MERCI -Multimedia European Research Conferencing  Integration 	
	
Sector 3                                   Telematics for Research                                            1007 ( RE)

Original commencement date:  December 1, 1995

Revision with new partner to commence:  January 1, 1997

Pages Numbered 1 to 108

Content list

Part A - Project Summary										  3

1. Project Summary (including a Project Synopsis) - Form A.1 (for publication) 			  3
2. Budget Information -  Form A.2									  6
3. Participants List - Form A.3									  7

Part B - Project & Contractor Description							  8

1. Rationale												  9
2. Overall Description											11
3. Detailed Description										19
	3.1 List of Work packages (free text)								19
	3.2 Timing of Work packages								20
	3.3 GANTT Chart										22
	3.4 Description of the Work									22
4. Project Management										38
5. The Partnership (Consortium)									42
6. Relevant References										54 

Part C - Project Resources & Deliverables							55

1. Work package list - Form C.1									56
2. Work package resources - Form C.2								57
3  Deliverables list - Form C.3									70
4. Equipment list - Form C.4										71
5. Other significant specific project cost - Form C.5							72

Supporting Information - Financial justifications						73

1. Budget information per Year- Form S.1 ( A.2 per year)						74
2. Labour rates - Form S.2										75
3. Confidentiality and IPR handling - Form S.3							83
4. Participants details - Form S.4									84
5. Contractual and Banking information - Form S.5						          100
6. Full list of Validation Sites - Form S.6							          107
7. 	Budget Information for the Demonstration Work - Form S.7			 	          108

Part A - Project Summary
TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS Programme      September 26, 1996

Form A: OVERVIEW OF MERCI PROJECT

A1.1 - Summary Information on the Project 
Project Number - Acronym - Title	
1007 - MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing  Integration 	
Lead sector 	Other sectors
(Initials)	Start	End 
	Project Duration
in Months	
Telematics for  Research		Dec  1, 1995	Nov  30, 1997	24:	

Total Cost (ECU)	EU - Contribution (ECU)	
2,179,195	1,400,000	

Project Objectives, Summary description and anticipated results (up to 20 lines):

The objective of the project is to provide all the technology components, other than the data network itself,  to allow proper deployment of the tools for multimedia collaboration in Europe.  We will improve our tools over the earlier MICE tools, developed during 1992-95,  in many important aspects:
•	Better integration of the multimedia conferencing facilities to make them easier to use by untrained users;
•	Better capability for higher quality video, audio and shared workspace facilities;
•	Inter-operable cross-platform support for many systems - UNIX workstations and  PCs
•	Better support for the introduction and recording of multimedia information in conferences;
•	Support for different network technologies - mainly over IP: packet-switched, ATM or SMDS and ISDN;
•	Inter-operation between workstations running the multicast Internet and the normal ITU-T procedures;
•	Facilities for  secure conferencing - with easy distribution of keys and information;
•	Distributed measurement,  monitoring and control
Verification activities will be pursued both inside the project and in other Telematics projects:
•	Regular research  seminars given from the sites of the partners - and from North America
•	Annual interactive workshops in invasive surgery given at UCL - transmitted internationally, and with some operations coming from other countries;
•	Industrial trials with commercial organisations including our sponsoring partners Hewlett-Packard & Shell
•	Use in the research community, including by our sponsoring partner UKERNA and by other ACTS and Telematics projects including MANICORAL, ATHOC and ICE-TEL.
Besides tools from earlier EU projects, it will utilise results from concurrent Telematics projects: Security tools from the ICE-TEL and Shared Visualisation tool from MANICORAL.	

Major Validation sites1 :
Institution/Organisation	City/Town + Postal Code	Region 2 . 	Country 3 . 	
UCL	London WC1E 6BT	UK55	GB	
GMD	Darmstadt 64202	DEA2	DE	
INRIA	Sophia Antipolis 06902	FR82	FR	
KTH	Stockholm 164 40	SE01	SE	
UiO	Oslo 0316	NO	NO	
RUS	Stuttgart 70550	DE11	DE	
TELES	Berlin 10587	DE3	DE	
CRC	Ottawa	N/A	CA	
Middlesex Hospital	London W1P 6DB	UK55	GB	
Sahlgrenska University Hospital	Gothenburg S-413 45	SE052	SE	
Hewlett-Packard	Bristol BS12 6QZ	UK61	GB	
Hewlett-Packard	Villefontaine 38090	FR71	FR	
Shell Research	Thornton CH2 4NX	UK81	GB	
Shell Research	Amsterdam 1031CM	NL32	NL	
UKERNA	Didcot OX11 0QS	UK52	GB	
Multimedia National Support Centre, Austria	Linz A-4040	AT31	AT	
Multimedia National Support Centre, Belgium	Brussels B-1050	BE1	BE	
Multimedia National Support Centre, Italy	Bologna 40127	IT4	IT	
Multimedia National Support Centre, Portugal	Lisboa 1700	PT13	PT	

Other Characteristics of the Project:
•	Users involved: Students and research workers - in the regular seminars, conferences and remote teaching; doctors and medical students - in the medical workshops; computer equipment users and technicians - in the training seminars;  office users and researchers - in the industrial trials . 	
•	Technologies and/or approach used: Packet technology;  highly compressed audio, video and shared workspace;  multimedia servers;  security technology;  distributed management and control;  broad spectrum of network technologies: packet data, ISDN, ATM, & MAN - ITU-T and Internet procedures.	
•	Expected benefits for the citizen:  It is expected that this technology will have a very broad impact.  It will be broadly applicable in education, industrial research  and medicine - which touch all of us.   	
•	Expected benefits for the users of the application:  We expect that the applications will set the tone for the use of audio/visual techniques and shared whiteboard in tele-teaching, remote consultation of doctors, and many other similar disciplines.  Clearly several industrial organisations will investigate how there business can  be helped by the technology.	
•	Expected benefits for the European Industries:  There should be benefits from the User industries, in their improving their productivity by use of the techniques pioneered in MERCI;  it is also vital that the supplier industry get a better feel for the impact of the technology on their products.	
•	Contribution to EU-policies:  It is the policy of the EU in the communications part of their programme to pioneer the use of multimedia and of international standards; in the GII discussions, they are promoting international collaboration and co-operative working over high-speed networks. The addition of the Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada as an non-funded partner will further this aim. The MERCI concentration on standard hardware and software solutions for European-wide and international multimedia, collaborative working furthers both the EU dissemination policies, and their aim to further developments that should be profitable to exploit by European industry.	
Coordinator:
Name of Institution/Organisation	City
+ Postal Code	Region1  	Country 2	Number of Employees on 1/1/1995	Turnover in 1994 (ECU)	
University College London
	London, WC1E 6BT	UK55	GB	5000	229M	
Parent company	Controlling Company (Country)	

Contact  person from the Coordinating Contractor: 
Title, First Name, Name	Professor Peter Kirstein	Address:	Gower St, London, WC1E 6BT, UK	
Tel: 	+44 171 380 7286	Fax: 	+44 171 387 1397	
E-mail 1: 		E-mail 2:	kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk	

Other Contractors:
Participants Code3 	Name of Institution/Organisation	City
+ Postal Code	Region1	Country 2	Number of Employees on 1/1/1995	Turnover in 1994 (ECU)	
C 2	GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH	Darmstadt, D-64204	DE 71	DE	1200	89M	
C3	Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique	Nice,
06902	FR 82	FR	1300	70M	
C4	Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan	Kista, 16440	SE 01	SE	2500	150M	
C5	University of Oslo	Oslo,       N-0316	NO	NO	4500	251M	
C6	Rechenzentrum U Stuttgart	Stuttgart, 70174	DE 11	DE	109	10.5M	
C7	TELES	Berlin, 10587	DE 3	DE	90	6M
	
C8	Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada	Ottawa,	N/A	CA	420 
	32M	

A.2 - Budget Summary Information
Project Number - Acronym - Title	
1007 - MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing  Integration 	
Human Resources Summary (Person-month)
Total Resources of funded1 Contractors  	261.3	
Total Resources of funded Associated Contractors  		
Total Resources of funded Subcontractors  		
Subtotal Resources of funded Participants  	261.3	
Total Resources of non-funded2 Contractors	29	
Total Resources of non-funded Associated Contractors		
Total Resources of non-funded Subcontractors		
Total Resources of Sponsoring Partners	6	
Cost Summary in ECU
Participants Code3 	Person-month4 	1.
Personnel	2. 
Equipment	3. 
Third Party Assistance
(subcontractors)	4. 
Travel and  Subsistence	5.
Consumables and Computing	6. 
Other significant Specific Project Cost	7. 
Overheads	Total 
KECU	% of EU Contribution5 	EU Contribution	

C 1	   84.0	264129			18100	 32300	    6300	  64166	385.0	100%	385.0	
C 2	   26.9	134500			20000			154500	289.0	  50%	144.5	
C 3	   21.6	252000			15000				267.0	  50%	133.6	
C 4	   36.5	136250			25830	   5000		33420	200.5	100%	200.5	
C 5	   29.0	68246	10982		25000	   6032	    2323	22517	135.1	100%	135.1	
C 6	   23.0	105711			16650			11639	134.0	100%	134.0	
C 7	   40.3	494600	  7000		16000		  17000		534.6	  50%	267.3	
C 8	29.0	204000	21000		9000				234.0	0%	nil	
Total	261.3	1659436	38982		145580	43332	25623	286242	(a)		(b)	

Total estimated allowable costs (ECU) (to art 3.1. in contract)	(a)2 179 195	
EU contribution in % - (to art. 3.2. in contract) (EU Contribution excluding 100% additional cost * 100 / Total cost excluding 100 % additional cost) 	      46%	
EU Contribution (ECU) (to art. 3.2. in contract)	(b)1 400 000	

Estimated contribution from Sponsoring Partners (ECU)	       810 480	

A.3 - Participants List
Project Number - Acronym - Title	
1007 - MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing  Integration 	

Participants Code1 	Participant's Institution/Organisation	Participant's -
Short Name	Country2
+ Postal Code. 	
C 1	University College London	UCL	GB, WC1E 6BT	
C 2	GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH	GMD	DE. D-64295	
C 3	Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique	INRIA	FR, 06902	
C 4	Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan	KTH	SE, 16440	
C 5	University of Oslo	UiO	NO, N-0316	
C 6	Rechenzentrum U Stuttgart	RUS	DE, 70174	
C 7	TELES	TELES	DE, 10587	
C8 	Communications Research Centre of 
Industry Canada	CRC	CA, K2H 8S2	
X 1	Hewlett-Packard France	HP	FR, 38090	
X 2 	JNT Association Trading as UKERNA	UKERNA	GB, OX11 0QS	
X 3	Shell Research Ltd	SHELL	GB, CH2 4NX	
X 4	Multimedia National Support Centre, Austria	ANSC	AT, A-4040	
X 5	Multimedia National Support Centre, Belgium	BNSC	BE, B-1050	
X 6	Multimedia National Support Centre, Italy	INSC	IT, 40127	
X 7	Multimedia National Support Centre, Portugal	PNSC	PT, 1700	

Number of Participants
Number of Contractors (including Co-ordinator)	   8	
Number of Associated Contractors	   0	
Number of Subcontractors	   0	
Number of Sponsoring Partners	   7	
Total Number of Participants	 15	

1 	Codes for the participant roles are as follows: C1 = Co-ordinator, C = Contractor; A = Associated Contractor; 	S = Subcontractor; X = Sponsoring Partner
2. 	Please use ISO Country codes as described in annexed notes

