Romulus Project

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) is the oldest and largest of the Spanish Technical Universities. UPM currently has more than 3.000 faculty members, around 38.000 undergraduate students, and around 6.000 postgraduate students. UPM’s Schools cover most Engineering disciplines, including Aeronautical, Agronomical, Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Electronic, Forestry, Industrial, Mechanical, Mining, Nuclear, and Naval Engineering, as well as Architecture, Computer Science and Geodesy & Cartography.
UPM has a strong commitment to R&D and Innovation. The UPM has more than 200 Research Units and several Research Institutes and Technological Centres in the areas of: Architecture, Solar Energy, Nuclear Fusion, Automotive Security, Mocrogravity. Opto-electronics and Micro-electronics, Domotics, Laser technology, Biotechnology and Genomics of plants, Industrial Electronics, advanced Materials, Software, among others.

Of a total annual budget of around $350 M€, UPM receives annually over $100 M€ support from external sources for research activities. The UPM has participated in around 200 European R&D projects over the past four years, including 19 Networks of Excellence, and is member of 10 European Technology Platforms.
The contribution of the university to knowledge creation through its scientific publications is also significant. Most relevant is the high number of papers published in scientific journals and presented at conferences. The annual average figures are 1.200 journal papers, 2.000 conference communications and 200 Ph.D. theses.
Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas Telemáticos (DIT) is one of the largest and most significant departments dealing with Information and Communication Technologies in Spanish University. DIT also organises a postgraduate programme for industry, with one Master program for Networks and Systems, another for Mobile Networks, as well as several specialization programmes (IT Management, Mobile
Internet Engineering, Internet/Intranet Engineering, etc.).
The technical focus of research activities range from the infrastructure layers in communications (broadband network, IPv6, networks integration), to the management of networks and services (services trading and brokering, integrated management of networks, systems and services -TMN, SNMP-, cryptography and network security), and including the software engineering of services on networks (distributed platforms, real-time critical systems, software architectures and UML), specific platforms and techniques for Internet based services (Web, Web-services engineering, Java services, EJB, MDA, RDF, Multimedia Internet), and applications such as tele-education, tele-training, multimedia interfaces, tele-presence, CSCW, distributed data bases and data models, complex systems and office theory.

DIT introduced electronic mail in Spain (1986), the first Spanish Internet connection (1988), and Internet provider (1990-1994), and one of the first Web sites in Spain, the first satellite-based remote education programme ETSIT (1994-1996); DIT is an active member of IPv6 Forum and W3C and holds the Telefónica chair in UPM for Next Generation Internet (2001-2003).
The group performing research on software engineering for Internet services in DIT/UPM is composed by six professors, and more than twenty doctorate and master students. This group has followed a successful research line in the study of design techniques for services and software systems. IPTES and IDERS were two projects studying prototyping techniques for real-time systems in the III and IV ESPRIT programmes. ARES was devoted to the study of architectural reasoning techniques and was performed during the IV IST programme framework. ESAPS, CAFÉ, FAMILIES, OSMOSE were three EUREKA/ITEA projects with UPM participation. Currently, DIT/UPM is involved in several IST and ITEA projects (COSI, OSIRIS, PASSEPARTOUT, SERIOUS between them). As a result of this, DIT/UPM holds many contacts with European and Spanish companies and universities.

 

IMOLA Informatica

 

IMOLA Informatica S.R.L. (IMOLINFO) is a company offering consulting, skill transfer and advanced software development. It has been operating since 1983 along side its clients in the realization of mission critical projects. IMOLINFO, with a team of highly qualified experts, has accumulated decisive experience in the financial, local government and industrial sectors. IMOLINFO specializes in methodologies for the management of the project process such as, for example, techniques for software process improvement, requirement engineering, software technical revision, risk management, software measurement and post-project revision methods.

