Living lab approaches are a key research topic in Freeband. The cube below symbolizes the various aspects of Living Labs in Freeband.

click on the extended entry:

Kick-off ICT Innovationplatform Intelligent Communication

The fifth eChallenges conference will be held in The Hague from 24-26 October 2007, where more than six hundred delegates from European companies, governmental institutions and research facilities will gather to exchange ideas and compare notes on applied ICT research. The eChallenges conference is the seventeenth event organised by the European Commission to stimulate the broader application of research results with corporations and governments.
Freeband will present itself with presentations during the conference. On our booth you will find more information on the Freebandprojects Frux and Tumcat.

More info: www.echallenges.org/e2007

At the ICTDelta Innovation Congress on 22 and 23 May 2007 Freeband launched, in co-operation with ICTRegie, the Freeband ICT InnovationPlatform (IIP) “Intelligent Communication”.

This platform will focus on identifying opportunities for innovation, developing national research agenda’s and programmes in the field of intelligent communication and stimulating research and development. Smart communication solutions are the foundation for a wide range of innovations in work processes, services and wellbeing of people in The Netherlands Ltd. With the diversity and specific context of people, organizations and companies as starting point. In other words: user-central. More information: www.iipic.nl

FACE 2007 (28th of June) was a productive day with many interesting presentations, ideas and discussions. Before the event we asked all members of the community to send us their visions and presentations on future topics of Freeband. We invited 6 of them to present their ideas at FACE 2007.

We also invited two keynote speakers to share their thoughts with us. Emiel Aarts (Philips Research) told us everything about the future of Ambient Computing and Prof Ir. Ton Koonen (TU Eindhoven) presented the subject ‘Bring Broadband to the users’. There was a lot of emphasis on the business and user side within Freeband. Both Emiel Aarts and Mark Steen adressed these issues in their presentations.
This led to an interesting discussion about which parties should be asked to participate in the Freeband community. Another interesting subject, Smart Environments, was put forward by Emil Aarts, Bob Hulsebosch and Henk Eertink. The presentation of Mark Steen was labeled ‘best’ by public vote. Henk Eertink and Bob Hulsebosch came in a good second and third.
We continued the discussion on the future topics of Freeband during the first workshop at 21 September as a part of the ICT Innovation Platform ‘Intelligent Communication’, which was launched at ICT Delta 2007.

Op 22 en 23 mei 2007 vond 'ICTDelta, het ICT-Innovatiecongres' plaats in het Beatrix Theater, Jaarbeurs Utrecht. ICTDelta is bedoeld om verschillende partijen, die innovatie met ICT hoog in het vaandel hebben staan, dichter bij elkaar te brengen om nieuwe ontwikkelingen te delen, kennis en ervaringen uit te wisselen. Freeband heeft binnen de thema’s technologische innovatie en innovatieve toepassingen van ICT diverse workshops en lezingen gegeven. De bezoekers van de ICT- innovatiemarkt konden bij de stand van Freeband diverse demo’s van recente projecten bekijken. De projecten A-Muse, PNP2008, I-Share, Awareness, Frux en Tumcat hebben in verschillende demonstraties de laatste ontwikkelingen getoond.

Visit to Ericsson in Rijen to discuss future research topics for Freeband.

Noldus is a new Freeband partner that joined the Freeband TUMCAT project in 2006. Noldus is specialised in measurements on human-computer interactions. In TUMCAT, this is extended into the mobile domain, i.e. the domain of mobile applications and devices. This is a new, interesting field, since mobile users are not bound to specific environments, and the context of application and device usage changes, and hence the interaction patterns and there appreciations.

Michael Börjeson, Corelabs project coordinator explaining state of affairs in Enoll, the first wave of Living Labs in Europe. Patrick Strating, Freeband project director, held a presentation on the Freeband approach to the Living Lab instrument, explaining that in world of rapid mobile service development, living lab instruments are extremely valuable.

On march 8, the Freeband Awareness project held a plenary meeting at the Ericsson premises in Rijen. Keynote speaker was Edwin van der Star from Vitaphone company, giving a very interesting talk about the difficulties and possibilities of creating commercial telemonitoring services in healthcare.

Also interesting was a talk by Erwin Fielt, explaining the juridical boundaries for context-aware applications. Basically, context awareness is about generating and using knowledge about a subject user, while privacy laws aim at restricting knowledge generation about specific users. The discussions showed that possible problems are likely to be solved one way or another, but that this will not be without discussions or technical adaptations.

Finding the balance between patient safety and the ability of a patient to manage for himself through intelligent communication was the theme of the 2007 Care event by Freeband. The event was jointly organized by the Academic Hospital UMC Utrecht and Freeband, and was located in the hospital itself. The day was visited by a mix of technical people, care takers, insurers, government and consultant. A great mix, resulting in good discussions.