Part B Project & Contractor Description
1.	
RATIONALE OF THE PROJECT
1.1	User needs to be addressed
It has been clearly identified, both in studies and in comments from many applications areas, that there is considerable interest in networked multimedia.  The case hardly needs to be made in this proposal; the technology pervades the workplans of the Telematics Programme;  most of the sectors have some aspect of multimedia services in them.  In this project we will be addressing the user needs as they have already been recognised not only by different sets of users of the ESPRIT MICE project and the RACE EUROBRIDGE projects, but also by potential groups in the Healthcare, Education and Training, and commerce areas.
Many users would like access to network multimedia facilities for consultation, conferencing and database access.  They want a number of specific services:
•	Multimedia conferencing facilities - but often with a trade-off between quality and cost
•	They need Audio, and would like Video - the quality needed depends on the application and cost
•	Shared Workspace - different functionality is needed in different application areas
•	Multimedia Servers are vital in many application areas
•	Range of Network Support is required - again depending on availability and cost
•	Range of Workstation Support is needed - and possibly also conference rooms
•	Security and Multiple Locations are often needed
•	Capabilities for Management and Trouble Shooting are vital
1.2	Market situation and prospects
At present, there are very few products suitable for the applications of Section 1.1 - but the situation is changing fast.  There are several reasons for this:
•	Conventional codecs have been too costly for volume deployment, but are becoming more economical.
•	The availability of packet network bandwidth has been too limited, but is becoming less constrained.
•	Deployment of ISDN is becoming more prevalent, and support for multi-channel working is appearing.
•	Packet-based multimedia workstations have become much more popular and economic.
•	Video Servers are being developed frantically to meet the hoped for “video-on-demand” market.
•	Security facilities are becoming available, though regulatory constraints still impact deployment.
The introduction of products is a continuous process in this case.  There will be some impact already within the first year of the project;  this will derive from the MICE and EUROBRIDGE initiatives - augmented by the fact that the partners continue to have similar projects in train.  We expect to see products continue to emerge throughout the project and the subsequent year - partly in the application domain of this project, but more in related domains where the technology will be demonstrated as a result of its provision by this project.
1.3	The  State-of-the-art on Networked  Multimedia Conferencing.
Significant efforts to make packet networks more suitable for network multimedia are coming to fruition.  While the present generation of 2 Mbps Internet is on the margin of suitability, the lack of resource reservation has made their use marginal.  This is now changing both because of the deployment of new Resource Reservation and multicast facilities in the Routers, and because the Internet bandwidth is increasing with the deployment of ATM and other high speed solutions.
There are significant improvements in codec boards for workstations at affordable cost;  moreover, the general increase in processor speed has made it possible to provide more of the functionality in general purpose hardware, requiring minimal specialised boards.  This has resulted in only a marginal increase in the cost of making workstations able to incorporate multimedia facilities.  Growth in switched ethernet hubs, UTP-5 wiring, low cost higher speed 100baseT and FDDI LANs has made the local distribution of multimedia relatively straightforward.  The improvement of video projectors to work directly from workstations has made the equipping of conference rooms cheaper.  There are still problems, however, in dealing with audio problems in view of the variability of delays in multi-site working.
It has been possible to use n-channel Basic Rate ISDN for circuit-switched networks for some years;  the growth has only recently been taking place, and few workstations or PCs are yet able to support these facilities for n>2.  Moreover, the protocol structures supported on most of the ISDN boards available (PCs) have not been compatible with those on the packet networks.  This is changing in two respects:  more PC software now supports IP;  ISDN gateways are becoming available which support the common ISDN protocol structures.  It is realised that the H.221 adopted by the carriers for multimedia working on the ISDN is very difficult to input to computers.  Some manufacturers are providing boards which do not rely on the H.221;  others are providing special boards which allow for the H.221 peculiarities;  yet others are providing alternate protocol stacks for next generation multimedia based on other coding algorithms.
Video Servers are being developed frantically to meet the hoped for “video-on-demand” market.  These have the requisite hardware base needed for this project - but the software facilities are less flexible than we require.  Discussion with several manufacturers of these devices, several of whom are mentioned in this proposal, indicate that they would like to develop this market also.
Many providers of workstations would like to incorporate security features.  There is little problem in providing a light level of security;  for this it is not clear that there is a serious demand.  It is realised that stronger security, using RSA and DES, is desirable.  Regulatory considerations, particularly in France and the US, still make it unclear whether uniform levels of secure products can be introduced on a world scale.  This restrains the growth of these products.
It has been the requirement of the research community, particularly in the IETF, to bring real standardisation into the area of packet-switched environments with a truly flexible multicast capability.  This is clearly much more powerful, economic and flexible than the circuit-switched one with multiway control units (MCUs);  nevertheless, it will require further developments in network and router technology to allow easy deployment of such facilities.  The technology is nearly there;  the network speeds are nearly there to allow widespread deployment;  we feel sure that with or without this project people will start deploying such functionality widely over the next few years.  This project will help deploy the technology in Telematic Sectors who would be able to embrace it much more slowly without such a project.
1.4	Technical aspects of the Demonstrator
In many ways this is not really a demonstrator project.  It is a programme to ensure that adequate technology is available, and high quality advice can be brought to bear on applications demonstrators. This project will show that the technology is widely deployable by applying it to three important applications:  a Distant Learning seminar series (WP11), workshops in experimental surgery (WP12), and trials under commercial conditions (WP13).  In each case the applications require audio, video and shared workspace.  The seminar series requires rugged regular use of the technology to a wide number of sites;  the demands on the video and audio is high but not too stringent;  there is a need to distribute slide and OHP material as part of the seminars.  The Surgery Workshop (WP12) has tighter demands on the quality of the video;  the catheters used are often extremely narrow, and the detail is of interest to surgeons.  In these cases the introduction of multimedia servers is important, and the availability of high bandwidths will improve quality; all the participants will have access to  channels speed  of 512 Kbps or more. In the surgery case, confidentiality of the procedure, an approved audience, is vital for many reasons - of which patient protection is an important one.  The exact requirements of the commercial validator (WP13) remains to be agreed between the commercial partners and the project;  use of  servers, ISDN and security are likely to figure prominently.
We must emphasise that the above validators are not yet real demonstrators.  Each individual one can be developed into a full demonstrator - indeed this may well happen.  However so many projects are proposing to use the technology, that we believe it is more profitable to take stock next year to decide which should be pursued as real demonstrators - hence our application for funding being only for two years at first instance
2.	
OVERALL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT
2.1	Objectives of the Project
The Objectives of the project are the following:
•	To provide all the technology components required to allow collaborative multimedia conference amongst European Researchers;
•	To ensure that the components are as compatible as possible with the standards both of the Communications Community (as reflected n the ITU-T H recommendations), and the computer networks community (as reflected in the Internet Engineering Task Force).
•	To attempt to provide interoperability with between the tools compatible with the two sets of standards.
•	To provide the tools on a number of different platforms (including Unix workstations and PCs), and to ensure that they operate in a seamless way over a number of different networks (including LANs, SMDS, ATM, ISDN and normal packet-switched networks).
•	To validate the tools by their deployment in three Validation Exercises inside the project:  A Seminar Series, some surgical workshops, some commercial trials.
•	To validate the results by deploying the tools in two related Telematics projects:  MANICORAL and COBROW.
2.2	Methodology of the Project
2.2.1	Overall Approach
The components will be largely derived from the results of  the previous ESPRIT MICE project, though there will also be input from the RACE EUROBRIDGE project.
The main improvements being made over the MICE tools are the following:
•	Better integration, and therefore more easily used by untrained users;
•	Better capability for higher quality video, audio and shared workspace facilities;
•	Inter-operable cross-platform support for UNIX workstations and PCs;
•	Better support for the introduction and recording of multimedia information in conferences;
•	Support for Internet, ATM, SMDS and ISDN network facilities;
•	Inter-operation between workstations running Internet and the normal ITU-T procedures;
•	Facilities for  secure conferencing - with easy distribution of keys and information;
•	Distributed measurement,  monitoring and control;
•	To avoid duplication, and enrich the tools, we will integrate in a shared visualisation tool from the MANICORAL project.
There will be verification activities pursued inside the project, but the majority will be in other Telematics project:
•	Regular MERCI seminars given from the sites of the partners, including CRC, Canada - and from the USA.
•	Annual interactive workshops in invasive surgery given at UCL - transmitted internationally;
•	A set of industrial trials with two commercial organisations;
•	Deployment by our sponsoring partners:  Hewlett-Packard, Shell  and UKERNA
•	Use by MANICORAL and COBROW.
Besides tools from earlier EU projects, it will utilise results from concurrent Telematics projects:
•	Security tools from the ICE-TEL project;
•	Shared Visualisation tool from MANICORAL. 
2.2.2	Validation plan
In the MICE project, the partners started a programme of routine events and demonstrations  to validate the tools being produced.  These included live demonstrations at many conferences, and several specialised events.  The such activities are particularly noteworthy:
•	the handling of the JENC conferences broadcasting from Trondheim (1993), Prague (1994), Stockholm (1995),  Each showed a considerable improvement over the time before.  The first had all communication via the US;  the second used the European infrastructure, but brought in also California and Hawaii;  the third used the European ATM Pilot, showed a dozen countries simultaneously, and had the first demonstrations of secure conferencing.
•	the demonstration at Interop in Paris in October 1994, using for the first time an ATM link between Paris and Stuttgart - and involving many countries;
•	the dissemination of a workshop on invasive radiology in urology in London in November 1994, including the introduction of live operations from Gothenburg and San Francisco;
•	the MICE series of live seminars, including speakers from France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US though-out 1994/95;
•	the demonstration of the MICE facilities at the G7 summit in Brussels in February 1995 using, for the first time, the European ATM pilot;
•	the demonstration of the MICE facilities to the Prime Minister of France in March 1995 - using three separate sites in France and one in the UK.
This type of activity serves to ensure the quality of the tools developed.  In the verification stage, three similar activities will be described which will serve to validate the MERCI facilities.  The relevant workpackages are described as WP 11-13 in Section 3.4.  We are ready to address the demonstration phase at this time, and have been approached by a number of organisations to use the current MERCI tools in their application projects.  We are making them freely available, and are encouraging two specific projects, MANICORAL and COBROW, to use them in a semi-contractual way as part of this.  In addition, our sponsoring partners are using new versions of the MERCI tools as they become available.
We are delighted that so many organisations recognised that the MICE tools were already appropriate for the Demonstrator phase.  This allowed us to start the verification activities from the beginning of the project  with the three small projects described here.  Nevertheless, the very number of such proposals made it difficult for us to define specific demonstrator communities before the project got underway.  We will work with winning proposals to transition MERCI tools to them after the tools have passed through the verification phase.
These demonstration phases started almost immediately the project began.  Hewlett-Packard have one such project financed from their own funds;  in fact they have helped some of the MERCI partners to put in adequate facilities to run some training seminars for the company.  British Telecom have also funded another UK project in language teaching to employ the MICE tools in the past and from this we have gained experience with some real language courses [6] involving the Language Centres in Exeter U and UCL.  For this application, the MICE tools were not quite adequate;  we have included the now enhanced version of the audio tool, RAT, resulting from WP3 of MERCI to do a good job of the teaching.  It is still our intention to use that testbed as a real demonstrator.
Several of the MERCI partners have much more ambitious plans of mounting at least demonstrators, and possibly full scale services.  Both the two verification projects (WP11 seminar and WP12 surgical teaching) are very important to several of the universities involved.  The universities may well put these into serious service as a demonstration phase - and here a large proportion of any direct costs will be met by the university concerned.  This has already happened as a result of the MICE project, where UCL is running a joint HCI course with Imperial College, and is expected to happen in a surgical teaching course already being held over SuperJANET.
An important spin-off from the MICE project was the set of MICE network support centres established on a pan-European scale;  18 such centres are currently operating.  Some of these have some CEC funding to meet their European needs;  some also have national funding to support national users.  The national funding to support many of these centres is assured for several years.  There was an application to the CEC to fund such multimedia national support centres (MNSCs) under the Telematics programme.  This proposal was not funded, but there will continue to be some MNSCs who can function as Quality Assurance centres in addition to their other duties..  
We see four stages of verification:
1.	The components are shown to work by being transferred to another MERCI partner who is able to mount and use satisfactorily the components - usually in conjunction with other MERCI components
2.	We hold a weekly multimedia project meeting already under MICE auspices;  this is planned to be continued under MERCI auspices (c.f. Section 4.1.3 and WP11).  The second stage of verification is that the components work well when introduced into the weekly meetings.
3.	We plan to demonstrate the MERCI tools as part of the Deliverables.  In the MICE project, we used public conferences or exhibitions to demonstrate our Deliverables to the CEC (and others).  This is a very harsh test on whether the components fit together and operate reliably.  Since all of our components have to be demonstrated, this stage is an important milestone for the components.
4.	Finally, we will transfer the components to one of the validation workpackages mentioned below.  Here they will be hammered by people outside the project.  Only when the results here are judged satisfactory, do we consider them ready for the demonstration phase - and even then any drawbacks are noted for use in further development of the components.
Of course not all components will pass rigidly through all the verification steps mentioned above.  When a clear problem with the present system is identified, and an improvement made, it will be tested carefully but may be introduced into a validation work-package (or even a real application) as soon as the quality assessment tests from the MNSCs judge them adequate.  
2.2.3	Self assessment 
Self-Assessment is an activity which is an inevitable part of the way that we are developing and using the current MICE tools, and the way we expect to develop the MERCI ones.  We use the tools as part of our regular weeks progress meetings.  For this we keep having to introduce both new users and new techniques;  this alone acts as a forum for self-assessment.  Since the tools are deployed to all the partners - whether or not they participated in the development - criticism can be very searching.  We will be providing our tools to our own verification demonstrators, giving us the next level of assessment.  Finally, we have two other sets of harsh external critics:  
•	We will be providing the technology to other projects;  we can be sure that they will assess it harshly!
•	We have three Sponsoring Partners (Hewlett-Packard, UKERNA and Shell Research);  they will want to evaluate carefully what they are getting to ascertain whether they can afford to deploy it widely.
Many partners have close contacts with workstation suppliers, and one is already such;  we will therefore be forced to examine regularly whether we are incorporating the latest technological advances, Standards improvements, and economic trade-offs.
2.2.4	Demonstration stage
We address in WP 11-13  the demonstrators we propose under the project. Many of these demonstrators will come from outside this project - though some have already been mentioned in that subject from parties already interested in proceeding to the Demonstrator stage.  In these projects, some financial provisions have already been made for the basic function;  it is hoped that the use of MERCI technology in these demonstrations will reduce rather than increase the cost.  Certainly if extensions to the project are proposed later to embrace these applications, the addition of funds from the CEU will guarantee that the projects are financially viable.
For the telematics infrastructure we plan to use the research networks and the ISDN in every case - except the commercial testbed of WP13, where the choice of network has not yet been made;  in that case it may be the internal network of the company.  It  would clearly be desirable that the high speed versions promised under the TEN-34 project are available.  As far as we can judge, we do not have to make financial provision for the use of the research networks for the two years of this proposal;  the funding is coming from the providers of the national research networks - who are often sponsoring partners to this project.  We do expect to have to pay for ISDN usage, and expect this to be a legitimate charge to the project.  Some of the partners have already made substantial investment in Basic and Primary Rate ISDN facilities;  it is not yet clear whether any others will need to make such investments during this project.  All the partners have been members of the MICE and EUROBRIDGE projects, so that they have already made substantial investment in capital equipment;  much of this is not yet fully depreciated, and will be brought over to the MERCI project.  There will, however, be a need to update this equivalent during the course of the project;  some provision for this has been made in the budget;  it is expected that some will come from industrial donations - both from the sponsoring partners and from others interested in the outcome.  This has been the source of much of the equipment used on the MICE project.
The Telematic Application sites are, of course, the actual sites of the partners;  in some cases (e.g. for WP11 and WP12) they will also be other sites normally connected either to the national research network or to the ISDN. The sites of the research partners are all connected to the national research networks at the highest speeds locally available;  in every case they currently have ATM connectivity to the European ATM PNO pilot, or plan to have it installed within two months.  They do not expect that their access will be much reduced in the future - as long as other relevant Telematic Programme initiatives are successful.
2.3	The Phases of the Project
2.3.1	The Relationship to the Different Phases
This work previous to this project spans already spans all phases:  Analysis of user requirements (Phase 1), Definition of functional phases (Phase 2), Building of a demonstrator (Phase 3), Validation - including some verification - Phase 4a, but not really demonstration in the way used by the EU (Phase 4b).  From our contacts with workstation suppliers, we see that there is already some movement even under Phase 5.  Nevertheless, under MERCI we will do some work again in all phases.  The purpose of the MERCI project is to help development the tools so that they are available to other applications;  a major activity after the present proposals have been awarded will be to assess the real needs of such projects, which have stated that they want to use MICE tools, to see what they really need.  Inside this project, we will only to Phase 4a over the two years proposed - though we expect also to go to Phase 5 of exploitation!  The reason is that we regard that our main Demonstrators will be other projects which capitalise on the facilities being developed in MERCI.  However to retain a clear assessment of the success of the technology, we have put in the three verification activities of WP11-WP13.
2.3.2	Previous work
The project has several aspects:  the facilities required by the user, the technical development of the different aspects of the multimedia technology for this type of application, and the requirements of the applications themselves.  The general lines of the user requirements have been developed from experience in running a series of MICE applications including a successful seminar series and a medical workshop.  This identified  a number of new user requirements, reflected in the material we have included in the Work-Packages of Section 2.2;  examples are the need for better HCI, better audio and video, security, multimedia server facilities, ability to use more platforms, and the availability of support for more kinds of network.  In fact the User Requirements have been extensively tested by the different applications we pursued under the MICE [1] and EUROBRIDGE [2] projects;  they are well reflected in the improvements we have already made during the MERCI project to date, and those envisaged here. To ensure that we have not overlooked vital points, a special Work-Package (WP2) will address this issue, but otherwise little more is required as regards the user.  The requirements for two of the Demonstrator applications - the MERCI seminars (WP11) and the surgery workshop (WP12) are known.  We have developed those for the former from seminar series held during 1994/95 [8] and confirmed them by the seminars given since the start of the MERCI project.  The requirements for the latter were developed as the result of the surgery workshop we held in November, 1994.
2.3.3	Baseline of the Project
The baseline of the MERCI project was the set of facilities deployed under the MICE and EUROBRIDGE projects.
A simple set of multi-media receivers were made available by the MICE project. A full reference to the MICE tools is available [9] from the UCL-CS WEB Server, and has been provided to the Commission in the final Report on the MICE project.  The MICE tools are available on a number of platforms operating under UNIX over the Internet protocols;  they work in Unicast and Multicast mode over a variety of networks including ATM and conventional packet-switched networks.  A definitive set of these, upgraded to use the new Real-Time Protocol (RTP/2), were provided by this project as an initial software deliverable (D0) in February 1996.
The MICE Audio/Video tools comprised Release 3.4 of the IVS system, the provision of H.261 support under VIC, and audio under VAT. 	 The VAT and VIC S/W has been provided by LBL (Berkeley).  Error-tolerant audio was available under the new Robust Audio Tool (RAT) developed by the MICE project which incorporates a dual compression scheme to repair lost packets.  Since the start of the MERCI project we have developed the facilities to encrypt VAT, VIC and RAT data streams.  A style of e-mail based key distribution mechanisms, developed under MICE, is available for providing confidentiality in these packages.  Session announcements are made via the new UCL tool SDR, a second generation version of SD.
From EUROBRIDGE, a similar set of facilities are available for the PNO standards. The components operate on PCs using Windows and n-channel basic rate ISDN.  	These comprise a complete set of H320 S/W and H323 Multiplexed Control Units which allow multi-way secure conferencing over ISDN with a confidential capability mode - with the capability for multi-way working.  The EUROBRIDGE tools run under Windows 3.1, 3.11, Windows 95 and OS/2.  They are just being extended to include the T120 Standards series.  There are also other tools for Eurofile transfer, Fax, Windows LAN interconnection, and Windows for Workgroups.  There is also a WYSIWIS version of the tools, which will work with the T210 Standard.  TELES also has implemented encryption mechanisms to encrypt audio (G711), video (H261) and user data.
The EUROBRIDGE and MERCI tools do not currently interface to each other;  such interconnection is a function of WP5.
2.3.4	Conclusions from past work
The main conclusions are the following:
1.	The current MICE technology is adequate for real application over the current generation of packet networks;
2.	For most applications we need better audio quality, and for some better video;
3.	The current shared whiteboard facilities are invaluable - but certain applications require different facilities;
4.	The current MICE and EUROBRIDGE products are usable by trained people - but much needs to be done to improve their user interfaces and their usability;
5.	The current European research networks have marginal quality for this application in many international configurations;  their replacement by clean Internet Channels (as in the UCL links to the US), or ATM facilities (as in our use of SuperJANET and of the European ATM pilot) give excellent results;
6.	Work needs to be done on the AV programmes in the workstations to take proper advantage of the high speed capability of the emerging ATM networks;
7.	The support for the ISDN is still inadequate;  this is mainly due to confusion by the suppliers on the protocol architectures they use;
8.	There is a strong requirement for both security and multimedia servers;  some more work under MICE should provide a good basis, but much more work will be required in these areas;
9.	Multicast facilities are much more flexible that the ITU-T H.320 MCU ones, but interworking between the two worlds is essential;
10.	The newer congestion control and reservation schemes in the current Internet development and Deployment cycle will be very important to the successful deployment of the MICE and MERCI technologies;
11.	The family of platforms adhering to H.320 will not currently interwork with the Internet family - and such interworking is very much wanted;
12.	Considerable work on management and monitoring needs to be done - particularly under difficult conditions on Internet Routers and on interfaces between current ATM switches;
13.	It is very important to remain compatible with the Standards being used by the equipment manufacturers.  Nevertheless, many will adapt their implementations, and will move to have Standards changed, in the light of experiences from projects like MICE.

