Brussels, 06/03/2006 (Agence Europe) - The companies involved in the technological platform ARTEMIS were in Brussels on 6 March, to present their priorities for the coming years, with a view to reinforcing the competitiveness of European industry and allowing the Union to take on a leadership role at global level in the field of technological research. ARTEMIS (Advanced Research & Technology for Embedded Intelligence and Systems), which was created in June 2004 by several European industrial groups (ABB, Daimler-Chrysler, Thales, STMicroelectronics, Ericsson, Airbus, Philips, Bosch and Nokia), with the support of the European Commission and of the Member States, will come into being in 2007 with the ambitious objective of taking the European Union down the path of success in terms of the design, integration and supply of "Embedded Systems".
The member companies will get together to invest 2.7 billion EUR in the first four years of the project (2007-2010), which will go towards research, announced Yrjö Neuvo, president of Artemis. Embedded systems are specialised industrial devices which are integrated into systems or machines to ensure their functioning. A multitude of applications exist in the world of industry for embedded systems, which are used, for example, in the automotive sector or in the (tele) communications sector. Domestic appliances or items for professional use also contain embedded systems which are, therefore, used very regularly, even on a daily basis, by consumers in everyday situations. Our key challenge is to get rid of all barriers between the sectors of application by stimulating innovation and by publishing the results of our research, to feed into experiments with new applications to be used in different sectors, stresses ARTEMIS.
European Commissioner Viviane Reding, who is in charge of the information society and media, welcomes initiatives such as ARTEMIS which, she emphasises, respond to one of the priorities of the European Commission in terms of research and development in new technologies, which are to combine, in partnership, the efforts of the public and private sectors in order to rationalise expenditure and avoid an overlap in effort, whilst targeting a common objective. "Highly effective research programmes cannot be created by isolated actions. Action at European level is necessary (...). Technological platforms are key instruments in achieving this coordination", commented the Commissioner, who added that there are three key factors in putting Europe back on the road to success: concentrating on common objectives and coordinating research; working interactively; achieving economies of scale.