The chairman of the event, prof. Cor Kalkman of the UMC, led the audience through an interactive program with both plenary and group sessions. In the first plenary session Cor Kalkman and Patrick Strating started the discussion by outlined the challenges and question that they had from their on expertise field. The gap between current practices and possibilities in for furture improvement by technology was enlivened d by an enactment of an epileptic seizure. Frightening realistic.

In groups people were shown three examples of 4G and Care in Freeband from the Awareness, PNP2008 and Frux project. Discussion in these sessions was vivid and constructive. The group leaders summarized the discussion afterwards in the following plenary session.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Paul Barach, arriving with only 20 minutes delay directly from the US, emphasized on the consequences of new technologies. Inspired by the approach of the ‘Bauhaus’ group he advocated ‘aggressive usability’. Let people understand what they are doing, don’ hide critical process knowledge, from the user by computer systems. Only by understanding the consequences of new technologies and having the accepted by users, new technologies can find their way in the health sector in a successful and patient safe manner.

I think this day showed that Freeband is working on relevant technology research and development. But are we working on the good care applications, are we putting the rights emphasis? With the feedback and newly acquired contacts I hope Freeband will further improve the direct applicability of the Freeband 4G concepts and technologies in the health sector.

On wednesday February 14 the I-Share project organised their yearly plenary workshop. In the morning various speakers updated the attendees about the status of their work in Ishare. The progress in the research areas is quite impression and also shows potential business relevance. As you can see in the pictures,  business opportunities are explicitely considered in the various tracks. Peter de With presented a P2P mechanism for streaming video which is currently further exploited in a spin-off company. On a question concerning the relevance, he answered: " There are so many business applications. Don't forget that the Internet in Seoul gets completely clogged the moment the team of Guus Hiddink plays."

After the break a poster session and demonstrations further gave the opportunity to discuss about the details of the work and to see and feel the ideas in practice.

All in all a very interesting workshop.

On Tuesday January 23, 2007, Freeband organises its New Year's event at the brand new Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum.

The program starts with a mix of short presentations by entrepreneurs from the Dutch media sector and by Freeband on innovations and bridging the digital divide. These presentations will be followed by interactive discussions. In addition, Freeband will provide participants admission to the Sound and Vision experience, before or after the plenary program. Some Freeband-projects will organize their own project-specific meetings at the Media Park in the morning .

This event can only be attended, if you're part of the Freeband Community.

Plenary meeting of the BBPhotonics project at Lionix, Enschede.

On November 21 2006, the IST 2006 conference started, with approximately 4500 attended interested in the 7th Framework Program of the European Union.

Prior to the start of the IST 2006 conference, on November 20, the "First Wave of Living Labs" was officially launched in Helsinki, Finland. Freeband is one of the participants in this network of Living Labs.

The Living Lab approach has emerged as a spin-off result of the user experience research of the Freeband FRUX project (this FRUX focus is directly related to the user-centric 4G vision), and has been given a firm base with the initiation of the TUMCAT testbed project. Several "living" experiments are planned in the projects of I-Share, FRUX, PNP2008, BatHome, and Awareness, showing the spreading of the importance of 'live', user experience research in the Freeband Program .

Participation in the network of Living Labs enables the further elaboration and extension of Freeband epxerience sampling research in the European research area.

On Tuesday the 14th a conference organised by the Dutch Patent Office took place at the European Patent Office in Rijswijk, the Netherlands. The speakers shared their experience and knowledge with respect to national and international do’s and don’ts in protecting knowledge and trademarks. Next to a plenary session there were three parallel sessions focussing on ICT, Biotech and NanoTech.

Mr. van Eijk, principle director of the European Patent Office, emphasized the difficulties in patenting software in Europe. By definition a technical innovation can be patented based on three criteria: (1) Novelty, (2) Inventive step, (3) Applicable in industry. He pointed out that software itself cannot be patented unless it is a part of a technical innovation. Currently, the Netherlands holds a 7^th position in the world with respect to patent applications in general. In the US on the other hand, as pointed out by Jason Firth of a leading IPR law firm, software can be protected by copy right law. Although this does not prevent third parties to re-do the work, verbatim copying of code is protected. Moreover, software can be patented although the process is much more difficult than for traditional technical innovations.

Quoting Arno Boersma, SquareWise Consultancy: “International business is becoming more complex, there is need for a Chief Knowledge Officer that aligns the physical, technical and organisational knowledge protection within a company. There is more to knowledge protection than only patents.”