Already now the demonstrations we have made (e.g. at the G7 summit February ‘95, the interview with Balladur in March 1995, the Amsterdam and Stockholm IETF meetings and the Surgery Workshop in November 1994) have greatly interested other groups to use the technology.  We have advised groups in at least ten Telematics and RACE applications..
2.4	Dependencies
The project partners are already involved with some dozen projects related to the MICE technology;  some are national in scope, some are European, some transatlantic.,  We expect the number to increase dramatically during the coming year. We expect to collaborate fully with other technology projects, and to make our tools available to applications ones.  We welcome the Concertation mechanism being proposed for the Telematics programme, and will collaborate fully with it and with the SCIMITAR project.  We hope that an early meeting of all such projects will work out methods of co-operation - to avoid any  risk of non-interworking of the resulting tools. The consortium agrees to co-operate with other projects in the TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS Programme within reasonable use of resources and to exchange non-confidential information with these projects. Especially the consortia agree to co-operate actively with Support Actions Projects contracted to arrange concertation  and dissemination activities and to provide information requested by Support Action Projects contracted to perform social and economic impact studies.
We expect to maintain our collaboration in bodies such as the IETF, whose participants  normally have R & D programmes as well as their Standardisation work.    We expect that a number of applications user groups will form during the MERCI project, to ensure that specific user and sector needs are satisfied.
Clearly we will expect to participate strongly with certain infrastructure projects like TEN-34 and one providing a European security infrastructure - ICE-TEL.  Each partner also has national projects in these areas.
2.5	Expected Results/Exploitation of Results plan
2.5.1	The Users
This project will have strong impact on the users.  First, many users have access to different networks as part of their research or commercial activity;  that they should be able to use their normal networks for these advanced services would be of immense value.  Their organisation normally has a specific procurement policy be it PCs or UNIX workstations of various types;  that the same platform can be used for multimedia conferencing has strong impact on the support requirements and investment decisions needed inside the organisation - and hence on the ease with which the technology can be introduced.  At present there are a number of distinct groups of user doing conferencing - and their is no ability for them to interwork;  the multi-platform and multi-network environment proposed here should remove much of this barrier.  
There are already many specific conferencing products;  most are much more limited in their approach to security, incorporation of servers and control functionality.  Particularly without the security aspect, there are many application areas which cannot be addressed.  The capabilities of the present approach, which is compatible with that in the research community in the US, would support much more flexible and comprehensive services; importing such a technology would be impossible given the present US export laws.
2.5.2	The Suppliers
Suppliers are interested in this activity because of its potential impact in many of their products.  From workstation manufacturers, we have had considerable support - because of their interest in seeing the technology developed further.  Two server suppliers have seen the impact;  Hewlett-Packard, one of the sponsoring partners, is donating  both workstations and a large 180 GB server from their interest in its utilisation in these applications;  another server supplier is providing their software free of charge with the same motivation.  The network operators are, of course, enthusiastic;  BT is supporting many British national initiatives in this area (including at UCL), French Telecom has sponsored showing the MICE technology at the G7 summit and on a recent meeting with the French Prime Minister, and Norwegian Telecom would have been a partner in this project (as they were with MICE) if they could have completed the formalities in time.  This is the only application project on the European ATM pilot where there has been uniform agreement amongst the PNOs that all the MICE sites should be connected via the Pilot;  currently, this involves sites in all 6 countries.  The research network operators are enthusiastic;  UKERNA is a sponsoring partner, and is supporting the deployment of the technology over SuperJANET; many others are supporting the deployment of the technology in a proposal to supply a network of European support centres.  Finally training organisations see the potential;  hence the sponsorship of Hewlett-Packard to this project comes from their education and training centre, and we have language centres in involved in three countries with national projects.
There is no doubt that the technology is fast moving from prototype to product.  It will not only embrace one product;  several applications projects are proposing to take pieces of the technology developed here and emphasising specific areas.  One intends to include microscopy-specific shared workspace software and develop an integrated product suited to that domain;  another to develop a multimedia server incorporating parts of WP7 directly.  Several are eyeing our network experience particularly closely;  they intend to incorporate our control strategies into their products.
2.5.3	The Dissemination Strategy
We have a proven track record of broad dissemination in this area.  We are deliberately making the software widely available - and this is very popular with the suppliers.  Clearly the commercial partners have a considerable advantage;  they will get the software at a much earlier stage, and will have more influence on what is produced.  It is not expected that all the software from the commercial suppliers will be disseminated as freely as from the research ones - hence the advantage also of  having so many research partners in this activity.
We disseminate information widely at conferences and exhibitions.  During the MICE projects we have shown our capabilities at dozens of such events - creating a huge current of interest and awareness in broad segments of the communities.  Moreover, more than a dozen high quality publications, and several theses, have come from the MICE and EUROBRIDGE activities.  Already in MICE we established some dozen MICE National Support Centres to disseminate and support the information in different countries.  We have some national funding already for this area for MICE dissemination - but the national bodies hope that the technology will be developed further for dissemination.
2.5.4	Business Plan
We feel that in view of the basic nature of the many technologies incorporate in this project, it would be inappropriate to formulate a central business plan.  This will be pursued by the partners in accordance with their natural commercial allies.  We do not expect to form a specific MERCI company as a result of this work;  we do expect to spawn a number of products in companies, however.
2.6	European Added Value
Some aspects of the MERCI work are easier to exploit nationally.  Certainly during the MICE project, we have had significantly better national network connectivity than international.  Both technical and political considerations have made connectivity to some countries difficult in the past.  Nevertheless, the real benefit comes from the European dimension.  It is very clear from the other European projects in which the partners are involved, that the international benefits are huge;  we have a depth and regularity of content which is completely unavailable in the normal projects not using this way of working.   It would have been quite impossible to make the rapid progress we have made in MICE without the use of the technology;  the European dimension is required by many of the applications, and avoids different developments becoming unable to interwork

At the start of the MICE project, many of the partners already knew each other and had worked together on THORN, PARADISE and PASSWORD.  However the use of interactive conferencing has  revolutionise the collaboration - though the revolution does require a judicious mix of synchronous and asynchronous techniques.  The availability, and wide deployment, of this technology will have an integrating effect that cannot yet be fully appreciated.  This will be in full support of the information society in Europe and of the European Union policies.  Moreover, the way that the multimedia technology plans to embrace most of the underlying network technologies will have several important consequences:
•	It will be applicable where application sites do not have the latest and most expensive communications infrastructures;
•		it will, however, be able to exercise that infrastructure as soon as it becomes available (cf. experiences with MICE and the PNO ATM pilot
•		It will act as a searching probe to discover weaknesses in the European communications infrastructure - even though it will continue to be able to operate at reduced performance.
2.7	Economic and social impact 
To the extent that the project is generic, we can discuss only the impact on telematic applications in general.  Here we can talk only in generalities - as have been addressed already in the call for proposal.  In the particular education, training and health-care areas, the impact can be immense.  In tertiary education, UiO, KTH and UCL are already discussing putting on full joint courses - something which we are considering applying much more widely.  Hewlett-Packard and other similar organisations already have a European wide training mission;  they are looking to this project to help provide an insight on whether it is now possible to organise the training on a genuinely pan-European basis.  
In the medical education field, University College London already has integrated course across the three medical sites that have been part of their catchment area - hence the ease with which they have entered a larger British project, funded nationally, to provide surgical education embracing 6 universities and using SuperJANET.  This in turn has meant that the infrastructure was in place to introduce operations from Sweden and the US into a workshop at short notice.  These operations were watched in their turn (and  questions were asked) by doctors at that workshop, at other hospitals seminar rooms, and on individual  workstations.  The impact this will have for medical consultation will be immense, when the technology is  developed to incorporate higher quality video and audio, and to introduce the better instrument data used by the medical practitioners.  Because we are also embracing lower levels of technology, namely ISDN, we will be able also to influence also secondary health care - allowing medical consultation between the doctor's office and the hospital. 
These arguments extend to other areas.  It should be noted that the entry costs are not high.  A normal high-performance workstation costing between 3 KECU and 10 KECU will give access facilities - and without the need for expensive networks.  Clearly the higher performance workstations, servers and networks will improve the facilities that can be offered.  The economic justification seems over-powering.
3.	
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT
3.1	List of Workpackages
WP1	Management										(C1)
This work-package deals with all aspects of the management of the project.  It is entirely the responsibility of the Co-ordinating Partner. Both the Project Director and the Project Manager will be heavily involved.
WP2	Activity with External Groups								(C1)
This work-package is concerned with all aspects of relationships with other groups.  This includes concertation activities like the SCIMITAR project and anything else set up by the Commission.  It also includes the three other groups with whom we expect to have a particularly close relationship:  MANICORAL, COBROW and ICE-TEL.  It will be necessary to ensure common interface specifications between the projects, co-ordinate deliveries of software between the projects, feed back one assessment of the quality of the deliverables, and ensure that the feedback is properly progressed inside the projects.  Other activities will be the interface between the project and other communities such as the relevant Standardisation bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the ITU standardisation bodies etc.  Yet a third sector will be the various user groups in other programmes with similar needs.
WP 3	MM Conference Components and cross-platform support				(C3)
This work-package is concerned with the development of the fundamental multimedia components:  video, audio and shared workspace.  Most developments will be improvements from the MICE components, but at least one video one will use a different coding scheme, and one shared whiteboard tool will arise from the MANICORAL project.  Another aspect of the work-package is to ensure that the tools work  on different hardware and software platforms.
WP4	Usability and Assessment								(C6)
It is important to ensure that the developers really understand the user requirements, that the user interfaces are really user-friendly and  with the evaluation of the tools produced.  The work-package will serve as semi-independent activity between the developers and the users.  It is no coincidence that it is in this work-package that X9, one of our sponsoring partners, intends to participate at their own expense.
WP5	Interworking										(C7)
Of particular concern is the current split between the computer-based and the communications-based conferencing - and also that based on workstations versus that based on PCs.  This work-package is concerned with addressing both these elements - and so is naturally led by an industrial partner.  For some tools, this requires coding adaptation;  for others, it requires inter-working units
WP6	Network Support									(C4)
Only too often the tools are integrated, unnecessarily, into the network support envisaged by the supplier.  In the MERCI project we are envisaging a variety of interconnected networks:  LANs, Packet-Switched Networks, SMDS, ISDN and ATM.  This work-package is concerned with ensuring that the tools work over the different networks, and to provide interworking units to ease their operation across the different technologies.
WP7	Multimedia Server									(C4)
Multimedia conferencing embraces much more than human-human interaction;  it is often very important to introduce pre-computed data into the conference, or to record information developed during the conference.  This work-package is concerned with implementation, deployment and utilisation of multimedia servers.
WP8	Conference  Management and  Control						(C1)
The set-up, management and control of conferences is essential to allow widespread usage.  This  work-package is concerned with providing the components to allow distributed control:  booking systems, the set-up of the conference and of intermediate relays, the control of active conferences and fault diagnosis.  

WP9	Conference Room Support								(C5)
It is currently fashionable to talk only of workstation conferencing.  In some applications, there is a natural agglomeration of people in a Conference Room.  This work-package is concerned with aspects particularly appropriate to the Conference Room environment:  Whiteboards, use of hardware codecs and full familiarity with echo-cancellers.
WP10	Security										(C2)
Many uses of conferencing require confidentiality, and assurance that only specific people are participating in the conferences.  This requires authentication and encryption of the multimedia streams.  The provision of encrypted streams is a function of WP3;  the provision of the security technology itself is an activity of the ICE-TEL project.  This work-package is concerned with the design of the architecture for secure conferencing, the key management architecture, the participant authentication, and the provision of encryption gateways where these are required.
WP11	MERCI Seminars									(C1)
Distance education is an excellent consumer of the MERCI technology.  For this reason, we have organised this validation work-package to apply the tools in several distributed seminars.  The components developed in the technology work-packages (WP3 - WP9), will be tried out in this work-package, and the feedback will be used to improve the tools further.
WP12	Surgical Workshop									(C1)
Another important testbed for the technology is an annual series of surgical workshops held at the Middlesex hospital.  The needs for surgical teaching are more demanding than those of the specific WP11 seminars.  This work-package will validate the highest quality Audio-Visual facilities demanded by the surgeons, together with the security (form WP10) needed in this domain, and the instrumentation data which is also vital to this area.
WP13	Commercial Trials									(C2)
There has a persistent interest from industry for testbeds with the MICE tools.  In this work-package, we will try to satisfy this pent-up demand by carrying through complete applications in close partnership with commercial bodies.  Of course, it will first be necessary to carry out detailed task analyses collaboratively, to ascertain which tools will be appropriate to the different potential applications - and which applications make sense to tackle with these tools.
3.2	Timing of the Work
The following tables illustrate the dependencies  arising between the deliverables and the feedback needed from the various evaluating groups.  The feedback deliverables are 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4.
In these tables the dependent objects are coded as:
	D deliverable
	I   internal deliverable
Those deliverables to which the Work Package is a contributor are show in bold type.
	
ACT	SUBJECT	M3	M6	M9	M12	M15	M18	M21	M24	
A3.1	High Quality Audio	-------->D0	--------------	-------->D1	IA4/D4.1--	I10A--------	D4.2-------	I10B-->D3	-------->D4	
A3.2 	High Quality Video	-------->D0	--------------	-------->D1	I4A/D4.1--	I10A--------	I4B/D4.2--	I10B-->D3		
A3.3	Stream Synchronisation						I4B---------	-------->D3		
A3.4	Shared Work-space Support	-------->D0	---------------	-------->D1	I4A/D4.1--	I10A--------	I4B/D4.2--	I10B->D3		
A3.5	User Interfaces						D2/D4.2---	-------->D3	D4.3-->D4	
A3.6	Porting Activities				D1----------	-------->D2	-------------	-------->D3	-------->D4	
Table 1.1 Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP3 - MM Conference Components & cross-platform support

ACT	SUBJECT	M3	M6	M9	M12	M15	M18	M21	M24	
A4.1	Requirements Capture	-------------	------->I4A							
A4.2	User Interface Design			I4A---------	------------	------>I4B				
A4.3	Tool Evaluation		D0---------	----->D4.1	D1---------	----->D4.2	D2---------	----->D4.3	D3-->D4.4	
Table 1.2  Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP4 - Usability and Assessment

ACT	SUBJECT	M3	M6	M9	M12	M15	M18	M21	M24	
A5.1	Low-level Interoperability	-------------	-------------	------>I5A	-------------	-->I5B/D2	-------------	->I5C/D3		
A5.2	QoS Negotiation	-------------	-------------	-------------	-------------	-------------	-------------	------->D3	-------->D4	
A5.3	Common Conference Control	-------------	-------------	-------------	-------------	-------------	-------------	------->D3	-------->D4	
A5.4	White-board Interoperability				D1----------	------->D2	-------------	------->D3	-------->D4	
Table 1.3  Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP5 - Interworking

ACT	SUBJECT	M3	M6	M9	M12	M15	M18	M21	M24	
A6.1	Support for Technologies	-------------	-------------	-------->D1	-------------	------->D2				
A6.2	Network Measurement	-------------	-------------	-------------	-------------	------->D2	-------------	--------I6A	------->D4	
A6,3	Network Monitoring 	-------------	-------------	------->I6B	-------------	------>I6C	-------------	-------------	------->D4	
Table 1.4  Inter-dependencies and Timing of  Deliverables in WP6 - Network Support

ACT	SUBJECT	M3	M6	M9	M12	M15	M18	M21	M24	
A7	Multimedia Server	-------------	-------------	--------->I7	-------------	-------->D2	I10A-------	------->D3	------->D4	
Table 1.5  Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP7 - Multimedia Server

ACT	SUBJECT	M3	M6	M9	M12	M15	M18	M21	M24	
A8.1	Booking and Conference Set-up	-------------	-------------	-------->D1						
A8.2	Conference Relay Set-up				D1----------	-------->D2				
A8.3	Conference Control				D1----------	-------------	D2----------	-------->D3	-------->D4	
A8.4	Fault Diagnosis	-------------	-------------	-------->D1	D1---------	-------->D2	--------------	-------->D3	-------->D4	
Table 1.6  Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP8 - Conference Management & control

ACT	SUBJECT	M3	M6	M9	M12	M15	M18	M21	M24	
A9	Conference Room Support	-------------	-------------	-------------	D1----------	-------->D2	---------------	-------->D3	-------->D4	
Table 1.7  Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP9 - Conference Room Support

ACT	SUBJECT	M3	M6	M9	M12	M15	M18	M21	M24	
A10.1	Security Architecture	-------------	---->D10.1	D10.1>D1						
A10.2	End-end security			D10.1------	----->I10A	------->D2	----->I10B	------->D3		
A10.3	Participant Authentication			D10.1------	-------------	------->D2	--------------	------->D3		
A10.4	Encryption Gateways			D10.1------	-------------	-------------	-------------	------->D3	-------->D4	
Table 1.8  Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP10 - Security

3.3	Structure of the Work
The different technical work-packages are largely independent, feeding into the major software deliverables each six months.  Portions of these deliverables will then be the basis for further upgrades of the facilities.  In Section 3.2 we have provided a series of GANTT charts showing the timing of the various activities.  These charts can be used also to show the dependencies between the different work-packages.  Table 2 shows the relationship between the technical and the evaluation workpackages.

