNs). Macroprogramming WSNs by non-programmer end-users is programming by non-professional pro- being studied as a step towards an omnipresent World Wide Web interface for grammers. Our aim is to minimise the the provision of personalised ambient services. required programming knowledge, empowering ordinary users to interact A key enabling technology for AmI is to mix serious concerns, such as quality with the network so that they can intu- networks of large numbers of wirelessly- of service requirements, with low-level itively formulate the expected services. connected small, low-powered com- concerns like resource management, Our architecture also supports an open, puters. Such a system is called a synchronisation and routing. This makes concurrent system – requests may come Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and developing software for WSNs a costly in asynchronously from uncoordinated each node, a mote. WSNs can serve as an and error-prone endeavour, even for end-users. They are formulated using an infrastructure for the provision of per- expert programmers. intuitive and omnipresent World Wide sonalised ambient services. However, Web interface. They are served ubiqui- WSNs face very limited processing, Macroprogramming is a new technique tously and in parallel. memory, sensing, actuation and commu- which is being developed with the aim of nication ability of their motes. allowing programmers to capture the Architecture of the Ambiance Programming such networks means operation of the sensor network as a Platform those limitations need to be addressed. whole. To achieve the above goals, we are working on extending the Adaptive Unfortunately, current methods for In this research, we focus on simplifying Object-Model (AOM) architectural style WSN programming have led developers sensor network programming by devel- with Actor-based concurrent computa-

ERCIM News No. 66, July 2006 33 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

tion, communication, sensing and actu- Squeak. ARE exports service models ysis may trigger further data collection, ating. The resulting platform, called in XML to the Transformation sub- or reuse already collected data. The Ambiance, provides a meta-level archi- system (see below). It also sends exe- system being developed also provides a tecture to automatically translate high- cution requests to the Deployment type system for a partial semantic check, level specifications of global behaviour subsystem and receives from it the to ensure that queries are well-formed, by end-users into both meta-objects and execution result. On reception, the so that for example, a query does not meta-actors. These control and cus- latter is communicated to the APE (for result in a graph of node invocations tomise the runtime behaviour of passive formatting and presentation to the end- which is cyclic. and active application objects. users). 3.Transformation subsystem (ATE): Ongoing Work The meta-objects are dynamic. They implemented in VisualWorks This research is conducted within the have the capability to observe the appli- Smalltalk, is responsible for model framework of the Åmbiance project, cation objects and the environment transformation and verification. It funded by the University of (introspection) and to customise their allows service requests to be deployed Luxembourg, in collaboration with the own behaviour by analysing these obser- on different runtime environments. Open Systems Laboratory (OSL) and the vations (intercession). Behaviour models 4.Deployment subsystem (ADE): is Software Architecture Group (SAG) at and requested services are specified by responsible for executing models in an the University of Illinois at Urbana end-users, in their own terms, using a adaptive, distributed, and concurrent Champaign (UIUC-USA), as well as the sophisticated interface provided by environment. Computer Science Laboratory (LIP6) of Ambiance. Our architecture also allows the Pierre and Marie Curie University meta-objects to modify their behaviour For implementing this architecture we (Paris). in more fundamental ways if, for reuse the Dart meta-level object-oriented It draws on our previous real- isations Dart, AmItalk, and ActorNet. A first running prototype is implemented and we are finalising the systematic transformation of end-user queries to produce meta-actors and to dynamically manage their life-cycle. Such a lifecycle involves activation and registration, request management, application logic and result dissemination. A type system for Dart is being written in Figure 1: The Ambiance Platform supports macroprogramming WSNs by automated dynamic code Maude (http://maude.cs. generation and deployment. uiuc.edu). Once the core system is in place, we will work with experts in domains example, the meta-objects are endowed framework for task-specific, artifact and to which sensor networks are applicable, with learning mechanisms. activity-driven behaviour modeling. such as civil engineering, cooperative This framework offers the reifications target identification and tracking, envi- The architecture of the Ambiance plat- needed for (1) explicitly representing the ronment monitoring and security, to form comprises four subsystems (see ambient services and (2) automating the experimentally assess and refine the figure, from left to right): selection and deployment of an appro- Ambiance architecture. 1.Presentation subsystem (APE): the priate execution strategy, according to system's front-end. It is a web-enabled the service's resource consumptions and Links: application which is responsible for the actual execution environment http://ambiance.uni.lu/ the presentation and interaction with (Context-aware Computing). Each spec- http://osl.cs.uiuc.edu/ end-users. ification is translated into a group of http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/SAG 2.Representation subsystem (ARE): meta-actors which implement protocols offers to ordinary end-users an intu- to meet it. Please contact: itive, spreadsheet-like task-specific Reza Razavi, University of Luxembourg / language for commanding the system. These meta-actors control the concurrent FNR, Luxembourg Web pages sent to the APE are dynam- and distributed collection of data by E-mail: [email protected] ically generated by ARE, in HTML, actors in the nodes of a sensor network thanks to the Seaside framework and and analyse the data. Note that the anal-

34 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Towards a Platform for Widespread Embedded Intelligence by Simon Dobson, Steve Neely, Graeme Stevenson, Lorcan Coyle and Paddy Nixon

The vision of pervasive computing is that objects, buildings and environments extremely robust as it relies on very little may be endowed with software intelligence to improve human interactions both knowledge of the network's topology, with the individual objects and with the system as a whole. Realising this dream and makes very fair use of available is posing significant challenges for designers - allowing individual applications communications resources without gen- to co-exist in a common space without interfering, making the capabilities of new erating hot-spots at popular producers or sensors and services available to other applications as they appear and providing consumers. the necessary decentralised control to obtain robust behaviour. The goal of Construct is to provide a Any large-scale pervasive deployment semantic web, allowing easy integration simple framework for the community of will face a common core of issues. with other tools. Applications - both pervasive and adaptive systems devel- Decentralised control can be used to pro- clients' and sensors' - are written to query opers. The platform addresses decentral- vide coordinated behaviour in the face of and/or populate this model, which con- isation, robustness, fusion and other localised failures and a dynamic popula- siderably simplifies the design and problems at an infrastructural level, tion of devices. In many cases a knowl- deployment of new components. allowing the developer of an individual edge-based approach has proved to be sensor or service to focus on their own successful. This is something that is Noise and uncertainty are ubiquitous novel contribution. We have developed a especially important for sensor-driven characteristics of any sensor-driven number of sensors, including interfaces systems, which are inherently noisy and system, and Construct applies uncertain to the PlaceLab and Ubisense location incomplete and so must deal with sub- reasoning techniques to all its informa- systems and virtual sensors for a number stantial amounts of uncertain reasoning. tion. The system can maintain consensus of web sites, services and standard for- The systems must be self-configuring, - estimates of items of interest, modifying mats such as iCal. We are actively solic- managing and -optimising (the 'self-' its results and confidences over time. iting the help of others to improve the properties of autonomic computing and This means that the results from exces- platform, its services and algorithms. communications) as well as being exten- sively noisy or inaccurate sensors, which sible, standards-based, and upgradable would tend to disagree with the con- Construct is being licensed under LGPL. on-the-fly. Finally, systems must scale to sensus, will be de-emphasised over time, Our hope is that it will serve as a com- hundreds or thousands of devices while leading to a self-stabilising infrastruc- munity basis for rapid exploration and offering predictable and robust levels of ture. The disadvantage of this approach integration of new pervasive, adaptive service. is that all inferences are explicitly tagged and sensor-driven embedded intelli- with confidence values, which can com- gence. Within University College Dublin's plicate a programmer's task. Systems Research Group we have been This work is partially supported by looking at middleware solutions to these Pervasive systems suffer from frequent Science Foundation Ireland under grant issues, building both on our own experi- node failures, either from genuine faults numbers 04/RPI/1544, "Secure and ence with middleware and the other suc- or from devices being removed or deacti- Predictable Pervasive Computing" and cessful pervasive computing frame- vated. This causes problems for many 05/RFP/CMS0062, "Towards a works such as the Context Toolkit, infrastructures: where should data be Semantics of Pervasive Computing". Cooltown and Aura. The resulting stored so as to maximise availability? system - Construct - provides a scalable Construct answers this by having each Links: and open platform on which to build per- node store a copy of the public state of http://www.construct-infrastructure.org vasive and adaptive applications. the system, and gossiping this state ran- http://www.ucd.ie/csi domly between nodes. Any information Construct is unusual in a number of sensed at a node, for example, may be Please contact: ways. It is entirely data-driven, in that all placed into the public store and will be Steve Neely, University College Dublin / data is treated as being sensed either by a gossiped to another node. If the source IUA, Ireland traditional physical sensor, a 'virtual' then fails, its observations will have E-mail: [email protected] sensor accessing on-line information, or already been transferred to other nodes a reasoning strategy, making inferences and so need not be lost. Careful handling from other data. All information is repre- is required to ensure both the informa- sented internally using the Resource tion is not lost and that the public store Description Framework from the does not grow infinitely. Gossiping is

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 35 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Networking Semantic Services for Pervasive Computing

by Valerie Issarny, Nikolaos NetworkingGeorgantas and Semantic Sonia Ben Services Mokhtar for Pervasive Computing

With computing and communicationBy Valerie capabilities Issarny, Nikolaosnow embedded Georgantas in more and and Soniaservice Ben Mokhtarbehaviour protocols. A signifi- more physical objects in the surrounding environment and with most users cant enabler for dealing with these issues carrying wireless computing Withdevices, computing the pervasive and computing communication vision pioneered capabilities isnow the Semanticembedded Web in and more in particular and more the physical by Mark Weiser is being realisedobjects more of thanthe surrounding ever. Nevertheless, environment such an abundance and most usersSemantic carrying Web wireless Services computing paradigms, devices, the of ambient capabilities inpervasive the open, dynamiccomputing pervasive vision environmentpioneered by naturally Mark Weiserwhich is allow more description than ever ofbecoming service possible. comes with high heterogeneity,Nevertheless, which hinders such their abundance ad hoc integration of ambient into rich capabilitiessemantics in and the behaviour open, anddynamic rigorous pervasive pervasive applications. Withinenvironment the INRIA ARLES naturally team, comeswe are investigatingwith high heterogeneity, efficient reasoning which about hinders the former.their ad Tackling hoc integration solutions to pervasive heterogeneityinto rich pervasive building uponapplications. semantic Within service-oriented the INRIA bothARLES semantics team, andwe behaviourare investigating hetero- efficient architectures. solutions to pervasive heterogeneity building upon semanticgeneity inservice-oriented a combined way architectures. is still an open, challenging issue, further exacer- Various pervasive applicationsVarious may be pervasivecall for applicationscomputing paradigms may be that provisioned enable batedin today’s by the factnetworked that semantic environments. reasoning Figure 1 provided in today's networkedillustrates environ- exploitationloose, dynamic of the devicescoupling inamong the surroundings hetero- is toa createcompute-intensive smart spaces fortask, users. too In such an ments. Figure 1 illustrates exploitationenvironment, of thegeneous nomadic resources. user may Service-oriented in particular benefitdemanding from a large for the display wireless, that resource-is nearby to watch the networked devices to multimediacreate smart contentarchitectures provided (SOA) by a havelocal emerged media server, as an whileconstrained the content devices will ofautomatically the pervasive be switched spaces for users. In such an environment,to the user’s smartappropriate phone display computing as soon paradigmas other usersenvironment. get close to preserve the user’s privacy. This the nomadic user may, in particular,application ben- mayresolving further be a extendednumber of to heterogeneity share experience with others. For instance, assume that the user efit from a large display nearbyis actually to watch in a issues.holiday However, resort, watching pervasive an advertisementenviron- As for part available of the excursions.work of the Then, INRIA the user may multimedia content providedwill by to a localget feedbackments haveabout further the excursion, introduced whichnew chal- may beARLES obtained team, through on the blogs development maintained of by other media server. The content willnearby automati- visitors lengeson their for handheldsSOA both atand/or middleware the Internet. and distributedThe user maysystems even enabling will to the look perva- at alternative cally be switched to the user'sexcursions, smart whetherat application advertised layer. at nearby Regarding resorts, theat touristsive information computing vision, offices we or are even devising on the Internet. phone display as soon as otherActuator users getresourcesformer, like devices displays, need toand dynamically software resourcesenablers like for pervasiveblogs, multimedia services. Westreams and close, to preserve the user's privacy.advertisements This detecton the services Web, allavailable constitute in the networked open net- capabilitieshave, in particular, that may investigated conveniently interop be -composed application may further beto extended realize ato pervasiveworked application environment enabling and to interact a holiday with plannererability for nomadicenablers andusers. their integration share experiences with others. For instance, assume that the user is actually in a holiday resort, watching an adver- tisement for available excursions. The user may wish to get feedback about the excursion, which may be obtained through blogs supplied by other nearby visitors on their handhelds and/or the User detection Internet. The user may even wish to look at alternative excursions, whether advertised at nearby resorts, at tourist information offices or even on the Internet. Figure 1: Integrating resources in user-centric smart spaces. Actuator resources such as displays and Figure 1. Integrating resources in user-centric smart spaces software resources such as blogs, multimedia streams and advertisementsPervasive on the computingthem. This environmentsrequires enabling as interoper-the one exemplifiedwithin the base above SOA embed architectural networked style. devices, Web, all constitute networkedpossibly capabili- wireless,ability from of bothvarious discovery application and communi- domains, e.g.,The mobileresulting and SOA personal style for computing, pervasive consumer ties that may conveniently beelectronics, combined andcation home protocols, automation as servicesdomains. are This imple- diversitycomputing of devices offers along two withkey functionali-the ones of networks to dynamically create a pervasiveand of appli- softwaremented infrastructures on top of diversecall for middlewarecomputing paradigmsties, each that one enable vertically loose, integrating dynamic coupling cation providing a holidayamong planner heterogeneous for platforms resources. (eg, UPnP Service-oriented used in the home architecturesrelated advanced (SOA) havefeatures emerged in the middle-as a well-serving nomadic users. such paradigm andresolving Jini ina numberthe mobile of heterogeneity domain). issues.ware and However, in the applicationpervasive environmentslayer, as have further introducedRegarding new challenges the latter, applicationsfor SOA both need at to middlewaredepicted inand Figure at application 2. First, semantic-rich layer. Regarding the Pervasive computing environments,former, deviceslike compose, need to dynamicallyin an ad hoc fashion,detect services services availableinteroperable in the serviceopen networked discovery enablesenvironment and the one shown above, embedto networkedinteract withavailable them. This at the requires specific enablingtime and place,interoperabilitythe locating of both of discoverynetworked and services communication devices, possibly wireless, fromprotocols, various as serviceswhich haveare implemented been developed on top indepen- of diverseaccording middleware to their platforms semantic (e.g., descriptions. UPnP used in the application domains, eg, mobilehome and and per- Jini indently the mobilewithout domain). a priori mutualRegarding knowl- the latter,In the applications middleware need layer, to discoverycompose in is an ad hoc sonal computing, consumerfashion electronics, servicesedge. available The major at the challenges specific are time enabling and place,achieved, which despitehave been the possibledeveloped coexis- independently and home automation domains.without This a prioricommon mutual understandingknowledge. Major and adaptation challenges tenceconcern of various enabling discovery common protocols, understanding by and diversity of devices, along withadaptation those of of theof thesemantics semantics of ofthe the services services beingbeing associated,interworking and between interoperability them, which between fur- service networks and of software infrastructures,behavior protocols.associated A significant and interoperability enabler for between dealing withther includesthese issues middleware is the Semantic data type Web and in particular the Semantic Web Services paradigms, which allow description of service semantics and behavior and rigorous reasoning about the former. Tackling both semantics and behavior 36 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

over the last decade. In particular, various supporting software infrastructures have been proposed, some enabling semantic awareness for services, others dealing with middleware interoperability. Our contribution lies in the integrated treatment of service interoperability, from the application to the middleware layer. Our solution has further been designed to be lightweight and thus can be supported in most pervasive environments, not requiring the presence of a dedicated server. As a result, true open, pervasive computing environments are enabled - integrating and composing in an ad hoc fashion the most appropriate networked services in order to deliver rich applications to users, independently Figure 2: Extending SOA with interoperability enablers. of heterogeneous underlying software technologies and semantic representa- tions. system interworking. In the application Performance evaluation shows that our layer, semantics and behaviours of ser- solutions comply with the requirements Our research is conducted as part of the vices are reasoned upon and matched of the pervasive computing environ- European IST Amigo and Plastic pro- with the requested ones in order to ment. We are now in the process of inte- jects and industrial collaborations with decide their adequacy for a given user grating them to offer an instance of the Alcatel and Thales. request. Second, semantic-rich interop- overall architecture. We are further erable service interaction enables ser- studying extensions to the architecture to Links: vices to cooperate and compose. In the effectively exploit beyond third genera- ARLES site: http://www-rocq.inria.fr/arles/ middleware layer, support is provided tion networks and related multi-radio for communication protocol and data wireless handheld devices; this will Please contact: type system interworking. In the applica- expand the scope of our interoperability Valerie Issarny, Nikolaos Georgantas, tion layer, semantics and behaviours of solution to further cover radio and net- INRIA, France services are adapted and interworked to work heterogeneity. Tel: +33 1 39 63 57 89 enable their seamless interaction. E-mail: [email protected], Prototypes of the related architectural Enabling the pervasive computing vision [email protected] components have been implemented. has given rise to tremendous research

