Projects Overview

Green Star Network 

The goal of the GreenStar Network Project is to initiate a Canadian consortium of industry, universities and government agencies with the common goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions arising from information & communication technology (ICT) services. The expected result is the creation of tools, protocols, procedures, use cases for a growing network of ICT service providers that offers customers the lowest price and greenest services. The project is innovative because it focuses on the relationship between networks and green datacenters in order to provide Green ICT services. Canada and Canadians will benefit by a continued growth of ICT with significantly reduced carbon footprint and an international leadership role in Green ICT. Information & Communication Technology (ICT) is increasingly being provided by datacenters as a service, including evolving forms such cloud, grid, and utility computing, storage, and networking. The urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will affect both the providers and customers of ICT services. Carbon1 emissions resulting from service implementation will affect service providers' costs -- as a result carbon-dependent energy costs, as well as legislative contexts such as cap-&-trade or carbon tax. Customers will balance environmental impact against price and service qualities. Consequently, the ICT service marketplace is about to dramatically change. The key enabler of carbon-driven change in the ICT service marketplace will be the service providers' calculation, documentation and exchange of trusted carbon measurements at the granularity of individual services. This will create a level playing field in the ICT service market,and will leverage modern virtualization techniques to create networks of ICT service providers in which dynamic service supply chains will provide customers the lowest cost and greenest services. The GSN Project will develop a practical carbon footprint exchange standard for ICT services, and from this will build a growing network – the GreenStar Network – of carbon-centric ICT service providers. The GreenStar Network will be applied to two Green ICT service provision scenarios: (1) Creation & sale of carbon credits based on utilization of a green data center; and (2) development of management & technical policies that leverage virtualization mobility to facilitate use of renewable energy – e.g. solar & wind – within the GreenStar Network. GSN Project deliverables are intended for use long after completion of the GSN Project. The tools & techniques used in the two scenarios will be made available to industry & academia as open source. The GreenStar Network will continue to grow, along with an international GreenStar Consortium – a Virtual Organization – of Green ICT service providers large & small, to provide an authentic and economically viable network of services that offers customers the freedom to choose green services meeting their needs, budgets, and values. The GSN Project will be a cornerstone for continued innovation and Canadian leadership in Green ICT.

PANLAB II  - Implementation of Panlab I Project (FP7)

In order to assure the leading role of Europe in the area of Telecommunications, the European commission renewed its support to the PANLAB project as part of FIRE initiative (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) of the 7th European Frame Progamme (FP7). Its core mission is the implementation of the PANLAB Laboratory, which is a federation of testbeds allowing the test and the evaluation of concepts of services, technologies, solutions systems and of business models, to minimize risks related to their introduction as commercial products. The Panlab project will bring the necessary support to the actors of the telecommunications milieu to make easier the transition of their industry based on facilities and connection, towards an industry of services and applications. In this context, the participation of researchers of Quebec in the Laboratory PANLAB constitutes an opportunity for Quebec to be in the forefront international effort in the field of ICT, notably in what related to the development of technologies for resource and network virtualisation and of orchestration, as well as collaborative environments in telepresence. This participation will benefit an expertise which will make easier the deployment of the Synchromedia platform, both at the Quebec territory and Canada. It is worth to mention that Synchromedia team as a partner of Panlab II has been strengthen with two pioneers in the field of network virtualisation: Inocybe Inc. and CRC.

ICIOS: MDEIE Project with IMADOC, Rennes

An MDEIE (Quebec's Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export Trade) funding was recently awarded to Prof. Cheriet as Project Leader of SynchroMedia Consortium, under a unified international research initiative.

This project deals with the editing and understanding of online handwriting collaborative annotations. The aim of this research is to reproduce the pen and paper metaphor with the augmented functionalities provided by electronics. In recent years, there has been some progress and novelties might be noted in online handwriting acquisition devices, from the smaller ones (smartphones) to the larger ones (whiteboards), and also in interactive pen displays. These new devices have required the design of new human-computer interfaces, as well as dedicated recognition systems. The objective of this collaborative research program is to develop multi-stage architectures, new recognizers, linguistic post-processing, and user adaptation in order to improve the performance of online handwriting recognition systems. For training and testing such systems, databases available now (Unipen, ICROW-2003, SamPDA, Hands-x from TUAT, IRONOFF, IAM On-Line) will be used. Artificial data can also be generated by simulators. For example, virtual offline characters synthesized from online characters or writer-dependent online handwriting can be generated. Moreover, the new idea of online construction and understanding of composite documents and drawings has emerged. Development of the offline approach (lazy learning) and the online approach (eager learning) is still ongoing. But the full automatic understanding of composite structured online input using a pen-based interface is still an open problem and a challenge. The replacement of the classic keyboard and mouse devices by pen interfaces for many applications is still in its infancy, but it seems reasonable to assume that the move towards mobile and pervasive computing and communication devices will be a major success. Clearly, a great deal of research is still needed, which will be the aim of this collaboration project.

