Cost 219ter

Proceedings of

Extending Horizons

16th January 2007

Conference organised by COST 219ter

Accessibility to Next Generation Networks

PROF PATRICK ROE: Thank you, John. Can you all hear me all right? Yes. Well it's a great pleasure and I'm very pleased and in fact quite excited to be here today.
             
Thank you for all coming, and one of the reasons I'm quite excited is you will have all received in your package this book today, like you, I have seen it for the first time today. And, that is one of the reasons for my excitement, in fact, you must stop me jumping up and down, I was told if I stood on the blue spot it was perfectly safe for me to do so. If you see me jumping up and down it's all right, it's safe! I'm going to be coming back to this book quite often today and in fact you will have trouble stopping me talking about it.
      
First of all I would like in the next 15 minutes to try and give you an idea, a flavour, of what COST 219ter has been and done over the last four years. Some of you have heard this presentation before, but it's a slightly different approach today, and for those of you who know nothing about COST 219 I hope after the 15 minutes that you will understand the framework of COST 219 and the COST 219ter action.
      
So, I work in Switzerland in the French part, the LEMA-EPFL in the acoustics department and that is the title of the COST 219ter action.
      
So, first of all, I will tell you what COST is in general for those of you who don't know. Then I will give background information to COST 219ter. And finally, what I call the six sides of COST 219ter. There's in fact probably many more but that's all I will be showing today.
      
What is COST, it stands for European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research.
      
It's supported by the EU RTD Framework Programme FP 6 and 7. We are very lucky to have the European Science Foundation providing the COST office in Brussels through a European Commission contract.
      
We were set up in 1971 is as inter-governmental cooperation, so it is a very old, if we like, programme of 35 years, set up 35 years ago. Currently it's been restructured into nine scientific and technical domains. Our particular action comes under information and communication technologies, ICT. That's the field that we have been put into in the new structure. You have 34 countries who belong to COST. Member states and one cooperating country, Israel. We also have the possibility to have participants from non-COST countries such as Australia, Japan, China, whatever. This is very, for an action like this, where I think the previous speaker was talking about the importance of legislation, regulation, and standards, it's very important that we have that possibility to have participants from countries also outside Europe, and outside COST.
      
The basic five principles of COST 219 are that it's initiated. Any COST action is initiated by individual scientists and it's a bottom-up approach. It's the people who are doing the research who can identify the needs and make proposals. It's very flexible, if within a COST action you suddenly realise it's a very important topic that you didn't foresee at the beginning of an action you have the possibility to set up another Working Group and work on that particular issue. It's a'la carte participation which means there's no obligation to have this country or that in a particular action it's those who want to join who can join. And, from a financial point of view, only the coordination and related expenses are covered. It's not funding actual research itself, except through short-term scientific missions which are missions that last typically between one week, and two months. So there's a small possibility but nothing like compared to framework FP research projects. And there's equality of access.
      
So, I think, I put at the top of the features of COST, the bottom-up approach. I don't think it was by chance that an action such as COST 219 some 20 years ago decided to start within the COST framework. I think it is precisely because it was a bottom-up approach that it was within COST that such an action was founded. We have today with us some of the founding members who had the vision 20 years ago that this was an area of research that had to be looked into, that it was very important nothing was going on so they identified the need, and had the vision, and they had the possibility within COST to set up this action which was future telecommunications and teleinfomatic facilities for disabled people and the elderly. It Lasted ten years, had two extensions. Within COST this is very unusual - to have an action that lasts ten years. Then it had what we call the father action which was COST 219bis which lasted five years, telecommunications: access for disabled and elderly people.
      
Finally we get to the COST 219ter action which started in 2003, and will now end in January 2008. So we have about one year to go until the end of this particular action.
      
We have 19 countries participating, plus the Trace Center and inclusive technologies from the USA, and GSA information consultants from Australia, and also Toyo University from Japan.
      
So, the aim of COST 219ter - very broadly is to ensure people with disabilities and elderly people are able to share in the benefits of next generation networks and services. And to try and fulfil this aim, I think we have already mentioned some of the areas that we are working in, research is obviously one of them, but also standards is a very important area where we try and give input to the different standardisation bodies and also listen to what they have to say. We will be hearing later from someone from ETSI. Legislation has already been talked about. This is an area we monitor very closely. Guidelines. We have traditionally written and drafted guidelines and of course, publications you have already seen me showing one publication today!

Now I get to the part of I call the six sides of COST 219, firstly there's an organisation aspect and this is a very standard chart.

What I wanted to show with this first of all the Management Committee within a COST action is the body which takes all the decisions. From an administrative point of view it's the Management Committee that takes the decisions. Within COST 219ter we have the national members which are appointed by each country underneath that on the right you will see reference groups. Some of the countries had very active national reference groups, and this is particularly the case in the UK where there's PhoneAbility, and that enables the COST to be in touch with the users on a national level and be aware of national considerations. This is not the case of all COST actions in fact. I think this is a very useful possibility that we have in COST 219ter.

