AALIANCE2 Project is a Coordination Action funded in the FP7-ICT-2011.7, which focuses on the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions based on advanced ICT technologies for ageing and wellbeing of elderly people in Europe. One of its main objectives is to build consensus upon research priorities in the AAL roadmap and Strategic Research Agenda for the upcoming decades.

This first workshop will focus on the functional areas associable to the AAL application domains (AAL4Person, AAL in the Community) and the relative activities/application scenarios. The objectives are to refine, classify, organize and improve the contents of the first AALIANCE Roadmap, published in March 2010.

Suitable persons for the AALIANCE2 Workshop are experts in the AAL domain, which have experience in some of the following tasks: designing, developing, producing, experimenting, and assessing AAL technologies or studying and defining the main aspects of AAL field. Experts should be AAL technology developers and researchers, ICT service providers and technology suppliers, policy‐makers, standardization organizations, health and care service organizations, caregivers, etc.

We would like to invite you (or some of your staff) to participate in this Workshop as Experts in the field of the AAL or responsible in Projects related to AAL and Ageing Well. The participation in the Workshop is limited to a small number of experts, therefore we ask you to confirm your participation as soon as possible, since the experts will be accepted based on the “who first confirms, first participates in”.
We gently ask you to extend this invitation also to all partners of the AAL project in which you are involved in.

If you accept to participate in the Workshop, you will receive guidelines to participate in the event and contents of the previous AALIANCE Roadmap.

This conference will take place on July 11-13, 2012; with the Pre-Conference July 09-10, 2012. Place to be is the University of Linz, Altenbergerstraße 69, 4040 Linz, Austria.

The Web is rapidly evolving and converging with other media and technologies. Today the Web is on mobile devices, televisions, self-service terminals, and computer desktops. It is continuing to be increasingly ubiquitous and indistinguishable from other interfaces and an ambient part of our daily lives, particularly with the advancement of “the cloud.

Given the highly flexible and adaptable nature of the Web, its growth provides a critical potential of increased inclusion and equality for people with disabilities. However, it also raises new challenges for technology, software, and content developers in making their products and services accessible. In particular, the specific accessibility challenges and optimal ways for providing accessibility support are not well understood in all contexts, making it difficult to effectively design and develop accessible mainstream technologies.

This Special Thematic Session (STS) invites contribution and discussion on experiences with the day-to-day challenges that developers, evaluators, managers, policy makers, and other practitioners observe in implementing web accessibility in advanced technologies.

More specifically, this STS invites contributions analyzing good practices, use-cases, end-user requirements, promising accessibility features and solutions, and challenges in applying web accessibility in specific contexts such as (but not limited to):

• HTML5 and rich internet applications;
• Websites and applications for mobiles;
• Digital/IP TV and audio-visual media.

This STS also welcomes research, surveys, and discussion of future trends and directions including (but not limited to) web telephony and real-time communication, self-service terminals (e.g. information kiosks, ticketing machines, ATM, etc.), online games, social networks, virtual and augmented environments, 3D Web, multi-touch, and the use of cloud technology for personalized accessible interfaces.

Acknowledgements: This Special Thematic Session (STS) is jointly organized by the EC-funded WAI-ACT, AEGIS, and ACCESSIBLE projects.

Chairs:

• Shadi Abou-Zahra, W3C/WAI
• Karel Van Isacker, EPR/MCA
• Konstantinos Votis, CERTH/ITI

More information at http://www.icchp.org/node/363.

The event will bring together both end-users (people with disabilities) as well as platform and application accessibility developers, representative organisations, the Assistive Technology industry, and policy makers.

Since 2008, the AEGIS consortium (comprising companies such as Vodafone Foundation, Research in Motion, Oracle, and research groups from Cambridge University and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, etc.) has been developing an Open Accessibility Framework – comprising open accessibility interfaces, user interface components, developer tools, end-user applications and prototype accessibility solutions for desktops, rich Internet applications and mobile devices.

The workshop on 28 November will focus on the realisations of the AEGIS (Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards) project and provide attendees the opportunity to try out all outcomes of the project. The demonstrated products offer barrier-free access to desktop, mobile and web applications, are open source based and will be freely available.

