Project Summary

NiSIS is a European Project under the Co-ordinated Action (CA) scheme with the following overall mission aims:

• to co-ordinate multi-disciplinary studies and research endeavours into the development and utilisation of intelligent paradigms in advanced information systems design.
• to extend investigations into emerging new areas inspired by nature, both at biological (i.e. micro) and behavioural (i.e. macro) levels for visionary concepts of information processing and architectures.

The Co-ordination action will comprise four parts aiming to interconnect different disciplines and activities in an effective scheme:

1. The core of the project is a set of three Focus Groups which are to deliver the scientific and technological contributions of the programme. There are Focus Groups on: Nature-inspired Data Technology, Nature-inspired Networks, and Nature-inspired Systems Modelling, Optimisation and Control.
2. Technology Transfer will take results from the 3 Focus Groups in terms of technological concepts and algorithms, but also contribute challenges via Competitive Workshops concentrating on benchmarking situations taken from real-life relating to IST situations. Training and Education will give added-value in terms of cross-disciplinary instruction and motivation etc. for an upcoming generation of young researchers. Each of these activities will be present proactively in NiSIS as well as open to the wider community.
3. The overall integration of the Project will be overseen by an ITB (Integrated Technology Board), with participants from all of the above groups and committees, thus providing both “pulling” technology from the life sciences and “driving” the technology into IST via technical co-ordination of the project and a comprehensively designed Roadmap.
4. The co-ordination of NiSIS will be achieved via the management component provided by the ELITE Foundation. Apart from the overall co-ordination, assessment of the Project and project activities supervision, the Co-ordinator will seek collaboration between the participating multidisciplinary Partners as well as new potential partners enhancing the research opportunities of NiSIS. The Service Centre of NiSIS will support all the activities and will also develop and administrate a dedicated web-site as part of an information infrastructure for all interested institutions.