ACT	SUBJECT	M3	M6	M9	M12	M15	M18	M21	M24	
A11.1	Weekly Meetings		D0---------	---------->D4.1	D1---------	---------->D4.2	D2-----------	---------->D4.3	D3--------->D4.4	
A11.2	MERCI Seminars		D0---------	-->D11.1/D4.1	D1---------	-->D11.2/D4.2	D2-----------	-->D11.3/D4.3	D3->D11.4/D4.4	
A11.3	Other Seminars		D0---------	---------->D4.1	D1---------	---------->D4.2	D2-----------	---------->D4.3	D3--------->D4.4	
A12	Surgical Workshop				D1---------	-->D12.1/D4.2	D2-----------	---------->D4.3	D3->D12.2/D4.4	
A13	Commercial Trials				D1---------	-->D13.1/D4.2	D2-----------	---------->D4.3	D3->D13.2/D4.4	
Table 2  Interdependence and Timing between  the Technical and Validation Work Packages
Table 2 does not indicate specifically the feedback from, and the deliverables to, MANICORAL and other user projects;  this is really identical to the relations between the internal Validation work-packages of Table 2 and the Technical work-packages of Tables 1.1 - 1.7
3.4	Description of the work
Our fundamental model is of a multi-way conferencing environment.  For this reason, all our components are designed to operate in a multi-way environment.  This means that they should be able to operate with underlying multicast protocols - though some pieces of the system would operate in unicast mode also.  It is also a fundamental assumption that packet forms of data will be used on the majority of the systems - though several workpackages will address the interworking of the packet and circuit regimes.
Each of our technical activities will have Deliverables.  However, rather that specifying a unique paper to each activity, we will have 4 major Demonstrations during the project;  these will incorporate the latest results of each Activity, as specified in the workpackages.  D1, D2, D3 and D4 represent the Demonstrations arranged for Formal Deliverable purposes.  In addition, D0 represents the packaging of the tools existing at the beginning of the project, which will be made available to our User Groups three months after the beginning of the Project.
The Validation Deliverables WP11-WP13, have their Deliverables incorporated into the Work-package.
3.4.1	
WP1 Management
Objective
The Objective of the Management work-package is to ensure that there is an adequate management structure and appropriate management activity to ensure that the Consortium members, the Project Management, the Commission, and External Bodies interacting with the project have the relevant information on the financial and technical progress to plan and develop their relations with the project.
Description of the Management Activity
The detailed management structure and way of working are discussed in Section 5.  The activity under this workpackage is principally to ensure that each party is aware of those aspects of  the technical and financial progress of  the project so that they can take the actions needed for their part of the interaction.  The parties who must be considered are the following: The Partners of the Consortium, The Project Management, the Commission, User Groups inside the project and any external parties relying on the results of  the project for their work.  In order for this to be accomplished, all the parties concerned must  communicate adequately with each other, and take action if there are slippage or defects by themselves or another party.  
To achieve this, the following must be done:
•	The Project Management and Technical Committees must clearly state what each member is supposed to be accomplishing - and must be informed on how the work is progressing; in sufficient detail that remedial action can be organised.
•	The Project Members must inform the Project Management and each other of their technical progress, the financial consumption of resource in a timely manner - with due regard to the needs for internal control and external reporting.
•	If progress shortcomings are identified, Project Partners must be prepared to take action to remedy them.
•	The Project Manager must arrange for IPR agreements between the partners, Collaboration agreements between the partners, the timely provision of progress reports to the Commission, the timely submission of financial claims to the Commission, the timely distribution of funds received from the Commission to the partners, appropriate attendance at Concertation Meetings, and the timely provision of Deliverables to the Commission.
•	The Project Manager must organise regular Project Management meetings, organising their minutes.
•	The Project Manager must be aware of who is responsible for Deliverables, and how they are progressing.  If there are problems in there preparation, he must first inform the Project Management and Technical Committees; if problems are likely to persist, then they must be reported in the Progress Reports to the Commission.
•	The Project Manager must liaise with external groups on the products being provided to, or being received from, other projects.  He most organise Collaboration Agreements when these are required.  He must inform such projects which depend on results of the MERCI project of the progress, and any shortfalls in expected functionality or late delivery;
•	The Project Manager must ensure that there is an adequate external awareness of the project by distribution information on meetings and relevant calls in journals, organising presentations at conferences, keeping collections of publicity material and project publications.
Deliverables
Progress management reports (PMR), financial management reports (FMR), Annual Review Reports (ARR), Final Report (FR),  IPR agreements, collaboration agreements, deliverables, payments to partners as per the contract.

3.4.2	WP2 Activity with External Groups
Objective
The Objective of this work-package is to ensure that all activities concerned with external groups are adequately staffed, carried out and funded.  

Description 
There are a number of separate external interactions of the Project with the outside world.  Under this work-package we include the following:  concertation activities, interaction with user groups, annual reviews, dissemination activities, production of information activities, and collaboration with other projects;  each will be considered below.
It is planned that the SCIMITAR project act in a co-ordinating role;  this will include concertation meetings, at which the project partners will be represented.  We are organising particularly strong ties with the MANICORAL and ICE-TEL projects.  For these we will ensure that there are joint meetings with these projects - probably organised around the concertation meetings.  The Project Manager of SCIMITAR will be invited also to attend these joint project meetings.  It is intended to have a joint in-depth study of what each project has to offer to the others.  We will then provide documents between the projects detailing what products each expects to provide to the others.  In the joint meetings we will review progress in these promised products - flagging any potential delay or shortfall in specifications.  After delivery of the products to other projects,  we will expect feedback from them;  it is under this work-package that we remedy defects or make improvements in the products we have provided externally.  Similarly, it is under this work-package that we provide feedback to other projects, e.g. MANICORAL and ICE-TEL, from which we expect products. Of course we will provide the relevant material, and participate in, the annual reviews - whether they are organised directly by the Commission or via the SCIMITAR project. 
The interaction of the project partners with the User Groups within the project will be an integral part of WP11, WP12 and WP13.  However, we expect considerable interaction with both our Sponsoring Partners and other User Groups who also will wish access to the MERCI products.  We will organise publicity material, documentation, and limited information and training meetings with such groups.  While the initial responsible for documentation is with the component provider, the production of appropriate external technical documentation will be carried out under this work-package.
The MICE and EUROBRIDGE project were both particularly strong in presenting their activities at public demonstrations, conferences and in journal articles.  We expect to carry on this tradition in the MERCI project;  of course we will strive to present our results at the relevant meetings organised by the Telematics Programme or the SCIMITAR project;  we expect also to participate in important other events such as the Joint European Network Conferences, the Internet Society Conferences, and other relevant Technical Conferences and Exhibitions.  Finally, while presentations at  conferences provide substantial short-term exposure, it does not replace publication in the learned  journals;  we expect to provide material for conferences to such a standard that the organisers will wish it to be reproduced in the journals which often publish the best conference papers, and will also submit papers independently to the relevant journal editors.
It is relatively straightforward to develop products and services to meet specific narrow needs;  it is much more complex to develop them in a way that interworks with products developed in other projects or by other vendors.  In the original proposal, there was a special work-package developed to participation in Standards activities.  We have chosen to remove this work-package in this Project Plan - though the technical work-packages retain their intention to use such Standards where feasible, and often mention participation with relevant groups - particularly the IETF.  We expect, through this work-package, to retain our participation with the relevant co-ordination and standardisation groups.
With the inclusion of CRC, new areas of collaboration are opened up.  Under this Work Package CRC will be particularly concerned with co-ordination with three international projects that are concerned with trans-Atlantic connections and demonstration of user services across that infrastructure (NICE-Global, GIBN, MAY) and nationally with the CANARIE research activities, especially the Multicast Project and the NTN MBONE trials.  
NICE-Global The NICE (National Host Inter-Connection Experiments) project addresses the High Speed Networking area of the ACTS Workplan. NICE-GLOBAL addresses extending this work internationally. The primary objective of NICE is to integrate systems so as to enable EU, Central and Eastern European and Canadian National Hosts to provide broadband applications support functions based on ATM.
GIBN (Global Interoperability for Broadband Networks) is a project started by the Ministerial Conference on the Information Society of the G-7 nations.  The fundamental objective of GIBN is to provide a means for developing and testing trans-national applications that will support the promise of a Global Information Society. The purpose of the project is to facilitate the establishment of international links among existing high-speed data networks of the industrialised countries. The project will support experiments on inter-connectivity and interoperability, the establishment of standards and serve as a testbed for a wide variety of research on education, industrial and other applications. Initial infrastructure efforts have concentrated on Europe to Canada, Canada to the USA and USA to Japan links. 
MAY (Multimedia Applications on Intercontinental High Speed Networks) is a consortium formed by Deutsche Telekom, Sprint and Teleglobe Canada under the Global-One Alliance. MAY contributes  to the support of international (USA, Germany and Canada) co-operation in R&D of multimedia applications for office communications, education and training, distributed design and construction, publishing, medicine, tourism and interactive television.
DeTeBerkom (Berlin) and the International Computing Science Institute (Berkeley, California) are the organisations supporting Deutsche Telekom and Sprint, respectively, in the consortium. The initial infrastructure links Berlin, Ottawa and San Francisco.
CANARIE (Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education Inc.) is sponsoring a multicast Test Project to develop a multicast capability between the routers located at the ATM National Test Network (NTN) nodes and to conduct a series of interoperability studies and application trials.  One goal of the multicast Test Project is to explore the provision of a Canada wide MBONE service on the CA*Net using trunking from the NTN.  
CRC (DRX & BADLab) has participated in some of the initial MBONE/NTN activities.  DRX will continue to explore possibilities for co-operation between MERCI and the multicast Test Project.
Technical studies taking place in the four projects identified above are complementary to research activities in MERCI. The emphasis of the effort made under this Work Package will be on the exchange of information and to explore possibilities for co-operation and to consider collaborative activities where mutual benefit could be obtained. There are some possibilities for sharing infrastructure. That will be an additional point for discussion.
Deliverables
Publications, publicity material as requested by the Commission or required for conferences, annual reviews, documentation for user groups and other projects. 

3.4.3	WP3 Multimedia Conference Components and Cross-platform Support
Objectives
The objective in this workpackage is to provide multimedia components to meet the conferencing needs expressed by the users of the service.  We see these are principally the ability to provide better quality video, better quality audio, and stream synchronisation than is provided by the MICE and EUROBRIDGE projects.  In addition, it is vital to have a good shared workspace environment, all components so that they can provide information privacy,  and an integrated user interface.  It is the objective of this workpackage to ensure the availability of the components - developing them only when they are needed but not otherwise available to us.  A second objective is to increase the range of platforms on which the tools can run by porting them to other platforms
Description of work
A3.1 High quality video coding  We have considered in the MICE projects the problems associated with distributing a video stream from a source to N destinations, i.e. over a multicast delivery tree. In particular, we developed the software tool IVS based on the H.261 video standard. Our goal in MERCI is to provide better quality video than the current H.261 coding by considering alternate video coding schemes, and by improving the rate adaptation mechanism (which adapts the video transmission to network conditions).  The goal is then to adapt the video transmission to  the characteristics of the different branches.  A promising solution involves  using some form of hierarchical coding;  we believe that wavelet coding has considerable advantages in methods of including redundancy, computing complexity and robustness.
A3.2 High quality audio delivery   In conferencing, the quality of the audio data delivered from a source to its intended destinations is the most important factor in the overall quality of a videoconference. We intend to improve the quality of some of the base components of the audio tool, and to add new components capable of delivering  high quality audio both over a variety of networks including the Internet, primary rate ISDN (30 x 64 Kbps) and basic rate ISDN (n x 2 x 64 Kbps).  These include the following: using pattern matching techniques to improve silence detection, tying jitter control to video play-out, tying congestion control to error control, and adding error cancellation, automatic gain control and sound localisation
A3.3 Stream synchronisation  The emergence of new applications (such as tele-teaching) here has increased the need to synchronise audio and video streams sent over best effort networks such as the Internet. This is essentially because  the amount of jitter and loss is such that even the mere delivering of high quality audio and video from a source to N destinations remains an important challenge; the availability of newer, higher speed networks make synchronisation possible, and thus an important issue. We need to resolve which stream synchronisation methods are the most appropriate - and how they can be maintained in the event of mis-ordered or missing packets. 
A3.4 Shared workspace support environment  From our MICE and other work, we have determined the need for rugged, shared workspace tools in the MICE projects - working in a mode of reliable multicast  delivery protocols.  We already have many different such tools (e.g. shared White-Boards such as Berkeley's WB and INRIA's Mscrawl tools), shared text editors (e.g. UCL’s NTE tool), and shared drawing tools (an example MultiDraw tool).  These must operate well in a lossy multicast environment, important requirements such as reliability and re-ordering. Our intent is to design new multicast delivery algorithms tailored to different applications, and to implement these algorithms in our already existing  shared workspace protocols.  Our goal is to obtain a generic but easily configurable multicast support environment that can be tailored to specific application needs..
A3.5 User interface  The current tools, developed in the MICE and EUROBRIDGE projects, do not have user-friendly interfaces, making them hard to use by typical (i.e. non specialist) users.  We will ensure that the different interfaces developed for different tools are consistent with each other, acquire friendly user interfaces for all our multimedia tools; and can be reconfigured easily for the needs of a specific event - to meet the media supplied in the event, while catering for the facilities available to the user.
A3.6 Porting Activities  In EUROBRIDGE, most of the tools have operated only on PCs under Windows.;  in MICE, they have been operational on several types of UNIX workstations (mainly Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics and DEC). We will ensure that the tools are made operational, and capable of interworking, on a broad range of platforms including the above. Our initial intention to port to the Macintosh has changed since we have investigated the situation. In view of our limited resources and the poor support from Apple, we have dropped our plans to port the MERCI tools to the Macintosh platform.  Apple is developing tools compatible with VIC and VAT, operating above RTP/2; these will interoperate with the MERCI tools. The JAVA-based whiteboard tool, currently under development at RUS, should run on the Mac - though it is unlikely that NTE will work on that machine.
For the PC platform, we are including Windows 95 and, to a lesser extent, Windows NT.  We will try to ensure clear lower level transport interfaces, to minimise application dependencies on the operating system and network.  In some cases, it will be enough to ensure interoperability between current implementations;  in others (e.g. many enhanced audio, shared workspace and media synchronisation), a substantial porting activity is required.  We will concentrate on certain common hardware/software combinations - but will update the tools as new hardware and software become available.
Deliverables 
The initial software package (D0), included a package of software from A3.1, A3.2 and A3.4; secured versions contributing to D1. A year later, high quality versions of each will contribute to D3 (the unsecured versions being ready a little earlier), with synchronisation (A3.3) and integrated User Interfaces (A3.5). Facilities will be available on additional platforms (A3.6) three months after they are first demonstrated. T his means that the additional platform support will be demonstrated mainly in D2 and D3 - with secured versions with advanced facilities only in D4.

3.4.4	WP4 Usability and Assessment
Objectives 
This work-package will capture the user requirements, will ensure that there is an appropriate user interface to the system, will evaluate the tools provided, and will assess the tools needed for collaboration.  The work-package should also act as a bridge to the users, so that their needs and experiences can be fed back to the developers, to ensure a higher quality system later. It should act to provide Quality Control on the output of the technical developers and as a guide to good practice in setting up a conference room.
Description of work
This work-package  will consist of three activities: requirements capture, user interface design, and tool evaluation.  Each of these is discussed below.
A4.1 Requirements capture and review The statistics and problem reports compiled by the MICE network of Support Centres (MICE-NSCs), who provide expert advice and help in tools and installing them, will form a starting point for assessing usability of conferencing tools and how they can be improved - as will the evaluation reports from RACE projects such as ISSUE, CIO, and LUSI.  Since the tools which suit regular and expert users may not be ideal for beginners and casual users, and most users have more specific requirements for remote co-operation than general conferencing tasks, we will review the requirements on which current tools are based.  We will combine the responses of existing user groups on their assessment of the tools in relation to their own work tasks with the new user groups involved in the validation studies of WP11 -WP13, and with MANICORAL and other user projects.  From these, we should obtain a more representative assessment from a heterogeneous community.
In this activity CRC will contribute by developing assessment tools that can quantify all aspects of tele-interactions (static or dynamic; software parameters; user operations; timing).  Efficiency of use (e.g.  error patterns, redundancy in action sequences, use of short-cuts, superstitious behaviours) and cross-platform compatibility from the users perspective can then be documented empirically.  In an attempt to incorporate user needs into the development process of the MERCI tools, performance measurements will be obtained from the software and correlated with performance from the user. As for the human performance measurements, a naturalistic observation approach will be adopted where participants will be videotaped (audio and video) and screen captures will serve to anchor participants' behaviours with the activity at hand. 
A4.2 User interface design  A basic requirement for the multimedia conferencing system it that it be used comfortably and confidently by the intended users;  after short periods of instruction and training, they should be able to focus on the task (e.g. teaching learning a language, discuss a medical case/technique) rather than have to spend time and cognitive resources on working out on how to operate the system in order to get the task done.  The design of a suitable user interface (UI) is the major step towards fulfilling this requirement.  Different user groups have different requirements, so a modular UI is required - which interacts with the audio, video and shared workspace tools chosen for that user group.  Since UIs of most tools currently available are using TCL/TK, quick prototyping, evaluation and revision of UIs for the user groups is feasible and desirable. The basic control of cameras and microphones, and management of screen space need to be considered.  We will use the results of projects such as  EDITH (RACE) to design user agents, reduce the scope for user error, but retain adequate user flexibility and control. Systematic testing and evaluation of the various options will be conducted to answer how the control is best provided.. 
A4.3 Tool evaluation  A detailed evaluation of the usability of individual tools (particularly audio and video) and their suitability for the real-world tasks performed by user groups, will lead to establishing quality thresholds for such tools over a range of tasks, and should provide useful guidelines for establishing Quality of Service (QoS) guidelines for providers of services in this area.  The evaluation will include also the ease of learning and ease of use of the integrated conferencing solution offered to the user groups, and their effectiveness for long-term remote co-operation for the real-world tasks.  We will the examine internally factors such as optimum screen layouts for multimedia conferencing, conference protocols for coping with network problems, turn taking, use of White-Board etc; we will study also the feedback reports from the very different sets of users from MANICORAL and the other user projects.  We will the assess the  audio and video both separately and together by a series of targeted trials. The benefits of remote collaboration (opportunistic business alliances, sharing of expertise, reduction in travel) are hard to quantify; we will rely on the validation  workpackages and the linked projects for such an assessment.  
Additional work to be done by CRC in this activity will be in two areas: 
1.	To develop and use subjective measures of MBONE tools, specifically by developing an evaluation methodology that will allow systematic quantitative evaluation of the MBONE tools during or after MERCI sessions.
2.	To develop models of session suitability and success. This work will focus on the session’s goals and activities, rather than the actual tools used during the session.  For example, did the session meet its business, educational, or communication goals? How did it compare to face-to-face sessions or other telecommunication technologies?  This research will also involve the development of an evaluation methodology to be used during or after sessions.  In addition, objective measures of session attendance and real-time probing techniques will be used to measure various aspects of session success.  The results of this work will be a session evaluation scheme that will be useful for anyone using the MBONE.  In addition, guidelines will be established for service development and recommendations for new service areas.  This will be useful to other organisations interested in using the MBONE for new services, as well as to MERCI.
Deliverables
Most of the results of this workpackage will be internal Deliverable, discussed between the users and the Developers.  They will provide a formal record of the User feedback to the developers - and vice versa.  They will be provided each six months, and we will be happy to make the reports available each six months to the Commission if desired.  One evaluation report will be written at the end of each year assessing the usability of the tools and their suitability for the tasks in hand.
CRC will provide, with the “User Feedback” deliverables (D4.2, .3 & .4), a series of reports, “Quantitative Pilot Data on Behavioural Patterns”, which will be delivered at months 12, 18 and 24.  In addition, tools for interface evaluation and service evaluation with real-time audience monitoring software will be provided to the MERCI partners at month 16 and related reports will be delivered in D4.4.

