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2003-2004 Work Programme
2.3.4.2 Proactive Initiatives
Proactive initiatives aim at focusing resources on visionary and challenging long-term goals that are timely and have strong potential for future impact. These long-term goals are not necessarily to be reached during the lifetime of projects but provide a common strategic perspective for all research work within the initiative and a focal point around which critical mass can be built and synergies developed. Calls for proposals for proactive initiatives may be preceded by invitations to submit 'expressions of interest'.
Instruments to be used
Each proactive initiative will typically consist of one or more integrated projects and, in some cases, a Network of Excellence (NoE). In the context of a proactive initiative, NoEs would have a specific role: they would bring together the broader community active in the research domain of the initiative in order to provide a framework of coordination for research and training activities at the European level, and allow the progressive and lasting integration of these activities around pre-specified themes. This may include the establishment of "distributed" centres of excellence, shared fabrication or experimental facilities, testbeds etc.
NoEs in the proactive initiatives will help elaborate and maintain a research roadmap for the area, in cooperation with the integrated projects, and they will also ensure a broad dissemination of research results emanating from the proactive initiative, stimulate industrial and commercial interest, and enhance the public visibility of the research. In addition to the above activities, the Joint Programme of Activity (JPA) of a NoE may provide support to research that is within the subject area of the initiative and is of an exploratory nature, or tests the credibility of new research ideas and concepts, complementing the work carried out within the integrated projects.
Proactive initiatives to be called in 2003
(i) Beyond robotics
Incorporation of information technology into physical mobile artefacts ("robots") poses a wide range of interdisciplinary research challenges and has the potential to lead to a large variety of new applications. Proposals should address one or more of the following long term objectives:
- The development of cognitive robots whose "purpose in life" would be to serve humans as assistants or "companions". Such robots would be able to learn new skills and tasks in an active open-ended way and to grow in constant interaction and co-operation with humans.
- Hybrid bionic systems that would augment human capabilities such as perception of the environment, motion, interaction with other humans etc. This would involve smooth integration of sophisticated robotic and information systems with human perception-action systems using bi-directional interfaces (invasive or non-invasive) with the human nervous system.
- The development of autonomous microrobot groups ('robot ecologies'), consisting of many heterogeneous members exhibiting collective behaviour and intelligence. The robots would be able to self-organise, adapt, co-operate and evolve in order to attain a global objective.
Proposals should have ambitious objectives at the level of a complete system and aim at breakthroughs that go well beyond the state of the art. Research should seek new approaches and address and integrate topics such as multisensory perception, learning, scalability, integration, task and environment adaptation, interaction with humans, and rigorous evaluation. Existing state-of-the-art solutions for robotic sub-systems may be adopted where appropriate. The work would partly build on the ongoing FET neuroinformatics (NI) and life-like perception systems (LPS) initiatives with augmented scope for integration and systems research.
(ii) Complex systems research
The extreme scale and dynamism of information systems poses fundamental challenges to their design and control. Conventional engineering methods will soon hit a complexity barrier due to the exponential growth of interconnections among a rapidly increasing number of system components. New conceptual frameworks for designing and building complex systems are necessary.
The objective is therefore to create a new generation of scale-free, autonomously evolving IT systems building on design and control paradigms derived from complex system analysis. Such systems - large scale networks, societies of simulated or embodied agents, electronic circuits, information repositories, etc. - must incorporate adaptive and stable self-regulatory mechanisms that guide their growth and lead to autonomous self-organisation. They must be able to operate on multiple spatial and temporal scales and continue operating reliably in dynamic environments.
To address the above objective it will be essential to study real-world systems - living organisms, eco- and social systems, or even the man-made internet - and understand how these scale-up and organise the information flow between their parts. In addition, beyond studying real-world systems as computational systems in order to develop tools to "engineer emergent order", ultimately only a general conceptual framework for complex systems would enable a leap from ad-hoc solutions to a scientifically-rooted paradigm shift. Essential for this are concepts from statistical physics, evolutionary and developmental biology, immunology, neuroscience, game theory, etc.
Possible research goals / challenges include
- Monitor, visualise and simulate the dynamics of large, rapidly evolving networks in real-time. Characterise and classify their structural properties and develop local algorithms taking advantage of these properties. Enhance their capacity of self-monitoring and self-management.
- Extract meaning from huge, unstructured, dynamically evolving sets of data. Guide societies of heterogeneous agents - simulated or embodied - to develop shared knowledge systems or languages.
- Create scale-free computational structures composed of self-assembling building blocks that are capable to develop - through spontaneous differentiation - organised structures and greater capabilities. Identify new languages for 'programming' such structures via local rules.
(iii) The Disappearing Computer
The designs of future ambient systems - that is, IT systems intimately integrated with everyday environments and supporting people in their activities - are likely to be quite different to those of current computer systems. Instead they will have to be based on radically new architectures comprising an unbounded set of "building blocks" - where these blocks may be embedded in everyday objects, be it stand-alone objects or software entities.
The key aim of this research is to develop such open architectures and supporting frameworks (tools, languages, ontologies etc.) that could become universally applicable. The building blocks would be heterogeneous entities with different functionalities (e.g. processors, controllers, protocol modules, agents, tags, human interaction modules, sensors etc, embedded in everyday objects or "stand-alone"). The architectures should allow their arbitrary combination to produce an unbounded range of configurations giving rise to functionalities that can be neither pre-programmed nor foreseeable.
In order to meaningfully bridge the distance between low-level architectures and high level ambient systems interacting with people, the research effort should span the entire spectrum ranging from low level architectural design through to development of representative scenarios of use. The scenarios should provide realistic contexts of use and interaction, inspired by observations of people and their activities. They need to be diverse enough to ensure that the architectures could indeed become universally applicable.
Work on the development of architectures should be done in conjunction with building research prototypes where the architecture is evaluated against the scenarios applied in a diversity of real-world settings.
Optional pre-proposal checks
Pre-proposal checks is a service provided by FET to consortia intending to submit a proposal to a Proactive Initiative call. Their purpose is to provide feedback on the eligibility of the proposal, the suitability of the proposed work with respect to the scope of the call, and on the suitability of the instrument used.
Planning for proactive initiative calls in 2004 and beyond
The following tentative areas are expected to build on successful work launched in the 5th framework programme. The list is not exclusive nor is it certain that all the areas listed below will be called:
- Quantum information processing and communication: This initiative explores novel computing and communication systems that exploit the properties of quantum mechanical operations. The main focus would be on scalable solid-state and atom-based approaches to quantum processors.
- Molecular computing: This would be the follow-up to the Nanotechnology Information Devices (NID) initiative and would focus on molecular and biomolecular approaches to information processing systems, including devices, computational architectures and bottom-up nanofabrication.
- Global computing: This would build on successful work under the Global Computing initiative that started in 2001. The central challenge would be to establish solid foundational principles for the analysis and design of systems composed of extremely large numbers of autonomous, mobile and interacting computational entities, so that the global system is dependable, secure, robust and efficient.
- Life-like perception and cognition systems would build on successful work undertaken in the "neuroinformatics for living artefacts" and "life-like perception systems" initiatives that were launched in 2000 and 2001. The scope would cover both subsystems as well as complete autonomous artefacts that are inspired by the sophistication of perception-decision-action architectures adopted by living organisms.