Partners
SINTEF leads the consortium. We provide the project with the technology and expertise: user-centred design. Wireless communication solutions, hardware/ software integration, context tags, user context technology, and interfaces for the mobile and travelling user.
SINTEF is an independent research and development foundation based in Trondheim and Oslo, Norway, which encourage innovation and improve competitiveness in Norwegian industry and public administration. In doing so, SINTEF maintain close links with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and University of Oslo, collaborating on projects, and sharing equipment and other resources. SINTEF is Scandinavia's largest independent research organisation, with about 1200 researchers (of which 28,1% doctorates and a turnover of NOK 1.5 billion. Most of SINTEF's operating revenues arise from contract research and development work carried out for industry and the public sector in Norway and elsewhere. SINTEF is not a publicly funded organisation. Less than 4% of their income is public grant. SINTEF consists of eight separate research institutes and four companies, covering all major scientific areas and industrial sectors. The institute represented in this proposal is SINTEF Telecom and Informatics. Our R&D work focuses on information and communications technologies - covering basic technologies as well as applications of these. We have departments specialising in computer science, systems engineering & telematics, distributed systems, radio & signal processing, and acoustics.
CognIT a.s was founded in March 1996 by Dr. Bernt Bremdal and Dieter Hirdes. As a spin-off from the R&D community in Halden, and Bremdal Technology Services, it builds on long traditions. Since the start the company has been fast-growing and currently there are 12 full-time employees. Our main office is located in Halden, Norway, about halfway between Oslo and Gothenburg. A second project-office is located right outside Oslo. CognITs business philosophy is to provide products and services for companies whose core business depends on efficient and knowledge intensive decision making. Our business partner is the "know-how" and "know-what" organisation. CognITs vision is to support such companies in order to enhance their cognitive production factors through systematic management of corporate knowledge and information. CognIT a.s will serve as a technology provider and implementation company. It is involved in the work packages on machine learning, user profiling and natural language processing. It will use its experience in text summarising, content analysis and visualisation as well as information retrieval and extraction technologies.
The Robert Gordon University (RGU) is located in Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. The University has strong links with industry that feed into both its teaching and research programs. RGU's mission statement is "To provide high quality, practice-based higher education and training programmes, research and consultancy services." This succintly summarises the research ethos encouraged where the emphasis is very much on applied programmes to address a range of industrial and environmental problems. The University has extensive links with industry and much of the research is funded by these industries. The University has earned a formidable reputation for providing high quality vocationally relevant education and research, the success of which is reflected in an outstanding record of graduate employment. The School of Computing consists of 30 full-time academic staff. The group directly participating in the AmbieSense project is the Information Retrieval (IR) subgroup which falls under the Interactive Systems umbrella group. The IR Group has eight members. RGU will serve as a method and technology partner. Within AmbieSense, RGU will primarily contribute to Intelligent agents for acquiring user profiles and contexts in (WP6) and information sharing and distribution in (WP5). Contributions will also be made to models in WP2, to user techniques for specifying contextual information (WP7). Our past work in Web retrieval, personalisation and development of software architectures for information services will form part of our competence for these tasks.
Ranked by sales and number of employees, Siemens is worldwide one of the largest companies in the electrical and electronic sector. With a manufacturing and sales organisation in more than 150 countries, Siemens does more than half of its business outside Germany. Electronic products and systems now account for well over half of Siemens' total sales. Application oriented research is the basis for the development of new and improved products and systems. Continued development in nearly 300 fields of activity largely depend on the progress in about 30 core technologies, in which Siemens is concentrating its resources. Many of these technologies are developed at the Corporate Research and Development Department carrying out projects on research and basic development for material, products, and systems technologies in strategically important areas. These technologies will remain a most important source of innovation for the coming decade. Software is becoming increasingly important as a product on its own, as a development tool, and as an indispensable component in numerous products and systems. Siemens will participate on the definition of the functional and non-functional requirements of the overall system architecture. Based on these results Siemens will also involved in the design of the AmbieSense technology, including the decomposing of the entire system architecture into building blocks, the elaboration of uses cases and necessary models. Siemens will also take part on the definition and design of the concepts and the underlying technology (incl. middleware, protocols, interfaces, transport technologies) for the distribution and the sharing of the context-information between server and clients. Another important tasks of Siemens within the AmbieSense project will the dissemination of the results of the project inside of Siemens, to standardisation groups, to research fora and at different conferences.
