ICS INSTITUTE OF COMPUTER SCIENCEFORTH FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY - HELLAS

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INSTITUTE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (ICS) FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY - HELLAS (FORTH)

PO BOX 1385, GR-71110 HERAKLION, CRETE, GREECE

TEL: +30 2810 391600 FAX: +30 2810 391601EMAIL: ics@ics.forth.grURL: http://www.ics.forth.gr

ICSFORTH

Thisplate represents the “Disc of

Phaestos”. It is a circular clay tablet foundat the Cretan archaeological site of Phaestos,

where the ruins of a Minoan Palacehave been excavated. It is

marked with 242 symbols.These symbols are the only

traces of a mysterious scriptthat dates back to 2000 BC,

the name of which is lost intime. From that moment on,

the deciphering of the Discbecomes one of the mostintriguing and challengingpuzzles in the history ofmodern archaeology.Amateurs and professionalsventure on the mission ofinterpreting the cryptic sym-bols proposing eccentric orreasonable solutions. Eventhough there are many

assumptions and abundantbibliography, to date no real

breakthrough has beenreached. This has made the

Phaestos Disc a real chal-lenge for archaeologists, and

this is also the reason whythis Disc has been chosen by

the Foundation for Researchand Technology - Hellas

(FORTH) as its logo.

September 2004

Heraklion: Institute of Computer Science (ICS)Institute of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology (IMBB)Institute of Electronic Structure & Laser (IESL)Institute of Applied & Computational Mathematics (IACM)

Rethymnon: Institute ofMediterranean Studies (IMS)

Ioannina: Biomedical ResearchInstitute (BRI)

Patras: Institute of ChemicalEngineering and High TemperatureChemical Processes (ICE- HT)

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The Institute of Computer Science (ICS) is one of the seven insti-tutes of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas(FORTH), a major national research centre, partly funded by theGeneral Secretariat for Research and Technology of theHellenic Ministry of Development.

ICS actively pursues high quality basic research, develop-ment of innovative technologies, collaborations with indus-trial partners within and outside Greece, creation of spin-off companies, promotion of specialised services andproducts, development of Science and Technology Parks,and educational activities.

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Since its establishment in 1983, ICS has a relatively long history and recognized tradition inconducting basic and applied research, developing applications and products, providingservices, and playing a leading role in Greece and internationally, in the fields of Informationand Communication Technologies.

Activities of ICS cover important research and development areas, taking into considerationnew perspectives, emerging fields of research and technological challenges worldwide.

Continuing its efforts towards the exploitation of its research activities and results, theInstitute contributes significantly to the diffusion of modern Information and CommunicationsTechnologies in the public and private sectors. Thus, ICS acts as a catalyst for the devel-

opment of the Information and Communication Technologies sector in Greece and the formation offavourable conditions for the emergence of an Information Society acceptable by all citizens.

The mission of ICS is to perform high quality basic and applied research, to promote education and train-ing, and to contribute to the development of the Information Society, at a regional, national, and Europeanlevel. Towards achieving these objectives, ICS develops innovative products and services, contributes tothe creation, transfer, and diffusion of technical know-how, collaborates with recognized companies, cre-ates spin-off companies, promotes incubators and science and technology parks, and performs studies ofregional, national and European interest. A successful example of spin-off is FORTHnet S.A., a pioneercompany in the internet and telecommunications sector in Greece, which was founded in 1995 and is quot-ed in the Athens Stock Exchange since 2000.

ICS is highly competitive at an international level, and many of its activities are carried out in the context ofEuropean collaborative research and development projects, which emphasize the development ofInformation Society Technologies and infrastructures in a number of domains of national importance andregional interest. On-going research and development (R&D) efforts focus on Information Systems, Dataand Knowledge Management Systems, Information Modeling and Retrieval Methods, Ontologies, WorldWide Web Technologies, Biomedical Informatics, Image Processing and Analysis, Computational Vision,Decision-making Support Systems, Robotics, Biological Behavior Simulation, Digital Communications,Network Management, Computer Architectures, VLSI Design, Computer-assisted Design, DistributedComputing Systems, Networks, Systems and Information Security, Human-Computer Interaction, SoftwareTechnologies and Programming Languages, Virtual Reality, Universal Access and Usability, and AssistiveTechnologies for people with disabilitiy.

ICS has achieved excellence by establishing a balance among its different activities, and in particular: (i)basic and applied research, (ii) development of large scale applications exploiting the results of research,(iii) development of applications and services, (iv) cooperation with other research institutions and the pri-vate sector, (v) participation in national and European research and development projects, as well as in col-laborative projects with industry.

In the context of their research and development activities, ICS offers scholarships and training to under-graduate and postgraduate students. Additionally, the Department of Education and Training provides train-ing in the use of computers and computing skills, by offering courses targeted to the population at large inthe region of Crete.

ICS is the appointed authorised registry for the [.gr] domain and member of the Task Force for the NamingPolicy in Greece. It represents Greece in the European Research Consortium for Informatics andMathematics - ERCIM, and hosts the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Office in Greece.

ICS maintains close links with industry and has played a major role in the development of the Science andTechnology Park of Crete (STEP-C). At the regional level, it contributes to the economic, social and tech-nological development of the Region of Crete through international collaborative activities and programmesaddressing the South-East Mediterranean area.

Professor Constantine StephanidisDirector of ICS

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Research and Development Laboratories

!! COMPUTATIONAL VISION AND ROBOTICS LABORATORY (CVRL) 2

!! CENTRE FOR MEDICAL INFORMATICS AND HEALTH TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS (CMI / HTA) 6

!! INFORMATION SYSTEMS LABORATORY (ISL) 10!! CENTRE FOR CULTURAL INFORMATICS (CCI) 13

!! HUMAN- COMPUTER INTERACTION LABORATORY (HCI) 14!! CENTRE FOR UNIVERSAL ACCESS AND ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES (CUA- AT) 17

!! TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKS LABORATORY (TNL) 18

!! COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE AND VLSI SYSTEMS LABORATORY (CARV) 22

Programmes

!! INFORMATION SECURITY 27

!! BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS 29

Other Departments

!! DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING (DET) 31

!! REGISTRY OF .GR DOMAIN NAMES DEPARTMENT 32

!! DEPARTMENT OF SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS ADMINISTRATION (DSNA) 32

International Links 33

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The Computational Vision and Robotics Laboratory (CVRL) of ICS-FORTH was established in 1985. Theresearch and development effort of CVRL focuses on the areas of computational vision and autonomousmobile robots that perceive their environment and exhibit intelligent behaviors. Research in this field hastheoretical interest because it leads to the computational and mathematical modeling of perception andaction, and contributes to a better understanding the mechanisms involved in the corresponding capabili-ties of biological organisms. Furthermore, this research is of practical interest because it forms the basisfor the development of interesting and often significant robotic systems (e.g., robotic wheelchairs for peo-ple with handicaps, tour-guide robots in museums and other exhibitions, robots performing routine taskssuch as cleaning and surveillance etc). Moreover, by-products of this research prove extremely useful inother application areas that are not directly related to robotics, such as virtual and augmented reality, 3Dmodeling and environmental monitoring, event detection, content-based image retrieval, etc. Efforts atCVRL are balanced between basic and applied research, resulting in the construction of robust vision androbotic systems for various application domains.

Research agendaResearch and development activities at CVRL address the following fundamental questions in an effort toarrive at robust solutions to corresponding theoretical, computational, and design problems:

Perceptual capabilities: What is the maximum information that a robot can extract by sensing its environ-ment? More importantly, what is the actual information that a robot needs to extract from its envi-

ronment in order to exhibit certain desired and possibly intelligent behaviors?

Robot behaviors and sensory-motor coordination: How should perceptual capa-bilities and control strategies be combined to obtain the desired robot behaviors?

How should the characteristics of the environment and the mechanical propertiesof a robot be taken into account in this process?

Learning: How can a robot acquire skills in a developmental manner, throughinteraction with its environment? How can a robot accumulate experience, thusimproving its acquired skills?

Research InfrastructureCVRL has a modern research infrastructure (including robotic platforms, active vision

systems, state of the art workstations, etc.), which facilitates experimentation and thedemonstration of research results.

The CVRL robotic platforms are:

! TALOS, an RWI B21 robotic platform equipped with sonar, infrared and bumper sensors as well asa TRC stereoscopic system.

! LEFKOS, an RWI B21r robotic platform equipped with a SICK PLS laser scanner, sonar, infraredand bumper sensors.

! A robotic wheelchair equipped with sonar sensors and panoramic vision.

Furthermore, CVRL has extensive expertise in the development of prototype robotic systems, and therforethe potential to extend its research infrastructure.

Collaborations

Since its founding in 1985, CVRL has established a large number of collaborations and partnerships withuniversities, other research institutions and industries in Europe and in the United States. CVRL has animpressive record of participation in funded projects and has acted as co-ordinating partner in projects andthematic networks at a national and European level.

Computational Vision and Robotics Laboratory

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Research on robot behaviors and sensory-motor coordination

In robotics, the goal of perception is to provide the necessary information needed for a robot to behaveautonomously in its environment.

The robot behaviors that have been studied take into account the characteristics of the environment andthe mechanical properties of a robot. In many cases, such behaviors are directly inspired by the behaviorsof living organisms such as insects. For example, a reactive, corridor following behavior has been devel-oped that enables a robot to move in corridors and narrow passages based on either a trinocular vision sys-tem or on panoramic vision. This technique has been inspired by the way that bees navigate in free space.The study of insect homing has also resulted in a robot homing behavior, which can solve the problem ofdocking efficiently and with minimal perceptual requirements. Other behaviors that have been studiedinclude obstacle avoidance, motion towards a desired visual target, following of moving objects at a fixeddistance, landmark based robot navigation, construction of metric and topological maps of the environment,path planning, etc. A hybrid probabilistic framework has been proposed and developed to model the uncer-tainties involved in robot navigation, leading to accurate and efficient robot state estimation (localisation)and feature mapping. In a predictive navigation approach, the robot moves in space based on its perceivedstate and predictions about the future states of moving objects, in an effort to optimize the tracked pathtowards its goal. All these behaviors exploit the information provided by a variety of sensors.

Research on robot behaviors takes into account the mechanical properties of the robots used and theirkinematics (holonomic/non-holonomic) constraints. Thus, the achievement of certain behaviors is usuallymodeled as a problem of trajectory tracking or robot stabilisation at a desired equilibrium state, while thecontrol mechanisms that are employed are directly related to the kinematics constraints of each robot.Since robot control is achieved based on sensory information, the effects of noise and delays in sensoryinformation processing on the resulting behaviors are considered and quantified.

The robotic behaviors described above are typically exhibited by wheeled robots that oper-ate in man-made environments. Other types of robots, which are able to operate in differentenvironments and to exhibit different behaviors, are currently also under investigation. Forexample, the locomotion system of certaininsects and their underlying control mechanismsare used to motivate the design and construc-tion of robotic systems exhibiting similar behav-iors. The long term goal of this type of researchis the development of miniature robots that areable to operate inside the human body. In a dif-ferent research and development effort, anautonomous helicopter is being constructed andwill be used to study the behaviors of flying robots. Finally, a soccer team ofautonomous robots is currently being developed in order to investigate co-opera-tive behaviors in dynamic environments.

Research on Computational Perception

Computational perception is the problem most heavily investigated at CVRL. Themajority of perceptual capabilities developed in the laboratory exploit vision as theprimary source of sensory information.

