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PiCToR newsletter June 11th 2009

11-06-2009
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PiCToR leads 20 Belgian companies in 7 European R&D projects

PiCToR invested a lot of time in the European calls ARTEMIS (Embedded systems) and ITEA2 (Software-intensive Systems and Services - SiS) and managed to involve in total 20 Belgian companies in 4 ARTEMIS and 3 ITEA2 projects.

By participating at the brokerage events, PiCToR could trace about 30 relevant themes, which were communicated via the PiCToR community (www.pictor-office.org). Companies that mentioned their interest were brought in contact with the project consortia that were forming. Both by workshops and face-to face meetings, the PiCToR advisors generated ideas and shaped the project content and structure in function of the needs of the companies.

The majority of these 20 companies entered in projects on the following themes:

  • Smart products
  • Development and testing of embedded systems

During the following months, the accepted project outlines will be transformed into full project proposals. Deadline for these project proposals is early September.

FP7 ICT Programme: Call 5

The upcoming FP7 ICT call 5 will close 3 November 2009. This call covers a very broad range of topics and a vast budget (722 million Euro). Interesting to know is that for SMEs, the financial contribution form the EC may reach a maximum of 75% of the total eligible costs.

In contrast with programmes as Artemis which focus on “close-to-market” research, FP7 focuses on research with valorisation on medium or long term (10 year time frame). The present call focuses on 5 challenges, each of them subdivided in a number of objectives. For each objective a budget is reserved.

For SMEs, FP7 is a very complex and overwhelming program. However, there might be projects out there that might be very relevant for your company. PiCToR can help you to link your innovative R&D challenges to these projects. If your company has a theme that might fit in FP7, contact Jan Kempenaers (jan.kempenaers@sirris.be).

Presently, companies and research centres from all over Europe are setting up consortia for preparing project proposals to be submitted before 3 November 2009 (one stage submission).
Several information days have been or will be organized by the European Commission on the different objectives of Call 5. These are used as brokerage events for introducing project ideas, offering or requesting expertise and ultimately supporting the formation of consortia.

PiCToR advisors have participated in a number of these events. For some these objectives, presentations and ideas are available online. Please consult the links below. Especially these project ideas are worth a look for anybody who’s interested is what is going on in ICT R&D on European level.

The topics of Call 5 are:

More info on FP7 ICT Call 5 can be found starting from http://www.ideal-ist.net/ict-programme

Trends in software engineering : report from the ICSE 2009 conference

PiCToR attended the ICSE 2009 conference in Vancouver. ICSE (http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/events/icse2009/home/) is one of the leading software engineering conferences in the world. We provide you with an overview of the research themes with potential industrial relevance.

  • Testing and test automation had the highest percent of submissions. Themes:
    • How to select the most effective subset of tests from a test suite (based on different criteria, both for execution and after execution for result inspection...)
    • How to automate GUI testing (including desktop GUIs, web-based GUIs, smartphone apps...)
    • How to test large number of product variants (e.g. configuration aware prioritization techniques)
    • Tools and techniques for automatic tests generation (e.g. to find performance bugs, to generate regression tests - detect behavioral differences between the original
      and the modified versions of a program, generate tests based on changing the input files, including automatically generated XML instances...)
    • Tools and approaches that aid in choosing which tests to write (e.g. a JUnit extension tool that indicates code changes currently not covered by tests, an experience report on defining system tests based on a systematic analysis of bugs found by customers)
  • Tools that try to automatically check or predict the quality of the code
    • Tools that try to predict faults based on different metrics (e.g. complexity or frequency of code changes, communication patterns, deadlock detection, exception handling rules, unexpected events during execution...)
    • Tools detecting code clones (clones are copies of pieces code, typically a consequence of a bad practice of "reuse by copy and paste")
    • Tools that try to detect common integration problems when integrating COTS
  • Risk analysis and management was also addressed by several research papers.
    • A CMMI-like assessment and improvement risk management approach was proposed (for development of medical devices)
    • Risk management in specific domains (security of telecoms applications, safety of medical equipment, hardware/software co-design)
  • Collaborative development (tools for supporting collaboration in development teams). A percent of the research in this area was driven by IBM's Jazz platform (implementing collaboration features in an IDE, http://jazz.net/) and their strategy to involve the research community.
    • There were a number of proposals and empirical studies about usage of social technologies in development (tagging, commenting, social networking, micro blogging...)
    • Number of tools that mine the data from different sources (source code repositories, bug tracking databases...) and deduce information about links and dependencies between developers, parts of the code, code revisions...
    • Tools for visualizing information (using graphs, 3D visualizations) important for collaborative development (e.g. relevant ongoing changes, links and dependencies between developers and code changes, presence of other team members, artefacts that are currently being changed...)
  • Other development tools
    • Tools that aid the debugging process
    • Tools that help software evolution (e.g. tools detecting syntactical (e.g. API) changes, improved diff tools, tools for visualizing major contributors and their dependencies for certain evolutions...)
    • Tools aiding integration of COTS and open source components (e.g. avoiding common integration problems of integrating COTS, advanced search for open source code, detecting and avoiding incompatibility of different licenses of different COTS components, avoiding security problems by selecting right permissions for COTS components...)
  • Development Paradigms and Software Process - several studies about process selection, process change and distributed development and their impact on software quality have also been presented.
  • Some more fundamental research (including some experience reports from industrial use): model-driven development and code generation, dynamic adaption, feature oriented development...

The different research results are of different types: empirical studies, theoretical concepts, tools and at different levels of maturity. If you are interested to learn more, please contact Vladimir Blagojevic (vladimir.blagojevic@sirris.be).

EUREKA Eurostars Programme

The first European funding and support programme to be specifically dedicated to SMEs. Eurostars (http://www.eurostars-eureka.eu/) stimulate SMEs to lead international collaborative research and innovation projects by easing access to support and funding.

Any technological area aimed at the development of a new product, process or service is eligible for funding. A Eurostars project must involve at least two participants (legal entities) from two different Eurostars participating countries. In addition, at least 50% of the project’s core activity should be carried out by ‘research-performing’ SMEs.

Next submission deadline is 24 September 2009.

Your challenges about Smart Products on Innovate09

The introduction of smartness in a product is a strategy to differentiate a product from competing products in the market. Smart ICT products use knowledge about the product itself, the user, other products or the operating environment.

Do you want to make your product smarter? Do you have solutions that provide intelligence to products? Are you interested to see concrete new possibilities for the application of ICT in products? Then, you should come to Innovate09!

Sirris Innovate09 will be an interactive event based around 3 innovation themes: Smart products, Nanotechnologies and Biomedical applications. It will give you a unique chance to start actively thinking about the future of your business. You will make acquaintance with inspirational ideas and be able to apply these to your own business straightaway. The formula is interactive, high-end and hands-on.

More information and registration: http://innovate.sirris.be.

More info on PiCToR can be found on www.pictor-office.org.
Contact: jan.kempenaers@sirris.be.

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