1.3 Joint Program of activities
1.3.1 Joint Program on Management and Quality Assurance......
1.3.2 Joint Program on Integration and Sustainability......
1.3.3 Joint program on Cooperative Research......
1.3.4 Workpackage List......
1.3.5 List of Deliverables......
1.3.6 List of Milestones......
1.3.7 Work Package Description Tables......
1.3 Joint Program of activities
Blah blah some text about how its made from 7 WPs, what they are, how they interact, talk through the diagram below need to add new A4.5 into diagram and say they are divided into 3 joint programs on QA, Integ & Sust and Coop Research
Need to have joint program on integration & sustain box around WP2/6/7 and in parallel the JP on Coop Research box around WP3/4/5 with an arrow linking them
Figure X: Interaction between Work Packages[VS1]
Text to introduce these aggregations of work pakages into “joint program on X”
1.3.1 Joint Program on Management and Quality Assurance
This joint program is coordinated by Ms. Patricia Ho-Hune from ERCIM
About a half-page talking of how its divided into WP1A and WP1B and project vs scientific coordination and enumerate the 5 activities in the WP
The management structure is conceived to optimally support the efficient and timely organization of the work plan.
It is designed to ensure a coherent scientific multi-disciplinary, administrative and financial coordination of SERENDIPITI, while providing the participants with the support and tools required for the achievement of the NoE’s objectives. In particular, the management will:
• Establish a democratic yet reliable overall organisation supporting the completion of the project activities;
• Support the integration of both research teams and activities, and ensure in particular the interaction among the different SERENDIPITI Work packages and activities;
• Assess the quality of work achieved and take appropriate measures if needed, in particular to supervise and review the completion of the milestones and deliverables;
• Promote the Network visibility;
• Provide expertise to address Intellectual Property Rights issues;
1.3.2 Joint Program on Integration and Sustainability
Some text introducing WP2, 6, and 7, the relationships between them, how the activities transfer across,
1.3.2.1 Integration of Organisations and People (WP2)
This WP is coordinated by ProfDr. Vojtěch Svátek of University of Economics, Prague (UEP)
Human capital is the most important asset of any network and SERENDIPITI will pursue a range of activities towards boosting the quality of researcher talent both within and outside the network. This will be particularly aimed at young researchers and will involve researchers from a range of disciplines involved in SERENDIPITI activities. The integration will be achieved at the level of on-site joint research (fellowships and exchanges), visiting lectures, web conferencing, summer schools, joint PhD supervision, sharing of educational resources etc. Care will be taken to extend the impact of the Network to other countries than those directly represented through project partners. The ultimate goal, reflected from the very beginning, is to form a Virtual Centre of Excellence that will persist over the completion of the SERENDIPITI project.
The workpackage is broken into five varied activities described as follows.
Activity 2.1 – Towards the Virtual Centre of Excellence[VS2] (coordinated by QMUL)
Leader: ???, Participants:
One of the primordial tasks for the Network is to lay the fundaments of a Virtual Centre of Excellence (VCE) that would assure persistence of the achieved accumulation of people and know-how. Initially composed and steered by the core partners, the virtual center will enlarge the member basis by integrating new partners in its governing body by establishing a research council and an associate membership program for academics. Clear priority will be given to enlargement with new member states partners with the constraints to avoid over representation of a single country. The virtual centre will also rely on an industrial board for the purpose of continuous market awareness.
This activity targets planning and execution of the program towards the VCE. Specifically the following sub-activities will be undertaken.
Planning of membership and Constitution: In this activity the plan, principles, problems and benefits of creating the envisaged centre will be analysed. This analysis will be used to produce well-defined terms of reference, membership and “mission statement” of the VCE. The results of this initial analysis will be weighed carefully against alternatives such as affiliation to existing professional bodies that will inevitably be evolving to better represent the importance of semantic urban computingmedia internet technologies[VS3].
Strategic plan for sustainability: A carefully thought out, realistic and achievable strategic planning process is required to achieve sustainability. This planning process should address among other issues, legal issues pertaining to the establishment of the centre, financial sustainability, centre identity, links to existing national centres, programmes and networks, etc.
This activity will draw and execute a plan and run sub-activities, analysis and discussions related to the sustainability of the envisaged VCE.
Activity 2.2 – Researcher Mobility Programme
The Network will encourage the mobility of junior as well as senior researchers within the Network and will allocate substantial funding to it. The mobility program will have two schemes differing in both the organisational setting and their typical duration. The Researcher Exchange Program (REP) will be open to members of the SERENDIPITI Institutes and the Fellowship Program (FP) will be reserved for PhD holders from all over the world to allow young scientists to join research centres within the Network. This Fellowship program is similar to the one already running within GEIE ERCIM and will benefit from its 20-year experience.
The Mobility program and procedure will adhere to specific rules described in the deliverable “Definition of the Mobility Program”. In addition the status of this activity will be described in the progress annual reports.