Substantial research has been carried out on understanding the content ofimages for the purpose of developing a biologically inspired multi-agent architec-ture that supports the content-based retrieval of images from image collections.Finding an effective solution to this problem would not only allow the content-based retrieval of images, but would also find useful applications in vision-basedrobot navigation. Issues related to the efficient extraction, description and repre-sentation of color, texture and shape have been studied extensively. These stud-ies aim at incorporating existing knowledge regarding the human visual system.Therefore, the emphasis is on the perceptual organisation of the primary visual

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s characteristics of images, on focus-of-attention methods, and on the scale-based description and repre-sentation of visual features. Mobile robots should be capable of perceiving the dynamic aspects of their environment, based on the visu-al perception of motion. Many such capabilities have been developed and include ego-motion estimation,camera tracking and independent motion detection by static or moving observers. The emphasis is on pro-viding robust and generic solutions that do not make restrictive assumptions regarding the observer or itsenvironment. Although the above techniques were originally intended to equip robots with motion percep-tion capabilities, they have also been shown to be very useful in completely different application domainssuch as traffic monitoring, surveillance, etc. Images are two-dimensional projections of a three-dimensional world. Therefore, the recovery of the “lost”dimension through the analysis of images and the perception of the 3D structure of the environment is anextremely useful perceptual capability. A lot of research has beencarried out on studying the properties of specific environmentalstructures, such as 3D planes. This is because planes exist inabundance in man-made environments, where robots typicallyoperate, and because they have attractive mathematical proper-ties. Very accurate techniques for plane detection, plane match-ing and plane tracking have been developed. Building upon suchtechniques, a method for reconstructing the full 3D structure ofthe environment has been proposed. Furthermore, the transferand matching of features in images acquired from considerablydifferent viewpoints (wide-baseline stereo matching) has beenachieved. In many cases, robots do not really need to reconstructall aspects of the 3D structure of their environment. Based on this observation, direct methods for ordinaldepth estimation, obstacle detection and time-to-contact estimation have been developed. As in the caseof other perceptual capabilities, the perception of 3D structure is useful not only in robotics, but also in amuch wider spectrum of applications including virtual and augmented reality.

The above perceptual capabilities can be integrated in order to develop more complex perceptual systems.A characteristic example of such an effort at CVRL is the development of a system that combines color,motion and structure information to track the 3D position of the hand(s) of a human carrying out a specifictask. Towards achieving this goal, the interaction of visual attention, active camera behaviour, recognition,

and knowledge from models, tasks, andcontext is being investigated in a cognitivevision framework.CVRL is also active in studying and exploit-ing alternative visual sensors toward the

development of visual perception capabilities. The basic goal of this research is to exploit the special char-acteristics of alternative cameras towards developing efficient and robust vision-based perceptual capabil-ities. A particular model of alternative camera that has been extensively studied and used is the panoram-ic camera that provides a 360 degrees field of view.

Vision is an extremely important source of sensory information. However, modern robots are often equippedwith laser, sonar, tactile and odometry sensors that provide rich information regarding the environment orthe robot itself. Many additional perceptual capabilities such as obstacle detection, self-localization andmap-construction have been developed, based on such alternative sensors. Finally, research on the fusionof sensory information provided by different sensors is currently carried out with a view toward exploitingtheir complementarities and developing perceptual capabilities that are more efficient and robust.

Learning

Robots, very much like their biological counterparts, should be able to improve their perceptual capabilitiesand skills, as they interact with the environment and accumulate experience. CVRL has adopted an ambi-tious, developmental approach to learning. The robot is modeled as an agent-based architecture, initiallyequipped with intentions, instincts, goals, as well as with some elementary perceptual capabilities and skills.Improvements in the robot’s perceptual capabilities, skills and behaviors are expected to emerge through

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the continuous interaction of the robot with its environment, based on which it discovers and exploits pos-sible relations among goals, memory, sensory input and motor capabilities. Additionally, research efforts arealso directed towards providing learning mechanisms that address problems such as robot localisation andperception-action coupling, in a biologically plausible framework.

Research prototypes

A robotic system is a complex combination of mechanical and electronic parts that operate through thecoordinated activation of perceptual capabilities, control strategies and learning techniques. All of thesecomponents have to be appropriately integrated in a common framework. The effectiveness of each of thesubsystems cannot be fully assessed in isolation. This is because the success of the overall system doesnot depend on the quality of the constituent elements only, but also on their appropriate integration and onthe characteristics of the interaction of the resulting system with its environment. For this reason, CVRL isvery active in the development of integrated prototype robotic systems. The importance of such prototypesis twofold; (a) they act as test-beds for evaluating the effectiveness and the robustness of their constituentcomponents and (b) each of these prototypes addresses the needs of important application areas. Twosuch prototypes, DRIVER and TOURBOT, are briefly described below:

! DRIVER is a robotic wheelchair for people with disabilities, possessing semi-autonomous navigationalcapabilities. DRIVER can perform collision avoidance, autonomous navigation in corridor environments andperson following at a fixed distance. DRIVER has an advanced multimedia man-machine interface thatfacilitates the control of the overall system. DRIVER also obeys voice commands, provided that the exe-cution of such commands does not pose a threat to the user.

! TOURBOT is an advanced robotic tour-guide used in museums and trade-fairs. TOURBOT is able toautonomously map the environment of a museum or of a trade fair and then offer guided tours to on-siteand web visitors. TOURBOT is capable of operating robustly in crowded environments and communicateswith on-site visitors through computer-generated voice messages, as well as through facial expressionsthat externalise its internal state.

Both research prototypes have been successfully tested and validated through extensive user trials.

Contact Person: Prof. Stelios OrphanoudakisHead of CVRLorphanou@ics.forth.grhttp://www.ics.forth.gr/cvrl

The robot Lefkos gives the Minister of Development Mr.Sioufas a tour during his visit to FORTH.

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The Center for Medical Informatics and Health Telematics Applications (CMI/HTA) ofthe Institute of ICS- FORTH, was founded in 1985. The R&D directions of CMI/HTAare carefully selected based on R&D challenges world wide, as well as the needsof the public and private sectors in Greece.

The R&D activities of CMI/HTA are focused on the development of innovative com-puter methods and tools in the area of medical informatics, e-Health, m-Health, medical

imaging and bioinformatics. Current research activities target solutions to problems in the intelligent man-agement of multimedia and geographically distributed medical data, the development of distributed com-ponent and middleware technologies, web services, real-time resource management in regional or nation-al health information networks, methodologies and strategies for the integration of heterogeneous informa-tion systems, processing and analysis of multimedia medical data (in particular indexing and retrieval of 2Dand 3D medical images based on their content).

Furthermore, CMI/HTA develops special purpose autonomous clinical information systems, which are sub-sequently integrated into a hospital-wide information system, regional pre-hospital health emergency sys-tems, e-Health and m-Health systems and services, and computer supported co-operative work environ-ments for medical tele-consultation and remote patient management. Research in machine learning and data mining is an additional important activity of CMI/HTA. These tech-niques facilitate knowledge discovery in medical databases. More specifically, systems for inductive learn-ing from examples have been developed to support the diagnostic andtherapeutic decision making process. In addition, constraintsatisfaction methods are exploited towards more flexi-ble learning operations and systems. The use ofmachine learning for image indexing andretrieval based on pictorial content is alsounder investigation.

Based on the results of its R&D activities,CMI/HTA has already developed clinicalinformation systems for the processingand analysis of medical images, themanagement and communication of mul-timedia medical data, medical imageindexing and retrieval by content, an inte-grated system for pre-hospital health emer-gency management, an integrated primaryhealthcare information system, an intensivecare unit real-time monitoring information system,and environments for computer supported co-operativework in the medical environment, as well as systems andservices for tele-monitoring and tele-management of patients at home.These systems and services use technologies for the integration of heterogeneous distributed applications,based on component engineering and distributed middleware services, methods for information encryptionand security, and relevant international standards.The research and development activities of CMI/HTA are funded primarily through its participation in com-petitive national and European R&D programmes. CMI/HTA has established a tradition of internationally

acknowledged excellence in conducting high level R&D work and in developing innovativesystems and services. CMI/HTA is an active participant in international standardization activ-ities in the domain of medical informatics and health telematics, and is a leading actor in cor-responding national standardization activities (i.e., HL7 Greek Chapter). CMI/HTA also coor-dinates the Health Information Technology (HIT) Working Group of the European ResearchConsortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM).

HYGEIAnet For a number of years, CMI/HTA worked on the development of HYGEIAnet (http://www.hygeianet.gr/), theIntegrated Regional Health Information Network of Crete, as a pilot and a model for similar developmentsat a national and European level. HYGEIAnet represents a systematic effort toward the design, develop-ment and deployment of advanced e-health and m-health services at various levels of the healthcare hier-archy, including primary care, pre-hospital health emergency management, and hospital care. Specifically,e-health and m-health services support the timely and effective management of patients, the synchronousand asynchronous collaboration of healthcare professionals, and the remote management of selectedpatients at home. Finally, e-health services are being used to support the continuity of care across organi-zational boundaries by providing access to the life-long I-EHR. The I-EHR service is currently deployedand routinely used by the South and Eastern Belfast Health and Social Services Trust in the UK for out-of-hours GPs with a significant impact on the quality of care delivered.

The technologies and eHealth services demonstrated in HYGEIAnethave been awarded an Honourable Mention at the MinisterialConference and Exhibition eHealth 2003, held in Brussels, 22-23May 2003.

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Commissionaire Erkki Liikanen con-gratulates the greek health minister andprof. S. Orphanoudakis, for the ehealthaward.

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s Research and Development Priorities of CMI / HTACMI/HTA recognizes that the challenge for the knowledge-enabled healthcare enterprises of the future willbe the successful, flexible integration of distributed information and knowledge across distributed (reusable)application components. With the ultimate goal of supporting shared care and the continuity of care acrossorganisational boundaries, an important objective is to support and continually improve business process-es and the effective delivery of appropriate information to all authorised users of such an enterprise.

Thus, addtional CMI/HTA's R&D priorities are focusing around the issues and requirements for significant-ly improving the care delivery processes through coordination of multiple human and other resources thatare spread over multiple organisations in a single enterprise as well as across multiple enterprises. To thisend, CMI/HTA's R&D efforts focus on the development of new, innovative ambient intelligence service plat-forms for automatic, context sensitive offering and contracting of eHealth and mobile Health (mHealth) serv-ices across heterogeneous networks. CMI/HTA is focusing on supporting mobility among users by inte-grating them with seamlessly accessible ubiquitous intelligent surroundings that support self-configuring

devices using semantic agents and tools for ambient awareness and decision support.

The existence of a lifelong integrated electronic heath and novel eHealth and mHealth services are funda-mental to bringing about the paradigm shift in the healthcare system, namely individualised and evidence-based medicine. In achieving this, there are clearly many challenges ranging from quality-of-service overthe Internet, security and confidentiality issues, terminological problems, standards, and system integrationissues. It should be stressed that probably the biggest challenges are related to the issues of organisationalimpact and change management. CMI/HTA, being a driving force in the development of HYGEIAnet, is alsofocusing its R&D efforts on all those non-technical issues related to change management and adoption ofinnovation in the complex environment of healthcare.

