Mission Statement

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

• Encourage cross-disciplinary team-based thinking to cross-fertilise engineering and life science understanding into advanced inter-operable systems.
• Progress the theme of adaptivity beyond curiosity and basic earlier engineering concepts and theory, via the spur of naturally-occurring phenomena and self-emergent systems.
• Elaborate the themes of hierarchy, modularity, redundancy, learning capacity etc in pursuit of greater robustness and reliability against uncertainties, time-variations and fault conditions for large information systems.
• Incorporate the large body of knowledge on systems dynamics, modelling and identification/estimation into hybrid structures based on intelligent paradigms.
• Develop a Taxonomy and Strategic Roadmap to describe the state-of-the-art knowledge in the different disciplines about intelligent systems and to signpost a future for integration of deeper nature-inspired concepts into smart devices and systems. This aims to prepare for long term goals leading beyond FP6.
• Provide training and education across the relevant disciplines via workshops, symposia, Best Practice Guidelines etc.
• Foster Technology Transfer via competitive team-based feasibility Workshops on realistic benchmarking problems.
• Co-ordinate the Project with a management structure which fosters cross-disciplinary endeavours via Focus Groups, Task Forces on innovative concepts , Annual symposia etc.
• Grow a new set of teams/groups via recruitment of new partners/partners steadily over 3 years, with a target of about 100 actively participating members.
• Encourage promising young researchers in the field, spin-off ventures and SME via interchange of students and researchers using Web-based material and short Schools providing expertise transfer.
• Establish links with other scientific projects and organisations, such as EU Networks of Excellence, which are working in the generic field of intelligent systems, via Web-site data and information communication.

Further details can be found in NiSIS Annex I - "Description of Work".