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 volunteersto 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 runninghave the required resourcesto 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 thanthe beginning of 2012, after the second
developmentiteration. 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, meansthatwe 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
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