In addition to the above, CMI/HTA has been an early adopter of standards and an active promoter of theircooperative and consistent implementation. Today, CMI/HTA continues to (a) actively participate in nation-al and international bodies responsible for the development of medical informatics and eHealth standards(CEN, OMG-HTF, HL7) and (b) to lead the effort for their wider adoption and implementation in Greece.Towards this objective CMI-HTA is the administrative and scientific coordinator of a relevant nationalNetwork of Excellence entitled "Health Standards", funded by the General Secretariat for Research and

Technology of the Greek ministry of Development, aiming at enabling the customisation of internationalhealth informatics standards to suit the requirements of the Greek healthcare market and their wider pos-sible diffusion in the Greek market. Moreover, CMI/HTA is the leader of an IST thematic network under the6th framework programme of the EC which aims at promoting the international adoption of the SCPECGEuropean standards and at lowering the barriers for interoperability in electrocardiographs (ECG devices).The objectives of OpenECG are:

! to inform decision makers, technicians, medical personnel and the public about interoperability stan-dards, so that closed devices are gradually banned from procurement and eventually the market,

! to promote the systematic recording and archiving of digital electrocardiograms, to promote interoper-ability of medical devices by reducing the cost of implementing interoperability standards, as well as test-ing the conformance of specific implementations to these standards,

! to lead the adoption of standards in other related examinations such as stress test and Holter.

Contact Person: Prof. Stelios Orphanoudakis

Head of CMI/HTA

http://www.ics.forth.gr/cmi-hta/

orphanou@ics.forth.gr

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On December 2003, the 1st Regional Conference on Innovationand Health (IHC) in the 21st century was held in Crete, Greeceat the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas. It wasa chance to bring up and discuss crucial issues that concern thenew opportunities offered by technology for innovation in Healthand provision in Greece, as well the challenges that mayemerge.

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The research and development activities of the Information SystemsLaboratory (ISL) of ICS-FORTH fall in three areas: Knowledge Systems, Net-centric Information Systems and Database Systems.

Research in Knowledge Systems focuses on:

• knowledge representation and reasoning, in particular action theories, beliefrevision, conceptual modeling, non monotonic reasoning, rule-based reasoningon the Semantic Web, and temporal reasoning

• ontology-driven systems, in particular formal ontology analysis, contextual Webontology languages, ontology management and engineering, and the analysis ofscientific discourse

• the analysis and management of knowledge organisation systems

Research in Net-centric Information Systems focuses on: • information integration over the Web based on Semantic Web middleware tech-nology, enabling large-scale information interoperation

• service-oriented systems, in particular service integration and management,service description and discovery, transaction models, and quality of service

• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems, in particular P2P data and knowledge manage-ment, and P2P database systems

Research in Database Systems focuses on query containment and minimisa-tion, semantic query rewriting and relaxation, and dealing with incomplete infor-mation.

Part of the Information Systems Laboratory is the Centre for CulturalInformatics (CCI). The Centre specialises in the analysis, design, developmentand application of IT systems in the cultural heritage sector.

Further application areas of the work conducted in the Laboratory include: scien-tific, technical and legal documentation and knowledge bases; collective memo-ries, digital libraries, integrated repositories, data integration; e-business: productcatalogues, service brokering; enterprise resource planning; bioinformatics; ande-learning.

Research highlightsDuring 2003 members of the Laboratory:

• published 10 articles in proceedings of international scientific conferences(including PODS and WWW2003), 6 articles in refereed scientific journals (includ-ing VLDB journal), 3 articles in proceedings of refereed international workshops,6 articles in books, 1 article in refereed scientific bulletins and 1 technical report;

• edited the proceedings of the CAA 2002, The Digital Heritage of Archaeologyconference and the WebDB, Workshop on the Web and Databases;

• organised the international workshops WebDB (Workshop on the Web andDatabases), MMGPS (Metadata Management in Grid and P2P Systems) andESSW (WWW2003 Workshop on E-Services and the Semantic Web);

• undertook the coordination of the ERCIM Working Group “SemanticWeb”.

The Semantic Web Science Association granted the ISWC 2003 BestPaper Award to A. Magkanaraki, V. Tannen, V. Christophides and D.Plexousakis for their paper “Viewing the Semantic Web Through RVLLenses”.

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Scope note:

Macrophotography permits the capture on sensitive film of details of the paint sur-face that are greatly enlarged. The photograph is taken with a camera fitted with abellows and a lens with a short focal length. The enlargement achieved has all thesharpness of the original work (NARCISSE)

Related terms: impasto, juxtaposed brushstrokes, incised underdrawing

Used for terms:

General Knowledge Registered:

6 Experts Opinion Related

21 Images Related

Examination MethodImaging Examination Method

Visible Light PhotographyReflection Visible Light Photography

Macrophotography

Enabling technologies• The Semantic Index System (SIS), a versatile,high performance tool for concept and semantic linkmanagement, especially suited for meta-modeling.SIS is offered as a product.

• The RDF Suite, including a parser supportingsemantic validation, a database generator, and adeclarative query language, all the first of their kind.This is a step towards the realisation of theSemantic Web. The RDF Suite is open source.

Project participationISL has been engaged in a series of knowledgemanagement projects, both in terms of the theory ofknowledge representation and as a technologyprovider. Work in current projects includes:

• CRISATEL (IST 2001-2004) Conservation Resto-ration Innovation Systems for image capture anddigital Archiving to enhance Training Education andlifelong Learning. Development of CREBITEL, aConservation REstoration BI-lingual TrainingELectronic handbook based on a knowledge man-agement system.

• OntoWeb (IST 2001-2004) Ontology-based infor-mation exchange for knowledge management andelectronic commerce.

• Ubi-Erat-Lupa (Culture2000 2002-2005) Integrationof complementary archaeological sources based onCIDOCCRM.

• SCHOLNET (IST 2000 - 2003) A Digital LibraryTestbed to Support Networked ScholarlyCommunities. Development of a hypermedia docu-ment annotation system and cross-languageretrieval through the use of multilingual thesauri.

• CYCLADES (IST 2000-2003) Development of anopen collaborative virtual archive environment.

• MESMUSES (IST 2001-2003) Designing andexperimenting with metaphors for organising andpresenting scientific knowledge offered to the publicby science museums.

• CHIOS (IST 2001-2003) Cultural HeritageInterchange Ontology Standardization.

• SeLeNe (IST 2000-2003) Investigation of the useof Semantic Web, Grid and Peer to Peer technolo-gies for building self e_Learning Networks.

Participation in research networks• DELOS Network of Excellence in Digital Libraries(http://delos-noe.iei.pi.cnr.it)

• PLANET Network of Excellence in AI Planning(http://planet.dfki.de)

• OntoWeb Thematic Network for Ontology-basedinformation exchange (http://www.ontoweb.org)

• CHIOS Thematic Network for the standardizationof CIDOC CR.

image Dv63118 Francisco Goya, Autoportrait

image Dc29536 Menageot Cleopatre

MACROPHOTOGRAPHY

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StandardsThe CIDOC CRM was accepted as Committee DraftISO/CD 21127 in 2003 and is currently on vote bythe International Standards Organisation as DraftInternational Standard (DIS).

Application systems• The SIS-TMS multilingual thesaurus managementsystem, developed through co-operation with theGetty Information Institute, USA, and theAQUARELLE European project. Offered as prod-uct. 35 installations to-date.

• The POLEMON National Monuments Record sys-tem, approved by the Central Archaeological

Council for application at all units and supervisedorganisations of the Ministry of Culture. Alreadydeployed at 21 locations.

• The MAISTOR building structural documentationsystem.

• The Integrated Documentation and DocumentManagement System for the GermanischesNationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

• The Byzantine Monument Record System for theEuropean Centre of Byzantine and PostbyzantineMonuments (EKBMM).

Education and trainingThe Laboratory and the Centre have constantly pro-vided substantial support to both the graduate andundergraduate programmes of study of theDepartment of Computer Science, University ofCrete, through hosting Doctoral dissertations, M.Sc.theses and diploma theses, as well as traininginternships and certain laboratory exercises. During2003, 1 Doctoral dissertation and 4 M.Sc. theseshave been completed. The Centre for CulturalInformatics has largely contributed to teaching andresearch supervision in the Inter-departmentalM.Sc. programme in Information Systems for

Cultural Heritage. Moreover, the Laboratory hashosted a number of doctoral research work diplomatheses, and training internships of students from for-eign universities (Germany, France, Sweden,Norway, The Netherlands, G. Britain). A specialisedseminar series on Cultural Informatics subjects hasbeen developed, including information modeling,digitization, encoding and exchange of information.Seminars on architectural design systems are alsooffered on a regular basis.

NATIONAL MONUMENTS RECORD SYSTEM

The Centre for Cultural Informatics (CCI, http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/cci.html) is the oldest and international-ly the most established research unit of its kind in Greece, with a series of innovative developments, oper-ational systems and co-operations with numerous organisations worldwide. It has acquired a highly spe-cialised knowledge about the information-related processes and requirements of cultural organisations. TheCentre is part of the Information Systems Laboratory and specialises in the analysis, design, developmentand application of IT systems in the cultural heritage sector. It follows a cross-disciplinary approach andaims at covering the entire lifecycle of cultural information and of documentation processes, ranging fromthe primary information obtained from object registration and source material, to the secondary informationaccruing as a result of study, to the electronic publication and exposition of selected material, and the asso-ciation, management and communication of all of these.

The activities of the Centre, interleaved with the other activities of the Information Systems Laboratoryinclude:

Semantic Interoperability: The CIDOC CRM is a coreontology which is intended to promote a sharedunderstanding of cultural heritage informationby providing a common and extensiblesemantic framework that any cultural her-itage information can be mapped to. It isintended to be a common language fordomain experts and implementers toformulate requirements for informationsystems and to serve as a guide forgood practice of conceptual modeling.ISL had the initiative and continues lead-ing its development, in the CIDOCCRMSpecial Interest Group, a working group of theDocumentation Committee (CIDOC) of theInternational Council of Museums (ICOM). From June2001 to November 2003, the work of the Special InterestGroup has been supported by the Fifth Framework of the EuropeanCommission’s IST programme in the context of the CHIOS project. Monument and Museum Information Systems: systems for administrative and for thematic documenta-tion, geographical information systems, structural documentation of buildings, field research documentationsystems.Source Material Management Systems: digitisation, classification, indexing, annotation and managementof resources.Models and Standards for Cultural Data: content standardisation.Terminology Systems: design of cultural term thesauri, coordination of heterogeneous, multilingual the-sauri.

Consulting and contracting activity 2003• Germanisches National museum - Nuremberg

• Deutsches Museum – Munich

• European Centre of Byzantine & Postbyzantine Monuments (EKBMM)– Thessaloniki

• National Documentation Center – Athens

• Institut für Museumskunde - Berlin

Contact Persons: Prof. Grigoris Antoniou, Head of ISL,antoniou@ics.forth.gr, http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/

Dr. Martin Doerr, Head of CCI,martin@ics.forth.gr, http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/cci.html

Information S

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Centre for C

ultural Informatics

13CCI

Centre for Cultural Informatics

CIDOC CRM Working GroupParis-Bibliotheque National de France

CIDOC CRM Fundamental concepts

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Hum

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tion The Human Computer Interaction Laboratory

of ICS-FORTH (http://www.ics.forth.gr/hci/),established in 1989, is an internationally

recognised centre of excellence, with accumu-lated experience in user interface software tech-nologies, design methodologies, and softwaretools.

The Laboratory carries out leading research activi-ties focused on developing user interfaces for inter-active applications and services that are accessi-ble, usable, and ultimately acceptable for all usersin the Information Society.