Materials with Intelligence by Simon Dobson and Kieran Delaney

Sensor networks are the key enabling technology for building systems that adapt can react in ways that are far more autonomously to their environment, without direct human intervention. Most sophisticated than are possible with sim- sensor networks operate in free air, but research being conducted in Ireland, pler, 'smart' materials. between the School of Computer Science and Informatics at UCD Dublin and the Centre for Adaptive Wireless Systems at Cork IT, is starting to explore the tools If this all sounds a bit abstract, imagine a and techniques we need in order to build 'augmented materials' which combine person with a broken leg who is wearing sensing, actuation and processing into the fabric of built objects. a plaster cast. For a physiotherapist, the challenge is to make the person take ade- Embedding sensing into a physical sub- Combine these sensors into a network quate exercise to stimulate the break, strate has a number of attractions. Each and we can construct a global view of the while at the same time stopping them sensor package can sense a number of material and its relationships to the real from attempting too much and risking local variables such as the stress on the world. Add processing and we have the further damage. As the physiotherapy material, its orientation in space, its potential to build materials that "know programme changes over time and in proximity to other materials etc. themselves", in some sense, and which conjunction with on-going assessment of

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 37 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

A 2.5cm-on-a-side 'mote', developed by Ireland's Tyndall National Institute.

the injury, the exercise required of the tractable way means developing a pro- with explicit software control, to patient and the optimal levels of rigidity gramming model that operates at the improved autonomic control of commu- and support required of the cast, will also level of the complete material rather than nications and routing, and to generally change. If we embed sensing and pro- at the level of the individual elements useful programming models for sensor- cessing into the cast, the network can within it. It should also be able to handle rich multi-agent networks and environ- sense the load being placed on the cast as failures and errors in sensing in the indi- ments. the person walks around. This can then vidual elements. This is not something be compared with a downloaded therapy that is easy to do in traditional languages Links: programme and react, for example, by and we are investigating some tech- http://www.ucd.ie/csi glowing green when things are fine, but niques pioneered in high-performance http://www.aws.cit.ie flashing red lights if the person is over- computing (skeletons and categorical http://www.tyndall.ie/research/mai-group/ doing their exercise. It is even possible to data types) as a possible basis for 25cube_mai.html build materials with variable rigidity so building self-managing applications on that the cast adapts the support it pro- top of the underlying unreliable sensors Please contact: vides over the course of treatment. and communications. Simon Dobson, University College Dublin / IUA, Ireland The individual elements of an aug- Augmented materials are in many ways E-mail: [email protected] mented material can be based around any the ideal co-design challenge. The prop- 'mote' technology. We are using the plat- erties of the material determine directly form developed by Ireland's Tyndall what can be sensed and processed, while National Institute, made available via software provides capabilities to that institute's National Access enhance and complement the material's Programme. While current mote systems underlying physics. A physical phe- are too large for use in practice, Tyndall's nomenon, such as placing one aug- 2.5cm-on-a-side motes (see figure) are mented object on top of another, gives being reduced to a 1cm form and rise to individual sensor readings beyond, making them realistic for affecting pressure, orientation and the embedded use. establishing of new wireless communications links etc. These in turn give rise Since a single object might contain hun- to a semantic inference that can be used dreds of elements, the elements them- in software to drive high-level responses selves need to be substantially config- based on the intention inferred from per- ured, by making connections to neigh- forming this particular action with these bouring elements during curing, for particular objects. example. Changes to this network may come from node failures, but may also While this work is still at a very early come from physically significant events stage, we hope that the programme will such as cutting which manifests itself as lead to useful advances in embedded a (rather structured) partitioning of the sensor networks, to new forms of network. Dealing with these changes in a microsensing and actuation associated

38 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

The CRUISE Project - Network Initiative for Creating Ubiquitos Intelligent Sensing Environments by Gabriele Kotsis, Anelia Mitseva and Neeli R. Prasad

Recent developments in research and technology have drawn attention to wireless European industries in this field. These sensor networks as one of the key enabling technologies of the next ten years. high-level objectives are pursued in ubiquitous intelligent sensing environments have a promising future in supporting activities such as: the everyday life of European citizens, bringing important social benefits for each • evaluating state-of-the-art wireless person and for society as a whole. Taking into account the current fragmentation sensor networking and collating of European research in this field, the CRUISE Network of Excellence (NoE) aims research topics covered in CRUISE to be a focal point in the coordination of research on communication and and in Europe into a knowledge model application aspects of wireless sensor networking in Europe. • depicting a path from current technological status to a successful near-term CRUISE's NoE partners are combining focal points for these actions, with the and long-term vision, by creating the their efforts to make a significant contri- strategic goal of greatly strengthening vision and roadmap on necessary bution to both the coordination and the the European position in this area of research in wireless sensor networking effectiveness of research into the com- research. CRUISE is to amalgamate the in Europe munication and application aspects of majority of European research entities in • implementing a set of well-defined WSN in Europe, promoting not only the field of Wireless and Sensor joint research activities and publishing open cooperation between individuals Networks. It is doing this on the under- white papers and a joint book pro- and organisations from European standing that this critical mass will put viding an integrated research view academia, but also research into cooper- the European Wireless and Sensor • sharing and integrating methods, soft- ation with industry. The main aim for Networks research community in a posi- ware tools and test-beds and making CRUISE is to push for a broad integration to successfully compete with the US an inventory of the existing platforms tion of actions and to become one of the and Asia and to provide support for and evaluating of the experiences using them • facilitating the mobility of researchers and PhD students as a key factor for integration and rationalisation of research efforts • creating distributed PhD teaching curricula and training curricula in sensor networking and related topics; Organising regular CRUISE Schools as a tool for training young researchers and communicating with the industry standardisation community and international research community • organising open collaboration events with industry, SMEs, academia, other projects with participation of experts from Europe, the USA and Asia, ie, cluster meetings, workshops, roundtable discussions, web-based tutorials, discussion forums, etc., to exchange and discuss ideas and to further elaborate thoughts exploiting CRUISE results.

The joint programme of research activities (see figure), is structured in four self- contained but still inter-related clusters: Cluster A - Architecture and Topology; Network integration and research activities. Cluster B - Protocols and data fusion;

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 39 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Cluster C - Security and Mobility; R&D projects working on close topics, interests span different aspects and sce- Cluster D – Transmission. such as eSENSE IP, MAGNET narios of sensing environments apart BEYOND IP, GoodFood IP, and from the purely technical ones. This will CRUISE Services to Industries, through national projects. Special atten- serve the European community beyond SMEs and the Public tion will be paid to promoting collabora- academia and science. One of the main goals of CRUISE is to tion with SMEs, which are expected to establish efficient and durable links with play a particularly important role in the This work has been carried out within industry, using existing relationships and deployment of sensor networks, but the framework of the IST-4-027738 NoE collaboration frameworks as a lever. which often lack specific research CRUISE, which is partly funded by the Each CRUISE partner is to further recourses in order to complement their European Union. The project started on develop existing liaisons with industry. own skills. Via the CRUISE Portal, January 1 2006 and has a duration of 24 In order to provide mechanisms of SMEs will be able to reach a working months. Thirty two internationally knowledge transfer, the project consor- group or an appropriate expert from the recognised groups from Europe, tium is to offer Business Deck@CRUISE project with a specific problem to be including the ERCIM members VTT and via the project website. Members of solved. Adding to the above, CRUISE is Fraunhofer-FOKUS, are coordinated by 'Business Deck' are offered access to to create links with other related IST pro- the Center for Telenfrastruktur (CTIF) at some of the internal documents prepared jects, such as NoE, e-NEXT, NoE Aalborg University, Denmark. by the network. They could influence the NEWCOM, NoE ACE, Coordinated choice of topics for tutorials prepared by action Embedded WiSeNets. Link: the network and, to some extent, over http://www.ist-cruise.eu topics presented at training schools Last but not least, as part of the plan for organised by the partners. They could be using and disseminating the knowledge Please contact: also involved in the tools' integration and to raise public awareness about the Neeli R. Prasad activities. immense social benefits of the sensor Aalborg University, Denmark network applications, active collabora- E-mail: [email protected] Cooperation with industry is also to be tion will be pursued with professional carried out through links with other IST communities and organisations whose

IntelliSense RFID - An RFID Platform for Ambient Intelligence with Sensors Integration Capabilities

by Ovidiu Vermesan, Nadine Pesonen, Cristina Rusu, Aarne Oja, Peter Enoksson and Helge Rustad

IntelliSense RFID project expands the technical and market potential of RFID technology by developing multi-protocol devices with sensing capabilities that In this context, the aim of the are able to sense the environment and communicate at different frequency bands. IntelliSense RFID project is to develop multi-protocol RFID devices with built- Embedded intelligence, or ambient intel- way. These devices will receive, sense, in sensing capabilities, operating at ligence, is the vision of the future where carry, and distribute context information multi-frequency bands. The device can information will be available to people in our environment. be associated with an object, a person or without their being aware of the sur- a location through a simple ID and is rounding information technology itself. Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) capable of measuring and acquiring data In the ambient intelligent world and in is the key technology for local connec- about the user's behaviour and his envi- the ubiquitous information society, com- tivity and an early vehicle for readying ronment (such as temperature T, pres- puting is distributed all around in the these future proactive computing sys- sure P, humidity H, and pH), thus cre- environment. Users are mobile and com- tems. ating a smart environment based on sur- munication is set up between individ- rounding 'invisible intelligent devices'. uals, between individuals and objects Nanoelectronics allows the mass produc- and between objects. This communication of such new silicon RFID devices It is a two-year project (2006-2007) and tion is obtained via 'invisible intelligent with sensing capabilities and this makes is part of the Nordic research pro- devices' that will tag almost everything massive and low-cost tagging of objects gramme NORDITE. It involves in our society in an easy and friendly feasible. SINTEF (Norway) as the institute

40 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Multi-protocol RFID devices with built-in sensing capabilities used for logistics and mobile phone-based consumer applications.

leading the project, VTT (Finland), this stage, capacitive sensors will be device memory by utilising the inte- Chalmers University of Technology used to measure temperature, pressure, grated HF RFID reader in a mobile (Sweden), and IMEGO AB (Sweden). humidity, and pH. phone. Applications that can benefit The NORDITE programme aims at sup- from such a dual-band RFID tag tech- porting research institutes and universi- One of the major issues with large-scale nology include object authentication and ties from Sweden, Norway and Finland RFID networks is the lack of standardis- information, personalisation, protection to enhance state-of-the art research in ation across many fronts. This ranges against theft, maintenance, and recy- the fields of SW radio, wireless sensors, from the different data formats used, via cling. short-range wireless networks and RFID reduced interoperability between RFID or MEMS utilising RF technology. The readers and tag/transponder devices The IntelliSense RFID technology plat- programme goal is to stimulate collabo- from different vendors, to interference form will address the HF, UHF and ration among national and Nordic coun- problems between RFID products from microwave (MW) 2.45GHz frequency tries, create synergism, and consolidate different manufacturers and the different bands focusing, in the first phase, on the technological and economic develop- frequency bands used in different coun- integration of the HF and UHF RFID ment opportunities for companies and tries. specific protocols. industries. These technology development research projects are funded by To overcome such problems, the 'global The whole infrastructure 'readers-RFID TEKES (Finland), VINNOVA sensing RFID devices' developed in the devices' will form the future 'Internet of (Sweden) and the Norwegian Research IntelliSense RFID project are designed Things' that will be one of the main ele- Council (Norway). to be able to communicate at different ment of the 'Ambient Intelligence' and frequency bands with different commu- 'Ubiquitous Information' society. One functional area of great relevance to nication protocols. They can thus com- many supply chain applications is the municate with the existing infrastructure Please contact: ability to monitor environmental or (ie, existing RFID interrogators) in var- Ovidiu Vermesan, SINTEF ICT, Norway status parameters using a RFID device ious environments. Of special impor- Tel: +47 22 06 75 06 with built-in sensor capabilities. A tance is the combination of high fre- E-mail: [email protected] generic sensor interface is needed in the quency (HF) 13.56MHz and ultra high RFID platform to enable various appli- frequency (UHF) 860-960MHz RFID cations that can be realised by inte- standards. Indeed, multi-band tags are grating the proper, low-cost sensor ele- needed to penetrate from logistics to ment to the RFID platform. The mobile phone-based consumer markets. IntelliSense RFID project focuses on For example, the same dual-band tag can developing a generic sensor interface, be exploited for logistics, by using the integrated with the RFID circuitry, for UHF RFID interrogators, and by con- external capacitive sensor elements. At sumers, to retrieve the content of the

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 41 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Collaborative Capture: A New Perspective for Sensor Networks

by Paul Couderc

Ubiquitous and collaborative capture unveils new perspectives in ambient reduces the network load, as well as computing. In the same way that distributed computing proposed approaches to decreasing download times. A typical the distribution of data and processing on a set of computing nodes, collaborative usage scenario would be, for example, at capture will have to propose efficient and practical solutions to recompose a sports event, where many people in a structured data from items collected asynchronously from contributing nodes. stadium would like to see an instant replay of the recent action. In this con- An important aspect of ambient intelli- INRIA has a strong background in the text, the same resources (video of the gence is to link information systems with domain of cooperating objects, which replay) are requested by many users. The real work. To this end, sensors and net- means groups of devices which sponta- spontaneous hotspot allows the network works of sensors play an important role neously team up to form a short-lived to balance the download and to flood the in providing data and events from the information system (called spontaneous replay into the stadium through blue- real world. Sensors and networks of sen- information system) in order to accom- tooth. sors are thus gaining more and more plish a task. It has demonstrated several attention from the research community. applications of this concept. Recently, We are now investigating a related, but Enabling cooperation between these tiny the team proposed the concept of sponta- more innovative concept: collaborative devices, in an extremely dynamic con- neous hotspots. This is where swarms of capture, where the shared data is no text, poses real challenges. In particular, mobile phones are used to increase longer resources hosted in the network, we have to cope with very limited download-efficiency of context-related as in the previous case, but structured resources (energy, processing power, resources in a GPRS network using blue- information composed of elements con- memory), high failure rate and node mobility. Another important issue is to offer programming abstractions and system architectures to virtualise a collection of sensors such that it can be used as a single virtual resource. The main application domain for these devices is monitoring at large (environmental, medical, industrial, etc.)

Surprisingly, much less attention has been paid to what is becoming the most important sensor network ever deployed: the multimedia phone. While these are well-known as personal messaging devices, their role as sensors has been largely ignored, in spite of their powerful capabilities in this respect. These devices can capture sound, picture, video, can cooperate with other sensors such as Many phones, treated as audio capture devices, could have recorded the beginning of GPS positionning receivers and, of the meeting to allow the newcomer to catch up with the missing part. course, can communicate with global as well as local networks.

An important challenge for these tooth-enabled cooperation (Spontaneous tributed dynamically by a collection of existing and promising sensing infras- Hotspots: Sharing Context-Dependant nodes. Consider, for example, someone tructures is to explore their potential Resources Using Bluetooth, Xavier Le arriving late in a meeting. Many phones, applications and to address the problems Bourdon, Paul Couderc, Michel Banâtre treated as audio capture devices, could raised by their emergence as an unex- International Conference on Networking have recorded the beginning of the pected sensor network. and Services (ICNS'2006) July 16-19, meeting to allow the newcomer to catch 2006 - Santa Clara, CA, USA). This up with the missing part. Similar sce- The ACES (ambient computing and approach both balances the network narios with photos can be envisaged, embedded systems) research team at download cost between users and allowing for example, a group of people

42 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

taking pictures at an event to merge their vacy is a big issue. For example, you may include poor data, or even false captures and provide a complete collec- may agree to share the pictures you are data. Worse, the very notion of ubiqui- tion. Another interesting use of collabo- taking at a given event with only a few of tous capture can be frightening: the rative capture is to use several nodes to the people present, but not the pictures potential capture activity of anyone, any- increase the quality or the accuracy of a taken an hour ago in another context. where may change social relations given data, by combining their indi- Traditional security, with authorisations, between people. It's too late to do any- vidual data. is difficult to apply in practice in the con- thing about that, this distributed infras- text of spontaneous interactions with tructure is already in our pockets! These applications, which can appear new and potentially unknown nodes. simple, raised difficult issues. Context Innovative approaches, based for Link: descriptions of available resources and example on more dynamic notions such http://www.irisa.fr/aces/ on-going capture processes should be as trust and behaviour, have to be inves- accurate enough to allow sharing, tigated before practical security mecha- Please contact: without overloading the local communi- nism for these systems can be found. In Paul Couderc, INRIA-IRISA, France cation medium to allow their efficient relation to trust, we must be able to rank E-mail: [email protected] distribution on-the-field. Obviously, pri- the quality of the contributions, which

Autarkic Power Generation for Networked Systems by Eberhard Mueller and Ulrich Hofman

A research project funded by the FIT-IT programme of the Austrian ministry for opportunities by episodic transmission traffic, innovation and technology (BMVIT) investigates the potential of different protocols. This principle is verified using energy sources for communication purposes, especially for out-door activities. two very different application scenarios: skis and bicycles. The economic relevance of this research Energy management is not only consid- activity can easily be seen by examining ered in terms of minimising the energy The scientific aim of the project is to the efforts companies take to optimise consumption, but also as finding addi- develop an innovative integrated frame- the energy consumption of embedded tional ways for energy to be supplied. work and tool for modelling the energy devices. The use of alternative energy Furthermore, the energy-consuming and communication processes in net- supply, like Piezo-Elements or Thermo- activities are bound to the current status worked embedded systems. Today's Elements, will thus be a great chance to of energy production and the current cost modelling approaches and tools are achieve this goal so as to minimise costs functions. For example, energy con- based on a combination of discreet mod- and to make devices independent from suming communication tasks are carried elling of the communication processes external energy supply. out not continuously, but at optimal and an underlying model describing the energy consumption. The modelling and simulation of the energy processes in sinks (sensors, actuators, physical communication) and sources (generator, battery) are realised by means of continuous models.

This two-paradigm approach has its dis- advantages: • Handling two modelling approaches and isolated tools is difficult for the researchers/engineers and increases the duration of the development cycle. • Interfaces between different modelling approaches/tools have a potential for misinterpretation by the experts in their respective domain. Figure 1: Logical components of Unified Model.

