Strategic impact. The important scientific and social impacts of dissemination projects that span national and international borders were outlined by Xxxxxx Xxxxxx, Head of Unit “GÉANT & e-Infrastructures, Directorate General for Information Society and Media, European Commission” in the GridBriefing Annual Report 2008-20097, produced by GridTalk: “Today, grid e-Infrastructures are facing significant challenges such as sustainability and the transition to a more user-driven and service-centric model. Grid computing has already engaged in the process of transitioning to a sustainable model of operation that would integrate at European level the corresponding national operations. This new pan-European organisation model will open grid e-Infrastructures to all scientific disciplines and complement national funding strategies in support of e-Science. Thanks to grid computing many prominent results have been achieved that directly affect people’s lives. It is essential to show the world and especially European citizens how European-funded research e-Infrastructures are working for them. Responsible and open communication plays an important role in ensuring public support of the European grid e-Infrastructures activities. This is where projects like GridTalk, disseminating the benefits, success stories and challenges of grid computing to a wider audience, play an important role. The effective communication of complex technical or scientific matters to a wider audience not only increases the public appreciation and support to scientific progress but also inspires the younger generations to get involved in the research process.” The need for dissemination projects to communicate the success stories and societal impact of grid computing and other EC funded e-Infrastructures has not diminished since GridTalk started in April 2008, and in fact with the transition to a new model for grid computing in Europe through the European Grid Infrastructure this is more important than ever. While dissemination will be carried out very effectively by XXX.xx and the National Grid Initiatives in their own countries, there will still exist a strong need to offer a global picture of this field to the scientific community and the general public. E-ScienceTalk will be ideally placed to communicate this overview and its global context to the wide-ranging audiences already established for its products through the GridTalk project, and earlier in the case of the GridCafé and iSGTW, which have built up a l...
Strategic impact. Please describe the strategic impact of the project in addition to the impacts identified above by adding a few bullet points for each releveant area in the table below. Impact type Examples Description of strategic impact Strategic leadership and influence - Communicating the needs of the beneficiaries and/or location of this intervention - Innovative approaches/best practice - Influencing partners to contribute to similar projects - New or more effective partnerships formed as a result of the intervention Leverage - Has investment (financial and in kind) been secured from a range of sources? Synergy - Existing interventions or partnerships more joined up - Part of a co-ordinated approach to addressing issues in these areas - Strategic partnerships working across administrative and sectoral boundaries Engagement - Engagement with businesses,retail, culture, leisure, the arts,the community andpublic sector organisations - Political engagement and support
Strategic impact. The purpose of the combination of collaborative activities and coordination and support actions proposed in NEXPReS is to further improve the research infrastructures for long baseline interferometry in Europe (VLBI, but also LOFAR). By its very nature this requires a European and often global approach. The continuation of the networking activities established in the past through the EXPReS project will ensure that this e-Infrastructure will be further integrated and consolidated by means of the most advanced ICT methods. The Service Activities will directly boost the scientific capacity of these large-scale facilities, leading to new, exciting scientific research by a larger user community. The R&D activities in the Joint Research Activities will explore new techniques enabling future capabilities in radio astronomy, and provide feedback into the ICT domain. Clearly, the proposed programme has all the qualifications to be considered as an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative, and will give Europe a leading role in the fields of radio-astronomy, long-haul, wide band connectivity, streaming computing and fast storage. Networking Activities Networking Activities will xxxxxx the cooperative culture established in our community over decades, but also provide a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration between radio astronomers and ICT infrastructure providers. Proper management is a common goal for all participants and this is implemented in WP1. Other objectives that will be addressed in Networking Activities include the strengthening of virtual communities. This is indeed the main activity of WP3 and WP4, which support the discussion platforms for EVN-NRENs and the e-VLBI Science Advisory Group. Both expert groups are essential for reaching the decisions that enforce and improve both the technical functioning and operational procedures of the infrastructure. Most of the funds are allocated to the organisation of meetings, which will definitely also attract parties from outside the consortium. However, these meetings are just the starting point for discussions and collaborations that will mostly work through e-mail and other means of communication. The EVN-NREN platform (WP2) is important for spreading good practices on high-speed connectivity beyond the NEXPReS partners, as well as discussing options and standards for the future. By associating these meetings with for example e-VLBI workshops, as has happened in the past, this activity plays an important ...
