Hi, CASALA are organising a workshop at the Pervasive Health conference in May, that might be of interest to the community here. Titled "Behaviour Modeling and health of older people in their homes". I'd be very interested to speak with anyone who would be interested in attending or submitting something to the workshop (all accepted submissions will be published in IEEE Xplorer).
I'm particularly keen on including something about AAL platforms. http://casala.ie/news-a-events/50-pervasive-health-2011-aal-workshop.html Cheers, Brian On 4 Feb 2011, at 13:36, Mohammad-Reza Tazari wrote: > Dear community, > > the governing board of AALOA has been invited to organize a special workshop > (most probably in April this year in Brussels, jointly with the ICT for > Inclusion unit of the DG for Information Society and Media of the European > Commission) with the goal to discuss possibilities for funding projects that > could directly promote the AAL market breakthrough. > > This is a big opportunity for AALOA to go a step forward and to give > foundation to the Manifesto's ideas around which this community is growing. > Of course, it is also an opportunity for all the satellite projects, which > could benefit from this funding scheme. > > We are asking all of you, especially people involved in running EU projects > (especially SMEs and enterprises), to express their opinion and if desired to > send a representative to the workshop in Brussels. This is the right moment > to help the community by doing networking to reach all the potentially > interested stakeholders. > > The original idea was developed by Reiner Wichert, spokesman for > Fraunhofer-Allianz AAL (which consists of 13 different Fraunhofer institutes > in different cities in Germany), who is also one of the first subscribers of > the AALOA Manifesto. > > Reiner developed the idea of "stress testing": > > To fill the gap between research and market, the industry must be involved in > projects that put selected promising research results under "stress tests". > That is, companies already offering AAL services and products / prototypes > start to use these results as underlying technologies (platform) in new > adapted versions of the existing products in such projects. The funding > should mainly aim at mitigating adaptation costs for the participating > vendors. > > The workshop is expected to examine the usefulness and feasibility of the > idea in conjunction with an appropriate funding scheme. For this reason, it > is preferable that the majority of the workshop participants are such > companies already offering AAL services and products / prototypes. Other > participants should be entities representing research results that are > volunteers to go under stress testing. Last but not least, representatives of > the current funding programmes, such as FP7, CIP ICT PSP, and AAL JP shall > attend this workshop. > > > The umbrella of AALOA could be the right place where such action could be > implemented. In fact, according to the manifesto, AALOA wants to "Design, > develop, evaluate, standardize and maintain a common service platform for > AAL", but the problem of creating consensus around a shared platform is still > an open issue. We think that the open source policy adopted by AALOA is the > right tool around which consensus can be reached. We are starting to incubate > projects within AALOA, but from among the EU projects supporting AALOA, > currently only those that are still running have the required resources to > put their research results under stress test in a production environment. > > This is the reason why we started contacting the universAAL project board. > They reacted positively to the initiative, provided that it starts not > earlier than the beginning of 2012, after the second development iteration. > In fact, universAAL had already planned to more actively present its results > to the general AAL community during their third iteration, in order to gather > and incorporate useful external feedback. > > The reaction of the universAAL consortium, which is composed of 17 European > partners, means that we have the first significant endorsement, so we are > positive about the idea of organising the workshop. In fact, we may be able > to candidate universAAL to be the first test bed for stress testing. The idea > is to grant universAAL a slot in the workshop for explaining why it would be > a good idea that a pilot project is based on their platform. AALOA would > ensure that possible decisions on this proposal will be the result of the > open discussions that we will have during the workshop. > > However, we hope that this is only a first step: we warmly encourage this > community to propose alternative platform candidates, and we invite other > consortia (e.g. OSAmI-commons, OpenURC, Continua, etc) to participate and > support the workshop. Given the many ongoing initiatives in this area, we > expect interesting candidate proposals. However, nobody knows whether the > general idea of one or more specific candidates will be confirmed by the > workshop; we do not even know if any solution can be found for funding stress > testing projects. > > We think that AALOA is the right umbrella to promote this interesting > initiative, also because it already has the strength to mediate among > competing solutions and creating synergies where possible. > > Some of the AALOA Governing Board members are going to meet physically during > the next week and will work on a first draft of the announcement of the > workshop. The draft will then be submitted to the whole Governing Board in > order to finalise a version to be posted to the AALOA promoters and > supporters, with one week time for gathering feedback. We must proceed > quickly in order to be able to contact the EC by the third week of > February with a concrete proposal on the organization of the workshop. > > Any criticism, doubt, further request for clarification, expression of > interest, or active support is welcome and warmly appreciated. Please provide > your feedback as soon as possible so that we can consider it for preparing > the announcement. > > The AALOA Governing Board > Francesco Furfari > Joe Gorman > Sergio Guillen > Sten Hanke > Thomas Karopka > Antonio Kung > Saied Tazari > _______________________________________________ > Supporters mailing list > Supporters@aaloa.org > http://aaloa.org/mailman/listinfo/supporters Brian O'Mullane Principal Investigator / Senior Research Engineer CASALA Netwell Centre Dundalk Institute of Technology brian.omull...@casala.ie Mobile: +353 87 699 8515 Skype: brianomullane Office: +353 (42) 937 0497
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