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The National Research Council (CNR) is the greatest research public body of Italy; its duty is to carry out, promote, spread, transfer and improve research activities in the main sectors of knowledge growth and of its applications for the scientific, technological, economic and social development of the Country.

CNR is distributed all over Italy through a network of institutes aiming at promoting a wide diffusion of its competences throughout the national territory and at facilitating contacts and cooperation with local firms and organizations. CNR has more than 8200 employees of whom more than 4 thousand researchers active in almost 100 Institutes, working in the main fields of scientific and humanistic research. In addition to these ones there are more than 3000 junior scientists completing their training at CNR. This patrimony of human resources, ideas and knowledge makes CNR, in terms of publications, one of the major contributors to Italian scientific production, with a respected position in the international context.

The Institute for Archaeological and Monumental Heritage IBAM- CNR is a multidisciplinary research institute with highly expertise in the specialized skills in the fields of knowledge, documentation, diagnosis, preservation, value enhancement, management, enjoyment and communication of the archaeological and monumental heritage. These skills are expressed through the Institute's multidisciplinary team that includes archaeologists, historians, architects, geologists, engineers, chemists, physicists and ICT specialists. IBAM expresses its expertise through the development, testing and application of methodological investigations with activities related to the territory landscape in Italy (center, south and Sicily) and in Turkey, Crete, Spain, Iraq, Peru, etc. and Albania and elsewhere.

Within the macro areas major themes "Settlements and territory", "The artifact as source for material culture" and, finally, "Diagnostic for the knowledge, preservation and enjoyment of cultural heritage", the Institute has set up research contracts projects on which was conveyed draw together the activities of its researchers.

The research is focused on: Prehistoric, Classical, Medieval and Industrial Archaeology; Landscape Archaeology, Ancient Topography; Geophysics; Geology; Virtual Archaeology and Restoration; Satellite and Aerial Remote Sensing; Archaeometry; Chemistry; Information Technologies and GIS.

The research activities are focused on:

·         Methodologies for the analysis of settlements, landscape and environment and transformations of landscapes in ancient and Medieval times;

·         Multidisciplinary studies in archeology, in a Mediterranean perspective, with particular reference to southern Italy and Sicily;

·         Methodologies aimed at understanding, diagnosis and intervention for the preservation, restoration and communication of archaeological heritage (sites and monuments);

·         Innovative methodologies for the knowledge of ancient landscape. 

smart systems for living areas.

The National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) (est. 1837) is the oldest and most prestigious academic institute in Greece. Since its establishment, it has been contributing to the progress of the engineering science in Greece, through the education of young engineers and its multi-faceted research and development activities. The Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS) was founded in 1989 as an independent institution closely associated with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (SECE) of NTUA. Its mission is to host and promote high quality research in all fields relevant with the SECE expertise (i.e., communications, computers, networks, control, multimedia, expert systems, components, biomedical engineering, education and management, etc.). As such, it serves as an umbrella of a large number of R&D laboratories and activities.

The Computer Networks Laboratory (CNL) of ICCS aims to remain ahead of the waves of change in mobile technologies and service engineering by cooperating with industry and academia in ICT related projects. CNL has highly qualified members with expertise in the areas of mobile and personal communications (ICCS is a member of both Wireless World Research Forum and e-Mobility platform), pervasive networking and service engineering. CNL has participated in various R&D activities and can offer technologies and tools with regards to fixed and mobile network infrastructure, location management, network management, context aware service creation over active and ad-hoc networks, cognitive networks, pervasive service platform design and development, security and privacy, ICT in transport and ICT for Green Cars.

In the following paragraphs, a selection of important research activities of CNL on the aforementioned topics is presented in more detail.

ICT in Transport & ICT in Green Cars: CNL initiated, coordinated and successfully carried out the proposal composition for the FP7 ICT-GC project EcoGem (Cooperative Advanced Driver Assistance System for Green Cars) (start-date: Sept. 2010). EcoGem innovates ICT and machine learning techniques, targeted for Electric Vehicles and applied for the purpose of discovering energy efficient routes and effective recharging strategies. The same happened with the FP7 ICT-GC EMERALD (Energy Management and Recharging for efficient electric car driving) (expected start-date: Oct. 2012), in which CNL is also responsible for the technical management of the project. CNL can support all aspects of ICT integration in Electric Vehicles, Green Cars, and the transport infrastructure, as well as R&D activities in the fields of traffic prediction and management, vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-transport interfaces.

Service engineering: In MOTIVE, CNL coordinated the development of a multi-layer open system architecture addressing issues such as enhanced terminal assisted positioning, terminal data local processing, user control (when and how information is revealed), data transfer load, network side processing and storage, and real time vs. off-line information collection. The MOTIVE system exploits information collected at mobile terminals in order to provide enhanced mobile services and applications in B3G wireless environments. MOTIVE also introduces the concept of anonymous mobile community services.