Strategic impact. MOLTO is addressing the task of high-precision translation of restricted language, which in the past has not belonged to the main stream of machine translation, but which is becoming increasingly relevant due to the advent of the Semantic Web. We expect the technology created in MOLTO to help greatly in the multilingual distribution of web content and also in its usage for information access and retrieval. MOLTO translation will be highly interoperable with Semantic Web standards (such as OWL) and adaptive to standard tools (web browsers and translators’ tools). The interoperability with Semantic Web standards will open existing ontologies and entity knowledge bases for the needs of MT tools. In turn grammar-based translation will strongly impact the way humans access structured knowledge, by providing NL query rendering to ontologies. The semantic retrieval results will also be rendered to grammatically flawless textual representations and presented to the end users as a high usability alternative to traditional table and graph based visualizations. Additionally, the grammar/ontology interoperability will empower knowledge extraction directly from text - a powerful metadata acquisition technique strongly desired by the Semantic Web, as a metadata layer struggling to capture the semantics of existing Web content. Translators are easy to build for new domains and to extend to new languages. They can even learn to translate better “on the fly”, by the use of example-based grammar writing, lexicon extension with minimal human intervention, and new statistical/grammar-based hybrid methods. A typical MOLTO translation system will work on a well-defined domain equipped with an ontology. The MOLTO developer’s tools will permit a domain expert, even without training in linguistics, to efficiently build a system that translates between an ontology and natural language. What is needed is a domain-specific lexicon and a set of example sentences describing the key properties of objects in the domain. This is made possible by the GF Resource Grammar Library (RGL) and the technique of example-based grammar writing. Porting the system into a new language is even easier, since the main relations between ontology and natural language tend to be similar in different languages; yet this similarity need not be followed, but can be overridden by transfer rules, most of which can be applied at compile time.
Strategic impact. Traditionally, low temperature research work has been small-scale table-top science, con- ducted in isolated university laboratories which have evolved around a single professor. The re- search was focussed on a narrow topic and each group has developed its own refrigeration and measurement techniques. The community still continues to operate on this way. A young professor is exhausting his/her energy when setting up alone his ultra-low temperature laboratory, which usu- ally takes up to 4-5 years. The community is fragmented into sub-critical units, which alone lack the capacity to offer services to other fields or to attack large-scale cross-disciplinary problems. At the same time emerging topics in nanophysics, material science and quantum information processing demand novel low temperature equipment, methods and services. Today there are perhaps 10 ultralow temperature laboratories in the world with large con- centrations of microkelvin refrigerators and technology, and the potential to provide and develop services beyond the low temperature community. Three of these facilities are in Europe (AALTO, CNRS and ULANC). One of these, AALTO, has served as a single-site access-given facility in 1995-2008 (ULTI projects). Most of the users (70%) of AALTO facilities came from the traditional quantum fluids and solids community. During the last 5 years, however, the fraction of nanoscien- tists among the users has steadily increased. The MICROKELVIN Collaboration has to be seen as the next evolutionary step in the inte- gration and restructuring of European ultralow temperature infrastructure. This next step cannot be realized on national level, taking into account the small number of large low temperature facilities in Europe. MICROKELVIN will take into account the present potential of its partners, restructuring their infrastructure and optimising their operation on a European scale, to attack both traditional and new problems. The impacts of MICROKELVIN will be several, both in terms of improved infra- structure and access services, improved knowledge dissemination, better practices, new products and scientific outputs. We can list the main outcomes as follows: The Impact on European infrastructure:
Strategic impact. Potential Impact on Industrial/research Sector There are still few European projects on audio and music by comparison to the video industry. This may be explained by a traditional weakness of the music European industry mainly dominated by US and Japanese companies. But while the European music industry is weak, both DVD and online music services are increasing rapidly in Europe. Nevertheless it is important to mention that although our society provides more access to music material, there are still many important challenges, as addressed by a project like Semantic HIFI : Information reserved to specialists and lack of interoperability Most of the information and metadata is available within Content provider’s back offices and is not shareable with other providers, very specialized or reserved to a music genre or not easy to find. In peer to peer and file sharing systems, large interoperability at the data level but lack of interoperability at the metadata level is obvious. The user has to know which specific music he is looking for in order to access to sound/music files through distinct not interoperable online catalogues. Information overload Information overload is currently prohibiting direct access to recordings by using Internet search engines. Even in his personal collection of CDs, an average user is listening to the same titles and has trouble browsing over all his recordings. There is also a need for interoperability between personal collection and large databases to benefit from metadata share and interoperability with other users. Inadapted or unpersonalized interfaces It is easy to figure out that, once an online database is identified, keyword interfaces are not always adapted for sound retrieval. If the user is looking for music with dijeridoo the best interface might be for him : o A quick way to listen to a lot of music (audio summarization) o A way to specify content keywords in his query such as timbre information o A way to provide a given dijeridoo excerpts and listen to retrieved similar recordings. Poor value-added to information Most of the music resources available on line are from CDs, CD-ROM or audio tapes which gather several songs related to a given theme or editorial idea. This value is lost if no personal publishing tools allow for the re-introduction of this richness in the context of digital databases. Proprietary access systems Even if the Web protocol has brought a tremendous cross-platform and hypertext compatibility at...