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 43 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

To overcome these drawbacks we model Figure 2: the data communication process by fol- Optimal data lowing a new approach that we have transfer to a base investigated in the European IST project station. INTERMON. There, data traffic is modelled as a continuous (in time and value), fluid process. We bring this paradigm into the modelling domain of networked embedded systems. Using the fluid abstraction, which was successfully employed in large scale IP networks, will open the way to a unified continuous modelling framework. This framework will accommodate the energy and communication models that will be developed within the project. In a second stage, the models will be validated and integrated into a complex system. As a proof of concept this new integrated modelling approach will be employed for the design and the development of a prototype.

The main challenge is to optimise data communication, sensor data generation and storage of relevant data in the prototype. This includes an autonomous power supply which makes use of the forces, temperatures or other physical Figure 3: Data transfer to different base stations. phenomena that occur during the use of such devices. State-of-the-art sensor technologies, power sources and communication systems will be investigated used for the validation of the scientific send model includes continuous and and their process models will be derived, and technical approaches. episodic transmission protocols above measured and integrated into the contin- the Layer-2 WLAN-protocol (Figure 2). uous unified modelling framework. Figure 1 shows the logical components Figure 3 shows transfer intervals of a Measurement data of field trials will be and models which are developed. The mobile station to different base stations.

Links: Salzburg Research: http://www.salzburgresearch.at/company/ ESYCS - Embedded Systems Cluster Salzburg: http://esycs.salzburgresearch.at/ INTERMON: Advanced architecture for INTER-domain quality of service MONitoring, modelling and visualisation: http://www.ist-intermon.org/

Please contact: Eberhard Mueller and Ulrich Hofmann Salzburg Research GmbH, Austria Tel: +43 662 2288 445 E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Figure 4: The author working with Piezo-Elements and Embedded System.

44 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

Formally Bounded Embedded Systems by Kevin Hammond

The EU-funded EmBounded project aims to develop new techniques for providing based around a new domain-specific formal guarantees on resource usage bounds. It is a collaborative project between programming language notation, Hume, AbsInt GmbH, a high-tech company specialising in high integrity real-time systems, that aims to find an optimum point and academic partners in the UK, France and Germany. between good programming abstraction and the ability to derive good cost infor- A major difficulty with constructing The EmBounded project, led by Dr mation. Hume embeds a rule-based embedded systems is that the available Kevin Hammond at the University of St notation for sequential computations system resources (processor, computer Andrews, aims to research this problem. within a finite-state-machine-based nota- memory, power) are necessarily Our vision is one where certificates of tion for concurrency control. The pro- restricted due to cost and other consider- the bounds on resource usage can be cess notation is designed to be easily ations. If it were possible to determine obtained from a source program, through tractable to standard analyses such as strong bounds on the use of such automatic program analysis, indepen- model-checking for deadlock detection; resources, then potentially there would dently of the usual software compilation while the rule-based notation is designed be significant benefits in terms of manu- process. These certificates may then be so that we can easily expose information facturing cost, reliability and perfor- verified using formal proof techniques about cost. Hume is designed to be prac- mance. However, determining such based on a program logic that captures tical as well as having interesting lan- bounds automatically is a difficult the meaning and behaviour of programs. guage properties. Prototype implementa- problem and doing so manually is tions of Hume produced at Heriot-Watt becoming impracticable as embedded The EmBounded project builds on University can run in less than 30KB on software increases in complexity. European strengths in programming lan- a standalone Renesas M32C develop- guage design, program analysis and ment board, with minimal dynamic embedded applications. Our work is memory requirements, depending on the end-application. embound, v. poet. arch. To date, project researchers at trans. To set bounds to; to confine, contain, hem in. Ludwig-Maximilians- Hence embounded ppl. a. Universität, München, and St 1595 SHAKESPEARE: The Life and Death of King John IV. iii 137 Andrews University have devel- That sweete breath which was embounded in this beauteous clay. oped new theoretical models of bounded resource usage for dynamic memory and time metrics based on Hume program source. They have related these formally to the underlying machine operations using an abstract-machine approach. We are now constructing automatic analyses based on these models that will expose resource constraints and other program properties in our program logic. This will give a good model of program cost based on the program structure.

In order to obtain accurate information about time usage on a specific computer architecture, we are using the aiT tool developed by AbsInt GmbH to provide precise and guaranteed timing costs for fragments of machine The 'EmBounded' vision. code programs. This low-level

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 45 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

information can then be combined with have been developing a number of real- buggy, and capable of speeds up to a the high-level information obtained from time computer vision algorithms in rather alarming 30 km/h. our program source to provide a highly Hume. These algorithms can be accurate analysis that will give guaran- exploited to detect, for example, road Links: teed bounds on program execution time. features from a moving vehicle, an Project: http://www.embounded.org essential component of any self-con- Hume: http://www.hume-lang.org. In order to produce convincing results, it trolled (autonomous) road vehicle. In is necessary to test our approach using due course, we intend to apply these Please contact: sophisticated and realistic applications. algorithms to the sensor and control sys- Kevin Hammond, University of St Andrews, Researchers at the Laboratoire des tems used in the CyCab autonomous Scotland, UK Sciences et Matériaux d'Électronique — vehicle (http://www.robosoft.fr), a self- E-mail: [email protected] LASMEA (Clermont-Ferrand, France), controlled electric car resembling a golf

Adaptable and Context-Aware Trustworthiness Evaluation

by Gabriele Lenzini, Santtu Toivonen and Ilkka Uusitalo

Conducted as part of the EU-ITEA Trust4All project, which aims to enhance possessing the network key or not) is dependability in networked and component-based systems, VTT Technical allowed to use it if residing outside the Research Centre of Finland and Dutch Telematica Instituut began investigating company boundaries. We apply the trustworthiness evaluation in ubiquitous environments. So far, the research has notion of context also to reputations and concerned context-aware trust and trust evaluation with indirect information. recommendations. When dealing with reputations and recommendations, con- Trust is an increasingly important phe- interaction occurs, can influence the textual data can be used to emphasise nomenon to grasp and support in open result of the trust establishment. For other experiences that have taken place environments, such as where networked example, acting in a safe environment under “similar enough” conditions to devices operate. A common scenario can affect the trust that an application those in which the Trustor currently sees a Trustor, the subject of trust, search has in a component. Context-awareness finds himself. Here “similarity” between for a Trustee, the object of trust. The has been recognised in many research contexts can be computed, for example Trustor's trustworthiness evaluation areas of information technology, such as based on reasoning or on context ontolo- directed to the Trustee should be facili- information filtering and retrieval, ser- gies, and expressed as minimal contex- tated. Semi-automatic trustworthiness vice provisioning and communication. tual distance. evaluation is of special relevance in However, the relationship between con- embedded systems as well as in the text and trust has not received very much The above-mentioned trust evaluation semantic web, or in the ubiquitous envi- attention, apart from some occasional works on the assumption that reputation ronments, where the Trustors and work. This is unfortunate, since such data and recommendations are directly Trustees can be computer programmes relationship can easily be recognised and available to the Trustor. In the second in addition to human beings. To perform its existence justified. phase of our research, we extended the an appropriate evaluation, Trustors adaptability of context-aware trustwor- request various information character- In the first phase of our research, we con- thiness evaluation by considering sce- ising Trustees. Typical solutions ask for textualise trust-evaluation by consid- narios where this direct information is users' trust credentials, often expressed ering individual context attributes and not necessarily available to the Trustor. in terms of user profile, reputation, and assign them with values influencing the In such cases, we highlight three sub- recommendations. The difference trustworthiness evaluation process. cases to be studied. First, the Trustee's between reputation and recommendation Depending on the importance of a given behaviour in other contexts may be here is that reputation is based on the context attribute, determined by what we unknown. Secondly, the Trustee's experiences of the Trustor, whereas rec- call a trust purpose, weights can be behaviour in the current context may be ommendations are communicated expe- assigned to amplify or weaken the unknown, for example due to absence of riences of others. respective attribute's influence on the knowledge referring to the current con- overall trust. For example, the Trustee's text. Thirdly, reliable recommenders Contextual data, that is information con- location can have significant importance and/or recommendations about the sidered relevant to the interaction when deciding if to grant access to the Trustee might not be available or they between a Trustor and a Trustee, local wireless network. A policy can be could refer to the Trustee acting in dif- including the environment in which this introduced so that nobody (regardless of ferent context. We address each of these

46 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

cases with separate proposals, all of Trust4All is a two-year EU-ITEA pro- Links: which are based on similarities between ject. Trust4All aims to enhance depend- Telematica Instituut: http://www.telin.nl/ the entities - Trustor, Trustee, recom- ability and trustworthiness of networked VTT: http://www.vtt.fi mender and other entities connected to and component-based embedded sys- EU-ITEA project Trust4All: each other by a (social) network - or con- tems. Trust4All project partners come http://www.win.tue.nl/trust4all/ texts attached to the entities. For from industry, research institutes, and example, the lack of direct information academia: CWI, Océ –Technologies, Please contact: about a new scientific conference does Philips Research (the project coordi- Gabriele Lenzini, Telematica Instituut, not stop the Trustor inferring trustwor- nator), Telematica Instituut, Univ. The Netherlands thiness by considering the reputation of Eindhoven (TU/e), Univ. Leiden (the E-mail: [email protected] the conference chair and favourable rec- Netherlands); Nokia, Solid Information ommendations about the programme Technologies, VTT (Finland); ESI, Santtu Toivonen, VTT Technical Research committee members and the conference FAGOR, IKERLAN-Electrónica, Centre of Finland proceedings publisher. Robotiker, Visual Tools (Spain). E-mail: [email protected]

Digital Identity in Ambient Environments by Ben Schouten and Onkar Ambekar

Embedded systems and ambient technology enable users to interact at any time protecting the user's privacy and the WP and anywhere. In the BASIS project for identity management, CWI investigates Home Biometrics is about the specific transparent biometrics in home environments. Possible application areas are problems of biometric authentication in user profiling for shopping , listening to one's favourite music and operating the home environment. Research at gadgets and appliances in the home. CWI, WP leader for Home Biometrics, started in January 2006. Historically, personal relationships, access to information and services in this face-to-face encounters, notaries, and personal environment, with a focus on In the home environment, it is unlikely third party counsel verified our identity. user convenience and privacy protection. that biometrics based on the recognition Nowadays, reliance on paper has shifted of one modality - such as speech or to electronic documents and in the same The research project addresses three vision - will suffice. If we want to pro- way, reliance on traditional trust factors topics in the following work packages vide the user with easy and transparent has had to shift to electronic authentica- (WPs). The WP Transparent Biometrics use we should be able to identify sub- tion for exchanging information, goods, is about transparent biometric authenti- jects in changing and uncontrolled con- and services. As territories and commu- cation (read without taking any specific ditions. In the project, identity is not nities are newly defined in the digital action) as a means to enhance user con- defined as a unique set of personal data, age, there is a need for a new definition venience - for instance, to automatically like name or age, but more generally. of digital identity. The question is: Do hear your favourite music. The WP Height, weight, or anything that can be we possess only one 'federal identity' as Template Protection is about anonymous used to classify user profiles is used. For in our passport, or do we allow the use of biometric authentication as a means of example, we are not interested in the partial identities, depending on the appli- Application or Relationship cation we are using or on the relationship or community of which we are a part? Healthcare Government Music Shopping Friend (See Figure 1.) Address Age The research project Biometric Blood group Date of birth s

Authentication Supporting Invisible e i Diary t i Security (BASIS) tries to answer these t Diet n e

d Drivers license

questions. It aims to develop authentica- i

l Gender a tion protocols in networked and dis- i t

r Insurance tributed systems and, in particular, a

P Likes and dislikes studies robust face recognition in images Name from multiple cameras. Users will have Nr of Children an aware, adaptive and responsive per- Place of birth Tax Income sonal space, in the home environment. The aim is to investigate the possibilities of biometric authentication for securing Figure 1: People share different identity data with different organizations and people.

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 47 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

name of the toddler who is approaching a Figure 2: dangerous stairway in order to automati- By ambient

cally close the stair gate. technology, Environment users can With BASIS, information from different authenticate Users Applications Healthcare Feedback sensors (speech, video etc) will be fused and profile Safety and analysed to produce a coherent inter- various Music Collection Telecommunication pretation. The main complexity here applications. Sensors Shopping stems from the heterogeneity of the data Email Intelligent Sensing Authentication sources. As a consequence of small user Representation groups in the home environment it makes sense to include so-called lightweight or 'soft' biometrics like weight, height or the location of a subject to improve reliability. tracking, could be expressed in terms of and address as a consequence of jumping Bayesian networks. a traffic light. Up to now, many ways of fusing data have been investigated. In the case of a The project outcomes can support future The research consortium consists of recognition system, they can roughly be applications in smart environments, University of Twente, University of divided into four groups according to the adaptive physical environments, pro- Eindhoven, CWI and Philips HomeLab level on which fusion takes place: pre- filing applications, and parental restric- and is co-financed by IOP GenCom of processing level, feature level, likeli- tions (see Figure 2). In the future we the Dutch Ministery of Economic hood score level and decision level. As foresee people carrying wireless identity Affairs. In the course of the four-year we will cope with uncertain inputs and tokens, for example in a handheld phone, project the results will be demonstrated changing modularity, the best candidate RFID or implanted chip, constituting in the Philips Homelab. In the short time is the likelihood score level. A very partial identities by which people present the project has been in existence, results promising candidate for solving the themselves, enabling them to authenti- have already led to a patent application. fusion task is to use a Bayesian network cate transparently by using different (BN) or an extension. Using BN, one can applications. To avoid privacy con- Link: cope with uncertain inputs and prior straints and repudiation, leaving control http://www.cwi.nl/pna4 knowledge (in the form of beliefs and in the hand of the user, negotiation and statistics), which could be incorporated interaction in the authentication process, Please contact: in a BN. Also Kalman-filters and HMM are essential. Just as in the 'old days' Ben Schouten approaches, used widely and success- when police would take down your name CWI and FONTYS, The Netherlands fully for coping with noisy inputs and Tel: +31 20 5924050 E-mail: [email protected]

Trust4All enhances Trustworthiness of Embedded Component-based Systems

by Gabriele Lenzini, Johan Muskens and Andrew Tokmakoff

As part of the EU-ITEA research programme, Trust4All project partners from more third party components (ie, software industry, research institutes and universities teamed up to design and develop components that have not been developed an embedded systems framework that helps component-based applications to by the device vendor) are used for their maintain a high level of dependability and security. Philips research and the Dutch development. So, component-based Telematica Instituut designed and developed the framework's trustworthiness devices run various components that management features. interact with each other to provide the high-level system functionalities. Component-based Software Engineering adopted for the development of software Furthermore, systems are becoming more is an emerging development paradigm for embedded devices. dynamic in the sense that the software that promises to accelerate software configuration of a device changes when development and to reduce costs by There are several trends in component- the device is owned and used by the end assembling systems from pre-fabricated based embedded devices. First, systems user. These trends enable an increasing software components. It has also been are becoming more open in the sense that number of features to be offered by

48 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 SPECIAL THEME: Embedded Intelligence

embedded devices, but threaten the devices' dependability and security properties. In the context of an open component-based system that supports unman- aged upgrading and extension (changing the software configuration), it is possible that component-based devices may host unstable components that could nega- tively affect the devices' dependability.

Here, the most risky scenario is the down- . s p i l i h P load of new components to extend the d n a

t system's capabilities; this exposes the sys- u u t i t s n I

tem's internals to potentially malicious a c i t a m

components that may compromise the e l e T

: e system's overall security. r u t c i P Recent research indicates that the use of The Trust Management Framework, as part of the middleware of the embedded Trust Management can be a useful tool component-based devices, ensures the dependability of the system, when a new when addressing the dependability and component is added. security concerns encountered in distributed and embedded systems. A core part of the TMF is the to re-evaluate the component's estimated The Trust4All project has embraced this Trustworthiness Evaluation Function quality attributes and, as a consequence, emerging topic and investigated its appli- (TEF), which is responsible for calcu- re-evaluate its compliance. cation in the context of component-based lating the trustworthiness of a compo- embedded systems. Our approach has nent/Trustee. It can be parameterised The project began in July 2005 and will been to extend the component-based with Trustor-specific dependability and run for two years. Its efforts are now middleware, first developed within the security requirements. By analysing a moving from research and design EU-ITEA Robocop and Space4U pro- Trustee's 'estimated quality attributes' towards implementation and construc- jects, to include a Trustworthiness and recommendations, the TEF can eval- tion of demonstrators in the domains of Management Framework (TMF), as uate a component's 'present trustworthi- consumer electronics, mobile devices, shown in the figure. This framework pro- ness' (or compliance) in terms of the and domotics. vides low-level mechanisms that can be degree to which it satisfies the Trustor's used to control and enforce components' stated dependability and security Many companies and researchers collab- behaviour, based upon established requirements. Through analysis of com- orate in Trust4All: CWI, Océ Trustor-Trustee relationship. The goal of ponent's behaviour, the TEF calculates –Technologies, Philips Research (pro- TMF is to support easy and late (possibly (utilising Subjective Logic) the 'believed ject coordinator), Telematica Instituut, runtime) integration of components and trustworthiness' of a component in terms Eindhoven University of Technology still have dependability and security of the following aspects: (TU/e), Univ. Leiden (the Netherlands). properties that are satisfactory to the user. • Benignity: the belief that the compo- Nokia, Solid Information Technologies, nent will continue to satisfy the VTT (Finland), ESI, FAGOR, The TMF design addresses the following Trustor's requirements, IKERLAN-Electrónica, Robotiker, and challenges: • Stability: the belief that the Trustee's Visual Tools (Spain). • The TMF acts on behalf of Trustors behavioural qualities of will remain and explicitly takes their trust require- within a given neighbourhood. Links: ments into account. http://www.research.philips.com • The TMF makes use of 'metric The triple of compliance, benignity, and http://www.telin.nl sources' to monitor and report on the stability is used to make control deci- http://www.win.tue.nl/trust4all system's overall behaviour. sions that regulate the system's overall • The TMF makes use of 'actuators' to dependability and security characteris- Please contact: control a Trustee's mode of operation, tics. For example, when a component Gabriele Lenzini, Telematica Instituut, thereby influencing the system's with positive compliance begins to show The Netherlands behavioural characteristics. a reducing benignity, the TMF may Tel: + 31 53 4850463 • The TMF makes use of the Space4U decide to 'wrap' the component in an E-mail: [email protected] Resource Management Framework to attempt to minimise its potential impact decide whether a component's on the system, since it is displaying Johan Muskens, Philips Research Europe, requested mode of operation should be increasingly less-compliant behaviour. The Netherlands allowed from a resource consumption Similarly, when there is a strong disbe- Tel: + 31 40 2742491 point of view. lief in stability, this may indicate a need E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 49 Articles in this Section R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

