by Constantine Stephanidis and Jessica Michel

In order to attract and foster trans-disciplinary research excellence, research programmes need to be defined around new grand challenges or key technological issues that are significant to economic growth or are derived from major societal drivers. Such programmes should be exploring visionary research themes that demand breakthroughs in basic research and engineering, and will be investigating radically new uses for technology.

The 'Information Society Technology 2006' conference and exhibition, organised in Helsinki in November 2006, was the opportunity for the European Commission to present its 7th framework programme (FP7) to the European IST research community.

by Bruno Le Dantec

Some 150 representatives from European and Asian research institutes, industry and ministries of research participated in the Grid@Asia workshop in Seoul from 11-13 December 2006. The workshop was the third workshop organised by ERCIM to promote co-operation with Grid actors from South-East Asian countries in the European Union's 6th and 7th Framework Programmes (FP). This workshop was held in conjunction with the winter workshop of the Grid Fourm Korea (GFK).

by Anthony Savidis and Norbert Streitz

The recently formed Working Group SESAMI focuses on research towards distributing, embedding, coordinating and interactively delivering computing intelligence, while putting people and social contexts at the centre of design considerations. This will result in smart surrounding environments and ubiquitous intelligence.

by Constantine Stephanidis

After twelve years of successful operation, the ERCIM Working Group 'User Interfaces for All' is drawing to a close. This Working Group has contributed significantly to the creation of a scientific community dedicated to Universal Access and Design for All in Europe, as well as to the establishment of this new research field.

by Constantine Stephanidis and Michael Pieper

In the tradition of its predecessors, the 9th ERCIM Workshop 'User Interfaces for All' aimed to consolidate recent work, and to stimulate further discussion on the state of the art in this area and its increasing range of applications in the Information Society.

by Allan Hanbury and Michael Nölle

A competition to find the best automated coin classification algorithm, with a prize sponsored by the MUSCLE Network of Excellence, was organised in 2006. The results were presented at a workshop held in September 2006 at the Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin in conjunction with the 28th Annual Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition (DAGM). The prize of €1500 for the best performing coin classification program went to Marco Reisert, Olaf Ronneberger and Hans Burkhardt of the Chair of Pattern Recognition and Image Processing, University of Freiburg, Germany.

by Marc Thiriet

The first Workshop on Multidisciplinary Simulation in Biomedical Applications was held in cooperation with ERCIM Working Group 'IT and Mathematics applied to Interventional Medicine' (IM2IM) at Berufsakademie (University for Cooperative Education), Mosbach, Germany from 21-22 November 2006.

Two new projects, VITALAS and EchoGRID, both administrated by ERCIM and partly funded by the European Commission commenced in January 2007.