In densely populated Europe, environmental and industrial disasters endanger thousands of peoples’ lives every year, causing enormous disruption to civil infrastructures. Frequently emergency services struggle to react in time and control a fast-developing situation. IST project EGERIS was intended to increase the safety and the efficiency of civil protection organisations and authorities involved in risk management operations.

EGERIS was completed in December 2003 with demonstrations of w

New technology that lets computer games fans round the world talk as well as play together online makes gaming more friendly, exciting and educational, according to new research.

A team from the University of Sussex Informatics department carried out a social experiment using the voice-enabled XBox Live, one of the new online computer games packages that employs internet-based audio conferencing, also known as voiceover Internet Protocol (VoIP). The introduction of VoIP allows users to chat

Managing the explosion of Europe’s online travel market requires flexible systems that incorporate niche offers with legacy systems. DAFNE’s Europe-wide infrastructure enables spontaneous cooperation among online applications on different networks.

A successor to the IST project FETISH, the main thrust of the recently completely DAFNE project, also funded by the European Commission’s IST programme, is to enhance the effects of existing FETISH network technology and commercially exploit the

Technology experts may claim that ground breaking virtual reality (VR) may greatly benefit industry, but in reality how can it be implemented in the workplace and be used to its best advantage? VIEW OF THE FUTURE provides some answers.

This recently completed IST programme-funded project was initiated “to translate the theoretical value of VR into a practical tool in the workplace whilst at the same time looking into how to make systems more useable for the end users,” explains John Wilson,

A Purdue University researcher is combining two technologies – hearing aids and cochlear implants – to help improve speech understanding and sound quality for cochlear implant users.

Research by King Chung, an assistant professor in audiology, and colleagues shows that by applying advanced hearing aid technologies, such as preprocessors, to cochlear implants, background noise can be reduced, speech understanding enhanced and sound quality improved for cochlear implant users. Chung collabora

Mobile phones are getting more and more complicated. One reason is that a new radio is needed for each standard-GSM, 3G, and WLAN. A simpler solution, a radio that can be programmed to cover all standards, is now being developed at the Stringent Research Center at Linköping University in Sweden.

“We have come up with three concepts that, together, can reach the goal, the software-defined radio,” says the head of the Center, Professor Christer Svensson.

The three parts are: Wi

The Internet has turned the sale and resale of information into a growing business, resulting in the birth of new enterprises. Making their creation and work easier is OPELIX’s open software toolset enhancing the uptake of this innovative business model.

“The OPELIX project was dedicated to information e-commerce, i.e. the sale of information over the Internet,” project coordinator Anne Marie Sassen at Atos Origin, formerly SchlumbergerSema, notes. “This obviously represents some very

Building on university research, Greek SMEs can now apply electronics circuitry for digital signal processing (DSP) to multimedia audio equipment thanks to funding from the European Commission’s IST programme.

Under the project name of HIPRO, the coordinating organisation Spectrum Electronics Company S.A learnt how to apply sophisticated DSP technology, a highly technical area involving complex mathematics as a result of the technology transfer of microelectronics know-how from project

When Dr. Robert Ballard went on a scientific expedition to Black Sea this past summer, he was able to take with him virtually any scientist or student who wanted to go. With the capability of Internet2 and a high bandwidth satellite link, scientists, for the first time, were able to work on the ocean floor from the comfort of their university laboratories.

In the April 6 issue of EOS, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union, Dr. Ballard, a University of Rhode Island geological

Imagine wireless context tags mounted inside shop windows, furniture or beside statues supplying content to your PDA as you walk through an airport or an old city centre. Such is the vision of ambient intelligence recently tested by IST-project AMBIESENSE.

The 30-month project, which runs until October 2004, has developed a system of context tags linked with digital content. Placed at strategic locations in a given environment, the tags communicate information to users relevant to their sur

Imagine you are a thousand miles from home, and your mother cooks your favourite meal for you. Then she takes a photo of it and sends it to you by email. And then, when you open the photo, a wave of aroma–your Mom’s cooking–fills the air.

Two researchers at the University of Alberta have been working to make this type of scenario a reality. Their latest success, the development of an electronic nose for multimedia use, has been reported recently in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Elect

Penn State researchers have proposed a new marking process for Internet messages to make it easier to trace the originators of spam, illegal copyrighted material or a virus attack.

The new marking scheme produced less than one percent false positives per 1000 attacking addresses in simulated distributed denial of service attacks and even fewer false positives and zero missed detections tracing addresses transferring copyrighted material in another simulation.

Marking messages via

Researchers in Germany claim to have opened the door to a new form of wireless communication by transmitting information at “terahertz” frequencies for the first time. The work could eventually lead to mobile phones that can transmit greater amounts of information at faster speeds than conventional devices, which use lower frequency microwaves. The team, led by Martin Koch from the Technical University of Braunschweig, encoded the electrical output from an audio CD player onto a terahertz beam and se

R&D continuously generates innovative technologies and solutions. But all too often insufficient business knowledge prevents their commercial exploitation. But TRAIN-IT’s hands-on business planning training and coaching resulted in 36 start-ups and a wealth of success stories.

The major obstacle facing would-be start-ups is the business plan, which in today’s post-Internet bubble world has to be not just good, but great in order to convince banks and venture capital firms to suppl

Often maligned as just another one of the Internet boom’s myriad hypes, e-learning’s chasm between theory and performance is being bridged by a new platform from SCHOOL+ that supports rather than imposes technology on Europe’s classrooms.

The three-year IST project SCHOOL+ project is developing a comprehensive online teaching and learning environment known as SCHOOL+ Microcosmos, which has been tested in 20 European schools at the beginning of this year. Simultaneously, this

Football stadiums and museums may not have much in common, but for two IST projects, EVENTS and VISIRE, they are the perfect testing grounds for computer vision technologies that have the potential to change key areas of visual media forever.

Coordinated by Eptron in Spain, the groundbreaking initiatives have resulted in two state-of-the-art computer vision applications that far surpass anything currently available on the market. “EVENTS is an image interpolation system that creates multi-v