50 Nanotechnology Single Molecule Switch and Memory Element Nanotechnology by Emanuel Lörtscher and Heike Riel, IBM Zurich Research Lab, Switzerland Single-Molecule Switch and Memory Element 52 Mobile Hybrid Wireless Networks by Emanuel Lörtscher and Heike Riel HyMN: A Self-Organizing System for Interest-based Data Distribution in Mobile Hybrid Scientists at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory have demonstrated how a single Wireless Networks molecule can be switched between two distinct conductive states, which allows by Steffen Rothkugel, Matthias R. it to store data. As published in SMALL, these experiments show that certain Brust and Adrian Andronache, types of molecules reveal intrinsic molecular functionalities that are comparable University of Luxembourg to devices used in today's semiconductor technology. This finding is a result

53 Visualization coming from IBM's Research Labs' effort to explore and develop novel Visualization of Colour technologies for beyond the CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semi-conductor) Information on Highly Detailed 3D era. Models by Matteo Dellepiane and Marco In the August 4 issue of SMALL1, we tion (MCBJ). With this technique, a Callieri, ISTI-CNR, Italy report on a single-molecule switch and metallic bridge on an insulating substrate 55 Databases memory element. Using a sophisticated is carefully stretched by mechanical Modular Access to Large Socio- mechanical method, we were able to bending. Ultimately the bridge breaks, Economic Databases - the Sedo Project in Luxembourg establish electrical contact with an indi- creating two separate electrodes that by Uwe Warner, Centre d'Etude de vidual molecule to demonstrate possess atomic-sized tips. The gap Population, de Pauvreté et de reversible and controllable switching between the electrodes can be controlled Politiques Socio-Economiques, and between two distinct conductive states. with picometer (one thousandth of a Thomas Tamisier and Fernand Feltz This investigation is part of our work to nanometer) accuracy due to the very Centre de Recherche Public - explore and characterize molecules to high transmission ratio of the bending Gabriel Lippmann, Luxembourg become possible building blocks for mechanism. In a next step, a solution of 56 Digital Libraries future memory and logic applications. the organic molecules is deposited on top BELIEF: Bringing Europe's With dimensions of a single molecule on of the electrodes. As the junction closes, Electronic Infrastructures to the order of one nanometer (one mil- a molecule capable of chemically Expanding Frontiers lionth of a millimeter), molecular elec- bonding to both metallic electrodes can by Federico Biagini, Pasquale Pagano and Franco Zoppi, ISTI- tronics redefines the ultimate limit of bridge the gap. In this way, an individual CNR, Italy miniaturization far beyond that of molecule is 'caught' between the elec- today's silicon-based technology. trodes, and measurements can be per- 58 Electromagnetic Radiation Cell Phone Danger formed. by Martin Röösli, Unversity of Bern, The results show that these molecules and Harry Rudin, Consultant, exhibit properties that can be utilized to The molecules investigated are specially Switzerland perform the same logic operations as designed organic molecules measuring

60 Satellite Communication Services used in today's information technology. only about 1.5 nanometers in length, SAFE: Satellites for Epidemiology Namely, by applying voltage pulses to approximately one hundredth of a state- and Health Early Warning the molecule, it can be controllably of-the-art CMOS element. The molecule by Catherine Chronaki, ICS-FORTH switched between two distinct 'on' and was designed and synthesized by and Laurent Braak, 'off' states. These correspond to the '0' Professor James M. Tour and co-workers 61 Satellite Devices and '1' states on which data storage is at Rice University, Houston, USA. Planck Mission 70 GHz Receivers based. Moreover, both conductive states by Jussi Varis, MilliLab-Millimetre are stable and enable non-destructive The main advantage of exploiting trans- Wave Laboratory of Finland read-out of the bit state - a prerequisite port capabilities at the molecular scale is 62 Detector Technology for nonvolatile memory operation - that the fundamental building blocks are Data Acquisition in Scientific Applications which we demonstrated by performing much smaller than today's CMOS ele- by Rob Halsall, CCLC, UK repeated write-read-erase-read cycles. ments. Furthermore, chemical synthesis With this single-molecule memory ele- produces completely identical 63 Security Network Anomaly Detection by ment, we have documented more than molecules, which, in principle, are Means of Machine Learning 500 switching cycles and switching building blocks with no variability. This by Roland Kwitt, Salzburg Research times in the microsecond range. allows us to avoid a known problem that GmbH, Austria CMOS devices face as they are scaled to Crucial for investigating the inherent ever smaller dimensions. In addition, we 64 Web 2.0 and Novel Interaction From Solitary Podcasting properties of molecules is the ability to hope to discover possibly novel, yet to Ambient Pondcasting deal with them individually. To do this, unknown properties that silicon and by Emmanuel Frécon and Pär we extended a method called the related materials do not have. Hansson, SICS mechanically controllable break-junc-

1 (E. Lörtscher, J. W. Ciszek, J. Tour, and H. Riel, "Reversible and Controllable Switching of a Single-Molecule Junction", 50 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 Small, Volume 2, Issue 8-9 , pp. 973-977, 4 August 2006) R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

Figure 1: Contacting a single molecule: Scanning electron microscope image of a metallic bridge, used for establishing contact to an individual molecule. Atomic-sized tips, serving as electrodes, are created by stretching and finally breaking this 'nano' bridge. The method is called the mechanically controllable break junction (MCBJ). The sketch at the top shows the switching molecule "caught" between the electrodes by closing the bridge gradually with picometer accuracy until one molecule "reaches" both electrodes. The switching molecule is a specially designed organic molecule (bipyridyl-dinitro oligophenylene-ethynylene) with dimensions of typically 1.5 nm.

Promising Nanotechnology will double roughly every 18 months, physical limits of CMOS technology for Beyond the CMOS Era this principle has governed the chip will be reached. Therefore, novel con- The single-molecule switch is part of a industry for the past 40 years. The result cepts are needed. series of results achieved by IBM has been the most dramatic and researchers in their efforts to explore and unequaled increase in performance ever Link: develop novel technologies that will sur- known. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/ pass conventional CMOS technology. cgi-bin/abstract/112713559/ABSTRACT Miniaturizing the basic building blocks However, CMOS technology will reach of semiconductor chips, thereby its ultimate limits in 10 to 15 years. As Please contact: achieving more functionality on the chip structures, which currently have Emanuel Lörtscher and Heike Riel, IBM same area, is also referred to as scaling, dimensions of about 40 nm, continue to Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland which is the main principle driving the shrink below the 20 nm mark, ever more E-mail: {eml,hei}@zurich.ibm.com semiconductor industry. Known as complex challenges arise and scaling 'Moore's Law', which states that the tran- appears to be no longer economically sistor density of semiconductor chips feasible. Below 10 nm, the fundamental

Figure 2: Memory operation of the single-molecule system. The blue line shows the write, read, and erase pulse pattern applied and the red line demonstrates the resulting switching between "off" and "on" states of the molecular system. As can be seen in the picture, the system is initially in the "off" state. Then a write pulse of +1.6 V is applied and the molecule switches to the "on" state. This state can be read out using a voltage of +1.1 V. The molecule can be switched back to the "off" state by another pulse (erase pulse) of -1.6 V.

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 51 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

Mobile Hybrid Wireless Networks HyMN: A Self-Organizing System for Interest-based Data Distribution in Mobile Hybrid Wireless Networks

by Steffen Rothkugel, Matthias R. Brust, Adrian Andronache

The concept of self-organisation already exists in the realm of ad-hoc networks. cation and protocol design in the realm The inherent limitations of pure ad-hoc networks can be overcome by introducing of ad-hoc networks. One distinct feature uplinks to the Internet backbone. Extending the principles of self-organisation of JANE is that applications can be exe- by transparently including those additional network links is the focus of the cuted on top of simulated devices (see HyWercs project. HyMN, in turn, is a system aimed at fostering user experience figure) as well as in so-called platform by employing these concepts in the domain of multimedia content distribution. mode on real hardware.

Ad-hoc networks emphasise flexibility to establish a communication link to a HyMN is designed for users interested in and survivability of the whole system. device in another network partition, live multimedia news, for example from However, centralised approaches, for uplinks are employed. The mobile certain sports events. Mobile devices of example for group management and devices elect a particular member of the football fans, for instance, create an information provisioning, do not work interest group, a so-called injection interest group in a local ad-hoc network well in such settings. Moreover, due to point, which maintains the uplinks. partition. Multiples of such groups co- frequent topology changes, connec- exist, such as football fans in pubs, those tivity of devices cannot be generally As one proof of concept, the HyMN watching another match, traveling fans guaranteed. In particular, this makes it system (Hybrid Multimedia Network) and more. In each of these cases, a con- hard to disseminate information in a has been implemented prototypically on siderable number of people have a reliable way. We overcome these limi- top of the JANE1 simulation environ- shared interest and might join forces in a tations inherent to pure ad-hoc net- ment. JANE is designed to support appli- local setting. works by (a) establishing local groups of communicating devices in a self- organising manner and (b) introducing dedicated uplinks to a backbone infrastructure. Such uplinks are used for accessing resources available on the Internet. Additionally, they are employed to directly interconnect dis- tant devices, either within a single partition and particularly also across different partitions. In practice, uplinks are realised for instance using cellular networks, satellites, or via Wi-Fi hotspots. Consequently, ad-hoc networks with devices that provide uplinks are called hybrid wireless networks throughout this paper.

One main goal of the HyWercs project is to develop a middleware that enables mobile devices to organise themselves in order to optimise the data access and provisioning process. The devices running the middleware keep track of the user's interests, which can be single data items or topics that comprise several data items. Devices sharing common interests will join interest groups. Whenever there is the need to retrieve information from a backbone network - like the Internet - or The HyMN System in simulation mode.

52 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

The devices in the ad-hoc network run- tion points within a single ad-hoc net- tent distribution from a backbone net- ning HyMN organise themselves in work partition. Thus, the bandwidth for work to ad-hoc networks. To optimise clusters, where the clusterheads act as injecting data into a single partition is this process, parameters like signal injection points. For each group, interest increased and the files reach the ad-hoc strength to the backbone network, long in certain football matches is registered network faster. After reaching the net- battery lifetime, dissemination degree with the injection point. The injection work, the chunks are exchanged among and clustering coefficient are used for point maintains an uplink to the back- the interested devices until all devices clusterhead election. bone network in order to receive multi- receive the complete file. media news related to the interests of the On-going research focuses on investi- ad-hoc members. Thus, the football fans To realise the architecture presented, we gating how the mobile devices deal with will receive injected information such as focus on mobile devices establishing different mobility scenarios. The HyMN small videos, pictures or text messages clusters in a self-organising way. For system will be further developed and a each time something interesting is hap- this, we have developed a clustering middleware for wireless hybrid network pening during the match. The multi- algorithm - namely WACA - that devices will be developed from it. media files received remain stored on employs a heuristic weight function. The the mobile devices and will be provided WACA algorithm (Weighted Link: to further devices joining the interest Application aware Clustering http://mocca.uni.lu group later on. Algorithm) is designed to build an ad- http://syssoft.uni-trier.de/jane hoc network topology that fits the needs In order to optimise the injection proof the application running on top of it. To Please contact: cess, the backbone multimedia files are achieve this, several parameters can be Steffen Rothkugel, split into chunks. These chunks are set in the weight function. The HyMN University of Luxembourg injected concurrently to different injec- application focuses on multimedia con- Tel: +352 466644 5259 E-mail: [email protected]

Visualization Visualization of Colour Information on Highly Detailed 3D Models by Matteo Dellepiane and Marco Callieri

It is now possible to display very detailed colour information on big 3D models. set correspondences not only between a Research at the Visual Computing Lab, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy, aims at creating a photo and the model, but also between mostly automatic, easy-to-use way of mapping colour on geometric data. photos, using overlapping sections. The 'image to image' correspondence is used The evolution of technology and impor- data are not available and have to be esti- by the application to infer new corre- tant advances in the field of visualization mated. spondences with the model. A 'workload of huge 3D datasets mean that it is now minimizer' analyses the graph of corre- possible to acquire and display detailed Camera parameters are calculated by spondences between the elements of the 3D models. However, in order to achieve aligning each photo to the model: since Alignment Process and helps the user to a completely realistic result, high quality this can only be done automatically in complete all alignments very quickly. colour information must be added to the particular cases (eg, 'shape from silhou- geometric structure. ette'), user intervention is necessary. Once calibration data have been estimated, we have to 'project' the colour A coloured model can be created starting Algorithms which align a photo on a information onto the model. In 3D from: a 3D dataset, a set of photos (such model need some correspondences graphics, there are two ways to display as those shown in Figure 1) and calibra- between them: the user must indicate colour on a model: texture mapping, tion data, ie, the values of the parameters some corresponding points on both where a single texture image is 'mapped' of the camera that took the photos. They objects. to the model, and 'per vertex' colour, can be divided into two groups: extrinsic where a RGB colour value is assigned to parameters (translation vector and rota- Our software, called TexAlign, allows each vertex. The first technique gives tion matrix), related to the position of the users to load both the model and all the very good results; the main limitation is camera in the space, and intrinsic param- photos, creating an Alignment Process that the photos have to be 'packed' in an eters, the 'internal' settings (focal length, whose data (correspondences coordi- image of maximum 4096x4096 resolu- lens distortion) of the camera. nates, parameters of aligned images) are tion. Since we normally deal with tens of Unfortunately, in most cases, calibration saved in an xml file. It is also possible to photos, we would need to subsample

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 53 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

Figure 1: An example of a 3D model (centre image) with a set of photos. The result will be the 3D model with the colour information extracted from the photos.

them in order to put all of them in a To solve this problem, we developed an a discontinuity in the 'depth map' (that is single image. Hence, since we can pro- application called TexTailor. Starting a map where each pixel has the value of vide very detailed 3D models, colour per from the set of photos, the model and the the depth of the associated vertex). vertex is the best choice to preserve both calibration data, TexTailor automatically These values are combined to calculate a geometric and colour detail. We assign creates a mask for each photo, assigning weight. The colour value of each vertex to each vertex of the model the colour of a weight to each pixel. The weight is cal- is a 'weighted sum' of the contributions the images which project on it. Since culated by considering three main of all images. A result achieved using more than one image could project onto values: the angle between the normal of this approach is shown in Figure 2. the same vertex, a major issue rises: how the vertex associated with the pixel and can we automatically 'weigh' the contri- the direction of view, the distance Even though the results so far are bution of each photo in order to achieve a between the point of view and the vertex encouraging, more work is needed to realistic result? (depth) and the distance of the pixel from improve the technique. The most promising area for future investigation is related to the estimation of the lighting environment. This can be done using known techniques (ie mirrored spheres) during the photographic campaign, or by combining image processing and analysis of geometric information during the projection operation. A good estimation of lighting would prevent the projection of dark areas in photos and could also provide information about the reflectance properties of the material.

Link: Visual Computing Lab at ISTI-CNR: http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/joomla/index.php

Please contact:: Matteo Dellepiane, Marco Callieri, ISTI-CNR, Italy Tel: +39 0503152925 Figure 2: E-mail: dellepiane|[email protected] Details of the model of a wooden statue in Benabbio (Lucca): 36 photos projected on a 2.5 million face model.

54 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

Databases Modular Access to Large Socio-Economic Databases - the Sedo Project in Luxembourg by Uwe Warner, Thomas Tamisier and Fernand Feltz

Now online and regularly accessed, the Sedo homepage is the entry point to a Since autumn 2005, Sedo has been mine of useful information about citizens' lives in Luxembourg. Underneath, the available online, featuring three dif- site is powered by a customisable platform for maintaining huge banks of data. ferent types of user access. A monitored Ergonomic search methods quickly deliver mains trends or detailed figures. free access for everybody to statistical Advanced users and people without statistical training can perform their own tables and graphs on the themes of the calculations with the guarantee of clear and accurate results. study. A controlled access on demand using a user login and password that The use of the Net for querying socio- its evolution. Such exhaustive and dis- allows registered users to explore the economic databases has recently caught parate information is difficult to exploit banks of data without having to install the attention of both experts and the due to the complexity and volume of the statistical software on their own com- public at large, with a number of online data. Up to now, only researchers with a puters. An access of registered users, services provided by statistical organisa- solid background in longitudinal anal- making a confidentiality pledge who are tions of various countries, such as those ysis could effectively benefit from this trained in statistical analysis to maintain in Europe that belong to the CESSDA. work, whereas it is relevant to all kinds individual and sophisticated statistics Not only does the networked publication of professional activities outside the area and research on the micro data. Finally, of statistics allow instantaneous update of the statistician experts. In addition, an Internet based discussion forum and correction, but it is also suited to thanks to its precision and its constant allows all users to exchange their expe- building a relationship between the data provider and the data consumer. The consumer can deliver his feedback and formalise his requirements and the provider has the means to control the use of the data, so that the figures are better and more properly used. Other advantages are easing the retrieval of large data sets, allowing them to be customised, and enabling end-users to exe- cute statistical functions for processing the data on the server.

