80% of young internet users in the EU27 active on social media

In the EU27, 70% of households had access to the internet in the first quarter of 2010, compared with 49% in the first quarter of 2006. The share of households with broadband internet connections doubled, to reach 61% in 2010 compared with 30% in 2006. These data2 published by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, represent only a small part of the results of a survey on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) usage in households and by individuals in the EU27 Member States, Norway, Croatia and Turkey. As well as internet use and broadband connections, the survey also covers other indicators such as e-shopping, e-government, e-security and advanced communication and content related services.

Proportion of internet access around 20 percentage points higher in households with children. The level of internet access increased in all Member States between 2006 and 2010, most notably in Romania where it tripled, and in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary and Slovakia, where it doubled or almost doubled. In 2010, the highest shares of internet access were recorded in the Netherlands (91%), Luxembourg (90%), Sweden (88%) and Denmark (86%), and the lowest in Bulgaria (33%), Romania (42%) and Greece (46%). The proportion of households with a broadband connection also rose in every Member State in 2010 compared with 2006. Sweden (83%) registered the highest share of broadband connections in 2010, followed by Denmark (80%), Finland (76%) and Germany (75%), while Romania (23%), Bulgaria (26%) and Greece (41%) had the lowest.

In 2010, the level of internet access for households with children in the EU27 was significantly higher than for households without children (84% compared with 65%). This was the case in all Member States. The shares for households with children ranged from 50% in Romania to 99% in the Netherlands and Finland. In twelve Member States the share was 90% or more for households with children.

One in five older internet users make internet phone calls. In the EU27, around 90% of all internet users sent e-mails during the first quarter of 2010, without any significant difference between age groups. On the other hand, there was a very significant difference in the use of internet for posting messages to chat sites, blogs and social networks by age. Four fifths of internet users aged 16-24 in the EU27 used the internet for this purpose during 2010, compared with two fifths of those aged 25-54 and less than one fifth of those aged 55-74. Use of this form of communication was particularly high for all age groups in Poland, Portugal and Lithuania. There was a less pronounced difference between age groups in the use of internet phone and video calls, with one third of those aged 16-24, one quarter of those aged 25-54 and one fifth of those aged 55-74 in the EU27 using this form of communication during 2010. Use of the internet for phone and video calls was particularly high for all age groups in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia. 

News source: Eurostat link: article

Scientists piece together EU media structure

How influential is the media in shaping the news agenda in EU Member States? Very, say EU-funded researchers, who evaluated more than 1 million news articles in 22 languages to identify the factors that make this impact felt. The study, the first mega content analysis of cross-linguistic text using artificial intelligence tools, is presented in the journal PLoS ONE. The research was funded in part by the PASCAL2 ('Pattern analysis, statistical modelling and computational learning 2') project, which received EUR 6 million under the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Theme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

In addition, the software used in the study was developed by the SMART ('Statistical multilingual analysis for retrieval and translation') project. SMART clinched EUR 2.34 million under the 'Information society technologies' (IST) Thematic area of EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) and created a statistical machine translation pipeline for EU news - called 'Found in Translation' - that could demonstrate machine translation technology. Europe-based news outlets cover myriad stories chosen from an extensive repository every day. One may assume that the outlets base their selection on specific criteria, but the researchers found that patterns materialise when all of these choices are assessed over both an extended period and a set of outlets.

The computer scientists, led by Professor Nello Cristianini of the University of Bristol in the UK, in collaboration with Professor Justin Lewis of Cardiff University in the UK, found that the news content selected by outlets reflects national bias, and cultural, geographic and economic links between nations. A case in point, say the researchers, is outlets swapping information with one another about common interests, whether it is news about the euro area or who is singing what in the annual Eurovision song contest. They point out that deviation from 'normal content' is evident in outlets of countries that do not share the euro currency, for instance.

Research on this topic was relatively non-existent in the past because no tools had been developed to evaluate the vast amount of data available. But thanks to the creation of machine translation and text analysis, the scientists used automated methods from artificial intelligence in their study with fruitful results. 'Automating the analysis of news content could have significant applications, due to the central role played by the news media in providing the information that people use to make sense of the world,' explains Professor Cristianini from Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory.

For their study, the researchers pulled articles from the online news feeds of the top 10 news outlets (by volume of web traffic) for each EU Member State. They collected 1,370,874 news items in total over a 6-month period (between August 2009 and January 2010). The number of non-English language news items amounted to 1.2 million; these were translated automatically into English. The team found various links between Greece-Cyprus; Czech Republic-Slovakia; Latvia-Estonia, Belgium-France; and Ireland-UK.

'This approach has the potential to revolutionise the way we understand our media and information systems,' Professor Lewis points out. 'It opens up the possibility of analysing the mediasphere on a global scale, using huge samples that traditional analytical techniques simply couldn't countenance. It also allows us to use automated means to identify clusters and patterns of content, allowing us to reach a new level of objectivity in our analysis.' Professor Cristianini says the tool developed by the SMART project is now used as part of the main pipeline that assesses EU news content. The Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), one of the seven institutes of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), made a strong contribution to this study.

News source: CORDIS link: article

Europe in the right MODE for future internet

We live in a fast-paced world, where information hits us from left and right. The transmission of data is made possible via diverse channels, including wireless communication, optical fibres and storage media. But as changes emerge, so do the needs in this field. The MODE-GAP ('Multi-mode capacity enhancement with PBG [photonic band gap] fibre multi-mode capacity enhancement with PBG fibre') project is developing the next generation internet infrastructure to improve the capacity of broadband core networks, making bandwidth 100 times larger than the current capacity. MODE-GAP is funded under the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to the tune of EUR 8.33 million.

