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Europe-Korea Research on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Final Report Summary - EKRUCAMI (Europe-Korea Research on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence)

EKRUCAmI - Europe-Korea Research on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence (www.ekrucami.ipp.pt) is a project receiving funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/, REA grant agreement No 318878 (PIRSES-GA-2012-318878), and also supported by the International Research & Development Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (Grant number: K 2013079410). EKRUCAmI is a 4 year project that began on the 1st January 2013 in Europe and in the mid of 2013 in Korea.
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) deals with a new world where computing devices are spread everywhere, included into objects, allowing the human being to interact in physical world environments in an intelligent and unobtrusive way. These environments should be aware of the needs of people, customizing requirements and forecasting behaviours.
Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) means to have access to the information anywhere, in an integrated and coherent way, using computing devices.
EKRUCAmI is a multidisciplinary initiative based on a balanced exchange of scientists with a balanced level of expertise among four research organizations. The project consortium includes the following 2 institutions from Europe and 2 institutions from South Korea:
- IPP – Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal, Project Coordinator
- USal – University of Salamanca, Spain
- CUD – Catholic University of Daegu, Korea
- SCNU – Sunchon National University, Korea

Project Objectives and Main Results Achieved

The main objectives of EKRUCAmI are the following:
- Building a lasting R&D network that will be open to other participants outside the current consortium in the future
- Training new researchers in UbiComp and AmI areas
- Supporting the exchange of ideas and techniques, promoting applied research and new project pilots development, technology transfer and, if feasible, the launching of new spin-offs
- Enhancing the career development of a series of gender-balanced early stage researchers
- Facilitating capacity building activities for researchers from Europe and Korea
- Developing new techniques able to provide effective solutions to current problems in Smart Rooms, Healthcare and Agrifood
EKRUCAMI results highlights:
- Contacts were established with Small and Medium Size enterprises of both countries (visit to SME and incubators in both countries)
- Models and architectures were defined and applications were developed for ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence in the three main application domains envisaged: agrifood, healthcare, and group decision support
- Identification of the main tasks involved in the creation of an UbiComp&AmI environment and in the application of AI techniques to these environments
- Application of EKRUCAmI architecture to the development of applications in healthcare, smart meeting rooms and agriculture monitoring, integrating the work done in previous work Packages.
- Two workshops were organized during 2014, one in Yeosu (South Korea) and another in Salamanca (Spain). In 2015 two international conferences were organized in Porto (Portugal), and in 2016 a total of 4 international conferences were organized, two in South Korea (Jeju and Suncheon), one in Porto (Portugal) and one in Sevile (Spain)
- Memorandum of Understanding proposed between the Convergence Information Technology Research Center for Agrifood at Sunchon National University, Suncheon, Jeollanam-do, Republic of Korea, coordinated by Prof. Hyun Yoe, and the Polytechnic Institute of Porto. Carlos Ramos (IPP), and Juan Corchado (USal), coordinators of IPP and USal groups in EKRUCAmI, have been involved as experts in a big project in Korea concerning the Convergence of Information Technologies in Agrifood area
- The publication record was very good, more than 130 scientific publications, including 80 in scientific journals.

Expected final results and their potential impact and use:
Under the scope of EKRUCAMI we develop models and architectures for ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence. These Architectures and Models were used to develop applications in the domain of agrifood, healthcare, and group decision support in smart rooms. We expect to contribute to involve SME of Europe and Korea in the areas of AmI and UbiComp, and to extend the network of academic cooperation between Europe and Korea in these fields, promoting new R&D projects as well. Several new publications are expected after the project, and the organization of workshops and conferences. Thus impact of the EKRUCAmI project in Economy and Academy is clearly being achieved even after the end of the project.