The CEPS/INSTEAD is a public research institute for statistics and socio- economic studies dedicated to population, poverty and socio-economic policy. Through the Sedo (Socio-Economic Database Online) platform, set up in cooperation with the Centre de Recherche Public - Gabriel Lippmann, it offers a generalised and convenient access to the Sedo's results for the public at large. voluminous database on the national population. The information, collected through socio-economic household panels, consists of longitudinal data, which means that the same questions are updating, the socio-economic picture rience and allows communication with periodically checked with the same drawn by the combination of these mis- those conducting the surveys and the respondents. Relevant domains are: cellaneous themes is apt to significantly research community. Compared to other demography, education, post-natal ease communication between the popu- information tools in the community, the child-care, employment, equal opportu- lation and public servants and to support Sedo project has great flexibility, a uni- nities, resources, housing, equipment the decisions made by the political versal portability and the possibility of and consumption and opinions about the authorities. adapting to different databases. The monetary situation of the household and most obvious benefit of the system is

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 55 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

being able to obtain customised presen- the coherence of the results and to ensure the different kind of users who will not tations of statistics with guaranteed that they are correct with respect to the be entitled to the same access to the data. accuracy and without the need for spe- interpretation criteria of the user, Sedo It also minimises the volume of data cialised statistical tools or an advanced also features an automatic calculation of used during the calculations, because expertise in statistical techniques. the actual sampling size after a sequence only the data relevant to the requests is of statistical operations. extracted and passed on to the processing For the sake of the reusability, it has phase. been preferred to build an integrated From the programmer's point of view, platform rather than developing features full latitude is allowed for the integration Links: on top of existing tools. This approach of thesauruses and the customisation of http://sedo.ceps.lu gives room for the integration of pow- the search-engine. The system is also http://www.ceps.lu erful statistical tools and lets the user characterised by a total freedom in the http://www.lippmann.lu perform online calculations according to choice and the management of the the data. With every single variable or databases. Please contact: result are associated information types Uwe Warner, Centre d'Etude de such as the statistical measurement With Sedo, the database server can be Population, de Pauvreté et de Politiques (metric, ordinal, nominal), the popula- distinct from the server where the client Socio-Economiques, Luxembourg tion concerned (individuals, house- requests are processed and the statistical Tel: +352 58 58 55 554 holds), or the expected results for the operations are performed. Thanks to this E-mail: [email protected] variable. Based on these types, the independence of data storage and data system defines the statistical analysis processing, Sedo is portable to any kind Thomas Tamisier, Centre de Recherche that can be performed in order to ensure of database. This separation is also Public - Gabriel Lippmann, Luxembourg the coherence and soundness of the oper- useful for protecting the confidentiality Tel: +352 47 02 61 622. ations delivered to the user. To guarantee of the data. In this case we must consider E-mail: [email protected]

Digital Libraries BELIEF: Bringing Europe's Electronic Infrastructures to Expanding Frontiers

by Federico Biagini, Pasquale Pagano and Franco Zoppi

BELIEF aims at creating a platform where e-infrastructure providers and users Supporting e-Infrastructure Projects can collaborate and exchange knowledge, thus bridging the gap separating the Projects can submit their documents research infrastructure providers from the users. A key role is played by the directly to the digital library: BELIEF BELIEF digital library, specifically designed to meet the needs of this community offers a Submission Interface and a and to guarantee wide dissemination of its results. Document Hosting Service to host projects' documents directly on the DL. To The BELIEF digital library (DL) offers be easily adapted to meet the information ensure that all documentation can be uniform access to multimedia documen- and collaborative needs of other scien- easily acquired, the DL stipulates a stan- tation (eg technical reports, presenta- tific communities. dard description format. tions, videos, manuals, on-line tutorials) providing continuously updated infor- In the BELIEF DL, users can define the Projects using the Document Hosting mation on eInfrastructure-related pro- information space they wish to search Service do not need to bear any extra jects, initiatives and events. The contents or browse in terms of the collections (ie, cost for the development of tools or ser- are harvested from different sources, sets of documents) selected from those vices for their documents' submission, such as projects web sites, repositories managed by the DL. Different collection and retrieval. Projects that and databases. The DL provides services search/browse options are offered: prefer to maintain their own documents to support the submission, description, Google-like or fielded (with fields can make them available to the commu- searching, browsing, retrieval, access, selected from a variety of known meta- nity by simply providing a standard preservation and visualization of multi- data formats), with or without relevance access to their documents and metadata media documents. Although designed to feedback. Users can search/browse any so that they can be transparently 'har- meet the needs of a specific community, information associated with digital doc- vested' by the DL. the technology adopted by BELIEF can uments and their parts.

56 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

BELIEF digital library web interface.

Supporting Users' Community Needs • Metadata encoding protocols: DC, of OpenDLib (see Links), some of these The BELIEF DL facilitates access to and DCQ (recommended), MARC, UNI- APIs were already available as part of dissemination of eInfrastructure project MARC, MARC21. the OpenDLib Toolkit. However, in documents as it provides the user com- • Metadata harvesting protocols: OAI- order to cope with emerging require- munity with a “one-stop-shop” where all PMH - Open Archives Initiative ments a number of new APIs have been relevant documentation can be found. Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (rec- implemented; these are now included in The DL provides a wide range of infor- ommended) or any API call returning the OpenDLib Toolkit (Browse, mation on eInfrastructures, how they an XML file containing metadata BrowseInfo, BrowseStandard, work, what projects exist and how to use encoded in one of the above men- GetDocumentsPerTerm, Submit, them. Even documents stored in inner tioned encoding. ListCollections). sections of the websites – and thus not • File formats: XML (recommended), indexed by general purpose search RSS. Future Work engines - are accessible via BELIEF. Further activity is planned to add addi- The user can search documents in a uni- Although information sources can be tional administration functionality to form way, and access documents pro- accessed via multiple protocols and for- ensure smooth management of wider duced by different providers via a unique mats, BELIEF has chosen to use Dublin user communities nad more friendly help interface. The DL knows the user's Core Qualified encoding for metadata facilities for end-user. The Submission interest, as all users submit user profile definition as it facilitates sharing of Service will be enhanced and the Access information on initial registration. The information between sources using dif- Service will be extended to support new DL can thus provide users with the most ferent encoding systems with no loss of protocols and formats to assist metadata relevant documents according to their semantics. compatibility over heterogeneous requirements and profile, thus providing sources. an intelligent bridge between informa- A web-based interface allows easy sub- tion provider and seeker. The figure mission of metadata and documents to Links: shows the display of results for a search the DL and 'document submission Networked Multimedia Information Systems for documents containing information on models' have been provided to cope with Laboratory website: the Globus and Glite systems plus the the specific characteristics of the docu- http://www.isti.cnr.it/ResearchUnits/Labs/ Condor project. ments managed by the DL (presenta- nmis-lab/ tions, articles, books, tutorials, etc.). This OpenDLib website: Technical Issues model is easily customizable, even by http://www.opendlib.com We have concentrated on implementing end-users, and new models can be added BELIEF project website: harvesting tools that support the use of by DL administrators at any time. http://www.beliefproject.org standard formats and conventions. BELIEF currently supports the fol- For developers interacting with the DL a Please contact: lowing standard protocols and coding set of APIs has been implemented. The Pasquale Pagano, ISTI-CNR, Italy formats: BELIEF DL was created as an instance E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 57 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

Electromagnetic Radiation Cell Phone Danger

by Martin Röösli and Harry Rudin

As we become more and more keen on cell phones there remains the open living in the vicinity. The measurements question of what effect these cell phones have on our health and well being. Some showed that in the week after the shut- recent work in Switzerland sheds some light on these issues. down, sleep quality improved and melatonin excretion increased by 15 percent, Our dependence on and investment in health. One could carefully measure on average. (Melatonin plays an impor- cell phones rise steadily. The annual sale their health status and their well being, tant role in regulating sleep-wake cycles of cell phones is approaching 1 billion distinguishing between those exposed because its production is inhibited by units. Is the result of all the accompa- and those not exposed. Obviously this light and permitted by darkness. nying electromagnetic radiation going to has not been done nor will it be done in Melatonin is sometimes prescribed when have an effect on our health? Almost the future. suffering from jetlag.) However, the shut everyone has heard some 'anecdotal evi- down date was known to the study par- dence' where there have been some While much material has been published ticipants. Thus, the authors state that undesirable effects on people: headache, with the objective of shedding light on "blinding of exposure was not possible concentration problems, irritability, the problem, many of the published in this observational study and this may insomnia, etc. But, can anything be said studies have serious methodological lim- have affected the outcome measure- on a scientific basis? Some recent itations - leading to doubts concerning ments in a direct or indirect (psycholog- ical) way." What effect have cell phones on In September, 2003, the Dutch TNO our health and Physics and Electronic Laboratory well being? announced the results of a study. They wrote: "The present study contributes to the research on finding a relation between electromagnetic fields and brain functions." Further, "Exposure to GSM- 900 or GSM-1800 electromagnetic fields had no effect on well-being in either experimental group. However, exposure to a UMTS-like signal resulted in a small, but statistically significant impairment of well-being. Interestingly this effect was not only observed in individuals with self-reported health complaints attributed to daily life EMF exposures but also in a reference group without such complaints. This effect was found after only about half an hour's exposure research from Switzerland has shed their validity. Reference [1] summarizes to what, by everyday standards, was a some light on the subject. More light is studies on mobile phone radiation and relatively high environmental field needed and some is coming. health-related quality of life, concluding, strength (1 V/m). In practice, while indi- "The results are contradictory and the viduals in the vicinity of operational The topic is difficult in itself and made greater part of these studies is not able to UMTS antennas will be subject to con- more difficult by the enormous financial address the issue of causality between tinuous exposure, the field strengths in interests involved. Ideally, in a cold, sci- exposure and outcome." question will be lower." Thus, the trans- entific experiment, one should find a ferability of the 'TNO'-results to normal group of humans, some of whom would One of the first studies dealing with day-to-day environmental exposure is be subjected to the electromagnetic radi- radio frequency electromagnetic field questionable. [3] ation produced by cell phones and their exposure was about the shutdown of the base stations for several years and some Swiss Schwarzenburg short-wave radio There was considerable criticism of the of whom in the group would not be transmitter. While this took place back in circumstances of this study including exposed. All of them would be blind to 1998, a recently published paper [2] that by its authors themselves. These exposure and they would not differ in reports of measurements in the change in authors and others recognized the need terms of other factors influencing their the melatonin produced by 54 volunteers to make a more careful repeat of the

58 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

study. However, one result of the TNO minute UMTS-radiation exposure inter- "The main goal of the REFLEX project study was a temporary and partial mora- vals (four of them separated by a period was to investigate the effects of EMF on torium on the construction of new base of one week) and radiation absorption in single cells in vitro at the molecular level stations in Switzerland, pending a more brain tissue was considerably smaller below the energy density reflected by the thorough study. than during the use of a mobile phone. present safety levels."[5] The study Thus, the authors concluded, "No con- showed that in certain human cell types A Swiss scientific consortium was clusions can be drawn regarding short- there was indeed a significant increase in formed to carry out such a more thor- term effects of cell phone exposure or the number of single- and double-strand ough study. It was performed by a group the effects of long-term, base-station- breaks in the DNA as a result of high [6] of scientists from the University of like exposure on human health."[4] and extremely low-frequency electro- Zurich, the University of Bern, and from Nevertheless, several of the temporary magnetic fields [5]. the Swiss Federal Institute of and partial moratoria for the construc- Technology in Zurich. Several method- tion of new UMTS base stations in These results fascinated Professor Primo ological improvements were imple- Switzerland were withdrawn, even Schaer at the Center for Biomedicine at mented, including investigating a larger though the question of long-term effects the University of Basel. In a talk at a sample size and applying two different of UMTS radiation on humans remains meeting on June 29 of this year, orga- UMTS exposure levels, all yielding open. nized by the Swiss Research Foundation more robust results. The results were for Mobile Communication, Professor published on June 6, 2006. [4] Meanwhile, the REFLEX study under Schaer gave a preliminary report on his Professor F. Adlkofer, was making mea- own experiments which confirm the The effect of UMTS radiation found in surements on isolated cells to see if these work in Vienna, showing that intermit- the TNO study was not confirmed in the were effected by a high or low-frequency tent extremely low frequency fields can new Swiss study. It should be noted that (power-line frequency) EMF (electro- result in damage to DNA. At this point in the experiment had to do only with 45- magnetic field). Quoting from the report: time these research results are unpub- lished; but, when published, we will References report on them here in ERCIM News. [1] Seitz H., Stinner D., Eikmann T., Herr C., Röösli M.; Electromagnetic Professor Schaer emphasized that some Hypersensitivity (EHS) and Subjective Health Complaints Associated with DNA damages are repaired by the DNA Electromagnetic Fields of Mobile Phone Communication: A literature review [of repair mechanism. Thus, the observed papers] published between 2000 and 2004. genotoxic effects do not necessarily Science of the Total Environment, 2005; 349 (1-3): 45-55. mean that EMF is carcinogenic for the human. [2] Altpeter, E.-S, Martin Röösli, M., Battaglia, M., Pfluger, D., Minder, C. and Abelin, T.; Effect of Short-Wave (6-22 MHz) Magnetic Fields on Sleep Quality and Melatonin In conclusion, we now know that EMF Cycle in Humans: The Schwarzenburg Shut-Down Study, Bioelectromagnetics, does have some effects on humans and Vo. 27, pp 142-150, 2006. human cells. Since we still do not know what the effect is on our health and well- [3] Zwamborn, A.P.M., Vossen, S.H.J.A., van Leersum, B.J.A.M., Ouwens, M.A., being, some degree of caution would Makel, W.N.; Effects of Global Communication System Radio-Frequency Fields on seem to be called for. Well Being and Cognitive Functions of Human Subjects with and without Subjective Complaints. Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). Links: FEL-03-C148, 2003. TNO follow up study: http://www.mobile- research.ethz.ch/projekte.htm#18 [4] Regel S.J., Negovetic S., Röösli M., Berdiñas V., Schuderer J., Huss A., Lott U., Kuster N., Achermann P. ; UMTS Base Station Like Exposure, Well Being and EMF projects at the University of Bern: Cognitive Performance. Environmental Health Perspectives 2006, 114 (8): 1270-1275 http://www.ispm.ch/index.php?id=814 (http://www.ehponline.org/members/2006/8934/8934.html) Primos research group at the University of [5] Winker, R, Ivancsits, S., Pilger, A., Adlkofer, F. and Rudiger, H. W. Basel: Chromosomal Damage in Human Diploid Fibroblasts by Intermittent Exposure to http://pages.unibas.ch/dbmw/biochemie/ Extremely Low-Frequency Electromagnetic Fields, Mutation Research, Vol. 585, Issues 1-2, pp. 43-49, 1 August 2005, http://www.verum-foundation.de/cgi- Please contact: bin/content.cgi?id=euprojekte01 Martin Röösli, University of Bern, Switzerland [6] Diem E., Schwarz C., Adlkofer F., Jahn O., Rüdiger H.; Non-Thermal DNA E-mail: [email protected] Breakage by Mobile Phone Radiation (1800 MHz) in Human Fibroblasts and in Transformed GFSH-R17 Rat Granulosa Cells in Bitro. Mutation Research, Vol. 583, Harry Rudin, Consultant, Switzerland (2), pp. 178-183, 2005. E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 59 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

Satellite Communication Services SAFE: Satellites for Epidemiology and Health Early Warning

by Catherine Chronaki and Laurent Braak

The risk of epidemics and emerging or re-emerging diseases such as avian flu real-time objective data, which is a or chikungunya fever is rising. Luckily, these risks can be contained with strategic objective not only for public prevention, early warning, and prompt management. In this context, current early health policy, but also for the eHealth warning and response systems, although well-developed in Europe, could benefit industry. The SAFE solution that will be from satellite services. marketed to the different actors of epidemiological surveillance comprises the Detection and monitoring of potential warning, and crisis management. SAFE following components: risks has become an important part of the aims to establish a roadmap for ESA to • a network of expert centers and hospi- so-called 'Epidemic Intelligence' as a determine how satellite services, by tals able to communicate by satellite, reaction of surveillance systems to the enabling or restoring access to informa- and interoperable with other networks risk of epidemics arriving from less- tion, can be integrated in European (eg gateways to Galileo and GMES- developed areas outside Europe. Health healthcare systems and civil protection RESPOND); early warning systems in areas remote, authorities. • a coordination van equipped with a inaccessible, or prone to natural or man- DVB-RCS capability and Internet made disasters enabled by satellite com- The SAFE project is part of the ESA access for communication with deci- munications can significantly limit the telemedicine via satellite transition sion makers and expert centers. It has risk of onset and the effects of epidemics phase, set up to pave the way for the cre- the role of the local coordination and contribute to settling major public ation of a European user-driven centre. Communication between the health issues. Economically speaking, telemedicine via satellite programme. local coordinator and the mobile teams satellite communications can also save ESA together with the World Health on the field will be ensured via a local money by enabling rapid and coordi- Organization (WHO) are joining forces Wi-Fi network and Satellite phones nated response and optimal adjustments for reaching this goal. outside the Wi-Fi coverage. Mobile of resources when deploying an emer- teams will be equipped with handheld gency plan. ESA through SAFE and with the assis- terminals for data collection; tance of WHO will specify, develop, and • a field laboratory or lab kit equipped The SAFE project, co-funded by the demonstrate a European outbreak early with biological and biomedical equip- European Space Agency (ESA), will warning system that will become a key ment will identify microbial agents develop and demonstrate the added tool for the national and European bodies responsible for the threats to enable in- value of satellite communication ser- in charge of epidemiological surveil- situ analysis; vices, including low and high bandwidth lance and especially the European • a SAFE information system including access to Internet, co-operative working Center for Disease Control (ECDC). a data collection sub-system and a and geolocalisation for all phases of bio- SAFE aims towards a better assessment GIS. Besides geolocalisation, the GIS logical crisis SAFEincluding Concept prevention, (1) early of the epidemiological risks based on will enable visualizing the evolution of the epidemic and monitoring the alarm levels associated with the different GPS geographical regions. This system will Eutelsat Globalstar Gateway be based on relevant standards and Globalstar Sat comm. Provider will be interoperable with existing terrestrial gateway information systems, ie national health