IMOLA Informatica has the reputation to be an « Innovation Company », since it evangelizes market in OO, RAD, Open Source Business Model, Corba, Java, UML, SOA, SCA, EDA and Semantic Technologies. The company experts are often invited to speak in public events about Java, SOA, Semantic Web, architecture, Banks IT, IT security, Open Source Software, etc. (in and outside Italy).

IMOLA Informatica is part of GruppoImola, which has participations also in MokaByte Srl and SensibleLogic Srl.

MokaByte is an online community for enterprise Java architects and developers, providing daily news, tech talk interviews with key industry figures, design patterns, discussion forums, free online and real books, tutorials, articles and more. MokaByte has become the largest independent Java community in Italy, with more than 30.000 subscribers to the monthly newsletter.

Sensible Logic S.r.l. is an academic spin off company born to industrially apply, develop and exploit the tremendous potential of the Semantic Web technologies and in particular of the research developed at the Semantic Web and Multimedia Group, Università Politecnica delle Marche. Sensible Logic is composed by leading researchers in the Semantic Web and Multimedia fields.

 

National University of Ireland Galway - Digital Enterprise Research Institute

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) has been created thanks to a joint partnership between National University of Ireland, Galway, Hewlet Packard and Science Foundation Ireland. The institute currently counts approximately 100 full time members including professors, senior researchers, postdoctoral students, ph.d students and masters.

DERI’s mission is “Making the Semantic Web Real”. DERI is in a unique position for accomplishing such task: the industrial component, backed up by the research background of the University makes DERI capable of not only of high scientific impact, but also of designing and delivering state of the art software engineering components.

Among these are the ActiveRDF framework for Ruby on Rails (www.activerdf.org), which enables semantic web capabilities in Ruby on Rails development; The experience matured in creating and supporting such framework will be very important for the Data Level integration components of ROMULUS.

The SWSE semantic web search engine (swse.deri.ie), is a cluster architecture which currently holds the world record for scalability of indexing and reasoning. SWSE repository, which is developed as Open Source project, has been recently demonstrated indexing and reasoning over little less than ten of billions RDF statements (). SWSE is programmed in Java, and its capabilities will be made available as an enabling infrastructure for Data Level integration over large datasets.

 

National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics – ICI

 

The National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics – ICI Bucharest was set up in 1970. Since then the institute has been acting as a leading unit in Romanian IT R&D. Six Academy awards were granted to ICI people. In 1999, ICI was ranked first among R&D Romanian organizations, in the EC survey “Impact of the enlargement of the European Union towards the associated central and eastern European countries on RTD - innovation and structural policies” (p.194, Office of official publications of the EC, 1999). Since 2000 the institute is certified ISO-9001. Currently the institute is coordinated by the Ministry for Communication and Information Technology. The personnel involved in R&D activities is organised in 3 departments and includes one member of the Romanian Academy, 21 Ph.D. holders and 4 Ph.D. candidates. The main areas of expertise covered by this staff include: communication networks and advanced technologies for distributed system development; digital content, creativity and personal development; knowledge-based systems, learning and cognitive systems; service and software architectures, platforms, technologies and tools; advanced computing and complex control systems modelling and design; IT&C based system design and implementation in public administration, business and industry development. ICI Activity areas: development and innovation activities within national and EU funded research programs; technological transfer and utilisation of IT&C research results; development of IT products and systems; coordination and integrator of large scale projects; development, implementation and supply of IT services; editor and publisher of scientific journals in IT&C area; collaboration with similar foreign institutes as well as international organizations. During the last five years, in the framework of National research, development and innovation programme, ICI was involved in 60 consortia as project manager and in other 20 as project partner. In international cooperation,since 1993 ICI has been involved in 60 EU funded projects (Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Framework Programmes), including project related to transport area as FRETRIS, EDIPA, DISTRICT projects. International awards: Finalist diploma for SOMCET-Net at the „High-Level European eGovernment Conference 2003”Como [Rou06, Tam01], Italia, and finalist diploma for the Elias-HIS system „eHealth 2003 European Conference”, Brussels, Belgium.