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News from the Front: Latest Results from EU Projects

The Extended Semantic Web Conference expects to bring together representatives of semantic Web projects from a wide selection of different domains and disciplines, including sensor networks, mobility and the social Web. The News from the Front event at ESWC 2010 will provide projects with a unique opportunity to present themselves to the wider research community and explore potential synergies and co-operations with other projects in a focused and constructive manner.

General Information

Many EU projects are currently actively tackling issues and needs in a broad range of areas in Information and Communication Technologies, with one thing in common: semantic technologies can form a vital means to achieving their goals and objectives. Yet some problems may already have solutions in other projects, and some challenges may be best tackled together. What one project can provide may be that which another project sorely needs, and projects stand to achieve collectively much more than what each one is achieving individually.
Given projects' constant activity in research and development, and focus on outreach to their own communities and within their own scenarios and use cases, there is often less opportunity to become aware of the opportunities presented by other projects, which possibly target other areas or are funded in other units, whose activities may have important overlaps, whose results may have important lessons, and whose plans may be affinable to co-operations and joint actions.
The purpose of the News from the Front session is to give current EU projects with a research and development aspect exploring the use of or potentially benefitting from semantic technologies the opportunity, in an intimate and relaxed atmosphere, to present themselves to the EU project community and meet with representatives of other EU projects. This will be complemented by a matchmaking action, where projects can browse details of other projects and arrange face-to-face meetings to plan concrete actions together. As a result, we expect to initiate first contacts between projects which stand to benefit from sharing expertise, technology exchange, and generate cross-project co-operations and joint activities at the task and technical level.

Please note: News from the Front is intended to facilitate knowledge sharing and matchmaking between EU-funded projects (any instrument from any unit) which are currently running and have meaningful results to share with the community. As such, we will accept submissions only from projects which have been active for at least 6 months and will not conclude before June 2010.

Format

News from the Front will be split into two sessions: a pre-lunch session open to all in which all participating projects present themselves; and a post-lunch session restricted to participating projects for matchmaking.
Each project will have no more than 6 slides (excluding title and closing slide) and 10 minutes to present itself to the attendees focusing on interesting technical aspects: what are the cool technologies that are developed, what interesting datasets can be made available, what are the possibilities that exist to build on top of the results? The idea is to be concise and direct, focusing on the concrete co-operation and re-use possibilities that exist.
The presentations will be complemented by an online matchmaking tool, where each participating project will be to provide further details on their activities and results and links to additional resources, demos, datasets, tools, etc.
Afterwards, we will have a “matchmaking” session, based on the meetings scheduled by the online matchmaking tool, where every attending project will have an opportunity to exchange information and share ideas for knowledge and technology transfer and joint activities and co-operations with other attending projects.

Submission

Project proposals should not exceed 3 pages and should contain the following information:

• Basic project information (name, website, contact person and e-mail)
• No more than 1 page on what are the cool technologies that are developed
• No more than 1 page on what interesting datasets can be made available
• No more than 1 page on what are the possibilities that exist to build on top of the results

Proposals are to be submitted as single PDF files using the EasyChair system:

https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=eswc2010newsfromthefront

Submitted proposals that follow the above guidelines will be reviewed by the chairs and programme committee with respect to relevance of the project, its described activities and results for the event.

Important Dates

Project submissions: EXTENDED TO February 12, 2010 (11:59 pm Hawaii time)

Notification of acceptance/rejection: February 26, 2010
Submission of presentation: May 15, 2010
Matchmaking profiles online: May 15, 2010
News from the Front day at the conference: May 31, 2010

For accepted projects, the presenters must provide the intended presentation at the event to the organizers for review, and if required, prepare a corrected presentation on the basis of the organizers comments by May 29, 2010. The projects must also provide the requested information to an online matchmaking tool which will be made available by May 15, 2010. Following this date, participating projects will be encouraged to select potential co-operation partners, and a personal schedule of face-to-face meetings will be generated for each participant prior to the event (by May 29, 2010).

Chairs

Lyndon Nixon (STI International, AT)

Alexander Wahler (STI International, AT)

Programme Committee

Lora Aroyo (VU Amsterdam, NL)

Eero Hyvönen (TKK, FI)

Grigoris Antoniou (FORTH-ICS, GR)