Start of operation in May | Pierre-Yves Saintoyant, the founding Director (2003 – 2006), starts building the lab with 3 employees in Aachen.
The European Microsoft Innovation Center – "EMIC" in short - becomes one of Microsoft's research facilities in Europe and its only one in Germany.
EMIC is founded with a commitment to collaborative technology development alongside product development. Our goal is to contribute to research programs of the European Commission and the German government.
We are proud to serve as a bridge between European partners and Microsoft's world-wide technology development efforts. EMIC begins working together with about 100 European partners, targeting the creation of advanced technologies which could be in the market within three to six years. |  |
EMIC's mission | "Using sponsored external collaboration with academia and industry the European Microsoft Innovation Center creates tangible, innovative assets to promote the Microsoft vision of "enabling people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential". The assets we pursue range from technologies that enhance the value of existing Microsoft products through new business opportunities in support of the Microsoft vision."
(John Lefor, director of the European Microsoft Innovation Center since 2006) - We contribute knowledge to the European technology base by participating with universities, research institutes and companies in collaborative research projects
- We learn from European areas of excellence and expertise and transfer the results to society as a whole through products and technologies
- We foster partnerships and relationships with European industry and academia
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Initial technology focus | Initial focus is on technology areas where Europe has a leadership position or a unique approach.
EMIC research centers on: - enterprise web services, security and privacy,
- eHome platforms,
- wireless networking and mobile application development.
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1st cooperation with RWTH Aachen | Smeagol Lab (Small, Embedded, Advanced and Generic Objects Laboratory) is a partnership between private companies, universities and schools. Funded by the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC), SMEAGOL encourages schools to pursue research in the classroom, helping to explain how technology affects our everyday life. Students from RWTH Aachen get "hands-on" experience testing and developing embedded networks during their physics lessons, producing new ideas for consumer products and toys using digital technology. |
By 2004, the initial team of 3 has grown to 19 scientists and engineers - participating in 13 collaborative European Commission & German co-funded projects. |
Research Domain "eHome" Sample | Since the very beginning EMIC has been developing platforms to seamlessly integrate different devices and services in the home and beyond. A big challenge in the field of intelligent home systems is network integration and interoperability. A central element is needed that links with all of the other devices. EMIC's Home team aims to: - Develop middleware to integrate all the existing, disparate devices and applications in the home to create a low-maintenance, user-friendly home network.
- Explore and evaluate innovative concepts for low-maintenance home networks
- Reduce the complexity of the application and services development and integration for the basic models in the Microsoft development environments on the basis of existing standards and devices.
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Research Domain "Enterprise" Sample | SLANG: From Web Service Auditing to Service Level Agreement
The focus is to shift the trust in contracts monitoring in order to enable billing in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Contracts (written with our SLANG language) express which audit information (extracted from multiple sources) is created and assembled.
The notion of contracts in SOA is also referred to as service level agreements (SLA). An SLA between a service consumer and a service provider describes the constraints that both parties must observe, based on the audit information, in order to fulfill the contract. |
First projects | (Samples) within the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) of the European Commission |
The EU funded project AMIGO (Ambient Intelligence for the networked home environment) explores and develops open, standardized, interoperable middleware and intelligent services for the networked home environment. The research results are aimed to allow the discrete interaction of all at-home services and applications. The main goal of the user-centric project focuses on enhancing the acceptance of home networking technologies by adding attractive, user-friendly systems. SeCSE (Service Centric System Engineering) is solving the issues and requirements of enabling businesses to move to a truly electronic service-based infrastructure using Web services. SeCSE combines large partners from the telecommunications (Telefonica, Telecom Italia) and automotive (DaimlerChrysler, FIAT) industries across Europe, as well as leading academic institutions and software companies. MYCAREVENT is a project integrated within the FP6 Programme for "Mobility and Collaborative Work in European Vehicle Emergency Networks". It focuses on the development of innovative, wireless applications and services for onboard diagnostic systems in vehicles. The GOLLUM (Generic Open Link-Layer API for Unified Media Access) project aims at developing innovative solutions for networking, middleware and programming interfaces that meet the demands made by heterogeneous and mobile network environments. The researchaims to develop key parts of an embedded, standardized, operating system independent link-layer API that standardizes the different programming interfaces to (wireless) networks to enable better portability of applications between devices using different communication interfaces. |  |
First projects | Another year of growth: We increased our team size from 20 to 30. EMIC developers are working on 13 research projects funded through the European Union and Germany. |
Awareness and consolidation | We received excellent external feedback based on continuously good work in our projects. Key notes at conferences like the European Wireless 2005 and active participation at research community workshops like the Feldafinger Kreis helped to further raise our recognition.