The conference on 29-30 November will gather a wide array of experts and users in the area of Assistive Technology to discuss scientific and policy developments in accessible technology; showcase relevant projects and initiatives in the area of assistive technology.

The event is free of charge, and registration is open for everyone, but space is limited. For that reason, registrations will remain pending until you receive a confirmation.

Both events take place at the Diamant Conference and Business Centre, Boulevard A. Reyerslaan 80, 1030 Brussels.

This event comes ahead of the European Day of People with Disabilities that is marked by the European Commission via a policy conference (1-2 December 2011), in close cooperation with the European Disability Forum (EDF).

• new developments of ICT in public inclusive services
• models of e-inclusion of digitally excluded Europeans, introducing them to wider social and cultural life, and increasing career opportunities on today’s digitally driven market
• effective models of independent living and security of the elderly, based on innovative and economically feasible e-care and e-health solutions
• overview of the most innovative national and regional e-inclusion programmes, and initiatives, as tools for the implementation of the Digital Agenda for Europe
• importance of the e-Inclusion policy to the delivery of the Digital Agenda for Europe.

The conference ended up with the adoption of a document stressing the priority actions that should be taken by the EU in the immediate future to improve digital literacy and inclusion of all EU citizens – “Gdansk Roadmap for Digital Inclusion”.
To read more and view the presentations, visit the conference website.

Keynotes speeches will be given by:
Vittorio Colao, CEO, Vodafone Group
Anne-Sophie Parent, Secretary General, AGE Platform Europe
Rodolfo Cattani, Secretary & Chair of the ICT Expert Group, European Disability Forum

The event will be followed by a reception & buffet dinner

RSVP by 29 November smartawards2011@vodafone.com.

The event will be held in English with translation into sign language.

This workshop will explore the applicability of different modalities of interaction (like speech, gesture, haptic interface, and so on) and investigate ways to develop intelligent adaptation systems that meet accessibility criteria and can personalize interfaces according to the range of abilities of the user. A particular focus will be given on interoperability though the adherence to standards for Accessibility such as WAI-ARIA and ISO standards.
The call for papers is now open.
More detail and a tentative program can be found here.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

ICCHP focuses on eInclusion for people with disabilities and older adults enabling a more independent life, participation and inclusion and improved services and support. By its nature, ICCHP has a wide area of topics and a future oriented mission:
* Full and short to be published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science
* Special track on Universal Learning Design (ULD), organised by the Support Centre for Students with Special Needs, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic
* Organise your own Special Thematic Session (STS)
* Workshops, tutorials and seminars
* Meetings, presentations, posters and exhibition
* Young Researchers Consortium (YRC)
* ICCHP Summer University 2012: Math, Science and Statistics for Visually Impaired Users
* Project:Possibility – Programming Competition for eAccessibility Solutions
* The Austrian Computer Society’s ICCHP Roland Wagner Award in the range of 3000€

And much more! Please refer to the below Call for Papers (pdf and rtf version) and visit http://www.icchp.org.

Come and get involved and distribute the call widely!

September 7, 2011

OASIS (www.oasis-project.eu), a research project partially funded by the European Commission under FP7, promises to revolutionize the interoperability, quality, breadth and usability of services addressed to older persons through ontologies and semantic web services.

First results will be presented at the 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011) in Bonn, Germany (October 23 – 27, 2011).

How to support holistically the independent living and mobility of the older citizens across Europe? How to connect services for the elderly in an one-stop-shop fashion and interrelate and integrate those services?

OASIS (Open architecture for Accessible Services Integration and Standardisation), a research project partially funded by the European Commission (FP7-ICT, GA# 215754), has developed an open and innovative reference architecture, based upon ontologies and semantic web services. This architecture enables plug & play and cost effective interoperability, seamless connectivity and sharing of content between existing and newly developed services in all domains required for the independent living of older people and for the enhancement of their Quality of Life.

The project addresses the issue of direct re-usability of information across heterogeneous services and devices through the common understanding and sharing of contextual information.

