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Next gEneration netwoRked mEdia over 4G+ infrastrU..
Next gEneration netwoRked mEdia over 4G+ infrastrUctureS
Start date: Sep 1, 2016,
End date: Aug 31, 2019
PROJECT
FINISHED
Recent advances in ICTs have seen the typical boundaries between media and networking technologies to fade, giving rise to a new scientific and technological era, the so-called 4G+, which can foster innovation and gear-up sustainable growth both at regional and national/global levels. Progresses in cloud computing, wireless/mobile communications, social networks, Internet of Things (IoT) and 3D/HD media are only some examples that paved the way towards a unified media-network ecosystem, where people and businesses are so interconnected that global antagonism is inevitable. To sort through this new working/living space, new engineers must possess multidisciplinary talents in order to deal with emerging challenges from a large portfolio of economic, cultural and societal activities.Surprisingly and in contrast to the volume, the intensity of the implemented research (a great part of this research takes place in Universities’ labs) and the number of publications in topics related to the “media over 4G+ infrastructures”, the Higher Education seems to be absent from the recent advances. Although parts of this new S/T domain have been included within a few HEIs’ postgraduate degree curricula, they are absent from the undergraduate curricula in the majority of the respective University Departments (Informatics, Networks & Telecommunications, Computer Science, Media and Social Media, ICTs, etc.). TEI of Crete has identified this gap since 2012, taking the appropriate actions towards the education of undergraduate students of the respective Departments. Among these actions are the implementation of short courses in selected areas of networked media and future infrastructures, including tutorials and lectures for graduates, research/innovation weeks, and implementation of a series of intensive courses in the fields of pervasive networks, services infrastructures and their convergence at both application and platform levels. The curricula of these intensive programs have already adopted as part of the core syllabus/material of new undergraduate modules in many of the partner Universities. In this context, NEREUS project makes one step beyond, towards the modernization of the European undergraduate education regarding the S/T skills that young engineers must possess in the near future. NEREUS exploits its partners’ Erasmus network in the fields of networked media and Future Internet infrastructures and attempts to unify its Erasmus concentrated knowledge & skills in the areas of HD/3D media, open networks architectures and “green” protocols, cloud-based services, secure and trustworthy communications into a series of deliverables. Within a 3-years timeframe, NEREUS plans to implement the following deliverables:(1) Course design and implementation of educational material in the aforementioned topics, including presentation slides, multimedia content and hand-outs in electronic version, examination tests, which will be accessible and free-of-charge to NEREUS learners as well as to the public. This will also include A/V resources and lecturing/training material available via the project on-line educational repository, as well as laboratory based material with interactive capabilities. (2) Short term learning activities in the form of Spring and Autumn Intensive courses, for evaluating and testing the implemented educational material, besides acquiring useful feedback for fine tuning them and adapting to the students’ needs. (3) Long term learning activities in the form of project assignments, for supplementing students’ theoretical skills with practical talents hands-on experience, besides enabling them to experience team-work in a multinational environment through blended mobility. (4) Integration of all modules into a semester’s curriculum at the partner Universities, which may have the form of “blended courses” and will combine videos, web-based learning material, presentations and ‘traditional’ teaching methods. (5) Accreditation (in terms of ECTS) of all modules and the course in total by the relevant HEI’s bodies and the national Quality Assurance & Accreditation Agencies, and recognition of them (6) A short version of the module for professionals, which will be used for fast track education in the field of “next generation networked media over 4G+ infrastructures”. Overall, NEREUS targets the undergraduate and young graduate engineers in the areas of Informatics & Computer Engineering, Computer and Multimedia Sciences, Mass Media and Social Media technologies, business and infotainment domain, e-healthcare and e-agriculture engineering. The educational material that will be implemented will be freely/openly accessible by the partner European HEIs and their colleagues in other countries, collaborating under the ERASMUS umbrella, thus giving a European dimension to all NEREUS results and their impact.