For the first time, we demonstrated technology together with partners in a larger scale at the Microsoft Research and Innovation Day: WearIT@work with TZI/University of Bremen
WearIT@work is actually the world wide largest project on wearable computing (24 Mio. € overall budget). 36 partners from 15 countries work on the user acceptance of wearable computing solutions. The WearIT@work project, the only one of its kind in the world, focuses on intelligent clothing designed to meet the growing needs in modern work environments. WearIT@work's objective is the development of a pan-European software and hardware platform for wearable computing in which professionals can be mobile and at the same time fully integrated into the surrounding IT infrastructure. EMIC is participating in application domains of healthcare and emergency response (e.g. working on firefighter scenarios) and is responsible for integrated information services. MOSQUITO – context-aware Access Control - with SAP France
Mosquito is a two years collaborative project focusing on the security of business applications in ubiquitous computing environment. The middleware under development in this project aims at providing an easy yet secure way to share Web Services. |  |
German co-funded Project (BMWi) – sample | HOMEPLANE (Home Media Platform Network) - Enhance wireless communication in the home environment
- Started in April 2006, runs 30 months, a total of 600 person months, with a 10 M€ budget
- Partners: BMWi, Siemens AG; IHP GmbH, Fra./Oder; Lintec AG; University of Dortmund
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October 2006 | John Lefor takes over as Director of the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) |
Nov. 2006: Bill Gates about EMIC's collaborative work | Bill Gates said during Microsoft Innovation Day in Brussels:
"(…)The reason we have got a strong future is because we did (that) research, but not just our isolated research that we created this eco-system of research. That includes a group we have in Germany called EMIC that has participated in a number of the European wide research projects, which has worked out very well for us, and, in fact, we are extending our activities significantly in line with the research investment the community has chosen to make, and many of those innovations go into Microsoft products." |
Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission
(2007-2013 period) | During 2007 EMIC successfully secured a new wave of partnerships within the FP7 research framework, paving the road for collaborations beginning in 2008: Active, Aragorn, PrimeLife, MyMedia, Consequence. We are once again partnered with some of the best researchers, both academic and industrial, from all over Europe to achieve our common goals. This approach towards collaboration is sometimes called co-competition: we work together in places where interoperability, standardization or general advancement of software solutions is important, while we compete in other parts of our research as well as in the market place.
European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) is coordinating the MyMedia and Consequence projects. |  |
German BMBF-funded project starts | Verisoft XT Project
Formal verification is the process of proving that computer software exactly fulfils its mathematical specification. The European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) collaborates with German academic partners and the 'Microsoft Research group for Programming Languages and Methods' on the formal verification of the new Microsoft Hypervisor to be released as part of Windows Server 2008.
The Hypervisor's objective is to allow multiple guest operating systems to run concurrently on a single hardware platform. Proving the mathematical correctness of the Hypervisor guarantees stability and security of the implementation. The Verisoft XT Project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). |
EMIC has 50 scientists and developers and enlarges its office space. |
Projects are coming successfully to an end … | | The project TrustCoM, started in 2004, ends successfully in 2008.
TrustCoM - a Trust, security and Contract Management framework enables secure collaborative business processing in on-demand created, self-managed, scalable, and highly dynamic Virtual Organizations. This is accomplished via open-standards web services based specifications and a reference implementation.
John Lefor says: "TrustCoM is one of the first EU funded projects that EMIC participated in. It has proven the technological expertise of EMIC and given us a chance to develop the basic processes for collaboration both with our European colleagues as well as with our colleagues in Microsoft Redmond. EMIC has been recognized inside Microsoft and in the European Community for contributions and analysis of various security scenarios (as well as other technologies) but much of it started with TrustCoM."
The official EC report reviewing the TrustCoM project concludes with the words: "TrustCoM clearly is a successful Integrated Project. The review team congratulates the project with this success". |  |
Announcement of co-located MESDC – Microsoft Embedded Systems Development Centre | Microsoft Unveils Its First Windows Embedded R&D Center in Europe
Microsoft Corp. announces the launch of its first Microsoft Embedded Systems Development Centre (MESDC) in Aachen, Germany. MESDC is part of Microsoft's effort to expand regional development centers in Denmark, France, Ireland, Serbia, the U.K. and other countries across Europe. The center's objective is to support global product development and drive smart, connected, service-oriented device development. Located within the European Microsoft Innovation Centre (EMIC) in Aachen, the MESDC is a significant part of the $75 million (U.S.) global R&D investment that the Windows Embedded Business Unit is making in Europe this fiscal year. See the press release on www.microsoft.com/EMIC |
Start of MyMedia EMIC is lead | MyMedia – a collaborative research project partly funded by the European Commission.
In the current flood of television, books, music and general information, how do you find content that matters to you? How do you discover multimedia information and entertainment in a way that suits you personally? MyMedia recommendations endeavour to help solve this "crisis of choice" by jumping beyond traditional recommender systems which are based on a single multimedia source. MyMedia provides recommendations to you that are integrated from many sources. You personalize the system by simply indicating you like a particular video or audio cast and it will find similar content. It will even learn what you like on its own. The more you use it the more it knows your preferences. Personalized recommender technology has the potential to become the central experience for access to multimedia content.
www.microsoft.com/emic/mymedia.mspx |  |
Start of Consequence EMIC is lead | Consequence (Context-aware data-centric information sharing) – partly EU funded Research Project
Efficient, fast and seamless data exchange is vital for today's society. But such data exchange should not violate the confidentiality or privacy of either the data owners, or those referred to in it. To deliver a technology that can effectively meet this goal is an important technological as well as societal challenge.
The Consequence project's purpose is to deliver a data-centric information protection framework based on data-sharing agreements.
The Consequence Framework fills the gap between today's business requirements in the area of controlled data sharing and currently available technology offerings. It provides technological enforcement of policies that are defined in legally binding data sharing agreements. To do this it combines technologies for access control with those for digital rights management by applying recent computer science research advances in policy based security.
www.microsoft.com/emic/consequence.mspx |
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