ICT
ICT (Information and Communication Technology) is at the heart of the revised Lisbon agenda for growth and jobs in Europe. ICT is a key economic sector and as such supposed to boost the economy by promoting a borderless Europe information space with stable markets for electronic communication services. ICT serves here as an umbrella term that includes all technologies for the communication of information.
By combining the expertise of the five IDEA League partner universities and developing collaborative and complementary research in the area of ICT, the IDEA League aims to make a significant contribution to society in this field.
More precisely, there is a consensus among IDEA League partners that after the disruptive societal and business changes due to digital communications and internet technology, the next generation will be faced with yet another disruption, namely the mixture of physical and virtual realities, identities, and presence. The provisional heading for this forthcoming ICT-driven innovation is ICT for the Next Generation.
Realizing that it covers both societal opportunities and threats as well as strong economical issues for the coming generation, IDEA League partners agreed that the ICT for the Next Generation prospects have to be taken up collaboratively in education and research. For Europe to be the front runner in ICT for the Next Generation, to embrace and keep a hold on technology innovation, to seize economic advantages, and to drive the debate on legal, ethical and societal consequences, it is urgently needed to act and consider the education and research required for these innovations.
On a topical level, the sustainable design and realisation of large ICT systems demand breakthroughs in field that are active research topics at the IDEA League member institutions:
- Developing the methods for designing, developing and validating the forthcoming large complex ICT systems
- Self-organized, adaptive, reconfigurable systems and networks
- Complexity analysis, optimization methods, automatic generation and validation tools
- Seamlessly interfacing the real and the virtual for the establishment of the Knowledge Society
- Virtual interactions and new usages
- Enriched reality
- Interfaces between virtual and physical world
- Operating multimodal systems
- Advanced multimedia and multi-modal communication
- Computer vision and recognition of other sensor signals
- Urbanizing and securising the ubiquitous presence of ICT
- Reliability
- Numerical privacy, liberty and security
- High throughput and enhanced connectivity
