Towards the sustainable use of Europe’s forests: a centre for European forest science! – Some missing catalytic elements?

The Symposium, “Towards the sustainable use of Europe’s forests”, with sub-title “Forest ecosystem and landscape research: scientific challenges and opportunities” lists three fundamental substantive areas of research that are involved: Forest management and practices, Ecosystem processes and functional ecology, and Environmental economics and sociology. This paper argues that there are essential catalytic elements missing! Without these elements there is great danger that the aimed-for world leadership in the forest sciences will not materialize. What are the missing elements? All the sciences, and in particular biology, environmental sciences, sociology, economics, and forestry have evolved so that they include good scientific methodology. Good methodology is imperative in both the design and analysis of research studies, the management of research data, and in the interpretation of research finding. The methodological disciplines of Statistics, Modelling and Informatics (“SMI”) are crucial elements in a proposed Centre of European Forest Science, and the full involvement of professionals in these methodological disciplines is needed if the research of the Centre is to be world-class. Distributed Virtual Institute (DVI) for Statistics, Modelling and Informatics in Forestry and the Environment (SMIFE) is a consortium with the aim of providing world-class methodological support and collaboration to European research in the areas of Forestry and the Environment. It is suggested that DVI: SMIFE should be a formal partner in the proposed Centre for European Forest Science.

An architectural approach to autonomics and self-management of automotive embedded electronic systems

Embedded electronic systems in vehicles are of rapidly increasing commercial importance for the automotive industry. While current vehicular embedded systems are extremely limited and static, a more dynamic configurable system would greatly simplify the integration work and increase quality of vehicular systems. This brings in features like separation of concerns, customised software configuration for individual vehicles, seamless connectivity, and plug-and-play capability. Furthermore, such a system can also contribute to increased dependability and resource optimization due to its inherent ability to adjust itself dynamically to changes in software, hardware resources, and environment condition. This paper describes the architectural approach to achieving the goals of dynamically self-configuring automotive embedded electronic systems by the EU research project DySCAS. The architecture solution outlined in this paper captures the application and operational contexts, expected features, middleware services, functions and behaviours, as well as the basic mechanisms and technologies. The paper also covers the architecture conceptualization by presenting the rationale, concerning the architecture structuring, control principles, and deployment concept. In this paper, we also present the adopted architecture V&V strategy and discuss some open issues in regards to the industrial acceptance.