The main line of work promotes the concept of UserInterfaces for All, introduced in the international lit-erature in the early 90s. This concept constitutes anew perspective on Human - Computer Interaction,rooted in the principles of Universal Access andDesign for All.

The research activities of the HCI Laboratory aredistinctively characterised by an interdisciplinaryfocus. The Laboratory develops software compo-nents that support the engineering of interaction-intensive applications that optimally suit the require-ments of diverse users, systems, platforms, andenvironments. The R&D efforts focus on advancedapplications and tools for the following importantdomains, putting particular emphasis on cross-domain impact:

Universal AccessDevelopment of software technologies to ensurethat accessibility proactively becomes a built-inproperty of interactive applications and services.

Automatically adapted User InterfacesSupport for the development of interactive applica-tions and services that deliver automatically adapt-ed user interfaces, optimally suiting the particularindividual user and the context of use.

Ubiquitous and pervasive computingSupport for the development of interactive applica-tions and services with wearable, distributed, and

mobile user interfaces for interaction “on themove” within intelligent ambient infrastruc-

tures.

Virtual RealityDesign, implementation and evaluationof novel interaction concepts and tech-

niques in Virtual Environments; develop-ment of support tools for creating accessi-

ble and usable virtual environments.

Software game engines and video gamesEmployment of game-based mechanics for futureinteraction- intensive applications and environ-ments; development of video games for diverseplatforms and users, such as simulated animatedworlds of intelligent artificial characters.

Accessibility and personalization of webapplicationsBuilt-in support for the development of accessibleand personalised Web-based applications and serv-ices for information access and collaboration, com-pliant with current accessibility standards (e.g., theW3C-WAI Accessibility Guidelines).

Computer-assisted designDevelopment of design support tools, providingprocess-oriented support and design verificationfacilities; development of digital libraries of designguidelines.

Outcomes and key results The HCI Laboratory designs and develops softwarefor a large variety of technological platforms, suchas personal computers, VR systems, hand heldcomputers (PDAs), mobile phones, home andportable electronic devices. In the recent past,many of the achievements that are summarisedbelow reached international recognition.

Universal accessFast Scanner (2001): a tool based onMicrosoft Active Accessibility providing accessi-ble interaction with interactive applicationsthrough the automatic “on-the-fly” activation ofhierarchical scanning facilities.

I-GET (2000): a User Interface ManagementSystem with a new programming languagesupporting the development of unified userinterfaces. I-GET provides multi-toolkit pro-gramming, agents, and declarative control.

Hawk (2000): a non-visual interface develop-ment toolkit that enables the programming ofgenuine non-visual interfaces embodying non-visual interaction metaphors.

ScanLib (1997): an augmented version of theWindows object library with embedded hierar-chical scanning facilities.

HOMER (1995): a User Interface ManagementSystem which supports the development ofdual user interfaces supporting both sightedand blind users.

HCI

Human Computer Interaction Laboratory

Automatically adapted User Interfaces

DMSL (2003): a decision making specificationlanguage for run-time user interface adaptationwith a compiler and a run-time system.

PALIO (2003): a system that supports the pro-vision of web-based services exhibiting auto-matic adaptation behaviour based on user andcontext characteristics, as well as the user cur-rent location.

Unified User Interface Software architecture(2001): a novel architectural framework facili-tating the development of interfaces that exhib-it automatic adaptation behaviour, and best-fitdynamic interface assembly.

Unified User Interface Design Method(1998): a design method that facilitates thedesign of interfaces that exhibit automaticadaptation behaviour based on user and con-text related diversity factors.

AVANTI browser (1998): a universally accessi-ble web browser with a unified user interface.

USE-IT (1996): a knowledge-based tool forautomating the design of interactions at thephysical level, so as to ensure accessibility ofthe target user interface by different usergroups, including people with disabilities.

Ubiquitous and pervasive computing

Voyager (2004): a User Interface (UI) develop-ment framework, delivered as a C++ toolkit, fordeveloping wireless dynamically composedwearable interfaces. Explorer (2004): a location-aware hand-heldmultimedia guide for museums and archaeo-logical sites.

Projector (2004): a C++ proxy-toolkit for JavaFoundation Classes with split cross-platformexecution.

Virtual reality

Virtual Prints (ViPs) (2003): a novel, intuitive,interaction concept for supporting navigation,orientation, way-finding, as well as a number ofadditional functions in Virtual Environments.

Software game engines and video games

UA-Chess (2004): a universally accessiblemulti-modal chess game, which can be played

between two players, including people with dis-abilities (low-vision, blind and hand-motorimpaired), either locally on the same computer,or remotely over the Internet.

DELTA (2004): a Dynamic EmbeddableLanguage for Extending Applications,employed for behaviour scripting of artificialcharacters and game logic programming.

UnderGO (2004): a software game engine foranimated 2D worlds supporting fast action andtile-based multilayer terrains.

BreakOut (2003): the “traditional” breakoutgame implemented with fully distributed wire-less wearable dynamic I/O.

Animatic (2003): a real-time 3D file manager,and animated windows events with heuristicparticle systems.

Accessibility and personalisation for web-based tools and applications

WebFace accessibility engine (2003): tool forthe dynamic transformation of web pages intopersonalisable and accessible versions.

IS4ALL training course (2003): an on-linecourse about design approaches and methodsthat can be used to address the challenges ofuniversal access in the context of HealthTelematics.

HERMES (2003): a web-based platform toenable systematic cooperation amongst mem-bers of the European Design for All e-Accessibility Network (EDeAN) and other the-matic networks, stakeholders and actors in the field.

Computer Assisted design

Papyrus (2004): A web-based developmentsuite for the implementation of digital librariesof User-Interface design guidelines, supportingcollaborative and distributed deployment.

MENTOR (2004): a tool for process-orientedsupport of Unified User Interface Design, pro-viding facilities for the consistency verificationof the designed adaptation logic.

I-doVE (2003): a digital library of design guide-lines for the domain of virtual environmentapplications.

Sherlock (1996): a Guidelines ManagementSystem for articulating and depositing guide-lines, facilitating the automatic usability inspec-tion of tentative designs.

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To achieve its long-term objectives, the Laboratoryis competitive in European research and develop-ment activities, and participates in national,European and international networks and industrialconsortia. The work carried out has been funded byvarious EC Programmes (e.g., TIDE, RACE, ACTS,TAP and IST) and National funding bodies.

International NetworkingOver the years, the Laboratory has undertakenleadership in a broad range of international net-working activities in the fields of Universal Accessand Design for All. Examples include:

• The coordination of the ERCIM Working Group“User Interfaces for All” (1995-present,http://ui4all.gr/).

• The coordination of the International ScientificForum “Towards an Information Society for All”(1997-2000, http://ui4all.gr/isf_is4all/).

• The coordination of the EC-funded ThematicNetwork - Working Group “Informa-tion Society forAll” (2000-2003, IST-1999-14101 IS4ALL,http://is4all.ics.forth.gr/).

• The coordination of the EC-funded Network ofExcellence D4ALLnet (2003 - 2005, IST-2001-38833 http://www.d4allnet.gr).

Outreach and ImpactResults of R&D work appear in more than 300 pub-lications in leading archival journals, proceedings ofinternational conference and workshops, tutorialsduring international conferences, international ency-clopaedias and books

(http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/at-hci/publications.jsp).

Prof. Constantine Stephanidis, Head of the HCILaboratory and of the Centre for Universal Accessand Assistive Technologies, is the Editor-in-Chief ofthe Springer international journal “Universal Accessin the Information Society”. The journal solicits orig-inal research contributions addressing the accessi-bility, usability, and, ultimately, the acceptability ofInformation Society Technologies by anyone, any-where, at anytime, and through any media anddevice.

Prof. Stephanidis is also the Editor of the book “UserInterfaces for All: concepts, methods and tools” pub-lished by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. The bookis dedicated to the issues of Universal Design andUniversal Access in HCI.

A new International Conference on Universal

Access in Human-Computer Interaction (UAHCI)has also been established by Prof. Stephanidis. TheUAHCI conference aims at establishing an interna-tional forum for the exchange and dissemination ofscientific information on theoretical, methodologicaland empirical research that addresses all issuesrelated to the attainment of universal access in thedevelopment of interactive software. The firstConference took place in New Orleans, Louisiana,USA, 5-10 August 2001, in cooperation with HCIInternational 2001; the second Conference tookplace in Crete, Greece, 22-27, in cooperation withHCI International 2003. In 2005, the 3rd UAHCIConference will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada,USA, 22-27 July, in the context of HCI International2005 (http://www.hci-international.org/).

Prof. E. Economou and Prof. C.Stephanidis with Prof. G. Salvendyfrom Purdue University, USA, at theHCI International Conference 2003,held in Crete, 22-27 June.

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Assistive Technologies

CUA - AT 17

Centre for Universal Access & Assistive Technologies

The HCI Laboratory of ICS-FORTH hosts and oper-ates the Centre for Universal Access and AssistiveTechnologies (http://www.ics.forth.gr/hci/cuaat). Themain objective of the Centre is to support the equalparticipation and socio-economic integration of peo-ple with disabilities in the Information Society, bydesigning products and services accessible andusable by the widest possible end-user population.The activities of the Centre include studies on e-Inclusion, as well as on industrial design practices,user assessment, accessibility guidelines and policyinterventions at national and European level. TheCentre is also actively engaged in technology devel-opment and applications in a variety of domains,including access to the World Wide Web, text pro-cessing, electronic books, interpersonal communi-cations, special education and vocational training,Telecommunications, Health Telematics and wear-able computing. Selected achievements include:

Onyx (2004): a Web browser with off-screen non-visual display transformation and delivery.

Home Access (2004): a smart home control inter-face supporting hierarchical scanning for motorimpaired users.

Braille Trainer (2003): an application for teachingBraille to blind users.

Digital Books (2001): a non-visual digital library ofdigitised audio books.

NAUTILOS (2001): an information kiosk enablingaccessibility by motor-impaired and blind users. Itsinterface supports the Greek language, offeringGreek Braille and Greek synthetic speech, whilesupporting operation in dual interface mode, inwhich both the visual and the non-visual browsersare displayed concurrently with synchronisation ofthe loaded web site.

FORTH Editor (2000): a text processor designedfor users with motor impairment of upper limps, andusers with learning or cognitive difficulties.

SEW Trainer (1999): A vocational training applica-tion for disabled people, specifically developed inorder to provide cognitive impaired users with sup-port for developing and enhancing the vocationalskills required for table and bed linen production.

Canteen Manager (1999): a specifically designedapplication for users with learning difficulties andintellectual disabilities, providing cognitive impairedusers with support for developing and enhancing

the vocational skills required for the management ofa refectory.

Additionally, the Centre offers services, consulting,as well as technical developments, to user organi-zations, industry agencies, government agenciesand non-market institutions. Moreover, the Centre isactively involved in the eEurope / eAccessibilityInitiative of the EC and in the establishment ofnational measures to implement the recommenda-tions of these initiatives by member states.

Other achievements of the Centre include:

• The design and conduct of the first-ever econo-metric study investigating technology adoption anddiffusion in the European assistive technology mar-ket through quantitative models.

• Contribution to international web accessibilityactivities (W3C-WAI).

• Participation in international standardisationactivities to promote accessibility and usability.

