LEVERAGE News 1

LEVERAGE
LEarn from Video Extensive Real Atm Gigabit Experiment

LEVERAGE News No 1, September 1996

Welcome | Pedagogical | Technophile | InterACTS | Acronym key

Co-ordinator's column
Patrice Le Moing, LEVERAGE Project Manager from CAP GEMINI TELECOM FRANCE in Rennes, puts LEVERAGE in context.

LEVERAGE: why?
In a society far more based on the production, transfer and sharing of knowledge than on the trade of goods, access to theoretical and practical knowledge must necessarily play a major role.¹
LEVERAGE: what is it?
LEVERAGE is a collaborative research project, partially funded by the European Commission's DG XIII Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS) programme which brings together a multi-disciplinary team of academics and industrialists from twelve organisations across Europe spanning six countries and many different cultures.²
LEVERAGE seeks to exploit the tremendous potential offered by combining the networking and data-processing facilities now available. History has shown that inventors tend to be rather bad at forecasting the real use of their discoveries: when first introduced in France, the telephone was presented as a tool for people to listen to plays and concerts from home! The time has come for large-scale experiments to put these new technologies to the test in real situations with real end users. Such trials will eventually pave the way towards uptake of the results by relevant markets.
Over a three-year period from January 1996 LEVERAGE will develop, implement and field trial a multimedia broadband network infrastructure to support collaborative, task-based foreign language learning between students in Cambridge, Paris and Madrid. From a business perspective as well as from a social point of view there is no doubt that language learning is an essential key to the transfer and sharing of knowledge. The rapid expansion in language learning worldwide coupled with the need and demand for more flexible modes of learning has proved language learning to be extremely demanding technologically and hence an ideal area for fruitful trials.
LEVERAGE: Where are we now?
Following preliminary meetings and work sessions which allowed partners from different cultures and technical backgrounds to find a common language for efficient collaboration, LEVERAGE is now feeling the enthusiasm which comes with the completion of a first full set of specifications.
The first in a series of three cumulative trials will take place at the beginning of next year on the University of Cambridge site. In the meantime the LEVERAGE team will sweat through many preparatory tests and tuning sessions. Building an integration plan for a project combining: optical networking, ATM switching, video-conferencing, video retrieval, audio retrieval, Web-like applications and more is a daunting challenge but, we hope, a rewarding one!
We look forward to telling you about the results of the first trial in the next issue of LEVERAGE NEWS.
LEVERAGE: to be continued . . .
¹ Commission of the European Communities, Growth, compet-itiveness, employment: the challenges and ways forward into the 21st century. White Paper: 133 (Brussels, 1993).
² Organisations involved in the LEVERAGE project