Pervasive networking & Ambient intelligence: In DAIDALOS and DAIDALOS-II projects (Designing Advanced Interfaces for the Delivery and Administration of Location independent Optimised personal Services), CNL participated in WP4 activities concerning the development of components supporting the deployment of Pervasive Systems, i.e. mixed physical-digital environments saturated with computing and communication functionality and seamlessly integrated with human user needs. CNL was also a partner in the IP Amigo (Ambient intelligence for the networked home environment), a research project concerning pervasive systems. Amigo applied the pervasive networking perspective on the home environment, including context awareness and intelligent user services. CNL has been serving as a partner of the STREP PERSIST and the IP SOCIETIES. The vision of PERSIST and SOCIETIES is a Personal Smart Space able to provide pervasiveness to users continuously and everywhere. Personal Smart Spaces are adaptable and capable of self-improvement, while they provide a minimum set of functionalities that can be extended and enhanced as users encounter other smart spaces during their everyday activities.

Context-awareness: CNL has participated in the single IST FP6 project which was dedicated to context awareness, namely CONTEXT (IST-2001-38142, active creation, delivery and management of efficient context-aware services). In this project, CNL was involved in devising a solution for efficient provisioning of context-based services making use of active networks on top of fixed and mobile infrastructure. The model of context-aware services is based on policies and the PEP-PDP model of PCIM is used. The produced services are deployed within the execution environment of DINA active platform, which offers rapid, dynamic, adaptive and decentralized deployment. Active networks are also powerful in context-aware systems for tackling the issues of context distribution and heterogeneity. Gathering and disseminating context using active networks based on the CONTEXT platform is proved to be efficient in terms of reducing traffic and time needed.

Service creation: The CNL has participated in a series of service engineering projects, the most recent of which is the IST Project SMART-EC (IST-1999-10130, Support for mediation and brokering for electronic commerce). The SMART-EC system is able to receive complex service requests, dynamically formulated by users with knowledge provided by means of ontology. CNL has been a VESPER partner. IST project VESPER (IST-1999-10825, Virtual home environment for service personalisation and roaming users) defined and demonstrated a Virtual Home Environment (VHE) architecture providing roaming users with service portability and session mobility across a multi-provider, heterogeneous network and system infrastructure. CNL has also been an ACTS AC325-MONTAGE (MObile INTelligent AGEnts in Accounting, Charging and Personal Mobility Support) and an ACTS AC036-DOLMEN (Service Machine Development for an Open Long-term Mobile and Fixed Network Environment) partner.

Mobility: CNL has a long tradition in mobile communications. In MOEBIUS (IST-1999-11591, Mobile extranet based integrated user services), CNL has contributed to the design of the mobile extranet platform and in the mobile terminal design and implementation of the lower software protocols. In IST project CELLO (IST-2000-25382, Cellular network optimization based on mobile location), CNL designed a patch array antenna (Modular Antenna Array, MAA) allowing a flexible setting of the required antenna pattern. In IST project MONASIDRE (IST-2000-26144, Management of networks and services in a diversified radio environment), CNL developed, in the context of a diversified radio environment, techniques, mechanisms and interfaces (i) for monitoring and analysing the statistical performance and the QoS levels provided by the network elements, (ii) for dynamic network planning, and (iii) for mapping of the IP based network resources to radio resources. In IST project CREDO (IST-2001-33093, Composite radio and enhanced service delivery for the Olympics), CNL conducted field experiments, which were targeted to the delivery of services, relevant to the Athens 2004 Olympics, through the joint utilisation and optimisation of composite radio environments. In DAIDALOS, CNL has been involved in activities related to the Integration of Heterogeneous Network technologies so as to ensure optimal inter-working between different networks, including fixed and mobile, wireline and wireless, symmetric and asymmetric, ad-hoc and infrastructure networks within the same administrative domain. In IST project FITNESS (IST-2000-3016, Fourth-generation Intelligent Transparent Networks Enhanced through Space-time Systems), CNL performed system level simulations and evaluation of Multiple-Transmit/Multiple-Receive (MTMR) techniques. Finally, CNL served as the project manager of project MOTIVE, aiming at producing added value from information collected from communities of mobile terminals.

Service discovery protocols: Significant expertise on service discovery protocols comes mainly from the participation of CNL in the AVPACK project (IST-2001-34447, Adoption and enhancement of open frameworks for converged Audio/Video/TV provision for the home user). The AVPACK trial project has aimed at the adoption and acquisition of technology and expertise in open standards and frameworks for delivery and management of voice and video based services to the end-user. CNL worked on the development and evaluation of service discovery protocols also in the Amigo project.

Cognitive networks: CNL has built solid knowledge on the promising area of Cognitive Networks featuring a number of relevant scientific publications. Relative research focuses on terminal sensing functionality, relevant functional architectures for both the network and the terminal side, communication protocols as well as machine learning techniques and optimization algorithms.