Network equipment information system, deployable emergency response information system, Field agents SAFE remote epidemiological information systems DVB-RCS application InternetInternet Field and others. It will facilitate monitoring server laboratory of indicators and other measures potentially useful in modeling the SAFE Coordination van transmission patterns. Dissemination Local application server Data consulting on remote site of this data can be done with the Video conference users Data handling (consulting, Internet capability via satellite. Operation field meeting, reporting) End users / Expert centers An end-to-end case of early warning at Components08/08/2006 of the SAFE demonstrator. SAFE 1 the onset of an epidemic will be demon-

60 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

strated at the Heraklion prefecture, in the tutes - ISCIII (CNE) Instituto de Salud vides recommendations relying on its island of Crete, Greece. The scenario Carlos III 'Centro National de ongoing activities in epidemiology and based on epidemiological monitoring Epidemiologia' (Spain) and InVS humanitarian medicine involving satel- after an earthquake, namely the onset of 'Institut de Veille Sanitaire' (France) - to lite communications. typhoid fever epidemic, will validate the ensure compliance with policies and SAFE approach within the user commu- practices of epidemiological monitoring. Links: nity and if successful it could become ICS-FORTH (Greece) coordinates the European Space Agency: http://www.esa.int part of regular earthquake readiness demonstration of post-disaster biological exercises. Furthermore, other demon- risk monitoring in Crete. MICRO- European Center for Disease Control: strations will be envisaged and imple- UNIVr (University of Verona, Italy) is http://www.ecdc.europa.eu/ mented, namely related to avian flu and responsible for the mobile lab equipment biological and radiological threats. and definitive identification of the World Health Organization: These itinerant and on-demand demon- microbial agent causing the biological http://www.who.int strations will be implemented all over crisis. MEDIVAN (Italy) provides Europe upon user request, promoting the industrial expertise on marketing mobile Please contact: added value of SAFE and allowing units for medical emergencies and Audrey Berthier, potential end-users and stakeholders to rescue. GMV (Spain) ensures the overall MEDES, France (project coordinator): assess the demonstration according to system design, integration and the devel- E-mail: [email protected] relevant criteria, such as availability, opment of the GIS. TTSA (France) interoperability, and security. brings expertise in satellite communica- Pierluigi Mancini, ESA, Directorate of tions and marketing of satellite services European Union and Industrial programs The SAFE consortium of nine partners in health. REMIFOR (France) provides (Program manager) from four countries is coordinated by the coordination van and links with the E-mail [email protected] MEDES (Institute for Space Medicine professional bodies of civil protection and Psychology, France). End users are and firemen. MEDES (France) coordi- Catherine Chronaki, ICS-FORTH, Greece represented by two epidemiology insti- nates the economical analysis and pro- E-mail: [email protected]

Satellite Devices Planck Mission 70 GHz Receivers by Jussi Varis

Planck is a European Space Agency - ESA mission to map the Cosmic Microwave The scientific performance of Planck is Background (CMB) to an unprecedented sensitivity covering the whole sky. An ultimately limited by the receiver noise accurate map of the CMB will allow the cosmologists to determine definitively level. To ensure very low noise perfor- the properties of our universe, like the age, the geometry, and the matter and mance, state-of-the-art Indium energy composition. The Planck mission will be launched in 2008. Phosphide (InP) semiconductors designed by the Finnish team were used Finland has been responsible for MilliLab delivered the six Planck low in the 70 GHz FEMs and BEMs. The building the crucial 70 GHz instruments frequency instrument (LFI) 70 GHz semiconductor devices were tested in for Planck. MilliLab, VTT has been front end modules (FEMs) and six back MilliLab's unique cryogenic test system leading the instrument development. end modules (BEMs) for the mission at the temperature of 20 K, which is the Together with Elektrobit Microwave (see figure) in 2006. operating temperature of the FEMs in the Ltd. and Metsähovi Radio Observatory, Planck satellite. The FEMs and BEMs were manufactured and integrated in Elektrobit Microwave, and further tested at their cryogenic facility at the satellite Planck LFI 70 GHz Front-End operating conditions. The receivers built Module (FEM, in front)) and by the Finnish Planck team have demon- Back End Module (BEM, in back) strated world record sensitivity at 70 developed by the Finnish Planck GHz. team. The FEM component houses four InP semiconductor Please contact: low noise amplifiers and two Jussi Varis, MilliLab-Millimetre Wave phase shifters, and the BEM Laboratory of Finland additional four low noise Tel: +358405694089 amplifiers. E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 61 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

Detector Technology Data Acquisition in Scientific Applications

by Rob Halsall

Large scale scientific instrumentation systems for particle physics research at of programmable logic with DSP CERN are currently being deployed with many millions of sensor channels and enhancements allowing performance Data Acquisition (DAQ) rates of the order of 100s of GByte/s. These systems, rates up to 250 GMACS/s for the largest consisting of many racks of large format electronics modules, are typically devices. implemented using custom digital logic in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. Installed in under ground caverns, closely coupled to massive detectors This provides the opportunity for and networked to PC processing farms, these systems could be regarded as very shrinking our systems and producing large examples of embedded systems. embedded high performance DAQ with standard networked readout such as GBit In other science areas (eg Synchrotron Recent advances in FPGA’s have seen Ethernet – Large Scale Science DAQ Radiation (SR), Neutron beams) there these devices evolve into programmable systems shrink wrapped into DAQ are growing requirements to move to System On Chip (SOC) ASICs making Sensor appliances. similar detector technology. Although these requirements feasible at reasonable on a smaller scale this is resulting in high cost and size. Typical FPGA compo- In CCLRC Technology we have demon- sample rates and channel counts with a nents now contain multiple microproces- strated the technical feasibility of dramatic increase in the data rates over sors, multiple multi-gigabit transceivers embedded hardware based on high- previous systems from around 100 capable of driving common network speed serial optical links, standard net- MByte/s to 10 GByte/s. standards, as well as multi million gates work protocols, and programmable System On Chip (SOC) FPGA devices to deliver across a wide range of requirements and projects.

Our designs have implemented embedded hardware support features such as electronic fuses, supply monitoring, thermal monitoring, shutdown on fault, Wake On LAN type recovery from shutdown and low stand-by power. Remote reconfiguration of FPGA FLASH memory is possible together Figure 1: Figure 2: with encryption of the bit stream and One of 500 digitiser cards for a Large High performance Embedded DAQ for automatic reversion to a fallback Scale Science Project. Custom CMOS Sensor (not shown). FLASH memory in the event of failure during re-programming. A typical small system might consist of a pixel sensor chip readout by an FPGA which is in turn readout by a PC server over a GBit Ethernet connection. A commodity SDRAM memory module connected to the FPGA provides data buffering and optical transceivers allow transmission of the GBit Ethernet over longer dis- tances.

Figure 3 shows an embedded DAQ module planned for use on SR applications reading out 16 CMOS Pixel image sensors capable of a multi KHz frame rate. The module can log up to 800 MByte/s into SDRAM for a few seconds and then is readout to a PC server on two GBit Ethernet cables each sustaining 80 Figure 3: Multiple Custom CMOS Pixel Sensor with high performance Embedded DAQ. MByte/s.

62 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

One problem for these more widely The strategy we propose is to exploit the Even allowing for the availability of C to deployed smaller projects based on high hardware IP modules and facilities hardware tools and an abundant gate performance embedded modules is the existing within the embedded design count in the FPGA using embedded design cost and turnaround time. tools by adding instrumentation-specific microprocessors would still be an effi- Unfortunately there is no all-encom- DAQ IP for integration of the sensor data cient method. passing design tool for DAQ systems. stream. Customising the vendor’s frame- The design process relies on an increas- work minimises the cost by reducing the Examples of the type of features which ingly large and diverse portfolio of com- amount of work that needs to be done, could be added include real-time tuning plex tools that require a high level of and minimises the risk by using standard of the data flow and processing algo- expertise to operate. Thus there is a interfaces. rithms, logging of environmental infor- growing cost of keeping up with the tool mation, safety critical monitoring of sen- flows required to access more powerful A similar approach is taken for the soft- sors (eg to prevent radiation damage), hardware. ware libraries - by using standard net- interaction with higher level control sys- work protocols (Ethernet) and operating tems using standard protocols and provi- Currently we have an R&D program system APIs the software side of the sion of information to the e-science sys- funded internally by our Centre for DAQ library is more like ‘DAQ middle- tems to aid in the management of the Instrumentation (CFI) which will inves- ware’. integrity of the data set. tigate the embedded processor design tools. This project aims to reduce the The addition of embedded networked Please contact: cost of the firmware and software design microprocessors within our designs Rob Halsall, CCLRC Technology for DAQ projects by developing a uni- gives us the ability to add higher levels Rutherford Appleton Laboratory UK fied approach based around FPGA of intelligence to our systems which Tel: +44 1235 445140 vendor embedded development tools. might otherwise be difficult to include. E-mail: [email protected]

Security Network Anomaly Detection by Means of Machine Learning by Roland Kwitt

Anomaly detection should be an integral part of every computer security system, Organizing Maps do not require a since it is the only way to tackle the problem of identifying novel and modified teacher who determines the favoured attacks. Our work focuses on machine-learning approaches for anomaly detection output. and tries to deal with the problems that come along with it. Considering the aforementioned feature Since the number of reported security Here, the second approach, termed vectors, the vector elements strongly incidents caused by network attacks is anomaly detection, is in evidence. depend on the preferred layer of detec- dramatically increasing every year, cor- Anomaly detection maps normal tion. That means, if anomaly detection is responding attack detection systems behaviour to a baseline profile and tries carried out at the connection level for have become a necessity in every com- to detect deviations. Thus, no a priori instance, connection specific features, pany's network security system. knowledge about attacks is needed any for example packet counts, connection longer and the problem of missing attack duration, etc., have to be collected. Generally, there are two approaches to signatures does not exist. However, if we require detection at a tackle the detection problem. Most com- higher level, for example at application mercial intrusion detection systems Our work deals with the applicability of layer, another set of features will be nec- employ some kind of signature-matching machine-learning approaches, specifi- essary. Generally we can state, that the algorithms to detect malicious activities. cally Self-Organising Maps and neural more discriminative power a feature pos- In intrusion detection terminology this is networks in the field of network anomaly sesses, the better detection results we called “misuse detection”. Generally, detection. By presenting a set of normal get. such systems have very low false alarm (problem-specific) feature vectors to a rates and work very well in the event that Self-Organising Map, it can learn the In case we use a neural network architec- the corresponding attack signatures are specific characteristics of these vectors ture for anomaly detection, such as a present. However, the last point leads and provide a distance measure of how Feed-Forward Multi-Layer Perceptron directly to the potential drawback of well a new input vector fits into the class (MLP), the training procedure for misuse detection: missing signatures of normal data. In contrast to other normal behaviour might not be apparent inevitably lead to undetected attacks! machine-learning approaches, Self- at first sight, since such networks gener-

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 63 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

results. Again, machine-learning with Self-Organising Maps can remedy that problem to a certain extent. Unless the amount of contamination is too high (which depends on the SOM parameters and the amount of normal data), no map regions will evolve which accept anomalous data.

Simplified anomaly detection process. Future work on this topic will include research on the feature construction process, which we found to be one of the most crit- ally require instances of both normal and make the assumption that malicious ical parts of an anomaly detector. abnormal data in the training phase. behaviour is potentially abnormal. Furthermore, we plan to evaluate However, anomaly detection assumes machine-learning approaches that incor- that we only have instances of benign, One big problem that comes along with porate time as an important factor. Last normal data. This problem can be suc- anomaly detectors is the lack of normal but not least, we have to find a solution cessfully solved by training the neural data in the training phase of a system. to the open problem of “concept drift”, network with a set of random vectors, in Most anomaly detection systems will which denotes the fact, that normal the first step, pretending that all miss an attack if the training data con- behaviour changes over time, leading to instances are anomalous. In the second tains instances of that attack. However, high false positives (normal behaviour step, the neural network is trained with no system administrator will waste his classified as anomalous) in most detec- the set of normal instances. In the ideal time, cleansing network traces from tion systems. case, the net is then able to recognise embedded attacks in order to produce recurrent benign behaviour as normal adequate training data. What we need Please contact: and classify potential attacks as are detectors that are tolerant with Roland Kwitt, Salzburg Research, Austria abnormal. It is clear that we have to regards to contaminated training data Tel: +43 664 1266900 instances and still produce accurate E-mail: [email protected]

Web 2.0 and Novel Interaction From Solitary Podcasting to Ambient Pondcasting

by Emmanuel Frécon and Pär Hansson

Podcasting has taken the world by storm and become a mass phenomenon in content and experience from a given set less than a year. The core activities of podcast consumers, namely selecting of already-loaded media players. This is broadcast sources and listening to portable media players, are solitary a problem, especially as the venue of experiences. The Pondcaster project seeks to take podcasting a step further by media players has been criticised as an encouraging group discovery and shared listening through a combination of invention that increases personal isola- interactive tabletop displays and personalised ambient listening stations. tion in traditionally public or semi- public spaces such as streets, transport Podcast was elected Word of the Year automatically have it downloaded so systems or even homes. 2005 by the editors of the New Oxford they can listen later, off-line, on portable American Dictionary and is now offi- media players such as the Apple iPod, The SICS Pondcaster project addresses cially defined as “a digital recording of a which gave its name to the phenomenon. these problems and proposes a system radio broadcast or similar programme, that radically steps away from current made available on the internet for down- Both the process of selecting shows to podcast selection and consumption by loading to a personal audio player”. In its subscribe to for automatic synchronisa- supporting shared experiences. The current form, podcasting is a way for tion and that of listening at a later time Pondcaster system comprises a tabletop individuals and radio stations to broad- are solitary experiences. While the var- interactive artefact, which uses a pond cast shows by making them accessible as ious communication media offered by environment as its metaphor, and any digital audio (and now also video) files the internet can help in discovering and number of ambient listening stations over the internet. Listeners decide the selecting shows, there are few ways for placed in the environment to allow group type of programme they wish to hear and a co-located group to interactively share listening, thus, bringing back the social

64 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 R&D AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

Figure 1: The Pondcaster interactive artefact Figure 2: Upon interaction, creatures representing shows surface and the artefact and some mobile devices. starts playing their content. aspects of radio listening from the early media player, which again favours dis- The associations between shows and days of radio. The tabletop artefact covery of new shows. Finally, the arte- mobile phones will be remembered by builds on devices that can be found in fact keeps track of bluetooth-enabled the system. At a later time, users are able every listener's pocket, such as media mobile phones in its close vicinity. Users to listen to the chosen shows at public players and possibly mobile phones, and can express their intention to listen fur- radio-like terminals. Users within the features unencumbered interaction via a ther to newly discovered shows by drag- bluetooth vicinity of such a terminal will touch screen. ging specific creatures to a representa- be recognised and their selections tion of their phone. retrieved and played using a queue The tabletop artefact acts as a sink for the system. The setting encourages social- podcast content of the users' media ising, discussion and mobility since it players, providing a snapshot of their keeps track of listening state across a set current choices and podcast tastes. On of listening stations for a given user. physical connection, the content of any media player is automatically shown, The Pondcaster is based on existing using an animated aquatic metaphor. The internet technologies and because the pond shows groups of similar content as system uses bluetooth tagging, no data is animated shoals of creatures, where each ever moved to mobile phones and media creature represents a podcast show. To players. Subscriptions and preferences avoid clutter, the metaphor is self- are kept on the Pondcaster and made cleaning, whereby old, unused shoals available for further access by media slowly sink to the bottom of the virtual players and Web browsers. As such, the pond. By interacting with the creatures artefact forms the premises of a person- representing podcast shows, users can alised podcast aggregator. access show details and start listening, which favours collaboration and dis- Link: covery of new sources. The artefact is http://www.sics.se/ice/projects/pondcaster also linked to a phone number and any user can send an SMS containing the Please contact: words of a query. On reception, acting as Figure 3: Two users listening to podcast Emmanuel Frécon, SICS, Sweden an internet podcast search engine, the shows at one listening station. The TV Tel: +46 8 6331500 artefact will display matching podcast screen shows the waiting list (some users E-mail: [email protected] shows as a new shoal. These shows are off-picture) and sound comes from the typically not present on any connected directed speaker hanging from the roof.

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 65 EVENTS

EPoSS – A new European Technology Platform on Smart Systems Integration

by Erwin Schoitsch

The European Technology Platform on Smart Systems Integration (EPoSS) however, requires a change in the level was launched in Brussels on 7th of July 2006. Information Society and and nature of these activities: regrouping Media Commissioner Viviane Reding officially opened the event and the scattered industry and research com- outlined in an encouraging manner the major issues to be tackled by munities and developing new instru- EPoSS. ments for interdisciplinary R&D activities as well as new models and formats of EPoSS brings together European private plines and principles from physics, policy support for a fast transfer of and public stakeholders in order to coor- chemistry, engineering and biology. The research into innovative products. dinate and to bundle efforts and to set-up systems may also integrate mechanical, sustainable structures for improving the electrical and biological functions in Areas covered by EPoSS include: • Automotive • Aerospace • Telecommunications • MedTech Systems • Logistics/RFID • Commonalities (Cross Cutting Issues).

Rosalie Zobel, EC Director for Components and Systems welcomed the expected co-operation with the ETP ARTEMIS (embedded systems) and ENIAC (European Nanoelectronics Initiative Advisory Council).