- SERENDIPITI Fellowships (FP)
This program will offer 12-18 month positions under a selection process managed by the Project Management Board. This program will aim to recruit excellent research fellows with respect to a particular topic addressed by the SERENDIPITI research objectives. In addition contacts will systematically be established with external academic institutes within the Activity 2.5 (Pan-European Integration) as described below. The research fellow will be hosted by two SERENDIPITI Members for a 6-9 month period each and will include another short visit to at least one more SERENDIPITI institute.
The process will follow 3 steps:
1- Launch of the call for proposals: the call for SERENDIPITI fellowship will be kept open for the first two years of the project;
2- Review and selection of best proposals will be conducted by the management Board on a monthly basis;
3- Recruitment of candidates will be carried out through extensive advertising at all SERENDIPITI member establishments and via the ERCIM channels, i.e. through publication on ERCIM Web site and announcements in ERCIM News magazine (approximately 11,500 copies in over 100 countries worldwide).
Available funding: the Network-budget guarantees four fellowships but may increase this number if it has the financial leeway.
NB: The researcher fellow must sign a contract with ERCIM and will be granted a monthly stipend.
- SERENDIPITI Researcher[VS4] Exchange Program (REP):
The mobility of researchers will consist of scientific visits and research stays between members of different SERENDIPITI institutions, as for example those involved in the same WP research task. Typical stays will be of one month although shorter or longer durations will be considered depending on which category of researchers it concerns. For each stay a joint proposal from the visitor and hosting institutions should be prepared, describing a project summary about the interest of the stay. Upon review of the Management board, the exchanges will be validated and refunded by a weekly lump sum to cover travel, accommodation and subsistence costs. This program is open to Junior and Senior Researchers from project members. To this aim the terms of the exchange will be adapted as follows:
- PhD Exchanges and Internships: PhD students as well as fresh post-docs from within the Network will have the possibility to apply for ‘talent-boosting’ internship within another partner. The typical duration of the internship will be 1 to 6 months. The applications will be granted through a review process managed by the Management rating both the qualification of the applicant and the overlap of interest between the applicant and the hosting institutes.
- Visits of researchers (incl. senior ones), as well as short visits of external scientists will be funded to enforce personal relations and understanding among scientists of the Network. In order to comply with its goal of integration within the scientific community, the Network will support short visits between a non core member[VS5] and a core member, providing that the joint research program is relevant to the project activities and the visited institute is a core member of the Network.
Available funding: the Network-budget forecasts more than 200 weeks for the REP but may increase this number if it has financial leeway. In general and whenever it is appropriate, the Management board will consider shifting some budget between the two SERENDIPITI Mobility schemes to fit as much as possible with the needs of the researchers of the Network.
NB: It should be noted that anyone benefiting from this exchange program must remain employed by their home institute for the whole duration of the visit.
Finally, we will explore the industrial placements of SERENDIPITI researchers engaged in their final year of PhD students. This will enable the transfer of technologies from SERENDIPITI to allied industrial domains and to actively strengthen industrial relationships relevant to the SERENDIPITI objectives.
Activity 2.3 – Cooperation in Education, Teaching Materials and PhD Formation
Leader: GLA Participants:
Six of the SERENDIPITI partners are leading research-oriented academic institutions and many of the senior researchers involved inSERENDIPITI teach courses at their Universities give research and invited talks, tutorials at conferences etc. In order to consolidate such a vastexperience and form a critical mass in SEREDENDIPTI domain, we will organise a set of activities aimed at co-operation in teaching, sharing of teaching materials and the development of PhD formation in multi-disciplinary areas.
We have specified the following sub-activities:
- The Network will, in its field of research interest, collect new teaching materials (lecture notes, video lectures, talks by SEREDIPTI researchers) and form links to relevant items in already existing repositories such as those from previous IST projects(Knowledge Web – REASE, K-Space, Reasoning Web etc.). The result will be a publicly available database of teaching resources.
- The Network members will actively create commented summaries upon these resources, which can be seen as proto-syllabi for new, dynamically built courses focussing e.g. on large scale and/or semantic urban computing.
- The Network will establish long-term cooperation in education of undergraduate students as well as in joint supervision of PhD theses in its fields of interest. In fact, all the SERENDIPTI supported PhDstudents will be jointly supervised by at least 2 partners of the consortium.
- The interaction among the PhD students involved in the network willbe fostered by organisation of an annual workshop – SerendiPhDi – where leading-edge research results will be semi-informally presented. The organisation of the workshop will be, for most part, carried out by the PhD students themselves to encourage and improve theorganization skills of the students.
- SERENDIPITI project meetings at partner institutions will also be scheduled to allow the opportunities for senior SERENDIPITI researchers to deliver guest lecturers to ‘local’ students during the times of these meetings and to contribute to local teaching in thatway, so that students from each university can benefit from the consortium wide expertise. In addition, this will enhance our teaching repositories.