The Centre is the co-ordinator of GR-DeAN, theGreek Design for All eAccessibility Network -http://www.e-accessibility.gr/ - operating as theNational Contact Centre in the context of EDeAN,the European Design for All eAccessibility Network- http://www.e-accessibility.org.

The GR-DeAN Network aims to promote in Greecethe application of the “Universal Access andUsability” and “Design for All” principles, and to sup-port activities towards the equal participation of indi-viduals with disability to the Information Society. In2005, the Centre for Universal Access and AssistiveTechnologies will undertake the annually rotatingSecretariat of EDeAN.

Contact Person:Prof. Constatine StephanidisHead of HCI Laboratory and CUA - ATcs@ics.forth.grhttp://www.ics.forth.gr/hci/http://www.ics.forth.gr/hci/cuaat.html

TNL carries out an ambitious program of research in the following major areas:

Telecommunications & MobileCommunications

The central themes of this activity cover the broadarea of wireless communications and communica-tions security. In wireless communications the interestis focused on mobile communications, W-LAN tech-nology and ad hoc networks. Areas of interest alsoinclude wireless and mobile positioning, softwaredefined radio, packet switching and multimedia net-working for mobile users, ad hoc and mobile networkssecurity, elliptic curve cryptography and mobile andelectronic commerce applications.

Wireless and Mobile PositioningPosition location in wireless networks is a uniqueservice with many capabilities and extensions. Userposition information enables a range of services likeemergency tracking, user surveillance and paging,security, radio administration and design, navigationand information. TNL develops novel standard-inde-pendent position location techniques directly employ-able to present and future wireless network devices.These techniques need no device-specific or user-specific information and operate in a user-transparentmanner. The experimental position location tech-niques adapt dynamically to the environmentalchanges and self-adjust to the wireless medium con-ditions. Simulations have shown high accuracy posi-tion location, and developed prototypes are thorough-ly studied under real world conditions, using the802.11b infrastructure.

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Mobile Testbed

The Telecommunications and Networks Laboratory (TNL) of ICS-FORTH is activelyinvolved in the areas of high-performance, wireless networking and mobile communi-cations. In particular, research and development activities involve resource control andtraffic engineering in wired and wireless networks, performance evaluation of networkswith guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS), traffic measurement and analysis, voice pro-cessing, synthesis and compression, mobile positioning, and contactless smartcards.The Laboratory maintains a number of collaborative signal processing, sensor net-works, fixed and wireless (based on IEEE 802.11) test beds for experimenting with newnetwork technologies and protocols and for performing measurement and analysisexperiments of real network traffic.

TNL has ongoing and close collaborations with both national and international indus-tries, including network manufacturers and telecommunication service providers, aswell as with other research groups having interests in the above areas. Funding of thisresearch has been provided by the European Commission, through ACTS (CASHMAN,MISA, REFORM, MONTAGE, ITHACI) and IST (M3I, SCAMPI) projects, by nationalprogramme funds (General Secretariat for Research and Technology - GSRT), and byindustrial funded projects.

P2P Communication

Multi hoprouting

Layer Structure of an Ad hoc Network System

P2P servicesAd hoc Group Management

Ad hoc Network Control

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Mobile Commerce Applications

The market for mobile phones, handheld computers and wireless PDAs isincreasingly being driven by multimedia- based Internet applications. Newdemands have arisen, concerning mobile commerce services such as the elec-tronic purchase of tickets, goods, or audiovisual content. TNL develops M-com-merce API packages for mobile phones in order to provide mobile commerceservices, achieve widespread usage, and offer unique benefits over and above

alternatives. The design of the corresponding APIs complies with secure hardware mod-ules like SIM cards already existing in mobile phones, and with advanced future securememory modules. The end-user perception and likely usage of these services is con-

sidered before revenue can be guaranteed. The potential revenue that multimedia and data services canbring to the industry depends on end-user perception of security and trust, i.e. on whether users believethat the mobile phone can become a “digital wallet”. M-commerce should be viewed in the context of thenumber of ways that end-users will be able to pay for goods and services. Research and developmentactivities at TNL focus in developing secure mobile phone applications, in establishing a framework forsecure mobile transactions and in supporting a variety of applications and services.

Broadband & Wireless Networking Activity

This activity deals with the performance evaluation of wired and wireless networksthrough modeling, analysis, simulation, and prototype implementation on local test-beds.

Resource control and QoS in future wireless networks Next generation wireless net-works will support real-time and multimedia packet-based services with varying requirements

in terms of delay and data loss. Their unique properties will make the provision of end-to-end QoS a challenging problem that requires the adaptation and extension of exist-ing solutions proposed for current generation wireless systems, and the development

of new approaches. Next generation wireless networks will consist of multiple-hop net-works of heterogeneous technologies, and may include fixed links. Moreover, multiple wire-

less LANs can co-exist in the same frequency band, requiring mechanisms to controlthe resulting interference and spectrum sharing. TNL develops novel models for effi-cient resource control in wireless third generation (3G) cellular networks and wireless

LANs, which jointly consider the rate control and the power control procedures, andother cross-layer interactions in such networks.

Congestion control and service differentiation in heterogeneous wired and wireless networks Thenumber of users accessing the Internet and enterprise intranets through wireless links and IEEE 802.11based wireless LANs (WLANs) in particular, is expected to grow dramatically with the proliferation of wire-less hotspots, enterprise WLANs, and metropolitan wireless networks. Emerging multimedia services overwireless networks will have different bandwidth and delay requirements and, compared to wired networks,there is a limited ability to increase the capacity of wireless networks, since the capacity is determined bythe available wireless spectrum. This creates a need for efficient and fair congestion control and service dif-

ferentiation over heterogeneous networks that includeboth wired and wireless links. TNL develops andevaluates procedures for addressing these issues fornetworks containing wired and wireless LANs basedon the IEEE 802.11 standard, which involve monitor-ing the wireless network throughput and applyingmechanisms for service differentiation. These proce-dures are implemented and evaluated in a local IEEE802.11 testbed, which consists of production andLinux-based access points.

TNL

Wirelesstechnology:

resource constraints,control variables that

affect resourceusage

Economicmodeling:

utility functions,shadow prices,

economic efficien-cy

Frameworkfor efficient

resource control inwireless net-

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andThroughput Monitoring

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SLA support and monitoring in next generation IP networks In the area of Service Level Agreement(SLA) support in next generation networks, TNL evaluates the combined operation of QoS mechanisms,such as queueing, traffic policing, and traffic shaping, for supporting SLAs across a provider network.Furthermore, TNL investigates architectures and procedures for flexible management and monitoring ofSLAs. Experiments are performed on a local testbed consisting of production (Cisco) and Linux basedrouters running advanced protocols such as IPv6, and over the Wide Area Network, through the availableconnection to the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET).

ICS-FORTH through TNL also participates in the recently approved European COST (Cooperation in thefield of Scientific and Technical Research) Activity on Traffic and QoS Management in Wireless MultimediaNetworks (WiQoST).

Digital Signal ProcessingThe Digital Signal Processing Activity focuses on the development ofadvanced algorithms and systems for multimedia content manipula-tion and delivery over broadband wireless networks. Research topicsof interest include time series analysis, image, speech, audio andvideo compression, smart antennas, and statistical communicationtheory. The unifying theme of this activity is the application of statisti-cal theory to characterise the operational environment and to investi-gate, develop, integrate, and validate novel techniques for informationprocessing and transmission. In particular, R&D activities focus on:

Multiresolution signal modeling, denoising, compression, watermarking, and content-based infor-mation retrieval. Research activities at TNL explore the statistical properties of linear time-frequencyanalysis methods, which include the short-time Fourier transform, wavelets and the discrete cosine trans-form (DCT). TNL work demonstrates that subband decompositions of actual signals have significantly non-Gaussian statistics that are best described by families of heavytailed distributions, such as the alpha-sta-ble. Modeling information is used to design optimal processors that exploit the signal statistics by perform-ing non-linear operations on the data. The adopted approach is unique in that it relates the optimal non-lin-earity to the degree of non-Gaussianity of the data. Such a methodology is applied to a wide range of prob-lems, including medical and SAR image denoising and autofocusing, DCT data compression, blind water-mark detection, and texture image retrieval.

Acquisition and rendering methods for immersive audio. Immersive audio systems have been makingstrides in such applications as telepresence, augmented and virtual reality, entertainment, distance learn-ing, and sound and picture editing for television and film. Signal processing issues are studied that pertainto the acquisition and subsequent rendering and transmission of 3D sound fields. On the acquisition side,advanced statistical methods have been developed for achieving acoustical arrays in audio applications, byaddressing two major aspects of spatial filtering, namely localization of a signal of interest and adaptationof the spatial response of an array of sensors to achieve steering in a given direction. On the renderingside, 3D audio signal processing methods have been developed that generate virtual sources around thelistener using only two loudspeakers. Finally, on the delivery side, space-time codes have been elaboratedfor orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM)- based quality scalable audio transmission systems.

Distributed signal acquisition and representation. Coherent processing issues for real wireless sensornetwork systems are investigated to enable their operation in a wide range of adverse environmental con-ditions. Beamforming methods have been developed to collect the power of the dominant sources whilealso providing high rejection of interference and noise, with the objective to design optimal maximum-like-lihood (ML) methods and suboptimal, computationally efficient distributed techniques using sub-arraysyielding cross-bearing information, which will be employed to perform accurate source localisation. The

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ultimate goal is to allow the network to self organize and dynamically configure the needed sensor nodesto perform complex beamforming operations.

Collaborative detection, classification, and tracking. Research and development activities concentrateon self-organisation of heterogeneous sensors in unstructured and uncertain environments and the fusionof the information for intelligent learning and decision making. The basic problem of concern is the fusionof sensor data when the relationships among the signals sensed by different sensors, the character of thosesignals and the environment in which they propagate are uncertain, variable, or simply unknown. TNLdevelops distributed pattern matching algorithms that are robust to these uncertainties and that can learnfrom the observed data and then adapt based on what is learned.

Speech spectrum expansion. The quality of transmitted speech in most of today’s telecommunicationservices is limited due to bandwidth restrictions. Typically, a small portion (4 kHz) of speech bandwidth iscoded and transmitted. We propose and evaluate statistical methods that estimate the lost spectrum fromthe transmitted speech. The estimation problem is studied from an information theoretic perspective and aspeech analysis perspective. In the absence of mutual information between the transmitted and the lostspectrum, collaborative (conditional) vector quantisation techniques are proposed that efficiently encodethe lost spectrum, utilising information derived from the transmitted speech signal. Subjective tests indicatethat very low bit rates (~134bps) for encoding the high-band spectral envelopes are adequate for high-qual-ity wideband speech reconstruction. The developed methods can be used as building blocks for high qual-ity, hierarchical, multi-stream wideband speech coding.

Contact Person: Prof. Apostolos Traganitis

Head of TNL

tragani@ics.forth.gr

http://www.ics.forth.gr/netlab/

TNL

WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

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Networks and the Internet are key to all computer and communication systems. Routers form the basicinfrastructure for all IP networks. Switches are essential components of every router, as well as the basicbuilding block for any high-performance (non-shared-medium) network. The CARV Laboratory () has beenhighly active on Packet Switch and Router Architecture since 1985.

