by Athanasios Mouchtaris and Panagiotis Tsakalides

Art, entertainment and education have always served as unique and demanding laboratories for information science and ubiquitous computing research. The ASPIRE project explores the fundamental challenges of deploying sensor networks for immersive multimedia, concentrating on multichannel audio capture, representation and transmission. The techniques developed in this project will help augment human auditory experience, interaction and perception, and will ultimately enhance the creative flexibility of audio artists and engineers by providing additional information for post-production and processing.

by Anatole Lécuyer and Yann Renard

Brain-computer interfaces enable commands or messages to be sent to computers by means of brain activity. Created by a consortium of academic and industrial partners, OpenViBE is free and open-source software, which makes it simple to design, test and use brain-computer interfaces.

by Fabrizio Falchi, Tiziano Fagni, and Fabrizio Sebastiani

Researchers from ISTI-CNR, Pisa, are working on the effective and efficient classification of images through a combination of adaptive image classifier committees and metric data structures explicitly devised for nearest neighbour searches.

by Jacques G. Verly, Jerome Meessen and Benoit Michel

3D MEDIA is part of a new portfolio of R&D projects that will run for five years, financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). 3D MEDIA covers most scientific and technological aspects concerning the management and processing of audio and video contents. It involves the three largest Universities in Wallonia, the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (FPMs), the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), and the Université de Liège (ULg); it is managed by the Multitel Research Center.

by Francesco Flammini, Andrea Gaglione and Concetta Pragliola

Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) against both natural and intentional threats has become a major issue in modern society. CIP involves a set of multidisciplinary activities and requires the adoption of appropriate protection mechanisms operated by centralized monitoring systems. Such systems are still highly dependent on human operators for supervision and intervention. One of the challenging goals of the research community in this field is the automatic and early detection of threats, including strategic terror attack scenarios. DETECT (Decision Triggering Event Composer & Tracker) is a new framework able to recognize complex events. This is achieved by a model-based correlation of basic events detected by possibly heterogeneous sensorial subsystems.

by Tanja E. J. Vos

Complex systems exhibit emergent behaviour, which makes them hard to predict. This presents particularly challenging problems during testing. However, this is a challenge that simply cannot be avoided: testing is a vital part of the quality assurance process. With important partners from Spain (ITI), UK (Kings College), France (INRIA), Germany (Fraunhofer, Daimler, BMS), Bulgaria (RILA) and Greece (European Dynamics), the EvoTest project, funded under the 6th Framework programme (IST-33742), is attacking the problem of testing complex systems using evolutionary algorithms.

by Janne Jul Jensen, Mikael B. Skov and Jan Stage

The Web Portal Usability (WPU) project is working on usability engineering methods, which are important in the development of Web portals. These methods are tested with companies that design modern Web portals.

by Jürgen Kogler, Christoph Sulzbachner, Erwin Schoitsch and Wilfried Kubinger

Reliable Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) aid drivers in a variety of traffic and environment/weather conditions. Growing traffic volumes require sensors and systems that handle difficult urban and non-urban scenarios. For such systems, the EU FP7 project ADOSE is developing and evaluating new cost-efficient sensor technology that will provide vehicles with a ‘virtual safety belt’ by addressing complementary safety functions.