by John Pendlebury, Mark Humphrys and Ray Walshe

There is an emerging consensus in much of AI and cognitive science that "intelligence" is most likely the product of thousands of highly specialised subsystems collaborating in some kind of 'Network of Mind'. In 2001, Mark Humphrys proposed that if Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to "scale up", it will require a collaborative effort involving researchers from diverse disciplines, across multiple laboratories (http://computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/WWM/). Until now there has never been an easy system to facilitate the construction of hybrid AI from the work of multiple laboratories. The World-Wide-Mind is the latest in a series of prototype systems, which enables the construction of hybrid AI systems from multiple laboratories.

by Patrick Ruch, Thomas Brunschwiler, Werner Escher, Stephan Paredes and Bruno Michel

The spectacular progress in the development of computers has been following Moore’s Law for at least six decades. Now we are hitting a barrier. While neuromorphic computing architectures have been touted as a promising basis for low-power bio-inspired microprocessors down the road, imitating the packaging of mammalian brains is a new concept which may open new horizons independent of novel transistor technologies or non-Van Neumann architectures.

by Mario D’Acunto, Antonio Benassi, Ovidio Salvetti

Nanotechnology is the manipulation or self-assembly of individual atoms, molecules or molecular clusters into structures to create material and devices through an exact control of size and form in the nanometer scale. The immense potential of this field is presenting a challenge for the ICT world.

by Massimo Ruffolo and Ermelinda Oro

The Web is the largest knowledge repository ever. In recent years there has been considerable interest in languages and approaches providing structured (eg XML) and semantic (eg Semantic Web) representation of Web content. However, most of the information available is still accessed via Web pages in HTML and documents in PDF, both of which have internal encoding conceived to present content on screen to human users. This makes automatic information extraction problematic.

by Koray Kayabol

Many applications in remote sensing, varying from crop and forest classification to urban area extraction, use Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image classification. As ERCIM Fellows, we have studied the classification of land covers for a year. Our results on the classification of water, land and urban areas can be used by city administrators and planners to automatically classify related land covers in order to control the development of the city, while preserving its resources like forests and waters.

by Peter Zinterhof

In a joint project, scientists at University Salzburg and SALK (Salzburger Landeskrankenanstalten) explore how to apply machine-learning techniques to assess the huge amount of image data generated by computed tomography.

by Salvatore Aronica, Massimo Cossentino, Carmelo Lodato, Salvatore Lopes, Umberto Maniscalco.

Information and communications technologies promise to have a significant impact on safety at sea. This is particularly true for smaller ships and boats that rarely have active on board safety systems. We are currently developing a system for computer-aided maritime search and rescue operations within the ICT-E3 Project (ICT excellence programme of Western Sicily funded by the Sicilian Regional Government).

by Máté Pataki, Miklós Vajna and Attila Csaba Marosi

When seeking information on the Web, Wikipedia is an essential source: its English version features nearly four million articles. Studies show that it is the most frequently plagiarized information source, so when KOPI, a new translational plagiarism checker was created, it was necessary to find a way to add this vast source of information to the database. As it is impossible to download the whole database in an easy-to-handle format, like HTML or plain text, and all the available Mediawiki converters have some flaws, a Mediawiki XML dump to plain text converter has been written, which runs every time a new database dump appears on the site with the text version being published for everybody to use.

by Stella Melina Vasilaki, FORTH/IACM

GenSET was an innovative project aiming to improve the excellence of European science through inclusion of the gender dimension in research and science knowledge making. It functioned as a forum for sustainable dialogue between European science leaders, science stakeholder institutions, gender experts, and science strategy decision-makers, to help implement effective overall gender strategies. The goal was to develop practical ways in which gender knowledge and gender mainstreaming expertise can be incorporated within European science institutions in order to improve individual and collective capacity for action to increase women’s participation in science.

by Sebastian Engell and Françoise Lamnabhi-Lagarrigue

In a recently published position paper, members of the HYCON2 Network of Excellence (‘Highly-Complex and Networked Control Systems’) demonstrate that control is at the heart of the information and communication technologies of complex systems. As a consequence, control should be supported as a priority in the coming European Commission’s work programmes, both at the level of enabling technologies and at application level, including ‘public private partnerships’ (PPPs) on Energy-efficient buildings, Factories of Future and European Green Cars Initiatives. The recommendations for a ‘European Research Agenda towards Horizon 2020’ are supported by major European enterprises and academia.