3.4.5	 WP5 Packet/Circuit MM Conference Interworking
Objectives
The videoconferencing services developed within most communications companies work on connection-oriented networks such as ISDN following the H.320 standards - running on PCs under Windows.  The computer communications community has developed their systems on  Unix workstations using packet-oriented networks such as the Internet, and following  IETF standards.  Both use H.261,  JPEG and MPEG.
The objective of this work package is to ensure the interoperability between the tools developed by the communities; the MICE/Internet tools should interoperate with H.320 systems and H.320 terminals will be able to enter a video-conference running on the Internet.
Brief description of the work
The main issues to be solved to achieve interoperability are: low-level Interoperability (data conversion, Quality of Service negotiation, Common Conference Control, White-Board interoperability) and multi-platform support; each of these items will be studied in a separate activity. The approach to interoperability is to provide a multimedia router (also called MMR) that performs the following: protocol conversion; keeping track of the routing tables and the related information; running Instances of conference control modules. The final configuration, to be realised at the end of the project, will allow workstations attached with IP multicast protocols on LANs or the Internet to interwork with H.320-conformant workstations attached to the MMR via the ISDN in multi-party working.
A5.1 Low-level interoperability In this activity we will assure the interoperability of multipoint videoconferencing specifically designed for packet oriented networks such as Internet and the H.320-conforming systems. The approach chosen by the project will not be limited to specifically designed equipment but will apply to H.320 equipment from a wide range of manufacturers.  The use of a multi-media-router,  that will act as an intelligent gateway, should be able to support the different types of protocols and terminals currently developed and used by the EUROBRIDGE and MICE projects: H.320/H.221 compliant videoconference terminals, H.320/LAN terminals as defined by IMTC, Internet-based Terminals either attached to a LAN or to a supporting WAN such as MBONE or ATM.  This MMR will be integrated - as a separated process - in the Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) as defined in the T.120 series in order to keep the system architecture simple and hence decrease the price of the overall system.
A5.2 Quality of Service Negotiation  Even when the workstations of A5.1 can interwork, they may have different capabilities - with different bandwidth requirements and offering different quality of services (QoS).   In A4.2 we will offer solutions for QoS negotiation to make heterogeneous conferences possible, with as little change as possible to the existing systems; this is essential for real interoperability between packet-oriented system and connection oriented systems (H.320 ISDN systems). Two solutions will be investigated: negotiating in the MCU and between end units.  The first allows multi-point conferences with mixed equipment - the MMR arranging for the interoperability;  the second will ensure that the most powerful terminal will the bandwidth to communicate with H.320 systems.  Only the MICE tools have the flexibility to adapt in this way,
A5.3 Common Conference Control  To achieve multipoint to multipoint communication over IP and ISDN, a common conference control is a major issue. We will define a conference control level for both a distributed (multicast IP) and centralised (T.120) architecture. The problem once again is that the T.120 series of standard is now being released and allows for very little flexibility, but we expect to implement an original solution based on the MMR of A4.1. All IP terminals in the conference will register at the router, allowing an instance of the GCC to be created for each IP participant, will. At this point, the IP terminals will be seen by the GCC and MCS (two main modules foreseen in the T.120 standard) as H.320-compliant terminals. The instance will manage the communication at the control level between the terminals.
A5.4 White-Board Interoperability  The White-Board application is a key factor in the utility of desk-top conferencing. It allows for slides presentation and joint-working within a conference and therefore increase the efficiency of the "virtual meeting". The objective of this task is to study and implement a white-board tool that can be jointly used in a conference by IP and H.320 terminals.  The MICE project used WB - a white-board tools that has been designed for conferences over the Internet,  H.320 terminals are expected to support the so-called still-image (SI) conferencing as described in the T.126 standard.  A5.4 will realise a mapping between the functions of WB and those foreseen in the T.126 standards - taking place either at the terminal-level or in a dedicated process in the MMR. Only one solution will be implemented. 
Deliverables
The results of A5.1 will be demonstrated in D2, with the interoperable systems from A5.2 and A5.3 shown in D3.  An early version of interoperable whiteboards should be available in D2;  better versions of such whiteboards (A5.4) and common control (A5.3) will be shown in D3.

3.4.6	WP6 Network Support 
Objectives 
This work-package will ensure that the tools operate using IP over a wide range of underlying technologies including LAN, B-ISDN, SMDS, ATM (including the European ATM pilots to be provided under TEN-34) and N-ISDN, i.e. EuroISDN. In addition, some network technologies will be supported in native mode. Since the performance of multimedia applications depend on the QoS provided by the underlying infrastructure;  we will provide the tools to measure the QOS in the distributed system, to identify problems areas and achieve adequate performance.
Brief description of work to be carried out. 
Three categories of activity are required to meet our objectives of providing good multimedia services over the concatenation of heterogeneous networks:  provision of appropriate network support, measurement activities and development of network and applications management and monitoring tools.  Each is considered below.
A6.1  Support for Network Technologies We will provide underlying support for the following wide-area network technologies: N-ISDN (EuroISDN), B-ISDN (ATM), native IP (both over SMDS and point-point circuits),. All these technologies have their separate user focus: B-ISDN should become increasingly available as a wide area bearer service;  native IP will continue to dominate in the 128 Kbps to 34 Mbps area; N-ISDN will be increasingly useful for isolated sites, places with low rates of utilisation and local access.  Here we address not only the native nodes of pure B-ISDN and N-ISDN but also the Internet Protocol (IP) run on top of these transmission technologies.  Thus, for example, we will implement the IP/ATM and IP/ISDN facilities in our workstations and also the ITU M660/ISDN. Another set of activities will be to support the next generation IP (IPNG), as needed.  Most of our network support will have to be able to operate in a multicast mode.  The work in A6.1 will provide software/hardware facilities for the different networks, but also will deploy them in a seamless and concatenated way for our validation WPs, and provide guidance on when to employ what networks.
CRC will contribute to this activity by providing heterogeneous network support for MERCI connectivity across the Atlantic.   Their aim will be to support IP Multicast Networks by interconnecting and integrating CRC into the MERCI/MBONE infrastructure in four phases: first using existing DRENet facilities; second using the ATM NTN facilities of Teleglobe, OCRINet and CANARIE; third using commercial ISDN; and fourth, as time and resources permit,  incorporating satellite connections.
A6.2 Network Measurement The MERCI multimedia applications make heavy demands  on the underlying network technology;  this is exacerbated when the heterogeneous networks of A6.1 are used, and the multicast requirement.  To provide such services effectively, it is essential to measure QoS broadly, and provide suitable management facilities. MBONE applications run over the Internet through multi-cast "tunnels", end users are usually connected to their local area network (LAN); hence  multicast traffic can be measured from the aggregate Ethernet traffic - filtering out the desired packets off-line. Hence we derive the parameters (such as the average inter-arrival times, packet loss, correlation among packet losses) needed by the multimedia tools of WP3, the network components of WP5 and WP6, and the multimedia server of WP7.
This activity will be supplemented by CRC’s intention to establish a measurement capability, to conduct performance characterisation experiments and to contribute to the collection of long-term performance statistics. 
A6.3  Network Monitoring and Traffic Management Monitoring tools are extremely important to assist in fault diagnosis,  debugging and performance analysis of the MBONE infrastructure, which is used for the multimedia conferencing service.  Existing monitoring tools will be improved and new tools will have to be developed to suit the strong need and ongoing request by project partners and public network operators who are managing MBONE services. Initially some of the tools already in use in the MICE project will be made available for a larger user community which requires improving the user interface, monitoring, set-up and control.  At a later date, generic, application-independent monitoring tools based on the IETF Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) will be deployed. In addition the control protocol (RTCP) is designed to provide minimal control and identification functionality, particularly in multicast networks - both being independent of the underlying transport and network layers. Based on these mechanisms, tools for monitoring the network and QoS will be developed. 
CRC will establish an initial network monitoring capability that can be used to support operation and maintenance of the infrastructure.  They will refine the measurement and monitoring tools and develop new tools as needed to study QoS and network management issues.
Deliverables
The support for the different networks envisaged in A6.1 will be largely available by D1 in at least one platform;  multi-platform support and new network interfaces will lead to later improvements - particularly for ATM.  The measurements tools of A6.2 will be demonstrated in D2;  the measurements themselves will be internal Deliverables.  The monitoring facilities of A6.3 will be internal Deliverables in D1 and D2, with external delivery in improved forms in the later demonstrations and to our applications partners.
CRC will provide trans-Atlantic ATM-IP multicast infrastructure and initial performance characterisation results to D2 at month 12.  They will provide additional network measurement results to D3 and D4 at months 18 and 24 and demonstrate a prototype integrated performance monitoring platform to D4 at month 24.

3.4.7	WP7  Multimedia Server Support
Objectives
The main objectives of the Multimedia Server are to:
•	Record multicast conference data whose source may be any of the conferees
•	Playback recorded material either directly to one user or into another multicast conference
•	Allow users to create their own edits of recorded material and to create their own presentations
•	Supply a large repository of archive space which is accessible to network  users  who  wish  to  record or playback multimedia data
•	Ensure authentication and privacy for providers and users of the service
•	Optimise multimedia storage with respect to storage cost and retrieval time
•	Define flexible hierarchical storage mechanisms for organisation, indexing and retrieval of multimedia document collections.
Brief description of work to be carried out.
The tools currently used in multimedia conferences on the Internet use IP multicast to transmit data to all other participants in  the  conference.   Experience  indicates that there is a need for a mechanism to record and playback both the audio and video of the multicast video conferences; we will develop a video conference recorder to achieve this.  When recording, both audio and video streams need to be archived, with the possibility of stream synchronisation on replay. As  some  seminars only require a subset of the conferees to be recorded, the record mechanism must allow  a selection of the streams to be specified. Retrieval of recorded material needs to be easy for users to access either for direct playback to the user or for inclusion in another  multicast  video  conference. Users need to know which conferences have been recorded and are on-line for access in order to select streams to access. Thus,  various indexing techniques need  to be deployed to aid users in their selection. In this work package the main aspects of a system which addresses these requirements will be described.  In addition the recording of audio and video and the recording of shared workspace tools will also be addressed. Since these do not produce the same of type data stream as audio and video, their storage will need to be flexible enough to support various scenarios, from simple storage of lecture slides to the multi-active scribbling of a brainstorm session. These storage mechanisms will need to be matched with equally flexible indexing methods for various search criteria.
The user interfaces to the recording systems will include a simple "video-on-demand"-like interface, probably based on World Wide Web forms and a remote-control interface based on the communication services of Conference Control Channel Protocol [CCCP] to allow recording and playback with distributed control. 
The need for privacy and authentication, from both service provider and users are not very different from the general needs of a multimedia conferencing.  We will use the developments from other WPs where appropriate.  Some specific scenarios for multimedia servers are different.  The server needs to authenticate the remote user, and determine whether the user should be allowed access. It is envisioned that the server typically should allow operations originating from many different users, so access control should be rather fine grained. We will take accounting services into consideration when designing the server.
The internal security of the server should be high enough to allow multiple user communities without compromising one community's privacy to the others. A user should be able to store an encrypted recording without having to divulge the key to the server. The full set of services will however not be supported for such recordings.
Deliverables
A multimedia server having the facilities of the above will be provided as part of D2;  it will be usable, without security, earlier as an Internal Deliverable by our User Groups. The secured version will be available only in D3.

3.4.8	WP 8 Conference Control and Management
Objectives 
The aim of this workpackage is to develop tools for booking conferences, controlling bandwidth usage, set-up and control of multiplexors and transcoders and diagnosis of problems occurring.
Brief Description of the work
The activity is divided into four activities: Booking and Set-up of Conferences, Conference Relay Set-up, Conference Control of Active Conferences and Fault Diagnosis.
A8.1  Booking and Set-up of Conferences  Conference booking has many aspects in a distributed heterogeneous environment.  We will adapt the IETF RSVP WG bandwidth reservation mechanisms as they become available and integrate them into our conference set-up mechanisms and tools; still a little way off yet, it will inevitably be deployed in a piecemeal fashion. The session description protocol used by SDR, developed under the MICE project,  is now in the early stages of the standardisation process in the IETF Multi-party Multimedia Session Control (MMUSIC) working group and we envisage this process continuing under MERCI.  Booking, in the context of a set of linked conference rooms, is also a requirement, but is more problematic. We will investigate whether existing protocols such as SNMP can satisfy the requirement for standardisation and distributed implementation; we will specify a protocol, and will try to introduce it both in the IETF and in our own institutions.

A8.2  Conference Relay Set-up  The "session directory" protocol allowing the set-up, advertisement and start-up of multicast conferences, needs a number of enhancements to allow flexibility and to ensure reliable start-up of transcoders and multiplexors;  we shall participate within the IETF in its update and standardisation.  One mechanism for the distribution of encryption keys needed for secure conferencing is to propagate these advertisements only to valid participants, whilst still participating in the enhanced MBONE booking scheme described above.  The automatic set-up of transcoders and multiplexors at appropriate places in the network is a requirement as we distribute the multiplexing functionality.  For multiplexors where the recipients are Internet-reachable before conference set-up, this should be done using the same mechanisms as for participants not requiring the services of the multiplex. It is not yet clear whether this can be achieved for systems such as ISDN video phones, which are not on the Internet - though this may be possible when the ITU T.120 conference control functionality is finalised and implemented.

A8.3 Conference Control of Active Conferences  The MICE Conference Control Channel Protocol is being standardised in the IETF MMUSIC WG - under its co-chair Mark Handley of UCL.  Continued feedback from the MERCI project will shape the standards for multimedia multi-party conference control on the Internet.  The enhancement of CCCP should also allow relevant conference control information to be made available to multiplexors and transcoders as required. One intended extension is the dynamic control of a fixed bandwidth allocation amongst the participants of a multicast conference.
The ITU T.120 multi-party conference control standard is now finalised for the control of centralised circuit switched conferences, although not widely deployed. Its centralised approach is at odds with the more distributed approach in the IETF, and is not appropriate for multicast based conferences. Interoperability schemes will be developed in A5.3 to allow the emerging IETF standards for conference control to interoperate with T.120/H.320 based multimedia conferences.  Since the MMUSIC group is still considering distributed conference control, we will influence this process in A8.3 to ease inter-operability.

A8.4 Fault Diagnosis The MICE tools to enable fault diagnosis have proved sufficiently useful to the MBONE community, that such features are being added to the next generation of multicast routers and to the RTP transport protocol.  We will continue to extend the tools, and interact with the relevant IETF WGs.