- Aside such face-to-face events, there will be joint web conferences during which the PhD students and researchers will present their contributions to the hot research topics of the Network.
- We will exploit avenues like Erasmus programmes to strengthen interaction and academic cooperation between partners.
Activity 2.4 – Summer Schools and Social Networking
Leader: NUIG, Participants:
An annual Summer School lasting one week and consisting of 5 days x 6 hours of teaching material will be created and will attract between 50 and 80 students, mostly from outside the network. Lectures will be given by senior SERENDIPITI researchers and by guest lecturers and will cover the whole range of SERENDIPITI activities from sensor technology, data communications, semantic web technologies, databases, data mining and machine learning, software development and interfaces, and societal impacts of new technologies.
While one goal of summer schools is to gather people and to foster long-term collaborations between young researchers, the interactions between students generally end when the summer school ends. In order to go further and to ensure long-term relationships between summer school attendees, leading to new collaboration opportunities and bootstrapping new research fields, we will provide access to an online social networking application built around SERENDIPITI so that attendees are encouraged to stay in touch with each other, have the ability to interact with the school lecturers after the summer school, and build upon their summer school experience around the SERENDIPITI platform. It will also include facilities to exchange messages as well as sharing publications, and will be done by using an existing social networking platform.
Activity 2.5 – Pan-European Integration
Leader: UEP Participants:
While the Network partners are based in 5 EU countries, the integrating activities of the network will extend to relevant parties in the whole European space. In particular, PhD students and researchers will be systematically invited to Summer Schools and to the mobility programme; joint activities will be planned with related EU projects; public bodies in different European cities will be involved in the dissemination and the like. The effort will have the following three foci.
- General infrastructure. The outcomes of this activity will materialise in the form of a contacts database, which will serve for the purposes of other activities and WPs. In parallel, Activity 2.5 will continuously monitor the activities of the whole network in terms of keeping their benefits, as much as possible, accessible to parties from countries not represented in the consortium.
- New EU member states. Particular attention will be paid to the situation in these states, in which the implementation of urban computing applications is rather novel but often progressing fast. The specific situation in these countries will be analysed in connection with prospective application of technologies developed or advertised within SERENDIPITI. Researchers from these states will be invited for presentations and discussions.
- Industrial contacts.Dedicated effort will be devoted to establishment of contact with additional industrial subjects (aside those present in the IAB), and settle initial negotiations on technology transfer, which will subsequently continue within Activity A7.3.
1.3.2.2 Infrastructure Integration and Sharing (WP6)
This WP is coordinated by Prof. Joemon Jose of Glasgow University (GLA)
SERENDIPITI’s objective is to integrate people and research from diverse fields like multimedia processing/computer vision, information retrieval, semantics, text processing and formal models of data integration. The joint programmes of activities (WP 3-5) are aimed at progressing research beyond the current state of the art. However, we will perform the joint programme of activities based on a set of case studies aimed at demonstrating our SERENDIPITI vision and research results. Though the intention is not to focus on such demonstrators, but to use them as creative guiding force that direct the research and integration activities. For this purpose, we have defined three different but related case studies: city planning; police; and journalist. Such case studies require integration of data from multiple sources and are incomplete and noisy by nature. These case studies form a basis for integrating our research activities and also to facilitate user-centred evaluation. In addition, we also define a set of activities, which extends the developments within the SERENDIPITI by exploiting the results outside the consortium.
The results of the activities of this work package include a publicly available SERENDIPITI platform (A6.5); 3 demonstrators (A6.4); development of data sets for experimentation (A6.3); design of experimentation methodology (A 6.2); and mechanisms for making the research results accessible to the rest of the research. The later include the creation of virtual laboratory (A 6.1) and the provision of a SERENDIPITI application platform (A6.5).
The objectives of this activity are to facilitate the exploitation of SERENDIPITI research results within the consortium for the effective integration and also outside the consortium to integrate with other stakeholders.
The work package is divided into a series of five inter-related tasks, described as follows.
Activity 6.1 Virtual Laboratory
Leader: QMUL Participants:
The objective of this activity is to form a SERENDIPITI Virtual laboratory. The concept of virtual laboratory is to make the SERENDIPITI research activities to reach outside the consortium and also make the SERENDIPITI activities to flourish even after the end of the project. The Virtual laboratory, a component of our proposed Virtual Centre of Excellence (A 2.1), will host the SERENDIPITI infrastructures (Platform A6.5), experimental data sets (A6.3), and tools (WP3-5). The VL will work along with other aligned set of societies (for example, CEPIS, SMART Society).
Activity 6.2 Evaluation Methodology
Leader: GLA Participants:
Evaluation of scientific results is very important and SERENDIPITI takes this very seriously. Proper evaluation allows characterizing the quality of the research results. However, there is no mature evaluation methodology developed so far for data integration and prediction. Most evaluation activities are scattered and depends on the research domain, for example: Information retrieval methodology used in TREC and that used in Computer Vision field.