[aaloa supporters] IMPORTANT: first public action promoted by AALOA and the EC - feedback required!

[Mohammad-Reza Tazari]

Dear community,

as promised in this posting 
<http://aaloa.org/pipermail/supporters/2011/000091.html>, I am getting 
back to this list to open the "call for comments" on a text prepared for 
announcing the workshop (see below). This text has been approved by the 
governing board of AALOA. The "call for comments" is open for one week. 
In parallel, we are trying to find a common date with AALA & eInclusion 
(as organizing committee meeting) in one of the calendar weeks 9 or 10 
in order to (1) do the final approval of the announcement, (2) agree on 
the exact date of the workshop depending on the availability of the 
premises in Brussels, and (3) appoint a programme committee.

My regards,

-- Saied
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Mohammad-Reza (Saied) Tazari
Stellvertretender Abteilungsleiter :=  Deputy head of department
Interactive Multimedia Appliances  ||  http://www.igd.fhg.de/igd-a1

Fraunhofer IGD: Institut für
Graphische Datenverarbeitung       :=  Computer Graphics
Fraunhoferstr. 5
64283 Darmstadt, Germany           ||  http://www.igd.fhg.de/
-------------------------------------------------------------------


*Call for Participation*

*A Public-Private Partnership for Facilitating the*

*Market Breakthrough of AAL*

*15.Apr.2011, Brussels, Belgium*


*A workshop organized by AALOA [1], eInclusion [2] and AALA [3]*

The demographic development all over the world, but especially in the 
industrial countries, is leading to a continuous growth of the share of 
older people in the society. Several challenging problems are expected 
to emerge due to these developments that might reach critical dimensions 
if solution-finding is not sped up.

In one of the parallel action threads for coping with the challenges of 
an aging population, public authorities have been investing since some 
years in research on ICT solutions for aging well, generally known as 
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). Despite the sizable achievements reached, 
the breakthrough of AAL in our daily lives is still not in sight. A 
major obstacle is the fragmentation of R&D efforts with little 
converging conclusions. Consequently, new findings remain confined in 
the academic area, vertical solutions appear that are difficult to 
compare, and user experience in the realized scenarios cannot be 
assessed. There is no well-known success story, not even in case of the 
few available vertical solutions.

The planned workshop, organized jointly by AALOA [1], eInclusion [2] and 
AALA [3], aims at investigating a certain approach for having the AAL 
market grow to an extent matching its theoretical potentials. The 
approach suggests that the industry should be involved in funded 
projects that put candidate research results under "stress tests". That 
is, in such projects companies already offering AAL services and 
products / prototypes should port their existing products and services 
to a candidate platform from research projects. This way, the two sides 
of the spectrum are supposed to get closer to each other, bridging the 
gap between the AAL research achievements and the industrial AAL 
products and services. The funding should mainly aim at mitigating 
adaptation costs for the participating vendors.

Candidates for "stress testing" in a production environment should be 
both mature enough (to be worth to invest on) and still under 
development (at least having resources required for maintenance) in 
order to guarantee that deadlock situations can be avoided. 
Additionally, the IPRs of the candidate platforms must allow their usage 
in such projects. The following benefits are then expected to be achieved:

    * The candidate platforms will be provided with the most effective
      feedback loop while there is still time for taking corrective
      actions. Stress testing will give them the opportunity to deliver
      the evidence for the practicality of the results.
    * In success case, the vendors of the existing AAL products and
      services that participate in such projects will benefit from being
      the early adopters of the promising platforms; even in case of
      partial success, they will be able to adopt selected technologies
      from the latest research results.
    * The funding authorities benefit from the overall effect of getting
      closer to the AAL market breakthrough and can show the usefulness
      of all the previous investments in AAL.
    * As, according to its manifesto, AALOA wants to "/Design, develop,
      evaluate, standardize and maintain a common service platform for
      AAL"/, such stress testing projects will provide the AALOA
      community with indicators for creating consensus around a shared
      platform.

The workshop should examine both the feasibility of stress testing 
projects from different viewpoints and the possibilities for funding 
such projects. Representatives from relevant funding programmes 
(including eInclusion, AAL Joint Programme, and CIP ICT PSP) and the 
governing board of AALOA will host the workshop. It will be open to all, 
based on a free registration that will be kept open as far as the 
physical capacities allow. Running projects working on AAL platforms 
have the opportunity to candidate themselves for stress testing. The 
first three will have the opportunity to shortly present why they are 
appropriate candidates. Especially, representatives from enterprises and 
SMEs that are already offering AAL products and services on the market, 
or have prototypes almost ready to market, are encouraged to participate 
in this workshop. The first 10 registrations from among of such 
companies, that are voluntary to share their experiences of AAL market 
obstacles within the workshop, will have the opportunity to do so with 
short presentations.

The preliminary scheme of the workshop program is as follows (the final 
programme will be published by <a date to decide at the time of 
announcement>):

   1. Opening by the organizers (ca. 15 minutes)
   2. Up to 10 very short presentations by technology and service
      providers on the AAL market obstacles (ca. 60 minutes)
   3. Three short presentations by the candidate platforms (ca. 45 minutes)
   4. Three short presentations on funding possibilities for "stress
      testing" projects by FP7, AAL JP, and CIP ICT PSP (ca. 45 minutes)
   5. Guided discussions on the targeted funding scheme and concluding
      the recommendations (ca. 2.5 hours)
   6. Closing with a sort of protocol (ca. 15 minutes)

In order to be sure that at least one candidate platform subject to 
stress testing will be there, eInclusion nominated the AAL platform 
being assembled within the FP7 project called universAAL [4], which is 
supposed to consolidate the results of the eInclusion previous 
investments in AAL towards an open cross-application platform. The goal 
of eInclusion in funding universAAL was to prevent the legacy of the 
previous investments from dying out; such legacy should be reused 
efficiently towards converging conclusions. The project board of 
universAAL has reacted positively to this initiative, provided that 
stress testing projects do not start earlier than the beginning of 2012, 
which is the end of the second development iteration in universAAL. In 
fact, universAAL had already planned to more actively present its 
results to the general AAL community during their third iteration, in 
order to gather and incorporate useful external feedback. Also due to 
the usage of permissive open source licenses by universAAL, the platform 
should be a serious candidate for stress testing projects. This, 
however, should be examined in the workshop as appropriate.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] The Ambient Assisted Living Open Association <http://www.aaloa.org>.
[2] Short for the ICT for Inclusion 
<http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/einclusion> sector of the DG 
for Information Society and Media 
<http://ec.europa.eu/information_society> of the European Commission.

[3]Short for Ambient Assisted Living Association 
<http://www.aal-europe.eu/aal-association>.
[4] Short for UNIVERsal open platform and reference Specification for 
Ambient Assisted Living <http://www.universaal.org> under the grant 
agreement no. 247950.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://aaloa.org/pipermail/supporters/attachments/20110216/22c55e4b/attachment-0001.html>