Information society - R&D challenges and opportunities
Mário Campolargo · 2005
The transition from an Industrial society to an Information Society represents a fundamental change in the way we live, learn, work and play. Information society technologies increasingly pervade all industrial and societal activities, accelerating the globalisation of economies. Europe's industrial competitiveness, its jobs, its quality of life and the sustainability of growth depend on it being at the leading edge of the development and take-up of information society technologies. The pace of development of the technologies vital to the creation of the information society is extremely fast. Advances in information processing and communications are opening up exciting new possibilities. There is a shift from stand-alone systems to networked information and processes. Digitalisation is resulting in the convergence of information processing, communications and media. Content is of increasing significance. Leveraging on this convergence of information, communication and networking technologies the recently launched Information Society Technologies IST Programme aims to help creating an information society for all by building a global knowledge, media and computing space supporting interoperable, dependable and affordable services and products with ubiquitous and seamless access. This presentation will first refer the strategic objectives of the IST Programme highlighting its integrated architecture and will then provide the audience with an overview of the workprogramme that will serve as a basis for the future work. Given the main topic of the conference (Autonomous Distributed Systems) particular attention will be given to topics related to the distributed communications infrastructure. The audience will therefore be exposed to major results achieved in Europe on the field of Open Architectures for the provision of advanced communications services.