Research at CTIT: A bird's-eye view

Profile

CTIT is one of the primary ICT-research institutes in Europe with a research staff of almost 450 employees. For more than 15 years, CTIT plays a leading role exploring communication technologies, multimedia design and embedded systems and applying novel ICT solutions in a diversity of domains including manufacturing and logistics; healthcare and well-being; media and services. CTIT has contributed significantly to the disclosure of new ICT research fields such as security, sensor systems and interaction technologies. Through its many industrial liaisons and its vast network of related research institutes, CTIT plays a major role in a variety of social and technological innovation processes. This leading role is visible both in the high volume of externally funded research and in CTIT’s active role in (inter)national policy discussions on ICT research and innovation. Many of the new insights have led to tangible societal and business results. During the previous eight years, newly developed technologies have formed the basis for more than 55 start-up businesses.

Research themes

ICT does not just enable us to do new things; ICT shapes how we do them. This constitutive character requires a research approach that combines perspectives from technology, business models and user needs. The 28 research groups cover a broad and multidisciplinary field ranging from primarily technology-oriented towards highly application-oriented, from ICT to business engineering and behavioural sciences. This combination provides CTIT with a unique blend of scientific disciplines that stimulates the exploration of multidisciplinary topics. CTIT has bundled its research into six Strategic Research Orientations, to create focus and sufficient critical mass around specific strategic topics:

1.	Applied Science of Services for Information Society Technologies (ASSIST)

Research in service architectures and software infrastructures fostering innovative,

open and cost-effective solutions for health and other application areas.

2.	Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)

Development and application of methods and techniques to make dependable ICT
systems (commercial consumer-market systems, as well as specialized systems) reality.

3.	Wireless & Sensor Systems (WiSe)

Design and validation of new techniques for large-scale wireless communication and
sensor systems and their applications.

4.	Natural Interaction in Computer-mediated Environments (NICE)

Research and build natural intelligent interactive systems that people enjoy interacting with,
by making interactions between users and technologies as easy, efficient and engaging as possible.

5.	Integrated Security and Privacy in a Networked World (ISTRICE)

Contributing to a comprehensive framework for the engineering, the deployment and the maintenance of secure distributed systems, in which existing and new techniques are harmonized and integrated.

6.	Industrial Engineering and ICT (IE&ICT)

Analysis and design of processes in business and society, as well as their optimization, management and decision support.

Research topics, application domains, participating research groups and a selection of projects and spin-off companies per SRO are presented on the following pages. An overview of all CTIT research groups can be found at the end of this progress report.

Application domains

ICT is an important sector of economic activity in its own right; it is also the essential engine for innovation within all knowledge-intensive domains within society. Although CTIT researchers are working on a broad field of applications, the main application focus of CTIT is on a selected number of areas that are of societal and economic relevance:

Well-being and Healthcare:

Well-being and healthcare is shifting towards prevention and patient-centered care.
A Strength of CTIT is the capability to combine knowledge of technical disciplines with inputs from social and behavioural scientists. CTIT’s healthcare focus is on the creation of personalized solutions, optimization and ICT support for healthcare processes and on advanced service architectures for healthcare.

Mobility and Logistics:

Mobility of freight and individual citizens is critical to the functioning of our economy. Focus is on new and innovative communication infrastructures (such as ad-hoc wireless and sensor networks), intelligent data processing techniques and the development of models and simulations to understand the behaviour of traffic participants.

Safety and Security:

Security clearly is a multidisciplinary field that has technological, legal, regulatory and societal aspects. Security systems fuse into the environment with the goal to increase the safety in public areas. Important research topics are biometrics, information security, network security, personal security, safety-critical services, crisis detection, risk management, access control and intrusion detection.

Energy and sustainability:

CTIT increases research activities on energy and sustainability. Important topics are energy-efficiency via micro-CHP, energy pricing, optimalisation of traffic-, transport and logistics processes and environmental monitoring via sensor networks.

Education and the creative industry:

Multimedia technology and human-centered-interaction clearly require the combination of ICT research with psychological, cognitive, ergonomic, sociological and philosophical research.

Co-operation and innovation

ICT is at the heart of innovation, it is revolutionizing the way we do business and the way we live. ICT creates new services and products and thus new economic activity. It enhances the quality of life, improves our well-being, creating a fabric of new social relationships. Such innovations require collaboration beyond organizational boundaries, intensive interaction between the various players in the whole innovation chain, each with its own expertise. CTIT is perfectly well positioned to sustain its leading position as an international research and innovation institute in the dissemination and valorisation of valuable ICT results. Important instruments to realize this goal are:

3TU.NIRICT

CTIT is one of the founding fathers of the 3TU Netherlands Institute for Research on ICT (3TU.NIRICT), which bundles the ICT research and innovation activities of the three Universities of Technology in the Netherlands (Delft, Eindhoven and Twente). Joint acting forms the basis for 3TU.NIRICT which brings together over 70 research groups from the disciplines computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics and several ICT application domains. More than 1200 researchers collaborate, which makes NIRICT the most important academic research partner in the Netherlands. NIRICT’s research program consists of a Strategic Research Agenda (closely linked to the national and international research agenda’s), a Long-Term Research Agenda (3TU.Centre for Dependable ICT Systems CeDICT), and an Innovation Agenda.

Smart eXPerience living lab

Many promising research results remain in the laboratory due to difficulty in assessing the value of these technologies in a realistic setting. Therefore, in 2009 CTIT has set up the Smart eXPerience living lab (SmartXP). SmartXP connects users with core technology such that individuals can experiment with state-of-the-art technology. Their perception will guide the further development and application of the new technology. In this sophisticated living lab infrastructure, researchers from a wide range of disciplines work closely together, enabling cross-disciplinary approaches and non-traditionally application ideas. The SmartXP lab is part of the 3TU.NIRICT Smart Environments Lab infrastructure.

EIT.ICT Labs

‘Turn Europe into the global leader in ICT innovation’ is the mission for the new Knowledge and Innovation Community selected in tough competition by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). ICT Labs builds centres on five co-location - Berlin, Eindhoven, Helsinki, Paris and Stockholm - to create a world-class innovation ecosystem, turning the potential of the ‘Future Internet’ into benefits for the citizens of Europe. Peter Apers (scientific director of CTIT and director of 3TU.NIRICT) is coordinator of the ICT Labs activities in the Netherlands.

Starting in 2010, EIT.ICT Labs will connect world leading companies, globally renowned research institutes and top-ranked universities all dedicated to speeding up innovation to address the grand challenges facing our society. Committed to an efficient open innovation model, ICT Labs will generate faster transformation of ideas and ICT technologies into new products, services and businesses, boosting Europe’s future competitiveness in all sectors of society. Dutch core-partners are 3TU.NIRICT, Philips, TNO-ICT, Novay, CWI and the Embedded Systems Institute.

Smart Systems Business Accelerator:

CTIT creates about seven high-tech spin-off companies a year. Research activities of the CTIT groups have formed the basis for 61 start-up businesses, facilitating a natural flow from knowledge to products and services. The CTIT Smart Systems Business Accelerator (SSBA) is an important instrument to speed up the fast expansion of these young ICT-based ventures. Many of them received business awards and valorisation grants. In 2009, three CTIT spin-offs (SecurityMatters, Smart Signs and BloomWise) received the STW valorisation grant phase II (200.000 Euro); in the same year, VC funds have been investing in several older spin-off companies. EIT.ICT Labs will be important to facilitate the further international growth of these new ventures.