Also we have an Advisory Group of disabled and elderly people. We are very grateful to have Steve Tyler representing the European Disability Forum. It's very important that we maintain those contacts.

The yellow countries are the 19 countries that are participating, and the little red flags that you can see are the 12 places where we have had meetings during the last four years. As you can see we have tested the limits right on the edge both to the west, south-west, and south-east. This is typically about three meetings a year.

I put here I asked for the statistics on our e-mail exploder in Lurgen in Belgium, this is actually not correct the figure, we have had 1200 e-mails that you can send to the exploder. Then it goes out to about 40 people, and then you have got to take into account all the individual e-mails you send and in fact the figure was closer to about 100,000. When I was typing it in I forgot one zero. So it's closer to 100,000 e-mails. It gives you some idea of how we work and interact.
      
Meetings are important. I would say a key for a lot of the work, and also between meetings is to maintain contact. Of course, it's very important to keep links with other organisations, projects, COST actions and if I just mentioned here a few of the organisations we try and maintain contact with, AAATE the INCOM committee in Brussels and all the different standardisation bodies the European Disability Forum I have also mentioned the Nordic Forum for Telecommunications, and EDeAN the European Design for e-Accessibility Network, the ASK-IT project, and COST 298 etc.
      
It's important we are aware of what's going on around us in our environment.
      
The Working Groups are where the core work of a COST action gets done.
      
First Working Group is information collation chaired by John Gill. This was really for harmonising all our output and publications and also synchronising work in standardisation, and regulation.
      
Working Group two - accessibility of emerging information society technologies chaired by Klaus Fellbaum. This looked into the kind of scenarios around describing the ambient intelligent, and it really looked at what would happen if you introduced people with disabilities into these scenarios. You can find a detailed analysis in this book in chapter four to do with ambient intelligence that was written by Costa, and Luigi.
      
Working Group three testing for accessibilities, chaired by Steve Tyler, and Anna-Liisa Salminen. They were testing for accessibility and what methodologies were they using and we discovered that not that much testing was going on and methodology was developed and tested with users within this Working Group. Again, details of this can be found in chapter six of the book.
      
Working Group four, chaired by Ilse Bierhoff looked at smart houses and home networking and this is chapter three in the book. So the results from all these working groups can be found and if you are interested in one particular subject well you have got them laid out in different chapters, so you can hopefully find clearly the subject that you are interested in.
            
I mentioned the short-term scientific missions. We had two related to the smart housing area.
      
So it means the researcher from one of the COST countries can go to another of the COST countries participating in the action. For example, one from Germany to the Netherlands and one from the Netherlands to Sweden.
      
And then we had one mission related to evaluation of accessibility in Working Group three, and a person went twice to the UK from Sweden and one from the UK to Portugal and Cyprus where the tests with users were carried out. They were carried out in the UK, Cyprus, and Portugal.
      
Cost organises workshops and conferences, apart from the conference today we have had five other workshops during the four years. The first was held in Arnhem and was looking at scenarios for 2010, another one was on network-based services for people with disabilities in Copenhagen organised with the Nordic Forum the NFTH in October 2004, and then in March 2005, one on e-accessibility legislation and policy. One workshop/conference was on the role of standardisation, where we had many people from standardisation bodies present.
      
We also had one called the "Ambient Intelligence Perspective" in Ayia Napa in Cyprus, and finally accessibility testing and evaluation which was last year in March in Seville where we were able to present some of the results from Working Group three.
      
Cost has many publications. This has always been one of the major focuses of COST 219, and COST 219bis and COST 219ter. We had the glossy booklet that came out in March 2005 entitled "Making Life Easier" edited by John Gill, maybe some of you have already seen it, 20,000 copies printed. We also had the glossy booklet "Equal Measures: Closing the Accessibility Gap" edited by Tony Shipley and John Gill, of which copies were mailed to 12,000 people..
      
And finally I get to it, the book, launched today, and I think I will go here! I won't jump up and down! And, it's not an iPhone but I am as excited as if it was one! So, if you have nothing to read by your bedside this should really help sort out that problem. So, I would like to mention you should all have received one copy of the book, but if you would like a second or even third copy there will be extra copies at the reception, so when you leave please do ask for them, for us it would be a great help to get the very efficient way for us to get them to you.
      
Finally, I think the most important asset of any COST action are its people, and, COST is an ideal platform for bringing people together who share the same passion and research interests, and it does this in a pre-competitive, multi-disciplinary environment, and on a personal level it's been an immense privilege and pleasure to work with such a distinguished group of people over the last four years. I remember John Gill saying to me, yes you, I remember these things you say! It was somewhere in Ljubljana in our meetings, and you said - you will find that any small difference that's made in the field is down to a person being in the right place at the right time. And that's what makes things change and makes things move.

I would personally like to thank everyone, all the members of COST 219ter, for being in the right place at the right time for the last four years, thank you very much.

DR JOHN GILL: Thank you very much, Professor Roe. We are going to move straight on. We will hear Professor Roe this afternoon, when he will be talking about the future. Our next speaker is Ian Pearson, who describes himself as a futurologist – an interesting occupation! – from BT. 
         

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