PUBLIC VOICE Lab

Expressions of Interests for the European Union's 6th Research Framework on Information Society Technologies (IST)


TODOS: TOwards increased participation in Democratic prOcesseS

TODOS will inspire extraordinary improvement in representative democracy by growing the participation of the European citizens to the democratic processes, supporting representatives and delivering and deploying the corresponding industrial tools on a global commercial basis. The Integrated Project will manage an adequate transition from the information society e-Democracy to the insertion of a knowledge management oriented democratic process within the whole governance environment. The emphasis is on making representative democracy work better, with more effective systems for engaging citizens in deliberations with policy-makers.TODOS will create a cyclical approach to the development of social research and technical products in the area of e-democracy.

TAML: Transformative Ambient Media Landscapes for the Archive of 2010

The core of this ambitious project is the creation of a completely open, flexible, aware, and secure knowledge sharing environment for media storage, handling, transformation, reuse and access. Central to this framework of innovation is the concept of transformation of media format, access method, language, mode of interaction, time frame, meaning, scale, context, and usage.  The goal is to provide open, customized, and free access for the public to Europe’s vast archive of cultural knowledge and heritage. At the same time all provisions will be made to enable sustainable business relationships between content holders and their customers.  This umbrella media research effort will strongly embrace standards, open source and free software tool development and component building.

FRICC: Fundamental Research In Chaotic Computing

FRICC aims at increasing the European competency in deep or “blue-sky” research in the field of emerging computer methodologies by focusing a critical mass of academic and industrial effort on researching the practical applications of chaotic systems for the purposes of effecting massively parallel supercomputing and chaotic cryptography.  The technical research focus will be upon fundamental research into the harnessing of natural and artificial complex systems including advanced sensing and control, state transition and analysis, and advanced state mapping and visualization techniques.FRICC will integrate 5 main themes: deep research, implementation and development, training and education, demonstrations and testing, and commercial exploitation.

CONTACT: Richard Wheeler
MIDAS: MIDdleware and Agents for SMEs

MIDAS aims to promote and enhance the acceptance of advanced Agents and Middleware technologies (including ASP provision) within SMEs. The idea is to provide SMEs with:-Easy access to a new generation of complex IC technologies, such as Agents, Middleware and ASP, offering support within a well-defined methodology-A direct relationship with leading research centres and universities, that SMEs normally do not have, thus resulting in a “behavioural change” with respect to research and development within SMEs in the future. This should therefore help SMEs better identify future R&D needs.The project is aimed to improve-Business to Business relationships (Middleware and Intelligent Agents)-Business to consumer relationships (Middleware and Intelligent Agents)-The creation of new business models for the Internet (ASP).

eCognis: European-Wide Knowledge Management

Knowledge is the basis of human work, life, problem-solving and productivity. It is created and communicated by humans. Finding knowledge is a human-to-human communication process. This IP will research the areas of knowledge management, the extraction of tacit knowledge, and the exchange of knowledge as a social and technical process. The outcome of this IP will be open-content tools to build a rich, multilingual European Knowledge Service. We build an interactive encyclopaedia in ten subject areas such as health, European cultural heritage, social problem-solving, cultural behavioural differences, tourism, food and health and conflict resolution. Within this integrated initiative, we develop new human-human interaction and natural language tools, multi-modal support, implement problem solving algorithms and facilitate use of ontological knowledge.

EURMIN: European Urban and Rural Minority Identities Network

Goal: Integration of European minority youth into mainstream society by providing them access to online and mobile youth communities.Building minority identity can be facilitated through the use of community media. Manifold content (audio, video, web) is produced Europe-wide every day by minorities.Bringing this content to one European online community will strengthen ties inside the minority while bringing positive attention to the minority.  The sharing of content, opinions, and platforms between mainstream and minority youth will provide a strong motor towards integration.The platform will be enhanced with features such as people matching, event calendar, special content, chat, e-mail, SMS-notification. 

CONTACT: David Röthler
PMDD: Research Network on Process Models for Deliberative Democracy

The Research Network on Process Models for Deliberative Democracy will conduct interdisciplinary research to design, analyse and evaluate a variety of alternative models for reforming political processes, taking into consideration the possibilities and risks of modern information and communications technology. Objective standards for comparing these process models with respect to their effects on fundamental democratic values and principals of rationality will be developed.

CONTACT: Roland Alton-Scheidl
EXACT: Exchange Agent for Community Television

Development of Agents and Methods to overcome the present lack of networking and programme exchange within the European community television sector. Thus enable community TV to play a crucial role in the development of an unique European content market. Exact is a bundle of solutions for shared archiving and publishing audio-visual contents, plus agents for:

  • feeding a common content space with programmes by local producers and stations
  • implementing contextual archives and metadata
  • syndicate content on international TV portals
  • delivering content for upcoming personalised services like mobile phones (3G)


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latest update: June 9, 2002: webmaster@pvl.at