Commodity Switches

Current research and development activities of the CARV Laboratory are guided by the vision ofCommodity Switches becoming a reality in the forthcoming years. Commodity switches must be low-cost, high-performance, universal building blocks for switching and routing across the whole spectrum rang-ing from WAN to MAN, LAN, system area, storage area, embedded system networks, (multi-) processor-memory interconnects, and networks-on-a-chip (NoC). New markets for switches are emerging with therecent expansion of switched architectures from WAN to LAN, and their expansion to SAN, I/O, embeddedand NoC. The volume of these markets is expected to become substantially higher than telecommunica-tion switches and routers. As switches enter this wider market, their architecture needs to be adaptedaccordingly while their cost should be reduced. This economy-of-scale effect may then alter the telecom-munication (WAN) router market, in the same manner that PC’s and workstations affected the supercom-puter market: clusters of inexpensive, mass-made, generic commodity components replaced expensive,special-purpose machines.

Contemporary switch architectures vary widely, evolve rapidly, oftentimes suffer from excessive complexi-ty, and have not yet met a number of objective goals, especially if one considers the different requirementsimposed by different application domains. Therefore, one of the important challenges in the present con-text is to discover the unifying and simplifying concepts for the switches at all of the above scales. This willallow the reuse of components and designs, leading to great cost savings.

Multi-Gigabit Switching Fabrics

Buffered Crossbars. Crossbar switches are internally non-blocking, but require complex centralisedschedulers and only work with fixed-size cells. However, by including small buffers at each crosspoint,operation with variable-size packets becomes feasible and scheduling is dramatically simplified. TheCARV Laboratory has shown (2001-02) that such distributed WFQ scheduling approximates very wellthe ideal weighted max-min fair allocation, and has studied the factors affecting the convergence time.Since 2003, the CARV Laboratory is active on the design of a variable-size packet buffered cross-bar switch (http//archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/bufxbar/).

Backpressure in Buffered Switching Fabrics: multi-stage switches scale to very large numbers ofports. Scalability requires distributed packet scheduling which, in turn, implies internal buffering in theswitching elements. Multilane backpressure (credit-based flow control) in the fabric allows the switchingelements to only use on-chip buffer memory, while the majority of the packets are buffered at the inputs, invirtual-output queues (VOQ), thus greatly reducing the cost of the fabric. In 1987, the CARV Laboratoryproposed the use of backpressure, and subsequently applied it to the development of the Telegraphos(1993-95) and ATLAS I (1995-98) switches.

ATLAS I, a 10 Gb/s single-chip 16x16 ATM switch with backpressure: this 6-million-transistor 0.35-micron CMOS chip —a general-purpose building block for gigabit networking— was designed at CARV,(1995-98) and was fabricated by ST Microelectronics. It provided credit-based flow control (multilane back-pressure) with 32,000 virtual channels, sub-microsecond cut-through latency, logical output queues in ashared buffer, 3 priority levels, multicasting, and load monitoring (http://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/atlasI/).

Benes Fabrics with Internal Backpressure: the Benes topology is a multi-stage fabric known toyield, for large N, the lowest-cost NxN non-blocking switches. CARV applied its buffered fabric architec-ture to this topology (2001-2002) by combining per-flow backpressure, multipath routing (inverse multi-plexing), and cell resequencing. Flow merging was needed to bring the cost of backpressure down toO(N) per switching element (http://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/bpbenes/).

Pipelined Memory is a novel organization (USA patent 5,774,653, owned by FORTH) that CARV designed(1993-95) for the shared buffer and associated switching and cut-through functions in a switch or router.

CARV22

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The advantage of this organization is that it is both simpler and smaller compared to other alternative ones(http://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/sw_arch/pipeMem.html).

Quality-of-Service (QoS)

Per-Flow Queueing. Providing guarantees for Quality of Service (QoS) through modern, advanced-archi-tecture network systems requires the decomposition of traffic into multiple flows and the provision of a sep-arate queue for each of them. Managing a large number of queues (hundreds or thousands to possibly mil-lions) at high speed typically requires the assistance of specialised hardware. CARV has been activeon such multi-queue management implementations that have varying cost and performance characteris-tics (http://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/muqpro/queueMgt.html).

Weighted-Round-Robin Scheduling. After the competing flows have been isolated using per-flow queu-ing, fair allocation of the available bandwidth requires a weighted-round-robin scheduler. In 1986, CARVinitiated a detailed investigation of various methods to perform this at different cost and performance lev-els (IEEE JSAC Oct. 1987). Current related activities include the development of a pipelined heap manag-er (ICC’2001) for weighted fair queuing (WFQ) at the rate of 20 to 40 Gbps, and the development ofa fast parallel comparator tree for WFQ at 40 Gbps and beyond, under fast changes to the set of eligibleflows (http://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/muqpro/wrrSched.html).

Other Topics

Wormhole IP over ATM. Inspired from the wormhole-routing multiprocessor interconnection networks ofthe 80’s, CARV has proposed (1998) this technique to turn existing ATM networks into gigabit IP routerswith the mere addition of low-cost wormhole-IP devices. An FPGA-based prototype for a 155 Mbps linkhas been built and successfully tested in 1999 (http://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/wormholeIP.html).

Telegraphos - High-Speed Network Interfaces. CARV has built (1993-95) the Telegraphos proto-type for workstation clustering. The novel features of Telegraphos included protected, user-level networkaccess for low latency communication, user-level DMA, and fast notification of message arrival(http://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/telegraphos.html).

Other topics of past research and development in CARV include branch penalty reduction (1990), par-allel supercomputer architectures (1991-94), interleaved Rambus memory controller (1994), JPEGentropy encoder chip (1994), consulting for a Silicon-Valley high-tech company (1999-2001) and fivesub-system prototypes for commercial networking products that have been developed under contractwith three companies (1998-2003). Current work includes network processor applications and architec-tures, network security, and home networking.

Contact Person: Prof. Manolis KatevenisHead of CARV Laboratorykateveni@ics.forth.grhttp://www.ics.forth.gr/carv

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ATLAS I (CARV-ICS-FORTH, 1995-98): Single-ChipATM Switch for High-Speed Networking,10 Gigabit-per-second, 6-million transistors, 0.35ìm CMOS VLSI.

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e Scalable Computing and Storage InfrastructureResearch and development activities in scalable computing and storage infrastructure investigate cost-effective architectures of commodity components and their applications. In particular, the focus is on:

! Interconnects: network interface architectures and communication protocols! Computing: programming abstractions and fault tolerance in commodity clusters! Storage: Block-level storage architectures, storage protocols, and storage virtualisation

The architectural level and all software layers (firmware, operating systems, user-level applications) oftoday’s systems, as well as the interactions between these layers, are addressed. Specific issues current-ly under research are:

System Interconnects: Activities in this field aim at developing the technology required to unify the net-work interconnects used today in data-centers and at providing the fundamental technology for evolving tomore flexible and effective data-center architectures. In particular, focus is on the lower layers of the com-munication protocol stack and on how higher-level protocols designed for different application areas can beprovided on top of the same physical layer. The overall goal is to use next-generation commodity physicallayers and networking equipment to achieve scalability and performance currently available at more spe-cialised system and storage area networks.

Storage access and virtualisation: Given current trends in technology, storage is increasingly beingdetached by application servers in various networked storage configurations. In this model, one of the mostimportant aspects of storage systems is the protocol used to provide applications with access to the stor-age subsystem. CARV is currently investigating existing protocols such as SCSI, and how such protocolscan best be provided on top of next-generation interconnects. Moreover, storage virtualisation is becomingincreasingly important due to the perceived gap between the increased requirements of applications andthe limited functionality offered by current storage systems. Current research at CARV led to the definitionof a novel virtualisation framework that allows easy extensions of storage stacks with new mechanisms andflexible combinations of these mechanisms to provide rich semantics. The developed framework providesfour main facilities that are essential to block-level storage modules: (i) hierarchy awareness, (ii) a high-level API for I/O request management, (iii) dynamic block mappings, and (iv) persistent metadata manage-ment.

Virtualisation of commodity clusters: Clusters interconnected with low-latency, high-bandwidth inter-connects are gaining acceptance as a platform for supporting applications that require access to scala-ble resources. However, the abstractions provided by clusters to applications tend to be restricted andlow-level, hindering the use of clusters in new applications areas. One of the goals at CARV is toaddress this problem by providing a single system image (SSI) on clusters of workstations, based onthe Java Virtual Machine. Java has steadily gained wide acceptance as a programming language forapplication development, mainly because of its platform-independence and because of the rich set ofclasses and libraries that it provides. The adopted approach is unique in that it makes use of a sharedvirtual memory layer that has been optimised for system area networks and extends a JVM that hasbeen written for SMPs to run on top of this layer.

Miniaturisation of computer systems: Recent progress in technology makes it possible to build minia-ture, networked systems that may have a profound effect on computing infrastructures. Autonomous,networked micro-systems with processing capabilities can enable new areas of applications, e.g. diag-nosis of epidemic diseases, forest and crop protection, safety, monitoring of fine grain parameters in ourenvironment. Driven by rapid progress in underlying technologies, early research in this area tended tofocus on experimental prototypes of infrastructure, devices and applications. As the field progresses,more fundamental challenges emerge, which are the focus of related CARV activities. There is anincreasing need to investigate and build advanced and generic functionality in the runtime system offuture microsystems. The objective of this line of work at CARV is to offer a new stable framework thatwill allow researchers to decouple systems issues from application requirements and will lead to easydeployment of microsystems in advanced application domains.

Contact Person: Prof. Angelos Bilasbilas@ics.forth.grhttp://www.ics.forth.gr/carv/acs.html

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System Timing and SynchronisationAs the number of circuit gates in a single chip constantly grows towards and beyond the billion mark, theoperation of gates under a single centralised clock or multiple rationally related clocks becomes impossi-ble. To solve this problem, researchers are now investigating “globally-asynchronous locally-synchronous”systems, or even completely asynchronous designs. Asynchronous techniques also help in the reductionof electromagnetic interference problems and they may often lead to a reduction of power consumption aswell. However, the synchronous paradigm is currently dominating today’s design community. The mainproblem that prevents a widespread adoption of asynchronous design technology is the lack of a commer-cial-quality RTL-to-GDSII asynchronous design methodology which will be based as much as possible onexisting tools and flows.

CARV is actively investigating this problem since 2001. Current research activities in this area focus onmethods and tools for asynchronous circuit design, techniques for de-synchronisation, asynchronoussupport for commercial-quality Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, asynchronous interconnectdesign and asynchronous processor design.

CARV currently coordinates the EU-funded research project, “ASPIDA” (ASYNCHRONOUS OPEN-SOURCE

PROCESSOR IP OF THE DLX ARCHITECTURE, http://www.ics.forth.gr/carv/aspida). The project “ASPIDA” exploitsthe idea of Open-Source hardware for the promotion of asynchronous design and IP reuse. ASPIDA hastwo key objectives: (a) produce an open-source, asynchronous IP of the widely-used in academia DLXarchitecture, equipped with two interfaces (one synchronous and one asynchronous), suitable for integra-tion into any SOC design, and (b) produce a novel asynchronous, low-latency, Open IP inter-connect protocol. ASPIDA is part of the OpenCores consortium (http://www.opencores.org).

ICS-FORTH, through its CARV Laboratory, is also a member of the European Working Groupon Asynchronous Circuit Design (ACiD-WG), and has recently hosted the Third ACiD-WGWorkshop, as well as ASYNC 2004, the largest international conference on AsynchronousCircuit Design.

