Find the most recent information on EU Funding activities in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by visiting our ICT in FP7 website, which covers ICT in the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) 2007 - 2013.
Coverage and main targets
Realising the vision requires a massive and integrated research effort that addresses the major societal and economic challenges and ensures the co-evolution of technologies and their applications.
The FP6 instruments, such as Integrated Projects, will enable the integration of various research activities from knowledge generation and technology development to their application and transfer. They provide an opportunity to combine, as appropriate, applied and generic technology research. This will help pull the technology developments with applications and services addressing the socio-economic challenges and will help focus the applied research on the development of relevant innovative technology platforms.
The main societal and economic challenges to be addressed are
- Solving "trust and confidence" problems so as to improve dependability of technologies, infrastructures and applications. These should ensure security and privacy, and protect property and individual rights. Improving trust in the knowledge society is a key requirement for its development.
- Strengthening social cohesion by providing efficient, intelligent and easy-to-use systems for health, "assisted living", transport, inclusion, risk management, environment, Technology-enhanced Learning and Cultural Heritage.
- Enabling sustainable growth and improving competitiveness, both of large and small businesses, as well as the efficiency and transparency of governments. This includes the development of mobile eCommerce and business and ework processes and will provide for more and better jobs.
- Supporting complex problem solving in science, society, industry and businesses. The aim is to harness the computing and knowledge management resources across Europe and bring them to the desktop of any researcher, engineer or other end user.
This requires progress in three main technology building blocks
- Pushing the limits of miniaturisation and minimising the costs and power consumption of microelectronic components and micro-systems. This includes breaking new barriers with current CMOS technology below the 10 nano-meter. It also includes the exploration of alternative materials allowing further miniaturisation or organic flexible materials for displays, sensors and actuators so that they can be placed anywhere, even in the human body, and take any shape.
- Developing mobile, wireless, optical and broadband communication infrastructures, as well as software and computing technologies, that are reliable, pervasive, interoperable and can be adapted to accommodate new applications and services. Europe's strengths both in communication technologies and in embedded software and systems provide a clear opportunity to lead and contribute to the development of the next generation of products and services. The development of open standards and open source software will be encouraged when appropriate to ensure interoperability of solutions and to further innovation.
- Developing user friendly interfaces which are intuitive, can interpret all our senses such as speech, vision and touch, and that understand our gestures and various languages. Developing more intelligent and flexible robot systems. This should be coupled with more powerful and flexible knowledge technologies that are semantic-based and context-aware. They should prepare for the next generation Web, and make access to and creation of digital content more effective and more creative. They should also provide solutions for organising, searching and accessing audiovisual content.
| IST today | The IST in FP6 vision |
|---|---|
| PC-based | "Our surroundings" is the interface |
| "Writing and reading" | Use all senses, intuitive |
| "Word" based information search | Context-based knowledge handling |
| Low bandwidth, separate networks | Infinite bandwidth, convergence etc |
| Mobile telephony (voice) | Mobile/Wireless full multimedia |
| Micro scale | Nano-scale |
| Silicon based | + new materials |
| e-Services just emerging | Wide adoption (eHealth, Technology-enhanced Learning etc) |
| < 10% of world population on-line | Worldwide adoption |