YellowMap intends to provide value added services for mobile users all over Europe. By distributing the licensed TeleAtlas and NaviTech content, YellowMap is keen to provide map services. AmbieSense technology made by the other parthers increase the economic viability of YellowMap. AmbieSense helps YellowMap to prepare for the start of 3G (third generation of mobile communication) and is the basis of the conversion of existing online services into mobile services. After the successfull completion of the exploitation work activities YellowMap has the vision to be the market leader of map content in the area of location based services in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. YellowMap will receive assistance regarding maps and cartography from Lonely Planet, which has a substantial amount of professional cartographers in their staff.
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) covers both technical and natural science disciplines, as well as arts and social science. It has app. 2000 employees and 20.000 students. The Department of Computer and Information Science counts about 100 scientific staff members, of which 35 are permanently and full time employed. The group directly participating in this project - the Artificial Intelligence and Learning Group - has five full-time faculty members, two adjunct faculty members and seven PhD students. As a university, the main business is to provide high-level, high-quality education, as well as to produce significant and influential research. The university is established in the international front line of many of its areas, and we are always looking for opportunities to maintain and further strengthen our international position, so that better quality research is produced, which in turn leads to higher-quality education. NTNU will serve as a method and technology provider, and primarily contribute to the modelling and design of the AmbieSense software (WP2), and to the intelligent software methods (WP6). Contributions will also be made to user context modelling and contextual information sharing (in WPs 4 and 5). Our past work on context modelling, our integrated case-based reasoning technology, our intelligent user interfaces research, and recently started work on distributed case-based methods and pervasive computing, will form part of our competence for these tasks. NTNU will serve as a method and technology provider, and primarily contribute to the modelling and design of the AmbieSense software (WP2), and to the intelligent software methods (WP6). Contributions will also be made to user context modelling and contextual information sharing (in WPs 4 and 5). Our past work on context modelling, our integrated case-based reasoning technology, our intelligent user interfaces research, and recently started work on distributed case-based methods and pervasive computing, will form part of our competence for these tasks.
Oslo Airport (OSL) was established on 13 November 1992, a month after the Norwegian Parliament had passed a motion to build the new airport. OSL is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Luftfartsverket (Norwegian Air Traffic and Airport Management (NATAM)). OSL was involved in the planning, construction, ownership and operation of the new main airport at Gardermoen, located 47 km north of Oslo. On 1 January 1997, OSL took on responsibility for the operation of the existing airports at Fornebu just outside Oslo and at Gardermoen. This increased the number of OSL staff by 400, not including the 240 people already employed on the construction project. Transfer of responsibility for operation of the airports has been completed well in advance of the new airport's opening. In this way, staff with a great deal of experience and expertise within the field are in place, enabling the company to be as prepared as possible. The establishment of OSL as a public limited company was a requirement of the Government's proposal to the Norwegian Parliament. This step was taken because of the socio-economic benefits of the project, which is being financed entirely by user fees. Investment in construction and commissioning costs are financed by loans arranged through Norges Bank. Therefore, the construction of the new airport has not affected the national budget. After the airport was completed in 1998, the loans was repaid by normal aviation charges and commercial income generated from its operation. Total investment amounts to NOK 11.4 billion (based on 1992 conversion rates), including acquisition of land and compensation. Specification of functional and non-functional requirements, test and evaluation, exploitation of results.