PANLAB I - Pan European Laboratory for Next Generation Networks and Services (FP6)

The Synchomedia consortium is a partner in the European project entitled PANLAB 1 (2006-2008). This is a specific research project that is part of a larger set of European activities: The PANLAB (Pan European Laboratory) for Next Generation Networks and Services research project. This research project is part of the CELTIC (EUREKA ICT cluster for end-to-end telecommunications systems), which in turn is part of the SIXTH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME (PF6). The PANLAB consortium includes ten (10) well-established high-tech European companies and a university, namely, Eurescom, Alcatel, Thomson, Nokia, Telefonica, France Telecom, Italtel, DIMES Association, Fraunhofer/Focus, RAD and École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS).

The PANLAB project aims at supporting European leading role in the field of telecommunications. The development of PANLAB consisted in three stages which will stretch over a 10 year program: (a) the development of a common vision of telecommunications of the future; (b) the definition of a virtual laboratory, and (c) the commercial establishment of PANLAB. Organized around a group of experts, PANLAB works have to define a common technological vision for ICT and for PANLAB, which will act as technological roadmap and as foundation for the development of a global strategic Plan for communications in Europe. PANLAB will have to allow the use, the test and the evaluation of concepts of services, technologies, solutions systems and of business models, and to minimize risks related to their introduction as commercial products. Results obtained by PANLAB represent an important step in the establishment of a Pan European collaborative network. This network will bring the necessary support to the actors of the telecommunications milieu to make easier the transition of their industry based on facilities and connection, towards an industry of services and applications. In this context, the participation of researchers of Quebec in the Laboratory PANLAB constitutes an opportunity for Quebec to be in the forefront international effort in the field of telecommunications, for development of technologies and collaborative work environments. This participation will benefit an expertise which will make easier the deployment of the Synchromedia platform, both at the Quebec territory and Canada.

ENIT Project AUF (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie)

An AUF funding was awarded to Prof. Cheriet as Project Leader of SynchroMedia Consortium, under a unified international research initiative.

In the same line, we joined a Francophone effort supported by AUF to support eLearning or distance learning and collaborative research. Three partners are involved: ENIT from Tunis, University of Paris 5, and SynchroMedia. We contribute to this initiative with our own SynchroMedia platform and solution, including the integration of intelligent interfaces (collaborative annotation and graphical recognition and understanding). Thus, this budget and that of the current application do not overlap.

Canadian Foundation for Innovation Grant (CFI)

A CFI grant was awarded to Prof. Cheriet as Project Leader of SynchroMedia Consortium, under a unified international research initiative.

SynchroMedia is a pan-Canadian collaborative effort which is active in the emerging field of IST technologies, and, more specifically, in Intelligent Distributed Cooperative Environments in Telepresence, which constitutes the timely Canadian high priority of increasing knowledge advances and productivity in various critical sectors, including Intelligent Interfaces (handwritten annotations, image enhancement, visualization, indexing, and retrieval), Intelligent Cooperative Systems (distributed knowledge mining and learning) for various applications: eHealth, eDiagnostics, eLearning, eDesign, etc.

The aim of SynchroMedia’s research program is to build a sustainable collaborative research and work environment, by means of an advanced network architecture based on the P2P computing paradigm, the integration of various perceptual modes of information, which enables remote access and the sharing of objects in a synchronous/asynchronous manner between geographically dispersed team members. Recently, SynchroMedia acquired some infrastructure for CAN $3.7 million, which was granted by the CFI. This research infrastructure is currently shared by the University of Quebec network, Concordia University, and Waterloo University via RISQ (the Quebec POP) and CA*net4. Currently, SynchroMedia is interested in benchmarking with similar foreign platforms. Furthermore, the SynchroMedia consortium is a partner in the European project, PanLab. This is a specific research project that is part of a larger set of European activities: the PanLab (Pan European Laboratory) for Next Generation Networks and Services research project. This research project is part of the CELTIC (EUREKA ICT cluster for end-to-end telecommunications systems), which in turn is part of the Sixth Framework Programme (PF6). We have since been invited to participate as a partner in the implementation of the PanLab project, PII, recently funded by FP7.