Contact Person: Dr. Christos Sotiriousotiriou@ics.forth.grhttp://www.ics.forth.gr/carv/async

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R&D work in the domain of Distributed Computing Systems focuses on the following areas:

Network Processors

The performance of modern networks is usually bottle-necked by routers and switches that are frequentlyrequired to perform an ever-increasing amount of func-tions. To reduce the cost, sustain the performance, andincrease the functionality of routers and switches, sev-eral vendors build such nodes around network proces-sors, a new generation of programmable processorsthat have been specifically optimized to handle net-work-related functions. Within this area, research anddevelopment work is conducted in order to study hownetwork processors can be used to improve the per-formance of network monitoring systems. The primaryinterest is in exploiting several network processors asbuilding blocks for scalable early-warning systems thatcan be used as building blocks for an Internet Securityinfrastructure.

Web Systems

The widespread use of the World-Wide-Web has expo-nentially increased the traffic currently generated onthe Internet. In addition, it has put a tremendous stressto both web servers and web proxies. Research in thisarea deals with designing methods that reduce webrequests, Internet traffic, and the associated serverload. Methods employed to achieve these goalsinclude caching, pre-fetching and intelligent contentcompression. The results of research carried out haveshown that the web provides a fertile ground for devel-oping caching policies that cache various types of information at various points. Such caching methodsinclude main memory caching for web servers, query result caching for search engines and disk cachingfor web proxies.

GRID and Peer-to-Peer Computing

Over the last decade, the Internet, the World-Wide Web and all the applications that have been developedon top of them have literally changed our lives. At the same time, however, the scalability and security ofInternet computing and communication infrastructure has been stressed, sometimes beyond its limits. As aresult, popular Internet servers cannot always cope with their increasing number of requests, failing to deliv-er their service during peak hours and/or in face of unexpected loads. This situation is expected to becomeworse as the number of Internet users continues to increase, and as the number of requests for multime-dia information content increases, posing a higher demand for the resources of popular Internet servers.

To enable Internet services to reach their desired level of scalability, research and development work is con-ducted in peer-to-peer models. Peer-to-peer systems, in contrast to the traditional client-server model, donot distinguish between clients and servers: all participating computers are peers. Thus, all participatingcomputers have the capability to act both as servers and as clients at the same time. Within this framework,the main issue addressed is how to scale peer-to-peer networks to several millions of nodes while, at thesame time, keeping the network management overhead at tolerable levels.

Contact Person: Prof. Evangelos Markatosmarkatos@ ics.forth.grhttp://www.ics.forth.gr/carv/acs.html

Information S

ecurityAddressing problems in security requires knowledge from both technology-based disciplines and social sci-ences, economics, and law. On the technology side, security spans a broad range of topics and requiresunderstanding of issues at all levels of computer systems, networks, information management, etc. TheICS-FORTH Programme on Information Security has been recently established (in 2004) to addresssecurity issues related to modern information infrastructures. Currently, the Computer Architecture andVLSI Systems Laboratory, the Telecommunications and Networks Laboratory, the Information SystemsLaboratory, the Centre for Medical Informatics and Health Telematics Applications and the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and of ICS are active in the Programme.

Broadly, the Programme’s goals are:

1. To conduct research in underlying technologies related to security of networks, systems, andinformation and to demonstrate solutions to the security problem in real applications.

2. To function as a center of expertise in Greece towards establishing a high level of security innetworks, systems and information, and to train specialised personnel, both in the private andpublic sectors in dealing with security issues in these areas.

3. To contribute to the creation and promotion of appropriate policies, methods for risk analysisand management, and to support standardisation processes.

4. To participate in standardisation activities if the field of security.

5. To create and maintain a catalogue of best practices in the security of networks, systems andinformation.

The main research issues addressed by the Programme are:

! Authentication of high volumes of data in non-trusted distributed environments. Current solutionsare typically centralised, expensive and non-scalable. The Programme develops a distributed system forauthenticating data in non-trusted environments, at the network edge and outside the firewall. A possibleapproach is to cache the authentication information over the network on inexpensive servers. TheProgramme is currently experimenting with the above and other approaches. The system under develop-ment is expected to be able to dramatically lower the cost of authentication in applications such as distrib-uted storage, end-to-end integrity, tamper detection, electronic commerce exchanges, wireless authoriza-tion, and certificate revocation checking.

! Runtime systems support for sensor networks. Work in this area aims to offer a new framework thatwill allow researchers to decouple systems issues from applications requirements and will lead to easydeployment of networks of miniature devices and sensors in advanced application domains, such as mon-itoring and safety applications. At this early stage of research in this area, activities investigate alternativesand tradeoffs through working prototypes.

! Cryptography algorithms and asynchronous decodification of software signatures. Related topicsinclude cryptographic key agreement methods, group authentication procedures, efficient cryptographicalgorithms and protocols, and trust management schemes, which provide high-levelsecurity services within dynamic varying network environments.

! Network Security. Over the last few years, the Internet has been repeat-edly used as a medium to launch attacks against computer and communica-tion subsystems. Such attacks, which are usually called cyber-attacks, maydisable a large number of computers, which may in turn paralyse criticalinfrastructures including telecommunications, provision of electric power,transportation, water supplies, and commerce. To avoid the initial spread ofsuch attacks and to contain their results after they are launched, research isconducted in the area of Intrusion Detection and Denial-of-Service AttackDetection systems. The underlying goal is to design and implement systemsthat can efficiently and effectively detect intrusions before they manage to spread.

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! GSM/UMTS security. The wireless market has experienced a phenomenal growth since GSM technol-ogy was introduced. Cellular operators now face the challenge to evolve their network towards UMTS,which is capable of delivering wireless Internet based multimedia services. The security architecture forGSM was based on the assumption that the core network is secure and trustworthy for the transmission ofconfidential information. For UMTS systems this assumption is not adequate any more. Security weak-nesses and threats that emerge from this technology evolution are examined and the provided securitylevel against man-in-the-middle attacks and cryptanalysis attacks is studied, using experimental test bedswith real-world characteristics. Moreover, new cryptographic algorithms and protocols that enhance the pro-vided security and enable the provision of scalable security services are developed.

! Ad hoc networking and security. Ad hoc networking enables wireless devices to network with eachother as needed, even when access to the Internet is unavailable. With a range of applications that spansfrom military and emergency rescue operations to unplanned topologies and home networks, mobile ad hocnetworks (MANETs) present a challenging environment. Communication in MANETs relies on the wirelessmedium and the cooperation of their participants. This activity aims to investigate the applications and thefundamental technologies required to enable ad hoc communications and collaboration in ubiquitous com-puting environments. Novel trust management and rumor spreading mechanisms, as well as route lifetimeestimation mechanisms are within the focus of the Programme.

! Investigation of security and trust issues in the environment of the Semantic Web.

! Logical representation and processing of knowledge for the purposes of representing, analysing andapplying security policies.

Besides conducting research in underlying technologies, the Programme is concerned with the applicationof these technologies in various domains:

! eCommerce. In this domain it is particularly important to provide high security transactions. Therefore,an integrated e-payment system for web and mobile users is currently under development. The systemrequirements include high-level security and data protection for both individual users and organisations.

! eHealth. In this domain, studies are conducted concerning the security of telemedicine and medicalinformatics systems.

! Tracking and monitoring of goods and people. Thisarea is core for many real-life applications in security ofphysical premises, public infrastructures, etc. Autonomousvehicles and sensor networks technologies are investigat-ed, focusing on how they can be combined to improve thecoverage and precision of monitoring and tracking applica-tions in a cost-effective manner.

Besides the above issues that are currently under investi-gation, issues that the Programme has started investigat-ing include:

! Biometrics. The importance of this area is increasingas there is a need to provide novel methods of human iden-tification in various environments.

! Information management. Issues of data privacy at alllevels of information management systems in private andshared environments.

Contact Person: Prof. Angelos Bilas

bilas@ics.forth.gr

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The primary purpose of the SafeLine hot-line (www.safeline.gr) is to offer a directand responsible point of contact for usersdemanding the removal and criminal pros-ecution of illegal Internet content. SafeLinecan be used to report material on theInternet which appears to be illegal orobjectionable. The SafeLine membersprocess each report and take the appropri-ate action by forwarding the report to legalauthorities for further processing. Users'personal data is treated as strictly confi-dential, and users submitting reports mayremain anonymous if they so wish. Usersare also informed of the outcome of theirreports.

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Biomedical Informatics Programme

Biomedical Informatics

The concept behind the term Biomedical Informatics is that a full understanding of health and diseases canonly be obtained though the integration of knowledge from the levels of molecules, cells, tissues, organs,clinical data and environmental data. The data needed to obtain this global picture mainly come from twodistinct disciplines: Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics. These two disciplines have traditionally beenseparated. It is expected that collaborative efforts between both disciplines will lead to novel approaches toscientific research and technological developments, leading to new discoveries both for research andhealthcare. Thus, Biomedical Informatics is an emerging area of scientific endeavour at the intersectionbetween Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics, with Neuroinformatics providing enabling tools.

The Biomedical Informatics Programme was initiated in September 2002 as a joint activity of the Instituteof Computer Science (ICS) and the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) at FORTH.Currently, the Centre for Medical Informatics and Health Telematics Applications, the Information SystemsLaboratory, the Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems Laboratory, the Human-Computer InteractionLaboratory and the Telecommunications and Networks Laboratory of ICS are active in the Programme. Itsresearch activities include:

Biological Modeling. This line of research focuses on building in silico models of biological componentssuch as single cells, networks of cells, gene pathways, whole organisms etc. Models are either biophysicalor abstract mathematical .(e.g., neural networks), i.e., mimic a more general behavior of biological ele-ments. Biological models of CA1 neurons in the hippocampus are used to address issues pertaining to thelearning and memory capacity of neural tissue under normal and pathological conditions. Biological mod-els of C.Elegans are used to study the neural mechanisms controlling the animal’s response to differenttype of stimuli.

Computational Methods for Biological Data Analysis and Origins. Work in this field focuses on thedevelopment of novel mathematical and computational tools that can be used to solve complex, data inten-sive biological problems. Methods developed and used include symbolic and sub-symbolic machine learn-ing algorithms, as well as global optimisation methods. Apart from classical analysis of biosequences, toolsare used for in-silico prediction and modeling of all kinds of structural and functional aspects of biomole-cules and their interactions, including:

• prediction of secondary and tertiary structure of proteins and RNA

• prediction of inter-residue contacts, solvent accessibility, disulfide connectivity of proteins• prediction of the sub-cellular localization of proteins based on their post-translational sorting

sequence signals for the partial annotation of complete proteomes

In addition, methods include development of different modules of gene finding algorithms and other auto-matic annotation systems for biological sequences, development of machine learning algorithms to analyzegene/protein expression and development of graph theoretic methods for visualization of gene/proteinexpression data.

Origins, Evolution and Diversity of Genomic Information. Research activities are focused on the studyof the biochemical functions at multiple levels and dimensions, as well as on the design of novel method-ologies to accomplish that. The multiple levels include in-silico function prediction based on meresequence, gene/chromosomal context, phylogenetic or expression profiling, and others.

The multiple dimensions include function prediction of a protein or of a family of proteins, in-silico recon-struction of single functional processes/subsystems, and, ultimately, the inter-wiring of all individualprocesses for the design of whole metabolic maps.

Integration and analysis of genomic and medical information. Research activities are focused onissues related to ontology based integration and analysis of genomic and medical information for healthapplications, gene expression analysis (computational and experimental) and on computational methodsand tools to support individualized medicine. Towards this end members of the Biomedical InformaticsProgramme are focusing on issues related to linking the Integrated Electronic Health Record of a citizento external knowledge sources, such as clinical guidelines/protocols and genetic information, and thedevelopment of predictive models for diseases.

