Brief summary: GEANT is the name of both the pan-European research and education network and of the corresponding four-year project set up by a Consortium of 27 National Research and Education Networks ( NRENs) across Europe, with DANTE as its co-ordinating partner. Co-funded by the European Commission as part of its 5th Framework Program, the main goal of GEANT is the continuation of the existing services provided to the European research and education community through the current TEN-155 network. GEANT has four key objectives:

• Gigabit speeds
• geographical expansion
• global connectivity
• guaranteed Quality-Of-Service

Brief summary: The general objective of this project is to promote and safeguard the historical-archaeological wealth and resources of the Mediterranean dockyards. This will be carried out through the development of a multimedia portal, which will integrate the historical content provided by seven Mediterranean countries (Cyprus, Italy, Spain, France, Malta, Tunisia and Algeria). The content is categorized into three logical parts:

• material wealth (dockyards, buildings, ships, ports, roads)
• immaterial wealth (science, arts and crafts, traditions)
• submarine wealth (submerged findings)

The expected results of the project are:

• To develop a network for the co-operation amongst schools, training centres, and laboratories at a European and South Mediterranean level concluding with a period dedicated to the cultural exchange and itinerant learning.
• To enhance the quality of professional training courses within the Mediterranean area, fostering the skills and the exchange of the experiences and knowledge of handicraft arts dealing with the maritime sector.

Brief summary: The CrossGrid project will develop, implement and exploit new Grid components for interactive compute and data intensive applications like simulation and visualisation for surgical procedures, flooding crisis, team decision support systems, distributed data analysis in high-energy physics, air pollution combined with weather forecasting. The elaborated methodology, generic application architecture, programming environment, and new Grid services will be validated and tested thoroughly on the CrossGrid testbed, with an emphasis on a user friendly environment. The work will be done in close collaboration with the Grid Forum and the DataGrid project to profit from their results and experience, and to obtain full interoperability. This will result in the further extension of the Grid across eleven European countries.

The involvement of the University of Cyprus in CrossGrid focuses on the design and development of benchmarks for the Grid, participation to the design and development of the CrossGrid Portal that provides a unified access to Grid resources, and the establishment of CyGrid, the local testbed site that will be connected to the CrossGrid-DataGrid testbed. Finally, the University of Cyprus leads the Internal Review activity within CrossGrid.

Brief summary: The DAEDALUS project will make a contribution to promote and improve the Mediterranean tourism sector tied to its rich cultural heritage. The goal of this project is to provide the professionals and the mass market with a flexible, dynamic, cost-effective, easy to deploy Mediterranean reference framework that will enable the establishment and the management of local communities of interest working in the area of tourism and culture heritage.
Daedalus project will establish a federated network of Tourism and Cultural related infoservices providers, combining both national-level and regional sites. This project will be in particular concerned with the enhancement of the Tourism sector, Therefore, the project will:

• design and implement a single one-stop shop entry point, the Daedalus portal, for the linkage with the global tourism and cultural heritage community
• set up national Mediterranean service centres in Cyprus, Egypt, France, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Tunisia and Turkey
• create Mediterranean tourism and cultural heritage communities of interest

Brief summary: The goals of the APART 2 working group (Automatic Performance Analysis: Real Tools) are:

• to network European groups with local development projects targeting automatic performance analysis tools
• to extend the specification techniques developed in APART 1
• to evalutate a broad spectrum of implementation techniques
• to take advantage of the established research network of APART 1 for the European projects
• to investigate performance analysis requirements and techniques for grid environments in close collaboration with the European Grid Forum and the American Grid Forum

Brief summary: We plan to provide a unifying scientific framework and a coherent set of design rules, for global systems resulting from the integration of autonomous interacting entities, dynamic multi-agent environments and ad-hoc mobile networks. We will focus on the issues of co-operation and antagonism, stability and fault-tolerance as well as of communication and motion in such global systems.
Description of the work: To provide at a foundational algorithmic level a unifying framework and a coherent set of design rules for the robust and efficient implementation of complex and dynamic global systems, we will focus on the following critical aspects:

• the co-operation and antagonism in coordinating autonomous entities behaving in a selfish way, having their own self-interests
• the stability and fault-tolerance in highly dynamic multi-agent environments
• the motion, communication and access to advanced services in ad-hoc mobile networks

We will build on complementary expertise and existing cooperation in a wide range of of aspects of Theoretical Computer Science, including distributed and parallel computing, networking and communications, on-line decision making under uncertainty, approximation algorithms and complexity theory, probabilistic techniques and combinatorial mathematics.
Furthermore, the new issues arising in the study of such systems necessitate the proper combination of these techniques with methods from other scientific disciplines, such as Game Theory and Economics, Physics and Statistics.
Milestones and Expected Results:

• A unifying scientific framework for coordination, stability and fault-tolerance, motion and communication in complex and dynamic global systems.
• A coherent set of design rules and recommendations for the robust and efficient implementation of global systems.
• A set of algorithmic engineering experiments, emphasizing on "hard" instances and appropriate gross measures.

