The ALMANAC consortium consists of seven organisations from four different countries. The consortium unifies a number of research groups that have a world leading position in their respective fields. The ALMANAC project is led by ISMB.
ISMB (Istituto Superiore Mario Boella) is a research & innovation center operating in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) domain. Founded in Torino (Italy) in 2000 by Compagnia di San Paolo, a major European bank foundation, and Politecnico di Torino, today ISMB relies on technological and process competences of around 150 researchers working in close cooperation with companies, academia and Public Administration. ISMB is organized in Research Areas focused on core sectors of ICT that are capable of managing the whole value chain, from basic technology up to its practical implementation (proof-of-concept). Since 2010, ISMB has extended its activities to process innovation, orienting its focus on priority themes of the European agenda and establishing interdisciplinary three Strategic Programs, namely Smart Energy, Smart City and Smart Health, that employ excellences and results of Research Areas. The Institute is involved in several cooperations with both large and small-medium enterprises, as well as in various higher-education initiatives in partnership with academic institutions. ISMB will contribute to the project with highly skilled and experienced personnel from the Emerging Trends and Opportunities Function and the Pervasive Technologies (PerT) Research Area.
The Fraunhofer Institute FIT (Institute for Applied Information Technology) has been making significant contributions to Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Human-Computer Interaction. The first distributed email system in Europe based on open standards and the first commercial workflow system in Europe were developed at FIT. Software for creating and organizing internet communities, for brokering and presenting information, for navigating in micro surgery was awarded international prizes and is being marketed through successful spin-off companies. Currently FIT is the most successful Institute within all Fraunhofer Institutes in European Projects. FIT UCC User-Centered Computing is an interdisciplinary group of scientists, which has gained an internationally acknowledged reputation in the areas of context-awareness, adaptive and personalized systems, context modelling, mobile services, and usability engineering. Three generations of adaptive, location-aware information systems have been built at the institute, bringing the Nomadic Computing vision closer to reality. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is a major player in the European Research Area. The FhG is an autonomous organisation with a decentralised organisational structure of 58 institutes, of which 15 institutes are dedicated to research in information and communication technology.
CNet Svenska AB is a leading-edge software house specialising in semantic-based knowledge and content systems. We are developing systems to acquire, organise, personalise and share the knowledge embedded in web, databases and multimedia content. Our technologies achieve semantic interoperability between heterogeneous information sources and services, and allow our customers to maximise automation of the knowledge life cycle. The core in our offering is Visual Net Server, a semantic annotation server. It is used to capture knowledge from raw information and multimedia content in webs and other distributed repositories to turn poorly structured information into machine-processable knowledge.
In-JeT ApS has been engaged as concept and technology developer in Pervasive Computing since 1998 and has extensive knowledge about wireless technologies, networks, Semantic Web Services, ontologies, and Knowledge Management. Since 2000, In-JeT has specifically been working with eBusiness and eHealth services in heterogeneous networks. In-JeT has increasingly been incorporating socio-economic and cross-disciplinary research tasks in technology development and is working with sociologists and anthropologists to define boundary conditions and analyse and integrate ecosystems in technology development. We have also pioneered methodological techniques such as scenario thinking for deriving comprehensive user requirements.
The Telecom Italia Group is a major Italian enterprise and a key European strategic ICT player. Driven by technological innovation and a commitment to service excellence, Group companies (spearheaded by Telecom Italia, TIM, Telecom Italia Media) operate in fixed-line and mobile telecommunications, Internet&Media. Telecom Italia Lab is the R&D branch of the Telecom Italia Group. Telecom Italia Lab took part in the definition and consolidation of the GSM standard, Mp3 and optical transmission. Taking part in major co-operative research work on an international level with universities, research centres and manufacturers, Telecom Italia Lab anticipates the future by planning advanced services in different fields from mobile to Future Internet. The team involved in the project belongs to service platform innovation department and is involved in several Projects regarding vertical application like: e-health, info-mobility, smart cities, and smart energy safe city. The core competences on the technological standpoint reside in cloud, M2M and Future Internet technologies.
The Municipality of Torino, with its 908.000 inhabitants, its 130 square kilometres of territorial extension and its GDP of 55.000 millions of Euros (which is 4.5% of the national GDP), is one of the most important city in Italy. Since the 1990’s, Torino has been following a path that has transformed it from an industrial capital - a sector which continues to play a fundamental role - into a pole of innovation, culture and improved quality of life. Torino first started a process of territorial transformation, thanks to the 1995 Town Master Plan, then a process of territorial marketing, through the first and second metropolitan strategic plans in 2000 and 2006, and it is nowadays multiplying its efforts towards a more and more sustainable development. The urban sustainable development is, indeed, one of the key-themes of the City Strategic Guidelines that is the programmatic document containing the political-administrative Mayor’s plan. In this plan, the Municipality government describes its strategic action-lines for the City development and, among the others, it affirms its commitment to foster the environmental quality of the town territory, to increase the capability of technological innovation and to make Torino a real “Smart City”.
Torino path to become “Smart City” started 2 years ago, when the City Council took the decision to take part in the initiative of the European Commission “Covenant of Mayors” and – as one of the first Italian cities – engaged itself to elaborate an Action Plan for Energy in order to reduce its CO2 emissions more than 20% by 2020. The Torino Action Plan for Energy (TAPE) now represents a fundamental step to present Torino as a “Smart City”. It has been approved in 2010 and its main objective is to reduce CO2 of 40% by 2020 (baseline: 1991). It is structured on 51 actions, concerning several sectors such as: transportation (public and private); building trade; tertiary sector (municipal estate, public and private tertiary, residential building, public lighting); industry.
The Alexandra Institute has extensive experience with international collaboration and is involved in many international projects, collaborating with over 200 international organisations in over 20 different countries - from very small SMEs to big international companies and knowledge institutions. Some of the recent research projects include: Smart Santander (FP7) proposes a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility in support of typical applications and services for a Smart City. The Airfield Monitor (R4SME) project aims to develop a novel system to support planning, control and assessment of airport runway and taxiway conditions, while significantly enhancing aviation safety. The IoT-I (FP7) Initiative is a coordination action that will support the development of the European IoT community for the coming years. ABC4TRUST (FP7) has the goal to address the federation and interchangeability of technologies that support trustworthy yet privacy-preserving Attribute-based Credentials (ABC). IoT.est (FP7) is creating an Internet of Things Environment for Service Creation and Testing. The goal of OUTSMART (FI-PPP) is to contribute to the Future Internet (FI) by developing five innovation ecosystems.
The ALMANAC project is co-funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 609081, objective ICT-2013.1.4 'A reliable, smart and secure Internet of Things for Smart Cities'. Duration: 1st September 2013 to 31st August 2016.
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