As part of the Future Internet week in Ghent I’m attending the one-day event organised by the Future Internet Research and Experimentation – FIRE – Initiative,
The Auditorium, where the FIRE event is taking place is really an impressive place; the whole congress centre is nice. Opening session is about the programme as such. The main complaint they seem to have is that they still need to convince users. IBBT gave their view on experimental research on social and economic challenges; they are interdisciplinary and user driven with a time-frame from 5 to 1 years. They base on three pilars: open innovation, technological infrastructure and usability. They have a big infrastructure with 100′s of nodes both wireless and wired. Then, the 7 flagship initiatives for the Commission were presented. The objective is bringing research results quicker to market, moving towards an Internet enabled service economy. FIRE is regarding time to market and technological risk between FP7 and the FI-PPP. A short term overview of the ICT WP for 2011&2012 was given and FIRE was cited as the main tool for experimentation driven R&D. Finally, a presentarion on FIRE itself was given from FIREstation representatives. They cordinate the different FIRE activities. As such, they announced an info-day on the 9th of Feb. 2011 for the different calls for proposals emerging from the projects. Focus on proposals that extend the FIRE session infrastructure.
The second session featured seven different FIRE projects, their goals in a nutshell and how they think they can convince users to use their facilities. Lots of information packed in an 8 minute/project format, maybe too much.
- EADS plans to use the CREW infrastructure for their development cycle.
- The approach of the SmartSantander project was presented.
- TEFIS presented their approach on lowering the entry barriers
- OneLab showed what they have up&running
- BonFIRE spoke about their approach to capture user requirements for multi-cloud Internet of Things environment.
- ngn2fi was showcased by Fokus
- OFELIA spoke about their OpenFlow infrastructure as an approach and that they hope that that the OpneFlow API might attract more users around the world than something developed from scratch.
The third session was about projects and their users and I had to leave in order to give my talk on SAIL @ the EURO-NF NoE meeting. More information on FIRE use cases can be found here.
Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, a project around the future internet on behalf of Telefónica I+D. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.