The OASIS platform allows aggregation of different services which offers the unique benefit of enhancing each of the services through a synergic exchange of information. In consequence, each application can adapt to the specific needs of the user

By fostering interoperability, standardization and organizational / business arrangements based on cooperative and aggregating models, OASIS addresses some of the main weaknesses in this area. These include fragmentation and duplication, poor cooperation among the key players of the value chain and lack of sustainable business models. “By these means, OASIS aims to contribute to the sustainability and efficiency of social and health care systems” says Project Coordinator Silvio Bonfiglio.

OASIS will moreover boost and improve the competitiveness of the markets for innovative products and services, responding to the ageing challenge at both EU and global level, thus creating new opportunities for businesses.

The research work carried out by the OASIS Project in the field of ontologies and semantic web services will be discussed during the half-day OASIS Symposium (October 25, 2011:14:00-18:00), co-located with the 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011) in Bonn, Germany ( October 23 – 27, 2011).

Press is invited to attend the Symposium.

Contact: Dagmar Roeller – Email: DRoeller@polisnetwork.eu

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OASIS Symposium at the ISWC 2011: Hyper-Ontologies and Modularity for Semantic Interoperability

The aim of the OASIS Symposium is to serve as a forum to exchange ideas with regard to the realization of a semantic interoperability of services.

The common vision of the Semantic Web is the achievement of seamless and transparent interoperability of services across diverse providers by making the meaningful content of those services openly accessible. For content to become ‘meaningful’ it must be related to more general information schemes for which some semantics has already been provided. Such information schemes range from tag collections, which impose an indirect semantics by means of induced similarity across tagged entities to formal ontologies, which explicity represent class-subclass relationships, the attributes of such classes as well as additional information that may be known about combinations of such classes and their instances. Whereas the semantic information that is explicitly maintained in ontologies might appear ideal for realizing the Semantic Web vision, substantial problems still render this goal difficult in practice. The symposium will address these problem areas.

More specifically OASIS addresses:

(i) the inherent complexity of constructing the high quality formal specifications necessary for trustworthy reasoning and (ii) the tendency for many formal specifications to emerge with little overlap in their coverage, modeling styles and intended semantics.

The solutions being explored involve: the replacement of large-scale ontologies by small-scale, application-specific ontologies maintained by those who know their data best, the system developers; automatic and semi-automatic support tools for allowing system developers to flexibly relate their data with re-usable ontologies in their domains of application; and the automatic generation of code supporting seamless data transfer across and within applications. The resulting framework relies on the well supported inter-linking of heterogeneous ‘ontological modules’, which we term a hyper-ontology.

The symposium will present results achieved to date and – through the contribution of highly qualified speakers, external to the OASIS Consortium – will raise issues in the formal foundations and guidelines for future hyper-ontology work and discuss opportunities for new standardization initiatives in the area of hyperontology-driven interoperability.

Specific attention will be devoted to interoperability spanning complex services in the areas of Independent Living, Autonomous and Smart Homes and Workplaces and to the provision of cross-domain networked ontologies, a goal which is itself a substantial research challenge.

Relevant topics that will be raised during the OASIS Symposium presented by renowned experts both internal and external to the OASIS Consortium, include:

• Modular Ontology Design
• Reasoning over content from multiple sources
• Query processing over multiple linked datasets
• Creating applications drawing on multiple data sources
• Open Ontology Repositories
• Information and design quality of ontologies
• Semantic Web Services and support tools

The program is completed by a Round Table discussion titled “Interoperability, Applications and Hyper-ontologies: the way forward”.

You can sign up for the OASIS Symposium when registering for the ISWC.

For further information about the OASIS Symposium, please contact info@oasis-project.eu or :

John Bateman – Chair of the Symposium Organizing Committee

E-mail: bateman@uni-bremen.de

Silvio Bonfiglio – OASIS Project Coordinator

Email: Silvio.Bonfiglio@philips.com

Evangelos Bekiaris – OASIS Project Technical Manager

E-mail: abek@certh.gr

For further information about the OASIS Project, please visit the web site www.oasis-project.eu