This Intermediate Programme Report covers the first half of 2006. It contains only progress reports on projects and major changes to the ITEA programme. To complement these reports, up-to-date statistical information will be available in the password-protected area of our website.

The first ITEA 2 Call for Projects, which opened on 2 February 2006 with a Project Outline (PO) preparation meeting, was very successful – with more participants and more project proposals than ever recorded in ITEA. Of the 46 POs received, 30 were invited for the Full Project Proposal (FPP) phase.

ITEA’s current project portfolio – Calls 1 to 8 – consists of 86 projects: 52 are completed, 34 are on-going or in launch. This takes no account of the 24 projects that have been stopped.

The August 2006 forecast for the total effort in person-years increased as well compared with the previous forecast of January 2006, and is around 10,000 person-years for all Calls 1 to 8. In the meantime, 2005 is the most successful year ever in terms of effort, and 2006 is expected to be even better.

At the beginning of 2006, we launched a new, restyled and updated website for ITEA 2. At the same time, we published a leaflet on ITEA 2, explaining briefly what ITEA 2 does and how to participate in the programme. The ITEA 2 Brief/ITEA 2 Political paper, published in 2005, was issued in 2006 in six other languages: Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian and Spanish, all available on our website (Publications).

Innovation Reports

As already be seen in the ITEA Programme Report 2005 and continued in this Intermediate Report 2006, we launched an initiative to share better the most important, when not outstanding, project results by highlighting them in Chapter 2 of the ITEA Programme Reports and publishing them on the ITEA 2 website. Broader publication is under consideration.

The objective is to share the project results’ impact and the technical, scientific, industrial and business consequences on a domain, and the vision of the future which can be derived from it, far beyond the arena of the consortium that made such achievements. In this intermediate programme report, smart solutions are proposed by:

• MAGELLAN, for secure end-to-end communication in heterogeneous local networks – i.e. broadband IP technology (DSL/cable), digital broadcasting (DVB) and digital storage; and
• MERCED, for the reuse of retargeted real-time and embedded (RTE) components.

ITEA 2 Symposium 2006
European research excellence for competitive software-intensive systems and services

Our 2006 Symposium will take place in Paris, France on Thursday 5 and Friday 6 October at the Méridien Montparnasse Conference Centre. It will provide participants with a unique opportunity to gain an insight into one of Europe’s most important and strategic ICT initiatives.

On the Thursday morning, an exhibitors’ forum is scheduled with three parallel technical workshops that will allow exhibitors to share experiences. In the afternoon, our executive team will present the programme’s achievements and results, and look ahead; and three selected projects will present their results. Friday presentations will include industrial, academic and political viewpoints. In the accompanying exhibition, project team members will communicate the impact of their work, using demonstrators and prototypes. The ITEA Achievement Award 2006 will be presented to the project that represents best practice; it will reward highlevel technical contributions based on true European collaboration that led to significant results and thus further promoted the programme and its goals.

ARTEMIS

At the ARTEMIS 2006 annual conference, ARTEMIS presented its planned innovation environment: SMEPact, Centre of Excellence, ARTEMIS approach on open embedded systems, ARTEMIS structure around the European academic environment on embedded systems, and methods and means of financing innovation. The conference also focused on the ARTEMIS Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) with its three priority domains: seamless connectivity and middleware; reference designs and architectures; and system design methods and tools.

On 6 and 7 July, an ARTEMIS Summer Camp was organised to further enhance the content of the SRA and set priorities for the first Calls. During this event, it became clear that the roadmap activities of MEDEA+ and ITEA 2 and the ARTEMIS SRA update should be aligned.

The establishment of the industrial organisation of ARTEMIS – called ARTEMISIA – is expected to be finalised in September this year. The ARTEMIS Joint Technology Initiative (JTI) is also expected to be established in the second half of 2006. Although the amount of funding for the ARTEMIS JTI is still not certain, the first Call for Projects is planned for the third quarter of 2007. 

ORGANISATIONAL ISSUES

In the first half of 2006, we welcomed our two new founding partners Airbus and Telvent in the ITEA 2 organisation:

• Representatives for Airbus are: Sylvain Prudhomme on the ITEA 2 Board, Sylvie Robert in the Board Support Group (BSG) and Marie-Line Valentin in the Steering Group (STG); and
• Representative for Telvent is Jésus Bermejo on the Board, in the BSG as well as in the STG.

Further organisational changes:

• Bull: Board member Geraldine Capdeboscq has been succeeded by Jean-François Leprince Ringuet;
• Nokia: STG member Titos Saridakis has been succeeded by Colin Willcock;
• Philips: BSG member Ger Verkoeijen has been succeeded by Wim van der Ligt and STG member Jan Bomhof has been succeeded by Ronald Begeer; and
• ITEA Office: Lara Jonkers, new member of the ITEA Office team – PR & Communications.

ITEA 2 thanks all departing colleagues for their contributions and welcomes the new members of the Board, BSG, STG and Office.