Under the plan, MODE-GAP is working on transmission technologies based on specialist long-haul transmission fibres and associated enabling technologies. Some of these technologies include transmitter and receiver components, rare-earth doped optical amplifiers and data processing tools. The four-year project will effectively enable 'future proof networks and systems of increasing information throughput', according to the project members. Failure to do so will significantly impact the future of the Internet, they say.

'We are close to realising the fundamental data carrying capacity limits of current fibre technology in the laboratory and although there is plenty of headroom for capacity scaling of commercial systems for the next 10 to 15 years, we need to be looking now at developing a new generation of transmission techniques, based on novel fibres and amplifiers, if we are to keep pace with society's ever increasing data transport demands in the longer term,' explains Professor David Richardson from the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton, the MODE-GAP coordinator. 'The MODE-GAP project has the potential to revolutionise the way we build and operate future generations of optical network. Success will require substantial innovation and major technological developments in a number of fields. The consortium partners believe that they are ideally equipped to undertake the work and are looking forward to the many challenges ahead.'

The MODE-GAP consortium consists of academic and industry experts from Phoenix Photonics Ltd (UK), ESPCI ParisTech (France), the Brondy-based OFS Fitel Denmark APS, the COBRA Institute at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Netherlands), Eblana Photonics Ltd (Ireland), Nokia Siemens Networks GMBH & Co. KG (Germany), and the Tyndall National Institute of University College Cork (Ireland). Commenting on the project, Bart Van Caenegem, Project Officer at the European Commission, said: 'A European consortium of highly qualified and talented researchers has teamed up and has adopted a groundbreaking approach in R&D [research and development] to advance the transmission technologies that will enable the networks of the future. This EU-funded project contributes to the Digital Agenda objectives, namely it aims to improve the competitiveness of the European industry and it aims to enable Europe to master and shape future developments in information communication technology (ICT) so that it can meet the demands of its society and economy.' Ultimately, the Digital Agenda will deliver sustainable economic and social benefits from a digital single market based on accelerated interoperable applications. 

News source: CORDIS link: article

EU-funded mathematicians piece together radio frequency design puzzle

Scientists in Europe have pooled their knowledge and ideas to develop and deploy integrated simulation algorithms and prototype tools to overcome the barriers in both existing and future radio frequency design flows. The result is part of the ICESTARS ('Integrated circuit/EM simulation and design technologies for advanced radio systems-on-chip') project, which is funded under the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to the tune of EUR 2.8 million. RFIC (integrated circuits for radio frequency) design is currently integrated with digital and analogue modules on the same die, posing severe challenges to existing simulation tools. Driven by the market demand for higher bandwidth and more end-product capability, radio frequency designs are moving into higher frequency ranges and growing in complexity.

The processes to develop both electronic design automation (EDA) and computer aided design (CAD) - indispensable to design integrated circuits for radio frequency design - and their underlying mathematics are themselves complex. Solutions to these problems therefore need new modelling approaches, new mathematical solution procedures and numerical simulations with mixed analogue and digital signals. That is where ICESTARS, a consortium of five leading European mathematical institutes, two semiconductor companies and two software providers, stepped in. 'Advancing radio frequency design in super high and extremely high frequencies necessitates new transceiver architectures and CAD tools as today's EDA tools are functionally not adequately addressing the simulation challenges of high-frequency designs,' said Jan ter Maten from NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch semiconductor company and ICESTARS partner.

'The project's research areas have been the efficient connection between the frequency domain, where the radio frequency part of wireless transceiver systems is usually designed, and the time domain, where the digital signal processing and control logic are developed,' he explained, adding that 'in electromagnetic (EM) analysis and coupled EM circuit analysis we deal with the 'communication' of the physical layer (such as mapping of devices) and the mathematical one'. The team used modified algorithms to tackle these issues. Mathematical equations, such as ordinary differential equations (ODEs), differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) and partial differential-algebraic equations (PDAEs), are the basis of time- and frequency-domain analyses.

However, the researchers modified these to cover extended functionalities to develop new algorithms to meet the simulation demands of circuits operating in frequency beyond 3 Gigahertz (GHz). For example, when it comes to the mutual simulation of digital and analogue radio frequency parts, standard time-domain techniques alone are far from sufficient. Therefore, the ICESTARS partners developed and successfully tested a prototype of adaptive wavelet-based analysis, an entirely new circuit simulation algorithm. In circuit-envelope simulation, input waveforms are represented as radio frequency carriers with modulation envelopes. By embedding the system of DAEs into partial DAEs the project succeeded in formulating a general mathematical framework that can be adapted to different classes of radio frequency circuits. An optimal dynamic time splitting allows efficient simulation of frequency or amplitude modulated signals.

Adaptivity - the dynamic simulator adjustment to the frequency response of, for instance, amplifiers, filters or mixers, in terms of network parameters or frequency-dependent noise - was core to the frequency-domain research in the project. The researchers achieved reasonable estimates for the initial conditions for distortion analysis of free-running oscillators, and for the first time, in ICESTARS, a truly generic multi-device, a so-called VoHB algorithm, was coded and tested for circuits that are larger than plain single-transistor power amplifiers. To prove that these and other concepts dreamed up by the researchers worked, they have been put to the test successfully by the industrial partners and Upper Austria University.

News source: CORDIS link: article