Deliverables
The booking system of A8.1 will be demonstrated in D1, with the extended functionality of A8.2 being part of D2, the interoperability of conference control of A8.3 shown in D3.  The fault diagnosis of A8.4 is a continuous process, and some will be demonstrated at each Deliverable.

3.4.9	WP9 Conference Room Support
Specific objectives 
The bulk of multimedia conferencing work has been on workstation-based conferencing. There are specific problems which must be resolved in the context of conference and large lecture rooms - as has been evident in the current MICE installations. These include the provision of higher quality video and audio, different integration of multimedia servers, integration of electronic White-Boards, and much more attention to space/related variables like echo cancelling.
Brief description of work
We will upgrade at least one existing conference or lecture room in each of KTH, UCL and UiO to include flexible facilities for conferencing. The conference rooms will be demonstrated by being used both for the MERCI seminars and in the weekly project meetings. We expect that some of these rooms will be deliberately over-provisioned to ensure that we are able to institute a good review on how to ensure high quality presentations.
The conference room is a physical space equipped so that groups of users with little or no training can communicate comfortably through audio and visually as well as through a shared workspace tool integrated in a suitable way into the conference room, i.e. as an electronic White-Board. The design of the conference room and how the components are arranged in the room and relatively to the users are crucial to the success of the conference room and will be addressed by the Work Package result in a conference room specification.
This Work Package will be based on results from others for high quality audio and video coding, shared workspace tools, multimedia servers and basic conference control and monitoring.  It will integrate those results into the conference room, partly by providing suitable user interfaces to the software. The conference room will be centred around a single workstation which is used for audio and video coding, shared workspace, conference set-up and control, and which may also be used for conference monitoring. The conference room is able to participate fully in conferences with workstations and vice versa. 
Since high quality audio is desired, usage of echo-cancellers as well as an automatic microphone mixer in each conference room is a requirement. Microphones and speakers will be integrated into the conference room so as to make usage by the desired number of users possible without the users having to be concerned about their relation to the microphones. 
High quality video may require usage of hardware codecs, preferably integrated onto a card in the conference room workstation, though it is no longer clear that hardware codecs will continue to provide much better performance that high quality video boards in workstations. One or more cameras, possibly with automatic camera switching will be used, with the decoded picture shown on large monitors or through video-projectors.
The electronic White-Board consists both of a software component as well as a hardware part. The software will be an adapted version of one of the shared workspace tools of WP3, while the hardware part will be addressed by this Work Package. The Electronic White-Board has much in common with the Xerox LiveBoard in that it is based on a  back-projected workstation screen and that a pen is used by the users interacting on the White-Board.
Deliverables
As part of  D2, we will demonstrate a completely working medium performance conference room;  the high performance one, with all its functionality, will be available as part of D3.

3.4.10	WP10 Security Support
Specific objectives
The objective of the security provision is to allow access to conferences and document stores only by authorised parties, and to ensure that the contents of the audio, video, shared White-Board and document store are is available only to authorised recipients.  It will be necessary also to ensure that participants of the conference are aware exactly who is participating at any time.
Brief description of work.
Where confidentiality is required in exchanges, for the current purposes, it is adequate to encrypt with DES. We will define facilities to allow the interchanges to be encrypted;  we will use here the same specifications as have already been provided in the MICE project.  We address here the security architecture, end-end security, participant authentication and encryption gateways.
A10.1 Security architecture for conferences  No security technology will be developed in this project, but we will incorporate technology developed under previous projects and the concurrent ICE-TEL project.  We have an agreement with the ICE-TEL project that suitable tools and infrastructure will be provided to MERCI from that project. We will, therefore, review the security architecture developed in the MICE project (including any APIs) to assess whether any changes are indicated as a result of current requirements, the standardisation activities of the ITU-T groups, or the  basic security tools that will be provided to MERCI.  We will investigate how secure working can be provided also between the packet-switched and circuit-switched worlds.
A10.2 End-to-end security  End-to-end security comprises security measures taken directly by the applications at the user ends. It includes end-to-end encryption and requires applications which are compatible in terms of security functions.  The multimedia components of A3.1 are being prepared in such a way that they can be secured by the use of suitable security tools;  these will be provided by the previous projects, or the ICE-TEL tools.  We will ensure that the key management mechanisms work in such a way that it is possible to change encryption keys dynamically for the video, audio and shared whiteboard components.  It should not be a particular problem to ensure secure interworking between the circuit and packet switched worlds on a point-point basis, but may be much more difficult if there are MCUs in the system.
A10.3 Conference participant authentication  We envisage two environments: in one there is a general announcement of the conferences - but only authorised conferees can join a conference and access the encryption keys;  in the second, the information about the conference is sent only to specific parties.  For either method, a list of session encryption keys may be provided;  these will either be sent out as part of the session announcement (with MOSS or sdr) in the session announcement ensuring that only authorised recipients can participate), or will be held in a directory - for which strong authentication will be required for access..
A10.4  Encryption gateways  In some environments it is impractical to use security-aware applications.   A viable alternative is to use an encryption gateway, in which all the security technology is concentrated.  The trusted component should be small enough, and provided in source form, so that any user can inspect and verify its functions. This clearly separates the user's choice of an application from the trusted components.  The use of an encryption gateway does not impact the problem of key management;  the mechanisms of A10.3 can still be used to affect the key distribution mechanisms.
Deliverables.
The architecture of A10.1 will be published as part of D1, and its first embodiment, the results of A10.2, will be demonstrated in D2.  At least one key management system from A10.3 will be shown at the same time, though it will be expanded in D3.  Encryption gateways, from A10.4 will be introduced in D3 also.  The earlier internal deliveries of secure systems will use merely software solutions.  From D2 onwards, some smart cards will be included in the demonstrations. 

3.4.11	WP11 The Seminar Work-Package
Objectives
There are several objective of the seminar workpackage: 
•	To exercise all the MERCI components in a realistic setting with all the partners participating; we have a real need to run the seminar series between the interested parties;
•	To have a regular event which allows new technical development to be integrated regularly.
•	To apply the leading edge MERCI components in an important teaching application, where practitioners not expert in Computing must apply them with undue distraction or training.
Brief description of work. 
A11.1  The Weekly Meeting  We hold a bi-weekly multimedia project (c.f. WP1).  Components considered ready for validation will be introduced into the weekly meetings, and tested there until they are considered rugged enough for wider use.   They will then be introduced into one of the validation work-packages (WP11, WP12 and WP13), transferred to a related project (cf. WP2), or passed to a Sponsoring Partner.
A11.2 The Distributed Systems Seminar Series.  We will maintain regular, scheduled, seminars as part of a formal course of study at University College London;  they  will be made available to students in at least five countries on a regular basis.  The seminars will incorporate the extended functionality developed in the technology packages of MERCI.  We will incorporate audio and video of high quality and shared White-Board facilities.  We will employ the multimedia server in the seminars;  in fact all lecture material will be held on the seminars - which will also be recorded on the server.   The series will use both conference rooms and workstations - and we will ensure that a variety of workstations are used to stress the cross-platform support.  This activity will incorporate the various techniques developed for conference room support - including the electronic White-Board.  For this type of application, the management and monitoring will be sorely stressed.   Finally, a wide variety of networks will be used - including the best ATM networks available from the research networks involved and the slower networks available to others.  
RUS is the responsible partner, but all MERCI partners provide both lecturers and audiences for the series.
A11.3 Other Seminars  Several MERCI partners are providing courses to commercial customers.  We will extend the seminar series to include others - e.g. Hewlett-Packard and British Telecom, for whom we are already providing such seminars.  This will ensure that other network technologies, like ISDN networks, will also be used in the series.  We expect that these demonstration phases will start almost immediately.  Hewlett-Packard is already starting one such project from its own funds;  in fact they have helped some of the partners to put in adequate facilities to run some training seminars for the company.  British Telecom have also funded another UK project in language teaching to employ the tools in some real language courses [6] - involving the Language Centres in Exeter U and UCL.  For this application, the MICE tools were not quite adequate;  we would need some of the audio tools resulting from WP3 of MERCI to do a good job of the teaching.  It is our intention to use that testbed as a real demonstrator.
Several of the MERCI partners have much more ambitious plans of mounting at least demonstrators, and possibly full scale services.  One such full-scale service will be run in Norway by the University of Oslo and the results will be factored into our analysis.  The seminar Work-package is very important to several of the universities involved.  The universities may well put these into serious service as a demonstration phase - and here a large proportion of any direct costs will be met by the university concerned.  This has already happened as a result of the MICE project, where UCL is running a joint HCI course with Imperial College.
Our new partner, CRC, will act as a host site for reception and assessment of the MERCI seminar series and will provide at least one seminar in the series.
Deliverables
The bi-weekly meetings and early seminars started within weeks of the start of the project; new technical components are now ready to be introduced.  We propose to consider one Seminar a Deliverable each six months - preferably timing it to be close to the Delivery Dates of D1, D2, D3 and D4.  When convenient, this will be supplemented by a public demonstration at a conference of either a talk or a session.   CRC will contribute fully to these deliverables by regular reception and assessment of Seminar series, arrangement and transmission of  a seminar in the series and making contributions to deliverables D3 and D4.

3.4.12	WP12 The Surgical Workshop Work-Package
Objectives
The objective of this work-package is to stress those aspects of the system which are particularly appropriate to the surgical workshops in a demanding application:  high quality multimedia tools, multimedia servers, security and conference control.
Brief Description of the Work
UCL has already held one, two day, surgical workshop in which live operations were carried out in London, but two others were brought in from Gothenburg and San Francisco.  All the participants were impressed by that event, but have recognised that substantial improvements are required for the further development of this application.  Most of these developments will be carried out in the Health Care and Training sectors - both inside the Telematics Programme and elsewhere.
In the annual workshop, we will ensure that operations carried out in the Middlesex Hospital as part of the annual Urology workshop (or some such similar event if that series is changed in the next few years) is broadcast to a number of other sites in Europe and North America.  We will bring in also operations from other sites to be part of the workshop event.  The operations will be part of a training workshop, so that both an oral presentation of the procedure, a visual demonstration, and an interactive discussion are integral parts of the event.   We have assurance of five hospitals already (in Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US) that they will wish to participate;  of these four participated already in the 1994 workshop.
The highest quality audio and video available under MERCI will be provided - in a conference room environment.  Moreover, the inclusion of real-time instrument data - usually X-ray and Ultrasonic scans is essential - with quality superior to that shown in the early demonstration in 1994.  Using the results of WP10 will ensure not only that confidentiality of the transmission is maintained, but also that only approved users are receiving the transmissions. 
Evaluations of the interactive surgery teaching workshop will be much more revealing than those of the seminars.  Now we are addressing a set of people in quite a different field;  the operating surgeons have little previous knowledge of, and no development experience of. remote teaching - though they have very good knowledge of the presentation of their subject to local audiences.   At each participating hospital, there will be similar surgeons;  thus we get excellent feedback on how experts view the facilities they are being offered - in very stressful conditions.  The audiences often have experience of local workshops of this type - and even video tape presentations which are prepared at very great cost;  most will not have any experience of distance demonstration of such operations.  The evaluations of both the audiences and the surgeons will be invaluable in guiding the project staff on what facilities require improvement.
CRC will participate in this activity by providing facilities for surgeons to view the workshops, if this can be arranged with the organiser of the workshop. 
Deliverables
The Deliverables will be the annual workshop

3.4.13	WP13  Commercial Testbeds
Specific objectives
The objective here is to apply the conferencing tools in at least one commercial testbed, where it will be evaluated according to real commercial criteria.  The application will be sufficiently demanding that the multimedia tools will be applied in the workstation environment, and will use the type of equipment, network and security procedures required by the end user.
Brief description of work to be carried out.
GMD is currently pursuing a number of its contacts to its commercial partners in order to locate a suitable test environment meeting the above mentioned objectives. We mention just two:
A project "Virtual Meetings based on ATM" has been set up with Deutsche Telekom, developing and testing a system for realising virtual meetings among parties in distributed meeting rooms, each of which is equipped with a number of workstations or laptop and a large size electronic board (Xerox LiveBoard). Initially, this will be an combination of MICE tools and DOLPHIN, a hypertext-based GMD development specialised for meeting support. (preparation, agendas, structuring of discussions, common and private views on documents, follow-up actions etc.). MERCI results shall be introduced when they become available.  In addition, ISDN conferencing systems used for inter-site conferencing within Telekom and/or marketed by Telekom shall be integrated with and evaluated against solutions from the MICE and MERCI projects.  Part of the project are the provision of proper tools for conference management and floor control, as well as a study to describe basic common and generic building blocks for cross platform conferencing in terms of the CORBA architecture.
Currently under negotiation is a project with Lufthansa to pilot the use of multimedia desk top conferencing tools to hold corporate meetings between participants at their various business locations. Lufthansa has expressed a need to update their current conventional facilities and has been looking at commercially available alternatives.  It is planned to integrate the MERCI tools into this activity.  This activity has several aspects including the following:
•	Use of the platform types and networks appropriate to the customer;
•	Use  of applications considered appropriate to the customer;
•	Inclusion of the appropriate user interfaces, security and server facilities required by the customer.
The first part of the activity will be a detailed analysis of the user's requirements for this testbed;  only when that has been agreed with the customer, will the detailed scheduling and implementation programme be fixed.
All of the contacts have in common an application scenario which is some kind of business meeting (usually with confidentiality requirements), previous experience with some form of (traditional) videoconferencing, and the desire to move to an innovative form of conferencing however with very specific requirements on the acceptable platform and network types.

Deliverables
It will be an integral part of the demonstrators to carry out the quality assurance.  Our discussions with the current companies under discussion indicate their need for quality assurance before the tools are introduced, and their concern with the evaluation of the tools in their environment.
4.	
PROJECT MANAGEMENT 
4.1	Project Internal Management
4.1.1	The Project Management Structure
•	The Co-ordinating Partner will appoint both a Project Director (PD) and a Project Manager.- who will be members of that Partner’s staff  The Project Director and the Project Manager work as a team;  the former is responsible for many of the Executive management decisions;  the second for the administrative ones; both posts are part-time.  
•	Each partner paid by the EU will appoint a Technical Manager (TM).
•	Each .Sponsoring Partner will appoint a Technical Contact (TC).
•	It has been stated in this Technical Annex which organisation is responsible for which work-package;  it is the responsibility of that organisation to appoint a Work-Package Leader (WPL).
•	The role of the PD is to represent the project from a policy perspective in the following respects:
Represent the Project to the CEC
Lead major policy discussions between partners
Lead negotiations for changes in contractual, technical or financial matters with the CEC.
•	The Role of the Project Manager is to lead the project from an administrative viewpoint in the following respects:
•	represent the project to the CEC and the outside world;
•	liaise with TMs at partner sites;
•	ensure that schedules and deliverables are met;
•	handle the overall financial aspects of the projects;
•	manage the MERCI project archive;
•	disseminate information about MERCI to the research community and the outside world;
•	take executive decisions between Project Management Meetings (subject to discussion at the weekly meetings);
•	chair Project Management Meetings (PMMs)
•	prepare Periodic Management Reports (PMRs).
•	The role of the Technical Manager is to represent, and to act as the main contact point for  their organisation vis a vis the Project.
•	There will be a Project Management Committee (PMC);  this will normally comprise the PD, the PM and the TMs.
•	There will be a Project Technical Committee (PTC);  this will include, but not be restricted to,  the WPLs and the PM.
4.1.2		Project servers
MERCI will produce substantial amounts of documents and software which have to be distributed to partners, individual users and user groups, and other interested parties.  The Co-ordinating Partner Contractor will maintain a document and ftp server containing general project documents such as minutes, management reports, technical reports and publications, and a directory of National Support Centres (NSCs), their contact points, and MERCI software.  Partners releasing software are responsible for making this available to NSCs in an agreed fashion, and updating entries in the general project server.  At present the project server is held as a World Wide Web (WWW) server.  In view of potential sensitivity of some of the information, some of the WWW pages will be available for all outside bodies, some will be restricted to the project members.  
The WWW server will be run on a Server using a 180 GB Jukebox as the main document store, though there is also substantial asic memory for indexing data.  A commercial database search engine (WAIS) will ensure that it is straightforward to search for arbitrary text strings in the project database - easing the location of project information.  As in the MICE project, the existence of shared editing tools eases the shared preparation of documents.

