Achievements

One of the widely acknowledged achievements of FORTH-ICS is the creation of FORTHnet S.A., a spin-off company founded in 1995 and quoted in the Athens Stock Exchange since 2000, a pioneer in the internet and telecommunications sector in Greece.

• HYGEIAnet: The integrated Health Telematics network of Crete. HYGEIAnet represents a systematic effort toward the design, development and deployment of advanced e-health and m-health services at various levels of the healthcare hierarchy, including primary care, pre-hospital health emergency management, and hospital care. Specifically, e-health and m-health services support the timely and effective management of patients, the synchronous and asynchronous collaboration of healthcare professionals, and the remote management of selected patients at home. (eHealth Laboratory, Start of real-life operation: 1/12/2001, leaflet about HYGEIAnet in PDF).

• Robotic Guide Systems The Computational Vision and Robotics Laboratory (CVRL) of FORTH-ICS has developed robotic tour guide systems, like TOURBOT and WEBFARE, that formed the basis for the development of interesting and often significant robots (e.g., robotic wheelchairs for people with handicaps, tour-guide robots in museums and other exhibitions, robots performing routine tasks such as cleaning and surveillance etc).

• ATLAS I single-chip ATM switch , a 10 Gb/s single-chip 16x16 ATM switch with backpressure. This 6-million-transistor 0.35-micron CMOS chip —a general-purpose building block for gigabit networking— was designed at the Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems (CARV) Laboratory of FORTH-ICS, from 1995 to 1998, and was fabricated by ST Microelectronics. It provided credit-based flow control (multilane backpressure) with 32,000 virtual channels, sub-microsecond cut-through latency, logical output queues in a shared buffer, 3 priority levels, multicasting, and load monitoring.

• ASPIDA DLX Processor. ASPIDA is an open-source RISC processor implementing the DLX integer ISA, i.e. a five pipeline stage design with 32 registers and hazard-detection logic. ASPIDA supports two possible modes of operation: the conventional synchronous approach and nano-synchronization. Nano-synchronization is a design methodology, which allows the replacement of clock signals by coordinated handshaking components, albeit using conventional synthesis tools and flows. The first fabrication run of ASPIDA was fabricated in early 2005 and post-manufacturing measurements verified the correct operation of the ASPIDA first silicon. Extensive tests over about 90 fabricated chips yielded very interesting results. Design: Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems (CARV) Laboratory of FORTH-ICS, Asynchronous Circuit and System Design. Aspida flyer in PDF.

• The Unified User Interface Development (U2ID) environment. Unified User Interface Software architecture: a novel architectural framework facilitating the development of interfaces that exhibit automatic adaptation behaviour, and best-fit dynamic interface assembly. Unified User Interface Design Method: a design method that facilitates the design of interfaces that exhibit automatic adaptation behaviour based on user and context related diversity factors. (Human Computer Interaction Laboratory)

• AVANTI Web Browser: a universally accessible web browser with a unified user interface. The AVANTI Web Browser (acting as a front-end to the AVANTI system) aims to provide accessibility and high quality interaction to all potential users. Following the Unified User Interface Design methodology (U2ID), a unified browser layer has been developed, which addresses the different abilities and skills, and diverse requirements and preferences of a wide range of users, including disabled and elderly people. Lexical and syntactic adaptability and adaptivity techniques are applied to the unified browser, in order to provide accessibility and high quality interaction to able-bodied, motor-impaired and blind users. (Human Computer Interaction Laboratory, Avanti flyer in PDF)

• I-GET: a User Interface Management System with a new programming language supporting the development of unified user interfaces. I-GET provides multi-toolkit programming, agents, and declarative control. The I-GET tool is a language-based UIMS for dialogue control implementation. It requires that interface developers write explicitly interface code in the I-GET dialogue specification language. Interactive construction facilities are not provided, since this would require a specific toolkit to be considered, an approach conflicting with one of the main objectives of the I-GET tool: openness with respect to underlying utilised toolkits. (Human Computer Interaction Laboratory, flyer about I-Get in PDF)
  
• Virtual Print (Vips). ViPs is a novel concept for Virtual Environments (VEs) introduced mainly to support orientation, navigation and way finding in VEs. Nonetheless, the ViPs concept can also be used for other purposes, such as for supporting social navigation, training and creating tutorial sessions, developing virtual tours and visualising and tracking the path of users or moving objects. Furthermore, the user-tracking and visualisation mechanism can be employed to support user-based evaluation of VEs (e.g., path analysis, re-playing user actions, providing statistics related to distance traveled or least / most visited areas and common interactions). (Human Computer Interaction Laboratory, flyer about ViPs in PDF)

• The Voyager tool for the development of dynamic, distribute and mobile user interfaces for ambient intelligence interaction devices (Human Computer Interaction Laboratory)

• UA-CHESS: a universally accessible multi-modal chess game, which can be played between two players, including people with disabilities (low-vision, blind and hand-motor impaired), either locally on the same computer, or remotely over the Internet. (Human Computer Interaction Laboratory, flyer about UA-Chess in PDF)

Semantic Web Technologies:

• Semantic Web: RDFSuite , a set of highly scalable tools used for managing RDF description bases and schemas. It includes a Validating RDF Parser (VRP), a RDF Schema Specific DataBase (RSSDB), an RDF Query Language (RQL) and an RDF View Language (RVL). (Information Systems Laboratory)

• Knowledge Dynamics: Furthermore, as part the basic research agenda of Information Systems Laboratory, novel results on belief revision with application to ontology evolution have been recently produced and published. Specifically, a complete characterization of Description Logics with respect to the ability of defining consistent revision operators has been produced, paving the way for the much-needed development of tools that support a sound ontology evolution process. (Information Systems Laboratory)

• Web Rule System: Development of a sound, well-defined theory of computationally simple rule systems with both monotonic and nonmonotonic rules, and development of first prototypes using the object oriented (DR-DEVICE) and the Prolog (DR-PROLOG). (Information Systems Laboratory)

  
  
  Cultural Informatics:

• Development of ISO/DIS 21127 (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model), core ontology for semantic interoperability of museum, archive and library information supported by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). (Information Systems Laboratory)

• Development of an ontology joining ISO/DIS 21127 with the corresponding model of the International Federation of Library Associations IFLA, the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records FRBR, supported by IFLA and ICOM. (Information Systems Laboratory)

• Development and deployment of a collection management software for the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg, Germany, followed by a bilateral framework agreement on long-term collaboration in Cultural Informatics and system development for the museum (SYNTHESIS, Information Systems Laboratory)

• Design and Development and deployment of the National Archive of Monuments of Greece, a viable running service (POLEMON, Information Systems Laboratory)