Telecom Italia Spa is the holding Telecom Italia Group, a corporation operative across-the-board in the telecommunications industry, from fixed wire networks to mobile and satellite communications, multimedia services, IT, broadcasting, manufacturing and plant installations. Telecom Italia Lab acted until March 30th, 2002 as the research unit of Telecom Italia Spa. From April 1st, 2003 they became the R&D Division of Telecom Italia.
Telecom Italia competes in highly competitive markets susceptible to rapid technological change. The company is making increasingly large investments to upgrade its networks and installations, while continuously expanding its range of products and services with enhanced and innovative services in all areas of the market - fixed network, Internet, multimedia, networking applications. From a strategic point of view, Telecom Italia aims to maintain its leadership while consolidating its international presence.
The company is doing this by reinforcing its position as a global operator in the key ICT markets that constitute the main terrain of the World telecommunications business as we move into next millennium.
VirtualSelf is a hi-tech start-up with the research and development facilities in Ramat-Gan, Israel. It was founded in 1999 by a team of leading technologists and business executives with experience in semantics, mathematics, software programming, and linguistics and product development.
VirtualSelf spent its first two years developing a revolutionary technology for unsupervised extraction of meaning from unstructured text. The intended first application of this intelligent technology is in knowledge management (KM) as an instrument for automated extraction of knowledge from unstructured information and for control of the information overload in the corporate environment.
VirtualSelf filed 3 patents during 2000 and submitted a research paper titled, “Automatic Taxonomy for Large Document Corpora Utilizing Idiomatic Character of Natural Languages,” which received highest distinction and was presented at the 2001 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, funded by 20 European nations, is constructing a new particle accelerator on the Swiss-French border on the outskirts of Geneva. When it begins operation in 2005, this machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will be the most powerful machine of its type in the world, providing research facilities for several thousand High Energy Physics (HEP) researchers from all over the World.
The computing capacity required for analysing the data generated by the experiments at the LHC machine will be several orders of magnitude greater than that used by current experiments at CERN.
During the last two years the MONARC project, supported by a number of institutes participating in the LHC programme, has been developing and evaluating different models for LHC computing. These models have been found to be a perfect match for the Grid metaphor and convinced CERN management to refocus on the Grid the entire computing pans for the evolution of CERN computing.
Sheffield Hallam University is one of the ten largest universities in the UK with almost 24,000 students and 3,000 staff, offering approximately 400 different courses. It is a higher education corporation within the meaning of the Education Reform Act 1988 and has the power to provide higher and further education, to carry out research and to publish the results of such research. It is traditionally associated with support for design and innovation.
The Computing Research Centre is part of the School of Computing and Management Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University. The centre contributes in the area of Knowledge Management and Strategic Information Systems by providing training services, consultancy, and research, as well as supporting technology transfer particularly through ‘Teaching Company Schemes’.
Other current activities in the centre include the design and development of A European funded ‘Multi-media On-line Environment’ to support collaborative working amongst SMEs in South Yorkshire.
Stuttgart University Library with its more than 1,2 million volumes and approximately 4,100 serial titles (plus about 1,500 electronic journals) regularly received is the basic information service provider for the successful teaching and research described above. Located at the two campuses of the University it offers about 750 workplaces in its reading rooms. Apart from its online catalogues it gives access to a variety of online and CD-ROM-databases over the Internet.
Electronic services include publishing of electronic thesis and dissertations as well as document delivery of scientific articles. The library takes an active role in several regional and national R&D projects in the area of library automation, acquisition, electronic publishing and multimedia authoring.
Stockholm University Library is one of the largest university libraries in Sweden with around 2 million visitors a year. The library is well advanced in IT and networking the library catalogue, a large amount of databases and electronic journals over the campus and to 12 branch libraries over the Internet. A key component in the strategic plan of the library is the building of the Digital Library and partaking in a Learning Resource Centre for the university.
Stockholm University Library has been involved in many national and international research projects. It was the coordinating partner of the EU-projects ELVIL and ELVIL2000. The library has also participated in a number of other EU-projects, for instance EQUINOX, CAMILE and EQLIPSE, Tempus Phare project.
Stockholm University Library was the first library in Sweden to implement an integrated library system and OPAC in the early 80s. The library is just about to convert its oldest card catalogue with OCR-technique where automatic indexing will be a key issue.
GL 2006 Europe is a UK company specialising in user interfaces and Web architectures, especially tailored for knowledge management and data warehousing. The company has shown steady growth since it was founded in 1998.
The Company supplies a wide range of design, implementation, training and assistance applications for use in the sphere of CRM, to optimise customer management in activities related to marketing and sales.
It is also active in the mobile computing sector with wireless solutions, across various market sectors, from pharmaceuticals, distribution and retail to business services. GL decides and develops ICT solutions and arranges for the reorganisation of the internal processes (office resource planning, knowledge management, etc) and supports processes related to interacting with customers (customer relationship management, sale force automation, call centre, help desk, etc) and with suppliers (supply chain management, e-procurement). It develops and manages systems and solutions for e-business and e-marketing.