European Strategic Programme on Research in Information Technology

Last updated January 16, 2024

European Strategic Programme on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT) was a series of integrated programmes of information technology research and development projects and industrial technology transfer measures. It was a European Union initiative managed by the Directorate General for Industry (DG III) of the European Commission.

Programmes

Five ESPRIT programmes (ESPRIT 0 to ESPRIT 4) ran consecutively from 1983 to 1998. ESPRIT 4 was succeeded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme in 1999.

Projects

Some of the projects and products supported by ESPRIT were:

BBC Domesday Project, a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC with some funding from the European Commission's ESPRIT programme, to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th-century census of England. It is frequently cited as an example of digital obsolescence on account of the physical medium used for data storage.
CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL) is a software library that aims to provide easy access to efficient and reliable algorithms in computational geometry. While primarily written in C++, Python bindings are also available. The original funding for the project came from the ESPRIT project.
Eurocoop & Eurocode: ESPRIT III projects to develop systems for supporting distributed collaborative working.
Open Document Architecture, a free and open international standard document file format maintained by the ITU-T to replace all proprietary document file formats. In 1985 ESPRIT financed a pilot implementation of the ODA concept, involving, among others, Bull corporation, Olivetti, ICL and Siemens AG.
Paradise: A sub-project of the ESPRIT I project, COSINE^[1] which established a pan-European computer-based network infrastructure that enabled research workers to communicate with each other using OSI. Paradise implemented a distributed X.500 directory across the academic community.
Password: Part of the ESPRIT III VALUE project,^[2] developed secure applications based on the X.509 standard for use in the academic community.
ProCoS I Project (1989–1991), ProCoS II Project (1992–1995), and ProCoS-WG Working Group (1994–1997) on Provably Correct Systems, under ESPRIT II.^[3]
REDO Project (1989–1992) on software maintenance, under ESPRIT II.^[4]
RAISE, Rigorous Approach to Industrial Software Engineering, was developed as part of the European ESPRIT II LaCoS project in the 1990s, led by Dines Bjørner.
REMORA methodology is an event-driven approach for designing information systems, developed by Colette Rolland. This methodology integrates behavioral and temporal aspects with concepts for modelling the structural aspects of an information system. In the ESPRIT I project TODOS, which has led to the development of an integrated environment for the design of office information systems (OISs),
SAMPA: The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script originally developed in the late 1980s.
SCOPES: The Systematic Concurrent design of Products, Equipments and Control Systems project was a 3-year project launched in July, 1992, with the aim of specifying integrated computer-aided (CAD) tools for design and control of flexible assembly lines.
SIP (Advanced Algorithms and Architectures for Speech and Image Processing), a partnership between Thomson-CSF, AEG, CSELT and ENSPS (ESPRIT P26), to develop the algorithmic and architectural techniques required for recognizing and understanding spoken or visual signals and to demonstrate these techniques in suitable applications.^[5]
StatLog: "ESPRIT project 5170. Comparative testing and evaluation of statistical and logical learning algorithms on large-scale applications to classification, prediction and control"^[6]
SUNDIAL (Speech UNderstanding DIALgue)^[7] started in September 1988 with Logica Ltd. as prime contractor, together with Erlangen University, CSELT, Daimler-Benz, Capgemini, Politecnico di Torino. Followed the Esprit P.26 to implement and evaluate dialogue systems to be used in telephone industry.^[8] The final results were 4 prototypes in 4 languages, involving speech and understanding technologies, and some criteria for evaluation were also reported.^[9]
Web for Schools, an ESPRIT IV project that introduced the World Wide Web in secondary schools in Europe. Teachers created more than 70 international collaborative educational projects that resulted in an exponential growth of teacher communities and educational activities using the World Wide Web
AGENT: A project led by IGN-France aiming at developing an operational automated map generalisation software based on multi-agent system paradigm.

Related Research Articles

The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for six European languages by the EEC ESPRIT information technology research and development program. As many symbols as possible have been taken over from the IPA; where this is not possible, other signs that are available are used, e.g. [@] for schwa, [2] for the vowel sound found in French deux, and [9] for the vowel sound found in French neuf.

Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech to text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science, linguistics and computer engineering fields. The reverse process is speech synthesis.

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition.

Computer engineering is a branch of computer science and electronic engineering that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and software. Computer engineering is referred to as computer science and engineering at some universities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theoretical computer science</span> Subfield of computer science and mathematics

Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, formal language theory, the lambda calculus and type theory.

Logica plc was a multinational IT and management consultancy company headquartered in London and later Reading, United Kingdom.

CIMOSA, standing for "Computer Integrated Manufacturing Open System Architecture", is an enterprise modeling framework, which aims to support the enterprise integration of machines, computers and people. The framework is based on the system life cycle concept, and offers a modelling language, methodology and supporting technology to support these goals.

Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) is the manufacturing approach of using computers to control the entire production process. This integration allows individual processes to exchange information with each part. Manufacturing can be faster and less error-prone by the integration of computers. Typically CIM relies on closed-loop control processes based on real-time input from sensors. It is also known as flexible design and manufacturing.

