Project ROMI aims answer three questions in demography:1) What is the formal relationship between of mortality improvement, below replacement fertility and population and population growth?2) Are period cohort effects more important for the steep increase in life expectancy, lasting now for more than one century?3) Can we develop a better method to forecast mortality and life expectancy since standard approaches are typically not able to model the age-shift in mortality improvements over time?Project Romi approaches these questions from an innovative perspective: the analysis of rates of mortality improvement. A by-product of this research will be the development of new methods such as smoothed surface maps over age and time of the pace of mortality improvements and an alternative procedure to forecast mortality.The importance of project Romi is that providing answers to any of the questions will have permanent impact not only for demographers but also for scientists in other disciplines as well as for public-policy makers.