Armonia

The overall aim of the research project ARMONIA (Applied multi Risk Mapping of Natural Hazards for Impact Assessment) is to provide the European Commission with a new harmonised methodology for producing integrated risk maps to achieve more effective spatial planning procedures in areas prone to natural disasters in Europe. Natural disasters are typical examples of people living in conflict with the environment. The vulnerability of populated areas to natural disaster is partly a consequence of decades of spatial planning policies that have failed to take account of hazards and risks in land use zoning and development decisions. Therefore it is critically important to develop a more effective methodology to incorporate natural disaster reduction into spatial planning, and to incorporate knowledge, technology and actors (data providers, information providers, data/information management and end users) in the field of risk assessment and land use zoning. (http://www.armoniaproject.net/)

NaturNet Redime

The general objective of NATURNET-REDIME project (NNR) is the improvement of knowledge and the provision of education concerning all aspects of Sustainable Development. The project will thus develop and demonstrate prototype technology and educational programmes towards implementing the European Union's Strategy for Sustainable Development (SSD). Extensive stakeholder understanding of the various factors and tools that affect sustainable development is one of the main goals NNR project. The content will focus on and integrate ecological, economic, social and technological factors and will prepare training facilities for Strategic Impact Assessment (SIA). (http://www.naturnet.org)

A BARD

Analysing Broadband Access for Rural Development (A-BARD) is a 24 month Coordination Action started in January 2005 to research rural broadband provision and use, as part of the Scientific Support to Policies ( SSP ) in the EU Sixth Framework Programme. A-BARD aims to continuously identify views on the issues and barriers to widespread broadband provision and the extent to which broadband can act as an external driver of change in rural economies.

WINSOC

Sensor networks are currently receiving a huge attention as a basic tool to detect emergency events or monitor physical parameters of interest, like radiation, pollution, temperatures, pressures, and so on. One of the main problems in designing sensor networks, especially in cases where the network is placed in areas difficult to reach, is, on one hand, the high reliability required to the whole system and, on the other hand, the potential unreliability of the single sensor. Many technological constraints make in fact the single sensor potentially inaccurate and unreliable, because of the need for battery recharge, small complexity, low cost, etc. The other major critical issues are congestion around the sink or control nodes and scalability. The most common approach available today consists in adapting the protocol stack of communication networks to sensor networks, taking into account the specificities of the application and focusing on energy-aware design. However, requirements and constraints of sensor networks are so different from communication networks that, in many cases, it is better to devise innovative design methodologies which are not necessarily bounded to the old protocols. The key idea of WINSOC is precisely the development of a totally innovative design methodology, where the high accuracy and reliability of the whole network is achieved by introducing a suitable coupling among adjacent, low cost, sensors that gives rise to a distributed detection or estimation more accurate than that of each single sensor, without the need for sending all the data to a fusion center.