Important industrial players are supporting and actively participating in EPoSS, such as EADS, Airbus, Thales, VW, Fiat, Siemens, Bosch, Infineon, to name just a few. . S S o P E

o ERCIM members participating in

y s e t r

u EPoSS are Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and o c

y b VTT. ARC Seibersdorf research (a o t o h P member of the Austrian ERCIM member AARIT) will also join EPoSS. Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding. The author, as the chairman of the ERCIM Working Group on Dependable Embedded Systems and member of the DECOS coordination team, was attending this event. Information on competitiveness of European R&D on order to create new features like uninter- ERCIM and DECOS was distributed Smart Systems Technologies and their rupted access to information, security among the about 200 participants. integration. Smart system integration is and ease of use. an emerging area with applications in Link: many industrial sectors. A particular fea- New business opportunities - for example http://www.smart-systems-integration.org/ ture of the technology is its interdisci- for automotive industries, a strong pillar plinarity and the holistic viewpoint of European economy (road safety, envi- Please contact: required for successful implementation. ronment) - are also in the focus of EPoSS. Erwin Schoitsch Systems combining sensing, processing Europe has a good position in micro/ ARC Seibersdorf research, Austria and actuating functions are increasingly nanosystems, advanced technologies and E-mail: [email protected] complex, involving a variety of disci- embedded systems. Further progress,

66 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 EVENTS

ECDL 2006 - 10th European Conference on Digital Libraries

by M.Felisa Verdejo

The tenth European Conference on Digital Libraries was held at the University of Audiovisual content and Languages Alicante, Spain from September 17 to 22, 2006. The event was jointly organised Technologies. The event was broadcast by the University of Alicante, Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library and Universidad live on the Internet. Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). The doctoral consortium was scheduled The theme of this year's conference was Stanford, USA, who presented Google the day before the conference at the same Towards the European Digital Library. Book Search, a book-indexing project, time as the tutorials in order to allow The aim was to emphasise the contribu- and its benefits to readers and publishers, both seniors and students to fully partici- tion made by the European Digital as well as a catalyst for other initiatives pate in the conference itself. Two Library research community (and its such as The European Digital Library. awards were made. The Best Paper liaisons with the international research Award, supported by the IEEE Technical community in general) to the current A panel discussing the topic Sustained committee on Digital Libraries (IEEE- efforts of the European Commission in Digital Libraries for Universal Use was TCDL) went to Carl Lagoze, Dean this direction. Speakers were invited to chaired by Ching-chih Chen of Simmons Krafft, Tim Cornwell, Dean Eckstrom, elaborate on this topic and the conference opened with a commemorative talk by Dr. Yannis Ioannidis looking back on the history of the ECDL. A CD-ROM is now available to the DL research community containing the proceedings of all the ECDL Conferences.

Although strongly international, the conference retained a distinctive European flavour. The 459 participants came from 45 countries: 66 percent were from Europe (26 countries), 23 percent from America, nine percent from Australasia and two percent from Africa.

The event followed the usual format of ECDL conferences consisting of a main conference, a doctoral consortium workshop, five tutorials, posters and demon- Ching-chih Chen of Simmons College, Boston, USA. strations (this year there were 33), six workshops and the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), a major event on its own, with 140 participants. College, Boston, USA and José Susan Jesuroga and Chris Wilper for the The three guest speakers were Horst Borbinha of INESC-ID, Portugal. They paper Representing Contextualised Foster, Director of Content in the were joined by Abdelaziz Abid from Information in the NSDL, and the Best Information Society and Media DG of UNESCO, Vittore Casarosa from Young Researcher Award, supported by the European Commission, who pre- DELOS and Eric van der Meulen from DELOS Network of Excellence on sented the Digital Libraries Initiative, the European Library. Digital Libraries, went to Daniel Coelho one of the flagships of the i2010 strategic Gomes, Universidade de Lisboa, as framework; Ricardo Baeza, director of Some 36 papers were selected for the coauthor of the paper Design and Yahoo! Research Barcelona (Spain) and main conference, an acceptance rate of Selection Criteria for a National Web Yahoo! Research Latin America in 28 percent. Papers were organised in 12 Archive. Santiago (Chile), who focused on the sessions around the topics: Architecture potential of exploiting users' behaviour (I, II), Preservation, Retrieval, As well as the scientific programme, in search processes and Michael Keller, Applications, Methodology, Metadata, ECDL 2006 included a full range of librarian at Ida M. Green University, Evaluation, User Studies, Modelling, social activities allowing participants to

67 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 67 EVENTS

get together, and enjoy the local cultural with photos of the conference events and Verdejo , Rafael Carrasco (Eds). Lecture heritage. On Sunday evening there was a further information about participants, Notes in Computer Science, Vol 4172, boat trip around Alicante bay and the fol- sponsors and cooperating institutions. 569 p. lowing evening there was a reception at the Santa Barbara fortress. The fortress This tenth conference highlighted The organisers of ECDL 2006 appreciate lies on top of mount Benacantil and has research achievements in the field and the financial support given to the splendid views over the harbour, the city provided a significant opportunity to Conference by Universidad de Alicante, and the coastline. Built by the Muslims demonstrate how the ECDL community Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, in the ninth century, it was redesigned is contributing towards the European Grupo Santander, Generalitat around 1580. On Tuesday evening there Digital Library. Valenciana, Patronato de turismo de was a visit to the archaeological Alicante and Universidad Nacional de museum. This museum, which was We are looking forward to the next Educación a Distancia (UNED). European Museum of the Year in 2004, ECDL Conference from September 16 to tells the history of the Mediterranean 21, 2007, in Budapest. For more infor- Link: using installations, audiovisual projec- mation see http://www.ecdl2007.org/ http://www.ecdl2006.org tions and computer graphics. The conference closed with a dinner and jazz band. The proceedings of ECDL 2006: Julio Delegates received a USB memory stick Gonzalo, Costantino Thanos, M.Felisa

Cross-Language Evaluation Forum - CLEF 2006

by Carol Peters

The results of the seventh campaign of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum representing information needs (queries) were presented at a two-and-a-half day workshop held in Alicante, Spain, 20-22 and collections of documents (corpora). September, immediately following the tenth European Conference on Digital System performance is evaluated by Libraries. The workshop was attended by over 130 researchers and system judging the documents retrieved in developers from academia and industry. response to a topic with respect to their relevance (relevance assessments) and The main objectives of the Cross- Evaluation Tracks computing recall and precision mea- Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) are In CLEF 2006 eight tracks were offered sures. to stimulate the development of mono- to evaluate the performance of systems and multilingual information retrieval for: The following document collections systems for European languages and to • mono-, bi- and multilingual document were used in CLEF 2006: contribute to the building of a research retrieval on news collections (Ad-hoc) • CLEF multilingual comparable corpus community in the multidisciplinary area • mono- and cross-language structured of more than 2 million news docu- of multilingual information access scientific data (Domain-specific) ments in 12 European languages (MLIA). These objectives are realised • interactive cross-language retrieval • CLEF domain-specific corpora: through the organisation of annual eval- (iCLEF) English/German and Russian social uation campaigns and workshops. The • multiple language question answering science databases scope of CLEF has gradually expanded (QA@CLEF) • Malach collection of spontaneous over the years. While in the early years, • cross-language retrieval on image col- speech in English and Czech, derived the main interest was in textual docu- lections (ImageCLEF) from the Shoah archives ment retrieval, the focus is now diversi- • cross-language speech retrieval (CL- • EuroGOV, ca 3.5 M webpages fied to include different kinds of text SR) crawled from European governmental retrieval across languages and on dif- • multilingual web retrieval sites. ferent kinds of media (ie not just plain (WebCLEF) text but collections containing images • cross-language geographic retrieval The ImageCLEF track used collections and speech as well). In addition, atten- (GeoCLEF). for both general photographic and med- tion is given to issues that regard system ical image retrieval: usability and user satisfaction with tasks Test Suites • IAPR TC-12 photo database; LTU to measure the effectiveness of interac- Most of the tracks adopt a corpus-based photo collection for image annotation; tive systems. automatic scoring method for the assess- • ImageCLEFmed radiological ment of system performance. The test database; IRMA collection for auto- collections consist of sets of statements matic image annotation.

68 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 EVENTS

Participation Sciences Winterthur, Switzerland, gave Participation was up again this year with an insightful talk on “What MLIA ERCIM-DECOS 90 groups submitting results for one or Applications can learn from Evaluation more of the different tracks: 60 from Campaigns” while Fredric Gey from Workshop Europe, 14 from North America, 10 U.C Berkeley, USA, summarised some from Asia, 4 from South America and 2 of the main conclusions of the MLIA by Erwin Schoitsch from Australia. workshop at SIGIR 2006 in Seattle, where much of the discussion was con- The ERCIM Working Group 'Dependable Workshop centrated on problems involved in Embedded Systems' held a workshop The campaign culminated in the work- building and marketing commercial in cooperation with the European shop held in Alicante, 20-22 September. MLIA systems. There was also an Integrated Project DECOS - Dependable The workshop was divided between ple- invited talk by Noriko Kando, National Embedded Components and Systems nary track overviews, parallel, poster Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan, on 29 August 2006 at Euromicro 2006 and breakout sessions. In her opening on new evaluation activities at the in Cavtat, Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Embedded systems are regarded as the most important computer application field in the years to come, and a business driver for European industry. Therefore they are a targeted research area for European Research Programmes in Framework 7, promoted by ARTEMIS, the 'Technology Platform for Advanced Research and Technology for Embedded Intelligence'.

The workshop, entiteled 'Dependability Issues of Networked Embedded Systems: Research, Industrial Experience and Education', covered topics such as: • Hardware/Software co-design, The real-time exercise: demonstrating the interface to the participants. System-on-Chip integration • Software processes for efficient development of dependable embedded systems • Architectures, Methods and Tools for talk, Carol Peters, the CLEF NTCIR evaluation initiative for Asian Design and Development of critical Coordinator, stressed the need for more languages. systems technical transfer activities. She com- • Interconnected, networked embedded mented that although many advances The presentations given at the CLEF systems had been made in the multilingual infor- Workshops and detailed reports on the • Time triggered systems mation access research field there were experiments of CLEF 2006 and previous • Functional Safety (system assessment, still few real-world operational cross- years can be found on the CLEF website evaluation and standards) language systems. In her opinion, CLEF at http://www.clef-campaign.org/. The • Verification, validation and certifica- should be paying more attention to issues preliminary agenda for CLEF 2007 will tion of hardware and software, compo- that directly regard the user and the be available from mid-November. CLEF nents and systems. needs of the application communities is an activity of the DELOS Network of • Use/integration of COTS hardware and/or rather than focusing most attention on Excellence for Digital Libraries. software as well as of legacy systems. system performance only in terms of precision and recall. In fact, one of the most Link: Attendance was free thanks to the spon- interesting activities this year was the http://www.clef-campaign.org sorship of the DECOS project. real-time question answering exercise, organised on-site by Fernando Llopis Please contact: Link: and Elisa Noguera, U. Alicante (see Carol Peters, ISTI-CNR, Italy, CLEF ERCIM/DECOS Workshop: figure). Here the aim was to examine the Coordinator http://www.itk.ntnu.no/misc/ercim/ ability of question answering systems to Tel: +39 050 3152897 respond within a time constraint. The E-mail: [email protected] Please contact: need for more technical transfer was Erwin Schoitsch, Austrian Research taken up again in the final session in two Centers/AARIT, Austria talks. Martin Braschler, U. Applied E-mail: [email protected]

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 69 EVENTS

ARTEMIS Annual Conference 2006

by Erwin Schoitsch

The third ARTEMIS annual conference took place in Graz, Austria on 22-24 May. DECOS - Dependable Embedded The event was attended by nearly 250 delegates from European companies, Components and Systems - was pre- representatives of SMEs, governments, academia and research Institutes. sented via videos explaining the DECOS technology in the context of automotive ARTEMIS (Advanced Research and biomedical, manufacturing, medical applications and by a demonstrator TT- Technology for EMbedded Intelligence systems, etc.) Car, a model car demonstrating the and Systems) is a strong, industry-driven • Nomadic Environments (enabling advantages of time-triggered tech- European Technology Platform (ETP) devices such as PDAs, on-body sys- nology. whose goal is to establish a coherent, tems) for the mobile environment integrated European Strategic Research • Private Spaces (homes, cars, offices, ERCIM and AARIT, the Austrian Agenda (SRA) to maintain the European entertainment, comfort, well-being, member of ERCIM, was represented at lead in the field of embedded systems. safety) the DECOS project booth. The ERCIM From the scientific-technical point of Working Group, Dependable Embedded view, ARTEMIS tries to establish a common approach and common technology across application domains. It does this by creating a public-private partnership bringing together people from industry, small and medium-sized businesses, universities, research centres and European public authorities, in the field of Embedded Systems. Common technology is defined by three working groups: • Reference Designs and Architectures: to offer standard architectural approaches for major application contexts and to address complexity challenges, dependability issues and build synergies between application sectors (eg aeroplane safety at automotive costs). • Seamless Connectivity and Middleware: to offer wide-scale interoperability and connectivity, to pro- ERCIM at the Smart Systems/ TTTech Booth at the ARTEMIS Conference Exhibition, vide new services, functionality and to Graz 2006. build the ambient intelligent (smart) environment • System Design Methods and Tools: to enable dependable, rapid design and • Public Infrastructures (airports, high- Systems (DES-WG), is cooperating development. ways, railways, communication net- closely with DECOS. The DES-WG is a works, security systems, energy, etc.). dissemination partner of DECOS and Additionally, a strategic group works on DES-WG events are sponsored by generic enabling technologies based on ARC Seibersdorf research was repre- DECOS. foundational sciences' results. sented at the exhibition by a booth displaying animated videos on the applica- Links: Application contexts are wide-spread, tion of dependable embedded systems at ARTEMIS: http://www.artemis-office.org/ according to the principle that NASA (time-triggered systems for the DECOS: https://www.decos.at/ Embedded Systems are Everywhere. Mars mission), DARPA Grand Challenge (Embedded Vision Systems Please contact: The target application areas are: being part of one of the finalists in this Erwin Schoitsch, ARC Seibersdorf research/ • Industrial (automotive, aerospace, rail- race of autonomous vehicles through the AARIT, Austria ways, machinery, process industry, desert in Nevada) and the DECOS pro- E-mail: [email protected] ject. The EU-funded Integrated Project

70 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 EVENTS

XP2006 - Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering by Outi Salo and Pekka Abrahamsson

The 7th International Conference on eXtreme Programming and Agile Processes The conference was also honoured with in Software Engineering was organized in Oulu, Finland in June 2006 by VTT the presence of two legends in software Technical Research Centre of Finland and the University of Oulu. industry; Barry Boehm (Professor of Software Engineering, Computer As the largest agile conference ever crowd. All together, 283 industrial and Science Department Director at USC organized in Europe, the five day pro- academic professionals from 25 coun- Center for Software Engineering and gram included altogether 18 tutorials, tries around the world, and from over creator of, eg, COCOMO, Spiral Model, five keynote speeches, 22 research and 100 different companies, gathered and the Theory W approach), and Kent experience paper presentations, 20 dif- together to discuss their needs and ideas Beck (Founder and Director of Three ferent workshops and activities, three for incorporating agile methodologies Rivers Institute, the father of Extreme cutting edge panel discussions and into the production models. In this Programming methodology and one of poster demonstrations, as well as 20 respect, the conference can undoubtedly the founders of the Agile Manifesto). round-the-clock open-space events self- be regarded as a huge success in terms of organized by the enthusiastic agile both quality and quantity! In all, the success of XP2006 is one indicator that agile methodologies and their variants are here to stay. The enormous and ongoing interest of both the industry and academia shows no signs of sub- siding. However, it is also evident that even though the agile ideologies and methodologies have emerged since the mid 1990's, there is still a great need to keep the debate and evolution moving upwards and onwards. In fact, a majority of software organizations functioning in complex human and technical ecosys- tems are still contemplating whether to Barry Boehm (left) and Kent Beck at XP2006. make the transition towards agile software development and how they should actually proceed in pursuit of increased quality and customer satisfaction, and Fellowships available in GRID Research decreased lead-time and costs. XP2007 will be organized in June, 2007 The CoreGRID Network of Excellence currently offers in Como, Italy. Welcome to join the agile crowd! Fellowships for postgraduate students in the field of GRID Research Links: http://virtual.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/symposiums/2006/ The CoreGRID web site also offers the possibility to post job announcements S241.pdf (Collection of Tutorials, related to GRID research. Job postings are free of charge for academic Workshops, Activities and Key Note institutions and organisations. Speeches of XP2006) http://www.xp2006.org For available positions and job postings, see http://agile.vtt.fi http://www.coregrid.net/jobs

Contact: Céline Bitoune, ERCIM; [email protected] Please contact: Outi Salo, Pekka Abrahamsson VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, E-mail: [email protected], CoreGRID is a Network of Excellence administrated by ERCIM [email protected]

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 71 EVENTS

Call for Participation Call for Participation Call for Papers GRIDS@work: CoreGRID SOFSEM '07 - CAISE '07 - The 19th International Conference, Grid Plugtests and Current Trends in Theory and Conference on Advanced Contest Practice of Computer Science Information Systems Engineering