Brief summary: The project proposes to establish CoLogNet, a European Network in Computational Logic (abbreviated as CL), which will include all the main centres of excellence in the field and the major players (both scientific and industrial), and it will provide a unifying framework for promoting and developing Computational Logic, supporting cross-fertilization by encouraging co-operation and exchange between the different sub-areas, and promoting links with other IT areas through collaboration with other Networks of Excellence.
More particularly, CologNet aims to:

• represent Computational Logic at a European level and promote the uptake of Computational Logic technologies in industry
• provide a world (Internet) entry point to Computational Logic through its WWW site
• provide the European entry point to the International Federation of Computational Logic
• promote exchange and co-operation between the different CL areas
• promote education and training measures, interchange of students and researchers, development of CL curricula, etc
• contribute to standards' debates and develop technological roadmaps for various subareas of CL
• promote exchange with other groups and Networks of Excellence (for example, NLP and Computational Intelligence

Brief Summary: This project aims to create a Network of E-Learning Centres and leading organisations in the learning technologies. The E-LEN network will support a diverse constellation of learning centres around the world, have a strong capacity for developing and delivering pedagogically-informed technology for effective e-learning experiences and disseminate these experiences to other institutions. The main objectives of the project are:

• to establish the necessary infrastructure and organisational structure,
  for the network of e-learning centres
• to identify and gather best practices, design patterns, research roadmaps on e-learning and to enhance the dissemination of such results
• to produce guidelines for establishing learning centres

Description of the work: The primary activities of this project include the survey, analysis and evaluation of existing e-learning centres, the establishment of the E-LEN network, the design and development of a portal for the gathering and exchange of e-learning resources and expertise and the evaluation of the project's achievements
Milestones and Expected Results: The expected output consists of the E-LEN portal itself, as well as a number of reports and guides on various organisational, pedagogical and technical issues related to e-learning and e-learning centers. The dissemination of these results is of high priority to this project. E-LEN's outcomes will interest people from academia and industry, policy makers and e-learning developers seeking guidance and feasible solutions to advance the effectiveness of e-learning.

Brief summary: Mobile devices are of increasing importance and prevalence within healthcare. It is important to build on the success of the existing, funded, medical mobile device projects and support their successful exploitation. This project will:

• create a business model supporting the adoption of mobile devices in healthcare
• create guidelines for interoperability
• create an evaluation method
• create a web portal and observatory for MMDs with secure internal information and public information and lay the foundations for future technical developments
  

Considerable effort will be put into dissemination.

Brief Summary: The main objective of Market Maker is to develop and demonstrate a highly sophisticated e-Sourcing platform for emerging BSPs in order to enable European enterprises become virtual nodes of highly integrated and dynamic value networks, under a service provision model. The introduced business model will enable business partners:

• Exploit a common organizational modelling infrastructure based on predefined role-centric operations and document templates.
• Share a distributed workflow management architecture, able to serve both own-defined and standard operation and interaction models in the context of integrated role-based workplaces.
• Outsource their business partnerships management and wire their inter-organizational processes in the context of alternative types of marketplaces, e.g., e-procurement, Internet retailing, reseller management, value chain management, etc.
• Streamline their business communication by automating document transformations and flows based on XML engines and commonly agreed market participation business rules.
• Harmonize their workflows in the context of dynamically constructed business partnerships for enabling M2M cooperation and coordinated planning.
• Exploit a common market intelligence repository emerging by the continuous interaction among business partners.
• Share highly sophisticated enterprise resources available by value adding partners and service providers.

Brief summary: SEACORN aims to investigate by powerful simulations new wireless techniques for capacity enhancements and new techniques applicable to the core network, which will enable the provision of broadband services. The project objectives are to:

• Characterize and choose a few new services UMTS is expected to deliver.
• Choose as reference the service with the most demanding application scenario.
• Investigate the wireless techniques to enhance capacity required to achieve more than 2 Mbps and even higher in hotspots, of the given mix of new services, packet switched with TCP/IP.
• Develop flexible models, algorithms, and new network protocols for the deployment of the future Enhanced UMTS networks.
• Build a link and system level simulator for the access and core networks of the Enhanced UMTS network.
• Build and publish an electronic library of suitable wireless techniques for capacity enhancement and network protocols for UMTS core network.