4.1.3	The Organisation of Meetings and the Management Structure
The general meetings will normally comprise a one day management meeting (PMM)  of the PMC and a two day technical meetings (PTM) of the PTC.  These will normally be held quarterly, but the frequency can be varied as required.
Project Management Meetings  The purposes of the PMMs are the following:
•	review progress of the project;
•	identify changes required in strategy or schedules;
•	take decisions on changes needed in management, goals or effort devoted to work packages
Decisions in the PMM will normally be made general consent.  For any decision involving transfer of resources between organisations, the organisations concerned have right of veto.  TMs are expected to follow the weekly meetings and attend PMMs;  TCs will be invited to attend the meetings..
Project Technical Meetings  In addition to the PMM, one or two day Project Technical Meetings (PTMs) will take place as required - though often around the PMM..  Project Technical Meetings have two forms.  There will be special ones of a "workshop" character;  these are focused on dealing with one or two specific points, such as interworking between two pieces of software, preparing a piece of software for release, or specifying a new protocol.  Naturally, only individuals directly dealing working on these points participate.  Another form of PTM is always arranged around the PCC.  These PTMs are to discuss the technical progress in each Work Package, and to report any problems to the PCC.  PTMs are, minuted and the minutes are made available to all partners.  Decisions in the PTMs will be made by general consent; serious disagreements will be referred to the PMMs.
Bi-weekly multimedia conferences  We propose to continue the successful meetings started in the MICE project, putting the project technology to good use.  The conferences have the additional advantage that they make it clear to all partners the current status of the different tools.  The main topics in these meetings are preparations of demonstrations and deliverables, results from remote testing of software, discussion of draft versions of specifications, reports and deliverables, etc.  A procedure has evolved for preparing, conducting and documenting those meetings:
•	An agenda is compiled and circulated before each meeting;
•	Documents relevant to agenda points (e.g. draft specifications or new versions of software are available from the WWW or ftp server;
•	The agenda is displayed on NTE and "worked through" in the course of a meeting;
•	Partners take it in turns to minute the meeting;
•	Minutes of the meeting are circulated to all partners and kept on the private WWW server.
4.1.4	User Meetings
We will hold periodic meetings of the users of the MERCI tools to ensure that we have a realistic view of their requirements - probably two such meetings per year will be adequate.  The sponsoring partners and representatives of the MANICORAL and other user projects will be invited to the meetings. At the meetings we will review the comments on MERCI tools received from MERCI users and from those in MANICORAL and such other projects as may be added by mutual consent.  Users’ comments and the Project’s resultant actions will be formally minuted and these minutes appended to the PMRs.  This subject is developed further in WP2.
4.1.5	The Management Plan and Quality Assurance Procedures
Most of the MERCI partners have worked together before, and realise that this type of project is complex and needs careful management.  A Project Manager (PM) will be appointed (cf. Section 4.1.1) responsible for ensuring that tight control of the project is maintained. With tight deadlines for demonstrations and delivery schedules to be met, partners need to be in regular contact.  Project Management Meetings (PMMs) will take place every 2-3 months - normally at one of the partners’ sites.  These will be supplemented by project meetings held over the Internet or any improved network facilities being put in for CEU Telematics projects.  The combination of frequent on-line progress meetings, regular face-to-face meetings and  monthly progress reports will give both the PM and the partners a clear view of the. current progress.  The on-line meetings will keep the both the PM and partners fully aware of the success of the tools currently deployed.  
Several other aids to project management will be employed.  We have as one of the Validation Tasks a fortnightly set of MERCI Seminars;  these will show only too graphically if there are problems either in the tools deployed or in the networks.  We will try to introduce various tools regularly into the weekly meetings and seminars, to provide realistic tests of our progress.  
A second important tool is the Multimedia Server, which we are introducing to hold all Project documentation..  This server is described in greater detail in Section  4.1.2.  In addition to all project documentation (held for internal project purposes), it also will hold publicly available information.  This will help greatly to ease the burden of technology dissemination - which is so vital to this project.
4.1.6	The Experience of the Project Director
Professor Kirstein will act as Project Director.  Professor Kirstein has had extensive experience of managing successful CEU and other collaborative projects.  These have included the following:
•	INCA (Esprit, only Technical Management) 1985-87
•	Paradise (COSINE) 1991-94
•	PASSWORD (Telematics) 1992-94
•	MICE (ESPRIT) 1992-95
In each of these projects, Professor Kirstein has appointed also a Project Manager in addition to himself.
4.1.7	Work Package Leaders
For each Work Package (WP), there will be a work-package leader (WPL), who will be responsible for planning and over-seeing the progress of the WP.  It is the WPL’s responsibility to report on progress at the PMMs, and to PTMs for the WP.  He/she is also responsible for progressing Deliverables for the WP.  Normally the WP leader will be chosen from the organisation having the largest effort in the WP.  WPLs will be expected to attend PTMs and the bi-weekly project meetings;  if they are not members of the PMM, they are expected to brief the PMM member of their organisation or the Project Manager for each PMM meeting.
4.1.8	Deliverables
Deliverables may be divided into Internal, Project and Public of which only the latter two are deliverable to the Commission.  Deliverables in this project, whether Internal, Project or Public, are one of three types and the responsibility for their preparation is allocated as follows:  
Specific - related to a single work-package. These will be the responsibility of the WPL.
Conglomerate - containing parts from many work-packages. Preparation of the components is the responsibility of the WPLs.  The responsibility for integrating the Deliverables will be either on the Project Manager or someone else appointed by the PMC - possibly on the recommendation of the PTC.
Management. Preparation of  the Management Deliverables is the responsibility of the PM - though WPLs and TMs are expected to provide their input in a timely fashion.

4.1.9	Confidentiality  and IPR
There will be a collaboration agreement between the partners outlining the handling of confidentiality and IPR.  It is expected that there will be two classes of document:  Confidential to the Project and freely available.  It is hoped that number of confidential documents can be minimised.  A statement on IPR is made in Form S3 in the section Supporting Information - Financial justification.
4.2	Contract Management
The sponsoring partners are members of the project, and will have full access to the information provided by the project.  The exact arrangements for the IPR will be agreed in the Collaboration Agreement.
We expect that documents confidential to the project will represent mainly work in progress;  openly available versions of all Deliverables will be provided.  Clearly some details of  the work will be Company Confidential - if only because it may represent background Information.  Confidentiality of such material will be maintained.  It will not normally be held on the open portions of the Project Archive.
Decisions on the confidentiality of specific documents will be made by the PMC. It is a key function of WP2 to provide documentation for User Groups and for the related projects - in particular SCIMITAR, ICE-TEL and MANICORAL.  The details of the collaboration agreement with these projects have not been settled, but it is hoped that they can be similar to those between the partners.