Sophia-Antipolis, France, Harrachov, Czech Republic, Trondheim, Norway, 11-15 June 2007 27 November - 1st December 2006 20-26 January 2007 CAiSE'07 invites submissions on the Following the successful second GRID SOFSEM (originally SOFtware development, maintenance, procurement Plugtests in 2005 with 230 participants SEMinar) is the annual, international and usage of information systems. This from many different countries, ETSI, conference devoted to the theory and year's special theme is 'Ubiquitous INRIA and CoreGRID decided to orga- practice of computer science. Its aim is Information Systems Engineering', but nize this year an enhanced to foster cooperation among profes- as usual the conference also welcomes GRIDs@work event, composed of: sionals from academia and industry papers on other aspects of IS engi- • a series of conferences and tutorials: working in all modern areas of computer neering. New information systems span view the programme science. The SOFSEM program consists different organizations and geographical • a 3rd GRID Plugtests, during which of series of invited talks, given by promi- locations, and often need to support the two competitions will take place: the nent researchers and professionals, untethered mobility of the people using N-Queens Contest and the FlowShop Contributed Talks selected by the the systems. They have a large impact on Contest. Program Committee from submitted the every day life of organisations as FLYER GRID 2006 13/09/06 18:10 Page 1 papers, Working Sessions discussing well as individuals. In the light of the work-in-progress, and the Student development towards ambient, pervasive Research Forum. and ubiquitous computing this impact will increase significantly. SOFSEM offers a unique opportunity to quickly obtain a representative and in- Topics depth overview of the areas of computer In addition to the special theme, relevant science which were selected as the topics topic include: of this year. For an optimal atmosphere • Methodologies and approaches for IS of close professional interaction, engineering: SOFSEM is organised in tracks with • Innovative platforms and architectures well-defined topics so as to attract all for IS engineering researchers and professionals that share • Engineering of specific kinds of IS specific fields of interest. SOFSEM is • Quality concerns in IS engineering. O WITH THE SUPPORT OF: especially suited for young computer scientists. Important Dates O EUROPEAN PARTNERS: Object Web • 30 November 2006: Open Source Middleware

O CO-ORGANIZERS Tracks Paper submission deadline O Information & registration: http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/Upcoming/GRID2006/GRID2006.htm O Join our sponsorship programme! SOFSEM 2007 tracks are: • 10 February 2007: http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/Upcoming/GRID2006/SponsorGRID2006.htm • Foundations of Computer Science Notification of acceptance • Multi-Agent Systems • 11-15 June 2007: This event will take place on a Grid • Emerging Web Technologies Conference and workshops infrastructure. You may provide • Dependable Software and Systems. machines to this effect. The proceedings will be published in the As it has became a tradition in the last series Lecture Notes in Computer More information: years, the proceedings with the invited Science (LNCS, Springer-Verlag). http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/Upcoming/ and contributed papers will be published GRID2006/GRID2006.htm in the series Lecture Notes in Computer CAISE 2007 is organised by NTNU and Science (LNCS, Springer-Verlag) which sponsored by ERCIM. will be distributed at the conference. More information: SOFSEM 2007 is sponsored by ERCIM. http://caise07.idi.ntnu.no/

More information: http://www.cs.cas.cz/sofsem/07/

72 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 EVENTS

Call for Papers Workshops new Widened Software Engineering ECOOP 2007 will host a number of (WISE) presentations. ECOOP 2007 - 21st European workshops addressing different areas of Conference on Object-Oriented object-oriented technology. Workshops Topics serve as a forum for exchanging late Contributions to the above events on any Programming breaking ideas and theories in an evolu- field of Software Engineering are tionary stage. invited, including, but not limited to: Berlin, 30 July- 3 August 2007 • Requirements Engineering Important Dates • Specification and Verification The ECOOP 2007 conference invites • Submission of papers: • Software Architecture and Design high quality papers presenting research 13 December 2006 • Analysis and Testing results or experience in all areas relevant • Update period: 13-20 December 2006 • Development Paradigms and Software to object technology, including work that • Deadline for Proposals: Processes takes inspiration from or builds connec- 20 December 2006 • Evolution and Refactoring tions to areas not commonly considered • Tools and Environments object-oriented. ECOOP 2007 is sponsored by ERCIM. • Empirical Software Engineering • Software Metrics Topics More information: • Software Quality and Performance ECOOP wishes to embrace a broad ttp://ecoop07.swt.cs.tu-berlin.de/ • Component-based Software range of topics, so the following list of Engineering suggested topics is by no means exclu- • Model Driven Engineering sive: Call for Papers • Web Applications • Architecture, Design Patterns • Distributed Systems and Middleware • Aspects, Components, Modularity, The Sixth Joint Meeting of the • Service Oriented Applications Separation of Concerns • Mobile and Embedded System • Collaboration, Workflow European Software Engineering • Open Standards and Certification • Concurrency, Real-time, Conference and the ACM • Software Economics and Human Embeddedness, Mobility, Distribution Resources • Databases, Persistence, Transactions SIGSOFT Symposium on the • Dependability (safety, security, relia- • Domain Specific Languages, Foundations of Software bility) Language Workbenches • Case Studies and Experience Reports. • Dynamicity, Adaptability, Reflection Engineering • Frameworks, Product Lines, Important Dates Generative Programming Dubrovnik, Croatia, • Workshop proposals submission: • HCI, User Interfaces 3-7 September 2007 5 March 2007 • Language Design, Language • Workshop proposals notification: Constructs, Static Analysis The biennial series of joint ESEC and 15 March 2007 • Language Implementation, Virtual FSE provides a lively and outstanding • Technical papers submission: Machines, Partial Evaluation forum where researchers and practi- 19 March 2007 • Methodology, Process, Practices, tioners can report and discuss recent • WISE papers submission: Metrics research results and trends, as well as 3 April 2007 • Model Engineering, Design their impact on practical application in • Doctoral Symposium abstracts sub- Languages, Transformations all areas of software engineering. missions: 14 May 2007 • Requirements Analysis, Business ESEC/FSE yields the just-right scope, • WISE papers notification: Modeling wide enough to portray a comprehensive 3 May 2007 • Software Evolution, Versioning and truly-international state of the art • Technical papers notification: • Theoretical Foundations, Formal overview, but small enough to keep an 1 June 2007 methods interactive and productive atmosphere. • Doctoral symposium notification: 10 • Tools, Programming environments. June 2007 ESEC/FSE has continuously attracted • Camera-ready contributions (all): 1 Research papers should advance the cur- participants from industry and academia, July 2007 rent state of the art. Many different confirming that the venue provides research methods can be applied, eg, topics that are up-to-date, significant, The proceedings will be published in the both experimentally based work and and interesting. ESEC/FSE 2007 intends series Lecture Notes in Computer mathematical results are welcome. to continue this tradition by offering a Science (LNCS, Springer-Verlag). Experience papers should describe novel strong technical program associated with insight gained from the practical applica- an exciting list of events, including ESEC/FSE 2007 is sponsored by ERCIM. tion of object technology, in such a way keynote talks by leaders in the field, that it is of interest to a broad group of invited state-of-the-art seminars, work- More information: researchers and practitioners. shops, a doctoral symposium, and the http://www.idt.mdh.se/esec-fse-2007/

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 73 EURO LEGAL

ERCIM News is the magazine of ERCIM. Published News about legal information from European directives, and quarterly, the newsletter reports on joint actions of pan-European legal requirements and regulations. the ERCIM partners, and aims to reflect the contribution made by ERCIM to the European Community in Information Technology. Through short articles and news items, it provides a forum for the Commission released the current draft of Proposal exchange of information between the institutes and for a Council Framework also with the wider scientific community. This issue Decision on the protection of personal data processed in the has a circulation of 10,500 copies. The printed version framework of police and judicial co-operation in criminal matters of ERCIM News has a production cost of 8 Euro per to the Secretary-General of the Council. The current draft says copy. It is available free of charge for certain groups. that data can only be exchanged with non-EU states "if an ade- Advertising quate level of data protection is ensured in the third country or by For current advertising rates and conditions, see http://www.ercim.org/publication/ERCIM_News/ the international body to which the data concerned shall be trans- or contact [email protected] ferred". Five member states support this 'adequacy' test (Czech Copyright Notice Republic Switzerland, Finland, Greece and Portugal) but seven - All authors, as identified in each article, retain backing the US complaint - are opposed to its inclusion copyright of their work. (Germany, Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and UK) ERCIM News online edition 24 Aug 2006 the original draft see, http://www.ercim.org/publication/ERCIM_News/ http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=ME ERCIM News is published by ERCIM EEIG, MO/05/349&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLang BP 93, F-06902 Sophia-Antipolis Cedex uage=en Tel: +33 4 9238 5010, E-mail: [email protected] ISSN 0926-4981 EU: Visa Information System (VIS) takes shape Director: Jérôme Chailloux, ERCIM Manager The EU is currently deciding on the purpose, function and scope Central Editor: of the VIS and law enforcement access to it. The personal data of Peter Kunz, ERCIM office [email protected] everyone who applies for an EU short-stay visa, including their Local Editors: photograph and fingerprints, will be recorded in the VIS (this AARIT: n.a. includes persons whose applications for a visa are rejected). As CCLRC: Martin Prime with the "US VISIT system", this data will ultimately be used to [email protected] CRCIM: Michal Haindl facilitate identity checks and verify entry to and exit from the EU. [email protected] In addition, the "internal security" agencies of the member states CWI: Annette Kik and Europol will have access to the data. See Draft Regulation on [email protected] CNR: Carol Peters VIS and the exchange of data between Member States on short- [email protected] stay visas, 7 September 2006, See also http://www.libertysecu- FORTH: Eleni Orphanoudakis rity.org/article108.html [email protected] Fraunhofer ICT Group: Michael Krapp Privacy International released a comprehensive Global [email protected] Freedom of Information Survey. FNR: Patrik Hitzelberger [email protected] Privacy International provides a comprehensive review of FWO/FNRS: Benoît Michel Freedom of Information Laws and practices in nearly 70 coun- [email protected] tries around the world. the survey draws attention to the growing INRIA: Bernard Hidoine [email protected] movement around the world to adopt FOI laws. While it also Irish Universities Association: highlights that many problems still exist such as poorly drafted Ray Walshe laws, lax implementation and an ongoing culture of secrecy in [email protected] NTNU: Truls Gjestland many countries. 28 September 2006 the survey is available at [email protected] http://www.privacyinternational.org/foi/survey SARIT: Harry Rudin [email protected] SICS: Kersti Hedman The European Parliament adopted 'European Parliament [email protected] resolution on the interception of bank transfer data from the SpaRCIM: Salvador Lucas SWIFT system by the US secret services'. [email protected] SZTAKI: Erzsébet Csuhaj-Varjú The European Parliament, demanding explanations from EU gov- [email protected] ernments and institutions regarding their complicity in the VTT: Pia-Maria Linden-Linna SWIFT transfers of financial data to the US on 5 July 2006. See, [email protected] W3C: Marie-Claire Forgue http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=- [email protected] //EP//TEXT+TA+P6-TA-2006-0317+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN Subscription Subscribe to ERCIM News by: edited by Yue Liu, NRCCL, University of Oslo, Norway • contacting the ERCIM office (see address above) • filling out the form at the ERCIM website at http://www.ercim.org/

74 ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 IN BRIEF

ISTI-CNR - Donatella Castelli coordinated the first Digital Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft - Ulrich Trottenberg took over the Library Reference Model workshop in Frascati, near Rome, presidency of the 'Fraunhofer Center of Institutes', Schloss in June. At the workshop, an Birlinghoven, on 1st July 2006. The 'center of institutes Schloss invited group of international Birlinghoven' gathers all research institutes at the Birlinghoven experts discussed the digital campus. With some 500 scientists, it is the largest center for library (DL) model proposed information technology of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. During by DELOS, the Network of his presidency Trottenberg Excellence on Digital intends to make the leading role Libraries. Despite the large of the institute center more vis- number of digital library sys- ible. He is planning to do this tems in existence, there is so far by numerous events/meetings no clear agreement on what for industry, research, politics these systems are exactly, nor and the general public. what basic functionality they should provide. This model is a Ulrich Trottenberg holds the first attempt at establishing an chair for Applied Mathematics abstract DL framework, based and Scientific Computing at the on a small number of unifying Department for Mathematics at Donatella Castelli. concepts. It seeks to provide a the University of Cologne. He common semantics that can be also is the head of the used across different DL implementations. The workshop Fraunhofer Institute for aimed at achieving global consensus on this model. In her Algorithms and Scientific introductory speech, Patricia Manson, Head of the EC unit for Computing (SCAI) and vice Ulrich Trottenberg. 'Technology-Enhanced Learning & Cultural Heritage' said that chairman of the Fraunhofer she expected that the results of the workshop would impact on Research Group for Informa- the definition of FP7 research priorities and help to initiate the tion and Communication relevant political and operational actions needed to deliver the Technology (ICT). In addition he heads the Department of European Digital Library to European citizens. Simulation and Software Technology of the German Aerospace Center.

Current research topics of the Fraunhofer Center of Institutes CWI - Christine Bachoc, Université Bordeaux, and Frank are the extension of the world-wide web to information tech- Vallentin, CWI, have found new upper bounds for 'kissing' nology services, the handling of the data flood with automatic in higher dimensions. extraction of knowledge from data (datamining) and Human- In geometry the kissing Machine Interaction. number is the maximum number of non- overlapping unit balls that can simultaneously A team of researchers from the Politecnico di Milano and touch a central unit ball. CEFREIL Labs, led by Stefano Ceri, won the 2006 Semantic In two dimensions the Web Services Challenge (SWS), organised by Stanford kissing number is six. University. The goal of the SWS Challenge is to develop a This can be seen when common understanding of var- euro coins are grouped ious technologies intended to around one central euro facilitate the automation of coin (see picture). The mediation, choreography and Kissing coins. kissing number is only discovery for Web Services known for the dimen- using semantic annotations. sions 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 and 24. For the dimensions 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10 The challenge required the Bachoc and Vallentin now found sharper upper bounds. The solution of a Web Service kissing problem has a rich history. In 1694 Isaac Newton and mediation problem and a Web David Gregory had a famous discussion about the kissing Service discovery problem. number in three dimensions. Gregory thought thirteen balls The implementation presented could fit while Newton believed the limit was twelve. Only in by the Italian team was judged 1953, Schütte and Van der Waerden proved Newton right. the most complete. See: An article explaining the results is available at http://deri.stanford.edu/chal- http://arxiv.org/abs/math.MG/0608426. lenge/2006/ Stefano Ceri.

ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006 75 ERCIM – The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics is an organisation dedicated to the advancement of European research and development, in information technology and applied mathematics. Its national member institutions aim to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase co-operation with European industry.

ERCIM is the European Host of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Austrian Association for Research in IT Institut National de Recherche en Informatique c/o Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft et en Automatique Wollzeile 1-3, A-1010 Wien, Austria B.P. 105, F-78153 Le Chesnay, France Tel: +43 1 512 02 35 0, Fax: +43 1 512 02 35 9 Tel: +33 1 3963 5511, Fax: +33 1 3963 5330 http://www.aarit.at/ http://www.inria.fr/

Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Norwegian University of Science and Technology Chilton, Didcot, Oxfordshire OX11 0QX, United Kingdom Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Tel: +44 1235 82 1900, Fax: +44 1235 44 5385 Electrical Engineering, N 7491 Trondheim, Norway http://www.cclrc.ac.uk/ Tel: +47 73 59 80 35, Fax: +47 73 59 36 28 http://www.ntnu.no/ Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, ISTI-CNR Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa, Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy Spanish Research Consortium for Informatics Tel: +39 050 315 2878, Fax: +39 050 315 2810 and Mathematics c/o Esperanza Marcos, Rey Juan Carlos http://www.isti.cnr.it/ University, C/ Tulipan s/n, 28933-Móstoles, Madrid, Spain, Tel: +34 91 664 74 91, Fax: 34 91 664 74 90 Czech Research Consortium http://www.sparcim.org for Informatics and Mathematics FI MU, Botanicka 68a, CZ-602 00 Brno, Czech Republic Swedish Institute of Computer Science Tel: +420 2 688 4669, Fax: +420 2 688 4903 Box 1263, http://www.utia.cas.cz/CRCIM/home.html SE-164 29 Kista, Sweden Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica Tel: +46 8 633 1500, Fax: +46 8 751 72 30 Kruislaan 413, NL-1098 SJ Amsterdam, http://www.sics.se/ The Netherlands Tel: +31 20 592 9333, Fax: +31 20 592 4199 Swiss Association for Research in Information Technology http://www.cwi.nl/ c/o Prof. Dr Alfred Strohmeier, EPFL-IC-LGL, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Fonds National de la Recherche Tel +41 21 693 4231, Fax +41 21 693 5079 6, rue Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, B.P. 1777 http://www.sarit.ch/ L-1017 Luxembourg-Kirchberg Tel. +352 26 19 25-1, Fax +352 26 1925 35 http:// www.fnr.lu Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Számítástechnikai és Automatizálási Kutató Intézet FNRS FWO P.O. Box 63, H-1518 Budapest, Hungary rue d'Egmont 5 Egmontstraat 5 Tel: +36 1 279 6000, Fax: + 36 1 466 7503 B-1000 Brussels, Belgium B-1000 Brussels, Belgium Tel: +32 2 504 92 11 http://www.sztaki.hu/ Tel: +32 2 512.9110 http://www.fnrs.be/ http://www.fwo.be/ Irish Universities Association Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas c/o School of Computing, Dublin City University Institute of Computer Science Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland P.O. Box 1385, GR-71110 Heraklion, Crete, Greece Tel: +3531 7005636, Fax: +3531 7005442 FORTH Tel: +30 2810 39 16 00, Fax: +30 2810 39 16 01 http://ercim.computing.dcu.ie/ http://www.ics.forth.gr/

Fraunhofer ICT Group Technical Research Centre of Finland Friedrichstr. 60 PO Box 1000 10117 Berlin, Germany FIN-02044 VTT, Finland Tel: +49 30 726 15 66 0, Fax: ++49 30 726 15 66 19 Tel:+358 207226041, Fax :+207226027 http://www.iuk.fraunhofer.de http://www.vtt.fi/

Order Form I wish to subscribe to the If you wish to subscribe to ERCIM News o printed edtion o online edition (email required) free of charge or if you know of a colleague who would like to Name: receive regular copies of ERCIM News, please fill in this form and we Organisation/Company: will add you/them to the mailing list. Address: Send, fax or email this form to: ERCIM NEWS 2004 route des Lucioles BP 93 Postal Code: F-06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex Fax: +33 4 9238 5011 City: E-mail: [email protected] Country

Data from this form will be held on a computer database. By giving your email address, you allow ERCIM to send you email E-mail:

You can also subscribe to ERCIM News and order back copies by filling out the form at the ERCIM website at http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/