Sevilla Global is the Urban Agency for the city economic development of Seville. It was established in September 2000 as an Inc. Company whose sole stakeholder is, until now, the Seville City Council. Seville city is the fourth urban agglomeration in Spain and the capital of Andalusia, one of the biggest regions within the European Union, which has also experimented a dramatic economic surge in the last two decades. Seville exerts nowadays a pivotal role in the articulation of the national economy, being the most important urban center in the Southern half of the Iberian Peninsula. A satisfactory communication and infrastructure, next generation medical services and avant-garde nature preservation policies, figure amongst the main factors that lead to the well-known quality of life in Southern Spain and to the great number of visitors from all around the world. Besides, Seville offers a really attractive industrial environment, which helps to foster the development of all kind of business activities. In this sense, Sevilla Global stands for a new local public action strategy in the field of urban economy and business development for Seville metropolitan area. Sevilla Global is a suitable public counterpart for corporations and businessmen, as well as other Agencies and public partners interested in the capital of the Southern Spain. Mainly business-oriented, services and programs, Sevilla Global has been configured as a last generation agency from its inception. In this sense, our urban economics and internationalization project has important starting assets. Sevilla Global envisages being the main interlocutor for every enterprise wishing to establish in our metropolitan area. Its challenge is to support the development of a healthy business environment, providing first-rate information services to newcomers and helping to improve the productive fabric. To do so, a wide-range programme package has been developed, included in the following areas: industrial spaces revitalization; e-business and innovation; cluster development; city marketing and international cooperation; and urban economics research and analysis. Sevilla Global, as one of the two "end-users" partners for the Ambiesense project, will work on the acquisition of the functional and non-functional requirements for the system, on the test and the evaluation of the components and on the dissemination and explotation of the Ambiesense Technology in Europe.
Lonely Planet Publications began in 1973 with the simple idea to document a journey from London across Asia to Australia. Today, the company is a major international publisher of over 500 titles, with operations in four countries, over 400 employees and sales exceeding $50 million.Headquartered in Melbourne, Lonely Planet has offices in Paris, London and Oakland, all of which are wholly owned by common shareholders. Each office enjoys a significant degree of autonomy and an ability to respond quickly to local conditions, which has allowed the group to rapidly carve out a strong position in these markets. In addition, the spread of operations enables the group to capitalize on the depth of market knowledge of its people in the various countries and regions while still achieving significant economies of scale. The company has a loyal, motivated and highly qualified staff.Lonely Planet's products and services are intended to meet the travel information needs of independent travellers. The product range incorporates the traditional travel guidebooks that successfully launched the company and a broad range of related travel books covering food, activity-based travel, reference books, foreign language publications and an increasing range of digital travel products. Lonely Planet's (LP) expertise can be seen as supplying authors, editors, cartographic skills (especially in GIS) - LP has actually managed to get our authors to use GPS units and gather latitudes and longitudes. So LP can gather content specifically tailored to applications, or LP can edit content to the needs of the application. LP has a website which is used by around 2 million visitors each month - LP is well placed for gathering feed back, and user trailing. We have experience in designing interfaces such as the one for our CitySyncPalm application, and our Interactive web application. The activities in AmbieSense are:
- Tourist data for London and Seville.
- Contribute to classification and taxonomy work and development
- Supply field workers from Lonely Planet as mobile user(s) for user testing in London and/or Seville and perform fieldwork of augmenting tourist data.
- Provide expertise in user interface issues, design and testing (based on our experience with CitySync)
- Help with integrating and structuring (LP's) relevant tourist data and maps to the AmbieSense prototype.
- Provide expertise and advise on data coverage issues in tourism industry
Reuters premier position as a global information, news and technology group is founded on its reputation for speed, accuracy, integrity and impartiality combined with continuous technological innovation. Reuters strength is based on its unique ability to offer customers around the world a combination of content, technology and connectivity. Reuters supplies the global financial markets and the news media with the widest range of information and news products. These consist of real-time text, financial data, collective investment data from Lipper, numerical, textual, historical and graphical databases plus news, graphics, news video, and news pictures. Throughout the Group, Reuters makes extensive use of internet technologies for the wider distribution of information and news. Over 663,200 professional users in 70,000 locations access Reuters information and news worldwide. Data is provided on more than 940,000 shares, bonds and other financial instruments as well as on 40,000 companies. Financial information is obtained from 257 exchanges and over-the-counter markets. 5,047 clients contribute prices, opinions and analysis covering a wide variety of markets. Reuters will be a subcontractor in AmbieSense who will provide real-time news and information for use within the AmbieSense mobile solutions.