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In achieving the above R&D objectives emphasis is placed on: (a) applying GRID technology to Data Miningand knowledge discovery and data mining techniques on very large quantities of clinical and healthcare-related data, stored in heterogeneous and distributed information sources, (b) working on an ontology–driv-en semantic integration, which will contribute to overcoming present architectural and design limitationshampering the use and wide deployment of computing and knowledge GRIDs, and (c) new efficient algo-rithms for the processing and visualisation of the obtained information.

One of the recent and important R&D activities of the Programme relates to Gene Expression Profiling. Theefforts are directed towards the design, development and customization of techniques, software-compo-nents and tools for the intelligent analysis of microarray data. In this context, the members of theProgramme participate in the PrognoChip project (funded by the Greek Secretariat of Research andTechnology) which focuses on: (i) intelligent processing of microarray data; (ii) high level normalisation ofmicroarray data; (iii) classification of breast cancer profiles, (iv) identification of candidate molecular mark-ers, and (v) the delivery of an Integrated Clinico-Genomics Computational Environment to support thevision of individualized-medicine.

Members of the Biomedical Informatics Programme also participate in the EU-funded NoE INFOBIOMEDwhere the emphasis is on the integration and synergy between bioinformatics and medical informaticsactivities.

Education and training

Despite its very recent establishment, the Biomedical Informatics Programme provides support to both thegraduate and undergraduate programmes of study of the Departments of Computer Science and Biology,University of Crete, through teaching and supervising undergraduate, M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. Membersof the Biomedical Informatics Programme contribute in teaching and research supervision of the Inter-departmental graduate program in Molecular Biology - Biomedicine and in Computer Science programmes.

Contact Persons: Prof. Ioannis Tollis tollis@ics.forth.gr

Dr. Martin Reczkoreczko@ics.forth.gr

Education and Training

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The mission of the Department of Education andTraining (DET) of ICS is to pro-

vide training in the area ofInformation Technology.The courses offered byDET cover a wide varietyof subjects, and range

from introductory coursesrelated to MS-Office applica-

tions to advanced programmingcourses and courses for familiarisation with cutting-edge technologies developed at ICS.

PresenceDET has been established in 1984. In its 20 years ofoperation, DET has developed a rich educationalactivity in subjects of information technology, pro-viding high quality training to more than 10,000 per-sons in the region of Crete. DET provides innova-tive and customised training to cover specific mar-ket needs and uses advanced methods and prac-tices in communicating information technologyknowledge.

Activities

• Specialised training for university graduatestowards expanding their career opportunities.One of the primary objectives of DET is to providespecialised training and re-training to universitygraduates in cutting-edge technologies in order toenrich their career opportunities. Innovative trainingis provided in new technologies exploiting theresearch and technology experience and know-howof ICS.

• Training in Information Technology for highschool graduates.. DET provides training to high-school graduates in order to strengthen their qualifi-cations upon entering the work force. DET staffdevelops training paths based on the knowledge ofthe labor market needs and on interviewing studentcandidates to assess their professional plans andneeds.

• Training Human Resources of Organisationsand Companies. DET provides customised train-ing, on demand and upon request, to private com-panies and public organisations. These seminarsare focused on specific private sector training needsfor companies that wish to maximise the potentialand the effectiveness of their personnel inInformation Technology.

• Certification and Testing. Upon completion ofany course the students are provided with certifi-cates of participation which report in detail the

course material and the number of hours each stu-dent has attended. Additionally, DET provides test-ing and certification facilities for MOS (MicrosoftOffice Specialist), ECDL (European ComputerDriving License) and Prometric exams (whichinclude a variety of more than 2.000 certificationtests).

• Research Programs. DET participates inresearch programs related to the latest develop-ments in the areas of education and training, focus-ing on distance learning and health care informationtechnology.• SUN Academic Education Center. Since 2001,DET is the first Academic Initiative Authorised SunEducation Center (ASEC) in Europe, offering train-ing courses for SUN Microsystems products. Theseminars are offered in specially arranged class-rooms, by SUN certified instructors, in Greek. Uponthe completion of such courses, students are pro-vided with certificates of participation and can applyfor certification testing for Sun Certified SolarisAdministrator and Sun Certified Java Programmervia the Prometric Testing Center (on site).

FacilitiesDET facilities are distributed in Heraklion (4 class-rooms) and Rethymon (3 classrooms). Every class-room can host up to 10 persons and is equippedwith an equal number of personal computers.Computers are interconnected via local area net-

works and are provided with a high-speed connec-tion to the Internet. Most classrooms are equippedwith high quality audiovisual infrastructure includinghigh-definition projectors, TVs and videos. Specialfacilities are provided for certification and testingexams. The quality of equipment at DET, providesthe opportunity to employ and demonstrate cutting-edge technologies in education (i.e., voice over IP,teleconferencing, distance learning, etc.).

Contact Person:

Mr. Yannis Trullis, Coordinator of DET

Malikouti 1, GR-71202 Heraklion, Crete

trullis@ics.forth.gr, info-tek@ics.forth.gr

http://www.noo.gr

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The Registry of .gr Domain Names, is the Administrative body of the [.gr] country code Top LevelDomain (ccTLD) name space since 1989. Activities include maintenance of the Registry's web site

(http://www.gr), the domain name database, the primary and secondary name servers situated ingeographically diverse locations, the accredited Registrars database and the connections ofAccredited Registrars with the Registry's infrastructure. Through its participation in various

International Organizations, the [.gr] ccTLD is able to follow Global trends and issues common toDomain Name Systems across all 245 ccTLDs.

The [.gr] Registry Department employs skilled personnel consisting of 14 full-time persons that cover theneeds of all daily operations of the registry. These operations include the maintenance of:

1. The [.gr] registry informational web site [http://www.gr] which includes a WebWhois utility allowing inter-ested parties to search for available [.gr] domain names.

2. The [.gr] registry database, which includes all domain names and their respective contacts (registrant,administrative, technical, billing & full contact information) and relevant DNS information.

3. The [.gr] database of accredited registrars.

4. In-house developed proprietary software. The purpose of this software is the processing of domain nameapplications, registrar transfers, ownership transfers and domain name modifications submitted by [.gr] reg-istrars, either through the available Web interface or through their own custom-built applications.

5. An online modification tool allowing registrants to modify their [.gr] domain names.

6. A web interface for [.gr] registrars that allows them to handle all aspects of the domain names they man-age.

7. An EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) server for [.gr] registrars that allows them to create and uti-lize their own applications for the domains they manage.

8. In-house developed proprietary software utilized by the National Telecommunications & PostsCommission (http://www.eett.gr) in order to monitor and approve [.gr] domain name applications and own-ership transfers.

With the publication of the 288/154/4-7-2003 decision of the National Telecommunications and PostCommission (NTPC) The Registry of .gr Domain names Department of ICS-FORTH was selected to con-tinue as the official Registry of the [.gr] domain name space for a period of five (5) years under the directsupervision of the NTPC, the National Authority for domain name registrations under the [.gr].

Contact Person: Mr. Vaggelis Segredakissegred@ics.forth.gr, hmaster-info@ics.forth.grwww.gr, grweb.ics.forth.gr

Department of Systems and Networks Administration (DSNA)The mission of the Department of Systems and Networks Administration (DSNA) of ICS is to provide sup-port in information technology planning, to implement efficient technology infrastructures, to develop anddeploy effective information systems and to deliver responsive IT support services.

The Department develops administrative applications, offers networking and telecommunication services,technical services and support, as well as end user support. The operational environment includes aswitched gigabit network as well as switched Ethernet for the end-users. The telecommunications infra-structure offers data, voice and video services to more than 1,000 users. A central computing facility pro-vides shared computing access to more than 120 servers and over 2 terabytes of networked disk space.The DSNA also supports various research projects within the ICS, offering implementation and operationalsupport. The team consists of 10 members offering support services on a 24-hour basis.

Contact Person: Mr. Demos Panagopoulosdimos@ics.forth.gr

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The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), founded in 1989,comprises leading research institutions from 18 European countries, committed to the advancement ofinformation technology and applied mathematics. ERCIM promotes European research and development inthese areas as well as linking research to the industry sector. ERCIM is a de facto network of excellenceand a “think tank” that contributes to the definition of research policies at a European and at an internationallevel. ERCIM has established a strong presence, with more than 12,000 researchers, providing solidfoundations for creating knowledge networks and potential for research collaborations throughout Europe.ERCIM aims to foster collaborative work within the European research community, and to increasecooperation with European industry, through:

• Joint Research Projects: ERCIM participates in several collaborative projects asco-ordinator or associated partner, such as, for example, DELOS and

COREGRID.

• Working Groups: The purpose of ERCIM working groups (WG) isto build and maintain a network of ERCIM researchers in a

particular scientific field. Their main activities are the organizationof workshops and the preparation of common project proposals.The working groups are also the focus of internal mobility withinERCIM. Examples of Working Groups wich are currently activeare the Constraints WG, the Control and System Theory WG,the User Interfaces for All WG, the Semantic WEB WG and the

Bioinformatics WG.

• Training and Mobility: ERCIM supports researchers’ post-docspecialisation, as well as mobility, through its fellowship programmes.

• Sponsorships: ERCIM supports established conferences withsubstantial overlap between the conference topic and ERCIM areas of activity,

as well as workshops and summer schools.

ICS-FORTH is an ERCIM member since 1992. For the period between 1995 and 1998 ICS was chairing theExecutive Committee of ERCIM. The election of the President of FORTH, Prof. Stelios Orphanoudakis asthe Director of ERCIM for the period 2004 to 2005 is a honourable distinction for FORTH. Moreover,members of ICS are very actively involved or play a leading role in various ERCIM activities.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Office in GreeceThe W3C Office in Greece, authorised for enrolling new W3C Members, was founded in 1998 and is hostedby the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH. The W3C Office in Greece informs at a national levelregarding W3C cutting-edge technologies, the applications performed and the potentials of the present Webso that it evolves to the Web of the future. The W3C Office in Greece has managed to activate a criticalmass of Greek Web users. The activities of the W3C Office in Greece include, among others, thedissemination of the W3C related information in Greek through translations of W3C News and Pressreleases, an electronic monthly newsletter and dissemination of information material to interested parties,such as private companies and academic institutes that are active in the area of Web technologies.

The Web page of the W3C Office in Greece is updated on a daily basis, with translations of the News andthe press releases that appear in the Web page of W3C, as well as with information such as the enrolmentprocess and other general information in Greek (http://www.w3c.gr/). Furthermore, the W3C Office inGreece organizes events in which the participants have the opportunity to exchanges information and viewsas well as to be informed regarding the W3C cutting edge technologies. In the context of such activities, theGreek Office organised a successful one-day event in Athens (June 2004) related to the Semantic Web.Contributions to the event were made by distinguished members of academia, research organizations, W3C andprivate firms.(http://www.w3c.gr/office/events/2003st/press.en.html). Besides the contacts with companiesand academic institutes, the W3C Office in Greece communicates with the Greek media, magazines andnewspapers that publish technology-related articles (http://www.w3c.gr/office/in-press.html). Recently, theW3C Greek Office has been involved in research activities. For example, it participated in Question HowProject (http://www.w3.org/2001/qh/) involving software development to promote World Wide Webstandards.

International Links

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ERCIM - The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics

International Links