Strategic impact. The main impact of this project will be to leave a lasting legacy of best practice for data relevant to climate. On this legacy, the European Commission, the European Space Agency, EUMETSAT and other international agencies, both European and non-European, can build in a staged manner as they seek to elevate investments in data products to a quality applicable to climate services (including detection, attribution, prediction and verification of predictions). This project will provide, as a prime delivery, a Commentary metadata system and a set of tools on which data providers can build readily on top of their current practices. Our approach recognizes the diversity that exists in such practices and the difficulty, or impossibility, in changing well-established procedures at different institutions in a top-down way. This project provides the key extra piece in the climate data puzzle to link the other pieces together and to complete the whole picture without trying to rearrange or reshape the other pieces in a major way. Data suppliers can build on the system organically, which means its value will be lasting, extending indefinitely beyond the duration of the two- year project (providing it is sufficiently resourced into the future). Because our system is an open system, others can build tools on top rather than having to re-engineer what they already have. By building on what already exists, and by minimizing the friction involved in changing practice, the project will capitalize on national and international investments that are already being made, facilitating a more cost-effective development of climate services. Data users will be leading beneficiaries. The project will extend the value and take up of climate data by diverse communities by providing the multi-layer information to find relevant data in the first place, to judge the fitness-for-purpose of the data, and to point to other complementary information as a route to innovation in the development of climate science and services. The metadata system will connect users to each other and especially to experts, marshalling the knowledge of the expert community and “crowd sourcing” that knowledge.
Strategic impact. Current European strength in mobile and wireless technologies means that global comput- ing applications like those above are an important potential market, of real importance for future competitiveness. This project will contribute new understanding of the principles and limitations behind such applications, vital for their eventual development into working products and services. The direct application of the individual workpackages is to generate results and knowl- edge that we shall pass through to the future projects that will build systems like these on a large scale. Several of the detailed avenues of research planned are speculative and even risky, in the anticipation that even if some are found impractical, this “negative” information is also useful to those trying to build concrete systems. As such, the strategic impact of this project will be on other, forward-looking, research projects that can draw on our work to more effectively build working systems for global computing.
Strategic impact. B3.1.1 Collaborative arrangements and perspectives for their long- term sustainability The BalticGrid-II includes partners from following countries: Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, Switzerland and Belarus. The project is designed to increase the impact, adoption and reach of the recently built-up e-Infrastructure directly in the Baltic States and around these states with new incoming partners like Belarus and eventually Ukraine. Based on the EU Country Strategy Paper for Belarus in 2007-2013 under the new European Neighborhood and Partnership Instrument (http:// xx.xxxxxx.xx/xxxxx/xxx/xxxxx_xx.xxx) the BalticGrid-II project provides the fostering exchanges between education and research communities, also opens the current research programmes to scientists and research bodies from Belarus. The consortium involves 13 leading institutions in seven countries and is a further extension of the BalticGrid consortium with the purpose of building a sustainable e-Infrastructure to support the scientific community in the region. The present successful BalticGrid e-Infrastructure consisting of 26 clusters in five countries will form the base for the deployment activities in the BalticGrid-II project. The overall vision is to enable and stimulate scientists in the Baltic region to conveniently access critical networked resources anywhere within Europe and beyond, and enable the formation of effective research collaborations.
Strategic impact. The concept of a cluster of nanoscience facilities attached to LSFs, which aims at raising the standards of nanoscience experiments and offering access to state-of-the-art synthesis and nanofabrication to a wide research user’s community, has been included in the 2006 ESFRI roadmap by one of the specific Emerging Proposals named NANOSCIENCE. Thus, the NFFA proposal fully enters in the structuring project for the ERA, with the support of the EC under FP7. The European potential users of NFFA belong to diverse areas: materials science, physics, chemistry, life-sciences, various branches of engineering, bio-medical application, etc., and come from academia, national research institutions, and industry. Currently there are no open facilities for supporting full nanoscience projects involving design and nanofabrication of samples and functional systems. The research is done via collaborations between different institutions, with a generally low pace when complex processes are involved at far away institutions (like growth, lithography, electrical characterization, protection of samples, acquisition of beam time at a LSF). For this reasons, a strategic plan for a scaled implementation of Centres and their locations in Europe both in close connection and synergy with specific LSFs is needed at European level. This action will provide effective services also to nanoscience users from Countries that do not host LSFs. The NFFA activity will directly impact on European nanoscience by monitoring the effective response to users needs, both qualitative and quantitative, contributing to the development of a RI science policy. The often rather expensive equipment for nanofabrication will be optimised and used much more efficiently in NFFA user Centres than conventional operating mode, allowing also for a faster update. E-beam lithography machines or TEMs, as examples, are multi-million Euro instruments with a 5-6 year life at the edge of technology. Intensive use at NFFA Centres will make overall financially possible to stay at the state-of-the-art by replacing and upgrading even the top equipment. This is hardly affordable by typical nanoscience national laboratories in Europe, and simply not available to most of the academic research groups, or to entire national research communities within Europe. Routine technical cross checking of the nanofabrication and nanoprobing capabilities of the NFFA Centres will provide the metrology for establishing a NFFA standard that shou...