ARPABET is a set of phonetic transcription codes developed by Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a part of their Speech Understanding Research project in the 1970s. It represents phonemes and allophones of General American English with distinct sequences of ASCII characters. Two systems, one representing each segment with one character and the other with one or two (case-insensitive), were devised, the latter being far more widely adopted.

The Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL) is an open source software library of computational geometry algorithms. While primarily written in C++, Scilab bindings and bindings generated with SWIG are also available.

A spoken dialog system (SDS) is a computer system able to converse with a human with voice. It has two essential components that do not exist in a written text dialog system: a speech recognizer and a text-to-speech module. It can be further distinguished from command and control speech systems that can respond to requests but do not attempt to maintain continuity over time.

James G. "Jim" Nell is an American engineer. He was the principal investigator of the Manufacturing Enterprise Integration Project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and is known for his work on enterprise integration.

MovAlyzeR is a software package for handwriting movement analysis for research and professional applications. Handwriting movements are recorded using a digitizing tablet connected to a computer. MovAlyzeR is used in many different fields ranging from research in kinesiology, psychology, education, geriatrics, neurology, psychiatry, occupational therapy, forensic document examination or questioned document examination, computer science, to educational demonstrations or student projects in these fields.

Loquendo is an Italian multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Torino, Italy, that provides speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker verification and identification applications. Loquendo, which was founded in 2001 under the Telecom Italia Lab, also had offices in United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, and the United States.

Nexor Limited is a privately held company based in Nottingham, providing products and services to safeguard government, defence and critical national infrastructure computer systems. It was originally known as X-Tel Services Limited.

Telecom Italia Lab S.p.A. is an Italian research center for telecommunication based in Torino, the biggest in Italy and one of the most important in Europe.

Alberto Ciaramella is an Italian computer engineer and scientist. He is notable for extensive pioneering contributions in the field of speech technologies and applied natural language processing, most of them at CSELT and Loquendo, with the amount of 40 papers and four patents.

RIPAC was a VLSI single-chip microprocessor designed for automatic recognition of the connected speech, one of the first of this use.

References

↑ "COSINE". Cordis. Retrieved 24 December 2012.
↑ "EC Value Programme".
↑ Hinchey, M. G.; Bowen, J. P.; Olderog, E.-R., eds. (2017). Provably Correct Systems. NASA Monographs in Systems and Software Engineering. Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-48628-4. ISBN 978-3-319-48627-7. S2CID 7091220.
↑ van Zuylen, H. J., ed. (1993). The Redo Compendium: Reverse Engineering for Software Maintenance. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-93607-3.
↑ Pirani, Giancarlo, ed. (1990). Advanced algorithms and architectures for speech understanding. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 9783540534020.
↑ "Machine Learning, Neural and Statistical Classification", Editors: D. Michie, D.J. Spiegelhalter, C.C. Taylor February 17, 1994 page 4, footnote 2, retrieved 12/12/2015 "The above book (originally published in 1994 by Ellis Horwood) is now out of print. The copyright now resides with the editors who have decided to make the material freely available on the web." http://www1.maths.leeds.ac.uk/~charles/statlog/
↑ "SUNDIAL Project".
↑ Peckham, Jeremy. "Speech Understanding and Dialogue over the telephone: an overview of the ESPRIT SUNDIAL project." HLT. 1991.
↑ Alberto Ciaramella (1993): Prototype performance evaluation report. Sundial workpackage 8000 Final Report., CSELT TECHNICAL REPORTS 22 (1994): 241–241.

External links

ESPRIT home page

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[1] "COSINE". Cordis. Retrieved 24 December 2012.

[2] "EC Value Programme".

[3] Hinchey, M. G.; Bowen, J. P.; Olderog, E.-R., eds. (2017). Provably Correct Systems. NASA Monographs in Systems and Software Engineering. Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-48628-4. ISBN 978-3-319-48627-7. S2CID 7091220.

[4] van Zuylen, H. J., ed. (1993). The Redo Compendium: Reverse Engineering for Software Maintenance. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-93607-3.

[5] Pirani, Giancarlo, ed. (1990). Advanced algorithms and architectures for speech understanding. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 9783540534020.

[6] "Machine Learning, Neural and Statistical Classification", Editors: D. Michie, D.J. Spiegelhalter, C.C. Taylor February 17, 1994 page 4, footnote 2, retrieved 12/12/2015 "The above book (originally published in 1994 by Ellis Horwood) is now out of print. The copyright now resides with the editors who have decided to make the material freely available on the web." http://www1.maths.leeds.ac.uk/~charles/statlog/

[7] "SUNDIAL Project".

[8] Peckham, Jeremy. "Speech Understanding and Dialogue over the telephone: an overview of the ESPRIT SUNDIAL project." HLT. 1991.

[9] Alberto Ciaramella (1993): Prototype performance evaluation report. Sundial workpackage 8000 Final Report., CSELT TECHNICAL REPORTS 22 (1994): 241–241.

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