Brief summary: ANWIRE is a thematic network established mainly by academic institutions from various EU countries acting in two main overlapping research tracks:

• Wireless Internet
• Reconfigurability
  

ANWIRE aims at:

• organizing and coordinating parallel actions in key research areas of Wireless Internet and Reconfigurability, in order to encompass research activities towards the design of a fully integrated system
• promoting and disseminating Wireless Internet and Reconfigurability solutions in order to make them available to the research and industrial community

Wireless Internet aims at changing the way wireless communication networks work, in order to offer new advanced services to the users in the most efficient way. Reconfigurability on the other hand, has been heralded as potentially offering a pragmatic solution to systems integration and flexible service provision to mobile users. The coordination activities encompass common efforts and tasks for covering open issues identified in the various specialised areas, relevant to the provision of a coherent integrated framework in next generation systems.

The work is organised in Task Forces, each one of which will focus on a specific thematic area. The selected thematic areas are identified as key enablers for the provision of integrated solutions, based on state-of-the-art and recent projects results. Task forces will have an internal structure with a clear objective, workplan, regular meetings and deliverables, and will be staffed by experts from the members of the thematic network and invited participants. Operation of task forces will rely mostly on partners' resources, while the requested EU contribution refers exclusively to coordinating them. Dissemination is considered a key activity in ANWIRE. The dissemination activities encompass the organisation of workshops, conferences, a Web Portal and the offering of specialised courses, in the thematic areas of advanced mobile systems, with focus on Wireless Internet and Reconfigurability. The aim of these events is to act both as vehicles for the exchange of ideas, as well as training and promotion vehicles.

Brief summary: TIME2LEARN will bring together the key actors and stakeholders in e-learning research and professional training to:

• Identify and catalogue the emerging actors and technologies in e-learning R&D.
• Identify and chart priority areas for future R&D in professional eTraining (roadmap).
• Define the evaluation criteria for benchmarking and identifying best practice for time to performance (through professional eTraining).
• Put forward recommendations as to the most effective and suitable mechanism for managing large research programs and networks in professional eTraining.

The overall objective of TIME2LEARN is to reduce the time to performance of Europe's labour force through the optimization of knowledge creation, delivery and acquisition facilitated by ICT. This will, in the long term, improve the employability, adaptability and mobility of the European citizen.

Brief summary: The overall objective of the project is to fight the existing gap in Europe between the most and least developed regions as far as the use and development of electronic commerce is concerned. Within this main frame, the specific objectives of e-MINDER will be:

• To raise awareness both in the Short-Medium-Enterprises sector and within the education and training structures about the use of Information Communication Technology to the field of Electronic Commerce.
• To provide citizens and companies with the required service and support to implement their Electronic Commerce related activities.
• To achieve all these, a European Network of three Leveraging Centres will be created among the three partner regions (Cyprus, Spain, Poland).

Brief summary: The UNIVERSAL Exchange for Pan-European Higher Education will demonstrate the feasibility of an open exchange system for course units between institutions of higher education across Europe and elsewhere in the world. The system will embrace offers, enquiries, booking and actual delivery of course units. Moreover, the additional proposed work has two aims:

• Creating interfaces for the UNIVERSAL platform to well known learning management systems ( LMSs). While an organization will have the flexibility needed to use the LMS, which suits to unique needs, the UNIVERSAL platforms interface components will make LMSs more open by allowing users to make customized searches and enquiries, bookings and then actual participation to the course units. Via these interfaces, for all web-based courseware, one could track test results and completion status automatically without user intervention.
• Evaluating the overall quality of the UNIVERSAL platform according to usability engineering techniques. The systematic evaluation study will follow the principles of the SUE (Systematic Usability Evaluation) methodology that provides a systematic and organized way of conceiving and conducting a usability evaluation process. It combines existing approaches, inspection and empirical testing in an original way.

Brief summary: The project aims to promote the integration of candidate enlargement countries through the application of a methodology for devising and putting into action electronic Business strategy in Short-Medium Enterprizes ( SMEs) and a series of executive education programs customized for SME managers in Eastern Europe. The project objectives are:

• To promote awareness of electronic Business - electronic Commerce opportunities and challenges in Eastern Europe at a micro level by addressing business managers directly.
• To engage in initiatives that transfer practical knowledge.
• To show how knowledge can be converted into action.
• To focus on management action rather than generic awareness.
• To demonstrate how electronic Business decisions are taken in practice.
• To generate learning from experience.
• To address local conditions and requirements.