On November 15 the Canadian Embassy organized the Canada Wireless Day event, to support industrial and research cooperation between Canada and the Netherlands. Key attraction was Jim Balsillie, CEO from RIM that developed Blackberry.
Many Blackberry developers were present, like Maurice Weigand from Web-Integration, partner in the Freeband FRUX project, e.g. Wijkwijzer. Jim Balsillie reported on their evolution strategy (media-IO improvement), and on their key success factors (reliability, security and replaceability)

For the Freeband program we made interesting liaisons with the CRC, Communications Research Centre Canada, the primary federal laboratory for research and development in advanced telecommunications, and OCRI (Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation), Ottawa's lead economic development corporation.

Today we visted the HKU, to discuss the progress on a new way of communicating the 4G paradigm. Students of the HKU presented their approach, which is part of their graduation: a 4G interaction experience.

According to the vision, communication is easy, transparent, and fit for the job. But how do you visualise this 4G communication? How do you visualise that people have easier access to information, or don't have to press buttons anymore that they don't care about or know of anyway? Key point here is that more information and more connectivitity lead to more choices/possibilities for the user, and therefore lead to different behavior: "I'd rather take this route (instead of the shortest)  if I know I will pass this shop which serves my interests"; "I'd better take a cup of coffe and take the next train". So eventually, 4G will lead to different behavior of individuals and groups, behavior that is either more efficient, more pleasant or more safe.

Too be continued...

The Freeband QuoM is rewarded to Evert Schut from ISC-Police in the Freeband FRUX project. ISC reports on their website on a workshop on Mobile Communication (http://www.isc.nl/nieuws/18-oktober-2006/). This workshop was organised around the FRUX project concepts and prototypes:

"Bij de vierde generatie mobiele diensten kun je denken aan diensten die niet meer vast zitten aan één netwerk, zoals GSM of UMTS, maar diensten die netwerk-onafhankelijk met je mee gaan, of je nu thuis, op het werk, vast of mobiel bent."

The QuoM (Freeband 4G Quote of the Month in a Public Medium) is monthly awarded to Freeband participants that express the meaning of 4G for their application domain in a striking way, in a public medium intended for a broad audience.

Disclaimer: the awarding process is highly subjective and can be disputed.

On 25-27 october, the EUROSSC conference was held in Enschede. This conference was supported and sponsored by several BSIK programs: Smart Surroundings, Multimedian and Freeband. From Freeband, the projects Awareness, Frux and AMUSE were involved. http://wwwes.cs.utwente.nl/smartsurroundings/eurossc/callfp.htm

Awareness project leader Maarten Wegdam was co-chair of this conference.

Philips opened its Experience Lab  on Tuesday October 24. The Experience Lab is an extension of the Philips Home Lab. The Experience Lab contains the Home Lab, and in addition a Care lab, focusing on well-being in health context, and a Shop Lab, focusing on experiences in shopping environments.

User experience, user-centric design and design for experience are key topics in the Freeband FRUX and Freeband TUMCAT projects. This is related to the user-centered communication paradigm of Freeband. The FRUX projects focuses on the experience concept itself, andf how it can be put to use in practice. TUMCAT focuses on a toolkit that supports the measurements of user experience.

On October 13, about 60 people visted Thales to join a meeting on ad hoc communication in emergency situations. The meeting was organised by the ITEA project Easy Wireless and the Freeband AAF project. The meeting was organised around five demos, each demonstrating specific extension to communication solutions in the context of emergency situations: e.g. cognitive radio, emission power control,  interference workarounds, and mesh network communication (hopping). see also http://ew.thales.no/ and http://aaf.freeband.nl.

The work on emergency communication in the Easy Wireless project is done with Norwegian partners.             

Ad hoc communications offer various benefits, e.g.:        

• more robust: communicate over alternative paths if the standard infrastructure, e.g. UMTS, C2000, are not availbale       
• extension of capabilities: by combining UMTS and e.g. C2000, broadband capabilities are 'modularly' added to the C2000 network        
• scalability: because vehicles bring there own access points and connections with the backbone infrastructure, scalability of bandwidth comes in a natural way with an increased number of vehicles present.             

Outcomes of the discussions were that the projects should emphasize more intergated demonstrators, and that actual products would be welcomed.

The BCTM2006 conference was organised from 8-10 october in Maastricht by Prof. John Long, project manager of the Freeband Wicomm project. "For those interested in devices and circuits in telcom and power control systems". Over 200 visitors visited this conference. Keynote speaker was physics Nobel price winner Dr. Zhores Alferov who held a keynote presentation on monday.

Freeband and Dimes were present with a stand at the exhibitors lounge. The Freeband WiComm project studies low power devices and high frequency (60GHz) devices.

Na zijn afscheid als programmadirecteur Freeband kreeg Daan van de community een dagje uit in Zandvoort. Zie hier het resultaat.