5.	THE PARTNERSHIP (CONSORTIUM) 
5.1	The Roles and Responsibilities of the Partners
University College London is the Co-ordinating Partner.  
We realise that it is unusual for a University to act in this role, but UCL is an exception for several reasons:
•	It has acted in this role for three series of previous pilot projects (PARADISE, PASSWORD and MICE);
•	It has the best connectivity of the partners to the outside world;
•	It has excellent links to many related technologies and partners through its other projects
•	It has particular links with BT, suppliers (e.g. Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems) and UKERNA - the British Research Network organisation.
UCL has a role not only in co-ordinating the project, but in ensuring its links with other such activities in European, North American and National activities.  It is active in every work-package and will form a link with other RACE (and presumably then ACTS and ESPRIT  programmes.  It leads many of the bridge functions between projects, and the co-ordination of the MERCI Seminar and Surgical workshop activity.  INRIA’s speciality is video coding;  their IVS system of is recognised as being in advance of other relevant activities in Europe;  hence they have taken the leadership of WP1.  GMD is an acknowledged expert on security;  they also have very good links with application projects.  TELES is the prototypical advanced small manufacturer;  they take responsibility for the standardisation, work-station facilities and cross-platform porting.  From their commercial standpoint they are well suited for this role on WP3 and WP4.  KTH has particular skills in high-speed networks and multimedia servers - so that they are leading WP4 and WP5.  U of Oslo has great interest in remote teaching, and has the intention to be the Co-ordinating Partner in a similar role to UCL in a project on the lecture delivery front.  Finally RUS has broad interest - though in an early form, of the MERCI activities in high speed networks. UKERNA represents the British responsibility for data networking in the research community.  Hewlett-Packard, a sponsoring partner of this project, is a leading workstation manufacturer;  actually it is their training division which is the main sponsor.
5.2	The Profile of the Consortium
Though superficially the consortium seems dominated by research organisations, on a closer look it is much broader.  Not only is TELES a progressive manufacturer, but also it provides a good link between the traditional communications interests and the computer ones.  Hewlett-Packard’s training division is a particular good sponsor;  they have strong interests in applying the technology broadly in their organisation.  UKERNA represents the research networks;  it operates one of the most progressive such networks, and is an important user and sponsor organisation.  GMD and INRIA are both research organisations;  however their strong links both with National industry and their PNOs make them particularly important members. UiO, KTH and UCL are universities;   however again their strong links with their PNOs and local industry are one important feature, and their commitment to distance learning is also very important.  The inclusion of CRC in the consortium provides us with a research partner with specific useful skills in the field and with excellent research contacts in both Canada and Europe.  From other links being established with DARPA, it should also be possible to extend applications sites to the US.
5.3	The Balance of the Consortium
All the main partners except TELES and CRC have had a several years collaboration on the MICE project, and represent complete knowledge of all the relevant technology.  TELES brings in their equivalent familiarity with the ITU approach, and their extensive experience of ISDN products and services.  There is an excellent geographic balance;  France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the UK are all involved and, with the inclusion of CRC, North America.  Each will have high quality access to their research networks, their National pilots, and their ISDN networks.  RUS brings in directly supercomputer centre;  we expect this to make unique demands on the MERCI technology.  KTH has first hand experience with both mobile and gigabit networks;  they are invaluable in this respect.  The INRIA skills in video and audio coding are a vital part of the project.  The University of Oslo projects with distributed classrooms will provide a unique feedback on the project’s needs in this area.  The UCL broad network activities provide the latest technology in flow control and reservation techniques.  INRIA, KTH and UCL all have very strong links with the US - an important ingredient for ensuring international interoperability, now further enhanced by our Canadian partner.   Huitema of INRIA is Chair of the Internet Activities Board;  Handley of UCL is Chair of the IETF and Kirstein of the International Collaboration Board;  Pehrson is planning to link US, Swedish and British universities together.  Hewlett-Packard is both a provider of relevant hardware, and a large scale user of the technology.  UKERNA is responsible for operating a network  - but also for funding relevant advanced applications.   
The GMD, INRIA and UCL organisations have also had successful partnerships over many years in other areas - directories (THORN and PARADISE), security (PASSWORD) and high speed networks (HIPPARCH, PREPARE).  UCL has acted some years ago as a test site for the TELES EUROBRIDGE technology.  Thus it is clear that the partnership has been chosen because we all know we work well together, and do not expect the problems endemic in many European projects.  It is significant that there were 11 partners in the original MICE project;  while all contributed well in the MICE context, and several other remain our partners in other activities, only six remain in the MERCI consortium.
5.4	The Mechanisms for involving the Users
The users will be involved both directly in the internal project demonstrators and indirectly via the other projects which will be using the MICE and MERCI technology.  We are now introducing the use of the MICE tools into many of our research programmes as a working practice;  this brings a broad range of users into direct contact with the technology.  In many projects the Validation Projects are well down stream of the project;  we expect to start the MERCI seminars at the beginning of the project, and hold our first surgical workshop within the first few months;  thus user will be directly involved from the beginning.  While the National Support Centres Project is not being funded on a European basis, many are receiving National support;  we will involve a wide range of users via these national centres, and they will hold user meetings from early in their project;  moreover we expect to maintain the flow of information to our users through the Project Servers of Section 4.1.2. We expect to set up a User Committee to advise us of user needs; this committee will include expected participants in validation work-packages (WP11, WP12 and WP13), and the related projects.   The inclusion of CRC will provide additional strength in the evaluation and feedback work of WP4.
There will be a careful monitoring of  the success of  the  validation activities, and  the users’ comments from the early exercises will be fully taken into account in further developments - as has already been emphasised in WP2, WP3 and WP4.  We have made very early delivery of the MICE software to MANICORAL (D0), and of MERCI software (D1) more recently;  the feedback from the user projects will factor crucially into our later activity.
We fully collaborate with the SCIMITAR project in its more global mechanisms for involving users.
5.5	The Contractors
5.5.1	GMD
The Organisation
GMD, the German National Research Centre for Information Technology, conducts research aiming at the development of innovative methods and applications.  It co-operates closely with industry and users, thereby increasing the competitiveness of the German and European economies.  It has four main research areas:  System Design Technology, Communication and Co-operation Systems, Intelligent Multimedia Systems, Parallel Computing.
GMD’s headquarters and four of its eight institutes are located at Schloss Birlinghoven in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn. Two institutes each are located in Berlin and Darmstadt, and there is a liaison office in Tokyo. GMD has a staff of 1200 (Bonn: 800, Berlin: 200, Darmstadt: 200). Most institute directors are also university professors.  The total annual budget of GMD is DM 170 million.  A basic funding of DM 130 million is provided by the Federal Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Technology (90%) and by the Federal States of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Hessen, and Berlin; an additional 40 million comes from project funds and industrial co-operation.
GMD presents its results and research activities at conferences, in scientific publications, on the World Wide Web, and in its magazine, the GMD Spiegel. These results benefit GMD’s co-operation partners in business, science, public administration, and the media, as well as the end-users of the resultant products.
The GMD institute in the MERCI partnership is the Institute for Tele-co-operation Technology (TKT), located in Darmstadt. GMD-TKT has been working in the area of computer networking since the early seventies, in IT security since 1982 and in multimedia conferencing since 1992. We are a regular contractor of the Deutsche Telekom in the areas of telecommunication technology and security technology. Through an interdisciplinary project on electronic communication in jurisdiction, supported by the Federal Ministry of Research and Technology, we have established an expertise in applying innovative communication tools and electronic signatures to end-user scenarios, running testbeds, and evaluating them together with non-technical experts. GMD-TKT has been an active partner in several international projects, including MICE (ESPRIT), CIO (RACE), PASSWORD (VALUE) and SAMSON (RACE).
The contribution to the Project
GMD’s main contributions will be on the subject of Security Support (WP 10) and on Commercial Testbeds (WP13).  In addition, GMD will contribute to WP4 (Usability) by covering user interface aspects of security functions and to WP6 (Cross Platform Activity) by working on common conference control between distributed and centralised architectures.
The Team leader
Knut Bahr studied Electrical Engineering (Dipl.-Ing., Dr.-Ing.) at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, FRG.   Since 1974 he has been  working in informatics at the  Deutsches Rechenzentrum as a scientist with GMD.  He has extensive experience in Communication protocol issues, data communication in ISDN, corporate network planning, ISPBXs, and packet switching technology, network and supplementary services, co-operative support of people in telecommunication, and applications of security techniques.  He has been responsible for the development of a high-integration peripheral packet handler for the ISDN system Hicom (a co-operation project with Siemens), the design of an architecture for computer integrated telephony (co-operation project with a medium sized manufacturer) and  Multimedia Conferencing (EU projects MICE and CIO). He has participated in studies on CSCW tools and on the integration of multimedia modules in the CORBA architecture (co-operation projects with Deutsche Telekom).
The role and service offered by sub-contractors
In the context of Commercial Testbeds, GMD will involve industrial partners (still unnamed). The objective is to test secure conferencing in a realistic business environment with “real users” and to gather feedback from those users. Evaluation, validation and dissemination of project results are expected to benefit from such an approach.  It is expected that the participating organisations will meet their own expenses.
5.5.2	INRIA
The Organisation
INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) is a French public-sector scientific and technological institute under the responsibility of the  Ministry for Research and the Ministry of Industry.  Headquartered at Rocquencourt near Versailles in France,  INRIA has five research centres at Grenoble, Nancy-Metz, Rennes, Rocquencourt, and Sophia-Antipolis (near Nice).  INRIA’ s missions are: basic and applied research, design of experimental systems, technology transfer, knowledge transfer, international scientific exchanges,  contribution to international co-operation programs, scientific assessments, contribution to standardisation.
INRIA employs over 1 300 persons including 1 000 scientists, amongst which are 340 tenure positions, 330 scholars and trainees, 180 researchers from public laboratories, 50 engineers from industry, 100 visiting researchers from abroad.  The research carried out at INRIA is mainly concerned with software and control engineering. This research brings together experts from the fields of applied mathematics, control, signal processing and computer science within the framework of 6 research programs.
Its budget is roughly 70 MECUs, 20% of which comes from contracts, royalties and sales.  Industrial relations are strategic for  INRIA. The Institute’s initiatives are directed towards: 
•	Designing tomorrow’s products through collaborative research contracts with industrial partners (more than 200 contracts with industry and potential users each year), and a growing participation in the ESPRIT and EUREKA programs (86 ESPRIT projects and 5 EUREKA projects since 1984).
•	Getting the products onto the market through software houses and technology companies (LE-LISP, ESTEREL, CAML, CHORUS, GRIF, SME-CI) .
•	Promoting the transfer of advanced  knowledge (receiving engineers from industry and encouraging the movement of researchers towards industry).
•	Stimulating the creation of spin-off companies and subsidiaries  by former  INRIA researchers and engineers (3 Subsidiaries: ILOG, SIMULOG, O2 Technology, and 14 spin-off companies created since 1984).
In the light of its commitment to strong European Scientific Community, INRIA is a member of ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) together with CWI in Netherlands, GMD in Germany, RAL in Great Britain, INESC in Portugal and CNR in Italy. Outside Europe, multiple relations exist, involving the United States, Japan and many more countries.
The Contribution to the Project 
The INRIA team which will be involved in this project is the RODEO project, high performance applications and transmission control protocols for high-speed networks. These protocols are used in particular in our audio and videoconference tools such as IVS (INRIA  Videoconference System), used happily in its MICE process.
INRIA’s effort in the project is focused on WP3 ``Multimedia conferencing components’’. They are involved in all the activities in this WP.  INRIA will bring their experience and expertise gathered in particular in the MICE projects. INRIA is also involved in WP5 ``Network support, measurement, and monitoring’’, bringing to this workpackage their experience in network traffic measurement and analysis gathered the  past few years over the Internet. 
The Team leader 
Jean-Crysostome Bolot (INRIA Sophia Antipolis).  Jean Bolot’s recent work (done in particular with Andres Vega-Garcia and Thierry Turletti within the MICE and the MERCI European projects) has focused on designing and evaluating congestion and error control mechanisms for the multicast distribution of audio and video over the Internet. These mechanisms have been included in FreePhone and in the INRIA Videoconference System IVS. In parallel with the work on control mechanisms, he has also been investigating the characteristics of end-to-end delay and loss in the Internet using an approach which combines measurements with analytic models. This work has led (in the audio task force of the MICE project) to the development of efficient FEC-based error control schemes for audio tools and has been used to dimension playout buffers, to support the case for feedback control of video applications, etc.
5.5.3	KUNGLIGA TEKNISKA HÖGSKOLAN (KTH)
The Organisation
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology), KTH, is the main university covering technology in Sweden. It is a modern institute of technology with first class education and research. Altogether KTH has about 8000 students, 900 active postgraduate students and a staff of almost 2500. The department of Teleinformatics is part of the faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. The department is still growing and has about 30 staff members and 40 graduate students. The academic staff includes 7 chairs covering different aspects of systems, including computer systems and communications, telecommunication, teletraffic and radio communication systems, distributed systems and software engineering.
KTH recently started a long-term strategic research centre on Computing & Communication with participating research groups from SICS,  KTH departments and three departments from other Swedish Universities. The strategic research program of the C&C Centre, and an associated graduate school, is focused on real-time distributed multimedia services, mobile access and high-performance communication networks. The centre has a strong participation from media-, computer- and telecommunications industry. Several staff members are involved in standardisation work, both via the IETF and via ITU-channels. KTH hosted the IETF international workshop in July, 1995.
KTH, in co-operation with the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, initiated the MultiG program in 1990 in which the Stockholm Gigabit Network (SGN) was conceived. SGN is a dark fibre infrastructure covering the Greater Stockholm area allowing pilot networking and field tests both regarding new end-user services and new switching and transmission techniques. SGN is being connected to the Pan-European PNO ATM testbed and offered as a national host for EU-projects. Discussions are under way to connect SGN to other gigabit testbeds into a global gigabit testbed. KTH also runs the Network Operations Centre of the Swedish University Network (SUNET), the Nordic infrastructure (NORDUNET) and also has a long experience from Pan-European networking operating the EBONE.
KTH participates in several EU-projects and networks related to the current proposals, e.g. MICE (ESPRIT 7606), BETEUS, and SONAH (RACE).  KTH has close co-operation with centres of excellence in computer and telecommunications throughout the world. Among the partners outside Europe,  the co-operation is particularly intensive with Stanford and Penn (US), NACSIS (Japan), UTS (Aus) 
Contribution to the Project
KTH will lead  the workpackages on network support (WP6) and multimedia servers (WP7).  it will contribute to those on conference rooms (WP9), conference management (WP8), security (WP10).  It will play an important role in the validation seminars (WP11) and the surgical teaching (WP12).
The Team Leader
Bjorn Pehrson has been a professor in Telecommunications and chairman of the department of Teleinformatics since its formation in 1992. His main areas of teaching and research at KTH is in distributed multimedia systems, focusing on protocol design. Before that he was an adjunct professor at KTH for six years as laboratory manager at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) which he co-founded supported by industry in 1985 while an associate professor at Uppsala University. He was one of the initiators of the MultiG program (1990-1993) a research program on distributed multimedia applications in high-speed networks leaving as one of its results, the Stockholm Gigabit Network. He also pioneered the establishment of SUNET and NORDUNET (1980) and participated in the creation of three spin-off companies exploiting research results from his research groups.
5.5.4	University of Oslo
The Organisation
Universitetet i Oslo (University of Oslo) is Norway’s largest university with 30 000 students and a staff of over 4 500. The Centre for Information Technology Services (USIT) provide services for all parts of the university and has close to 100 employees. The Research and Development unit of USIT has played a key role in establishing the national and Nordic academic networks and is today focusing on development and application of multimedia and network technology for new services to support teaching and research. This work is at the university, national and international levels. The university is connected to the Supernett, a national high speed network for experimental services which is currently under upgrade to ATM-technology, directly connected to the national node for the European MOU ATM-pilot and host for the 8 mbit/s international connection for the national academic network.
USIT participated in the ESPRIT MICE-project and will continue the National Support Centre established as part of that project - now funded by the national academic network operator (UNINETT A/S). USIT is participating in a project on delivery of video over ATM funded by the Norwegian Research Council. In 1992 USIT developed a distributed electronic classroom system (MUNIN) for teaching, meetings and seminars using audio, video and shared workspace technology over the Internet which is compatible with the MICE-technology. High quality audio and video is used by this system and much work has been put into user-aspects. Currently three electronic classrooms have been built with an additional four more being planned.  This will lead to at least one electronic classroom at each of the Norwegian universities. Based on the electronic classroom system a scaled down system for conference room videoconferencing has been developed (KOMPAKT).  This system has been specifically aimed for usage over the Internet and ISDN between distributed campuses of the 26 regional colleges in Norway and has now been deployed at five sites with an additional 10 to 15 sites expected before the end of 1995. USIT is working with industry to commercialise results from these projects.
The Contribution to the project
The University of Oslo will participate in most workpackages and as leader of the Conference Room Work Package. UiO will bring with it into the project an existing conference room, a multimedia server (40 GB optical jukebox) as well as a number of multimedia workstations. Through the MUNIN and KOMPAKT systems we bring with us a considerable base of users. USIT expects, in parallel with the MERCI project, to carry out other technically related activities both contributing to the project and exploiting results from the project. An example is the MA001 project developing a multimedia server based distance education system incorporating MICE technology.
The Team Leader
Geir Pedersen has been responsible for a number of technical development projects at USIT over the last few years. He has been project leader for the MUNIN and KOMPAKT projects and will continue to lead those projects as well as the MA001-project. He has been leading a number of other projects and efforts, like USIT’s participation in the MICE-project, the deployment of X.500 within the academic community in Norway, development of access to X.400-based electronic mail from Macintosh and piloting of usage of smart-card technology as a campus multi service card.  He has also been responsible for the technical design and implementation of the ISO 10163/10164 standards for networked database access in the Nordic SR-Nett project. He has for several years been part of a core technical reference group for the national academic network operator.
5.5.5	The RECHENZENTRUM UNIVERSITAT STUTTGART (RUS)
Organisation
The Stuttgart University Supercomputing Centre (RUS) has recently been selected to become the first German national supercomputing centre and will be visible in this role at an European scale.  In addition to serving users from Academia, RUS also maintains close co-operation with industry.  RUS comprises both a service and a scientific branch. In addition, the RUS director is also head of the Institute for Computer Applications. The total staff of RUS is about 100.  RUS has a record both in supercomputing, visualisation  - and networking and information services. 
RUS has initiated and manages the State science network  ‘BelWue’, the German science Internet and its international connections. RUS also leads the upgrade of BelWue into a 155 Mbps ATM network, which will be closely integrated in the forthcoming national and international ATM and other high-speed  infrastructures.  RUS is actively participating (ESPRIT and RACE) in, and  preparing for, new projects in the 4th Framework Programme.   In the ESPRIT MICE context, RUS acts as National support centre for Germany.  As a supercomputing centre, an industry partner and a member of Stuttgart University, RUS develops and applies multimedia techniques for collaboration, teaching and support at large scale.  In the next few years, the planned improvement in European high-speed networking infrastructures will help to extend this role to embrace a European dimension. 
Contribution to the Project
RUS will play a major role in the Cross-platform support (WP3) - particularly in the development of a new shared whiteboard tool that runs on all platforms foreseen in the project and in the ATM activity of WP6. RUS is currently the Leader of WP 11, the MERCI Seminars, and will collaborate fully in WP12, the Surgical Workshop activity.
Team Leader
The RUS effort would be led by Paul Christ.  Paul got his masters degree in Mathematics and Physics from Tuebingen University in 1968.  At present he is head of the department ‘Communications Systems and BelWue-Development’ (CS-BD) of RUS.  CS-BD has pioneered high-speed networking both locally, nationally and internationally.  In 1987, Paul based the technical initiator of BelWue, the science network of the State of Baden- Wuerttemberg;  he is now in charge of the BelWue-upgrade towards 155 Mbps ATM - including the corresponding transitions into the national and international ATM projects. Paul’s department is involved in four European projects such as RACE 2031, 2060 and ESPRIT 9033 and 7602.
Role and services of Subcontractors
Most of the RUS activities will be carried out directly by RUS.  However, the medical seminars will be carried out in conjunction with other German Hospitals, and some of this work will be subcontracted out.
5.5.6	TELES
Company Profile
TELES was founded in 1983 as a high-tech research and development company, particularly in the areas of telecommunications and security technologies. With currently 90 employees, the company has kept a typical SME structure in order to not only perform rapid prototyping but has also developed advanced quality assurance techniques in many areas e.g.  SGML, MHS, N-ISDN, B-ISDN, CGM, TELEX, FAX, VIDEOTEX, EDIFACT, STEP/PDES/IGES, ETSI/ITU);  it is developing ready-to-use products for them.  TELES provides its services to a variety of large enterprises in several European countries such as DBP (Deutsche Bundespost), the CEC, the BVD (Bundesverband Druck) and companies such as Dornier, IBM, ICL, Nixdorf, PKI, Siemens, Telenorma etc. is one of the leaders on the European ISDN market, offering a whole range of hardware/software products including standard-conforming (H.320/T.120) videoconferencing equipment. In addition to this, TELES is also present on the market of digital PABX, with several low-cost ISDN switching boards.
TELES has gained long term experience in working for the CEC in many European projects. e.g. in various projects in ESPRIT (CITED), RACE ( EUROBRIDGE, Netmart and LUSI), Telematics (MURIEL) and TEN-ISDN (ATTEMPT, SOFISM) . TELES has used the opportunity of European projects to establish strong commercial relationships with partners in all European countries that are now acting as distributors or co-developers. With the help of this network of partners, a significant part of the revenues of TELES now comes from products exported in European Countries.
The Managing Director of TELES, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sigram Schindler, also represents the above mentioned areas of technology in the Computer Science department of the Technical University of Berlin. This allows for a smooth integration of the latest research-developments into products.
Involvement of TELES in European Projects
TELES has participated in a substantial way in large international and national projects in the advanced communications/text technology areas such as:
•	BERKAPS (BERKOM): TELES developed real-time communication tools for broadband. It was on the first attempt in Europe to realise a multipoint system over broadband networks (> 100 Mbps/s).
•	EUROBRIDGE Project (RACE 2008): TELES was in charge of realising the videoconferencing services. It has developed the VISION standard-conforming (H.320/T.120) videoconference system that has been successfully marketed as a low-cost, integrated solution.
•	NETMART Project (RACE2079): TELES contributed to set-up an information network for the agricultural market allowing for remote access to databases and video-conferencing. It significantly participated in the organisation, running and evaluation of several successful user-trials. The experience gathered there will be a precious help for the trials planned in MISER,
•	AREA (RACE 2102): This user-driven project aims at providing remote access to expertise to farmers. TELES is in charge of the real-time services and participates into the setting-up of the ISDN/Satellite infrastructure needed for the user experiments.
•	LUSI (RACE2092): TELES was closely involved in usability studies to improve the user-interfaces of telecommunication services. It took an active part in the production of guidelines for designer of new services to ensure a better acceptance of the products. These guidelines are used internally for the design of new products.
•	CITED Project (ESPRIT-II): TELES was responsible to design and develop the security services for the network solution retained in the CITED model. The scheme developed (based on both RSA and DES encryption) has been integrated in the security module that is proposed in the enhanced version of the videoconferencing products marketed by TELES.
Contribution to the Project
TELES will contribute actively to the realisation of the MERCI PC-terminal. The contribution will rely on some of the achievements done within the EUROBRIDGE RACE-II project. As the EUROBRIDGE project continues until the end of ´95, a good collaboration and a smooth transfer of the technology can take place.  It will be involved in the following tasks:
•	Realisation of an Interworking-Unit to allow H.320/T.120 and multicast-IP Terminals to share conferences (WP5).
•	Definition and implementation of a software/hardware architecture retained to secure videoconferencing (WP3 and WP10).
•	Definition of multi-vendor architecture (WP5).
•	Contribution to the organisation and the support of the user-trials. In particular, TELES will provide users, when and where needed, with digital PBX so that in-house networking capabilities can be enhanced. to exploit the results through its existing commercial channels in all European countries (WP13).

Team Leader
Dr.-Ing. Julien Ardissan will lead the project.  He is a Dipl.-Ing. in Computer Science from the University of Technology of Compiègne (France), and has been Research Engineer in the Department  for Biosignal Processing at the AFB (Arzneimittel-Forschung-Berlin , Germany)
He is currently a Project Manager. He was in charge of co-ordinating all the technical activities of the company within the European Projects: EUROBRIDGE, Netmart, LUSI and Area.
5.5.7	UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
The Organisation
University College London (UCL) is one of the premier universities in the United Kingdom, with a strong emphasis on research.  Its income in 1994 was £185M with an expenditure of £179M. It has some 5000 staff, 7000 undergraduate and 2000 postgraduate students covering all areas including Science, Engineering and Medicine.  A set of five hospitals is linked to UCL;  its strong audio-video department is sited in one of the hospitals, and is  linked particularly to medical teaching.  It has recently set up a Language teaching centre, and is just establishing a distant learning centre.  UCL has been running a video teaching network between a number of sites for some years;  it is also one of the first sites on both the British SuperJANET SMDS and ATM networks.
The Department of Computer Science (UCL-CS) has been in the forefront of computer network technology development and applications deployment for many years.  It operated the first international link to ARPANET (and later the Internet) from 1973, providing a gateway between the US and British networks, for some 15 years. It still provides technical support to the computer centre now running the service.  It has pioneered the usage of most network technologies - both LAN and wide-area.  Currently it is connected directly to the Internet, SuperJANET (from its own ATM switches via the College Information Systems Division switches), the College FDDI MAN, and its own primary rate ISDN.  It has been involved with European telematic projects since 1985 (e.g. the ESPRIT INCA office services, THORN directory and PODA document architecture developments).  Over the last five years, it has been the co-ordinating partner of the PARADISE Directory pilot, PASSWORD Security Pilot, and MICE multimedia conferencing pilots.  Professor Kirstein, who would act as the Director of the project proposed here,  has been the Director of each of those projects.  In addition to these pilot projects, the department has also been involved in many ESPRIT and RACE development projects - particularly in ISDN developments (PROOF and MIDAS), and  network and service management (NEMESYS, CAR, PREPARE, and DRAGON).   Nationally for the last decade the department has had a continuous set of telematics projects from many funding bodies including National Research network provider (now UKERNA); currently it has collaborative projects with British Telecom in multicast over SuperJANET, Management of SuperJANET, and Language teaching over SuperJANET. Other National or US projects are in security, document interchange and multimedia.  Recently, at the G7 summit,  it collaborated with other MICE partners in the first four country multimedia demonstration using both SMDS and ATM over the European ATM pilot.
Contribution to the Project
UCL-CS will contribute to many of the technical aspects of the project - particularly 
•	audio coding (WP3)
•	network support (WP6)
•	multimedia server (WP7)
•	conference management and multiplexing (WP8)
•	security (WP10)
UCL-CS will provide project management (WP1) and will lead 
•	the activities with external groups (WP2)
•	the seminar activities (WP11)
•	the medical teaching validation (WP12).
In addition to the activities funded directly from the project, UCL-CS will make available existing multimedia software (developed under MICE auspices), security toolkits and applications (developed in many projects), large multimedia servers (a 90 GB and a 180 GB jukebox), and far more multimedia workstations than would otherwise be affordable under the constrained MERCI budget.  It will provide also at least two conference rooms for those aspects of the MERCI project, equipped with projection facilities and high quality Audio-Visual equipment.  For the medical validation project, the department will also bring in UCL hospitals’ operating rooms, which are well equipped for multimedia transmission.  UCL network facilities include ATM, SMDS, Primary Rate ISDN and a direct link from the department to the international Internet nodes (with a 650 Kbps UK-US channel dedicated to UCL-CS research activities, particularly multimedia).
Team Leader
The Team leader will be Professor Peter T. Kirstein, who will also be Director of the whole project.  Professor Kirstein got his B.Sc. from Cambridge U in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, Ph.D. from Stanford U and his D.Sc. from the U of London.  For 15 years he was Head of Department of the Department of Computer Science, where is currently Professor and Director of Research.  Professor Kirstein has been both Technical and Administrative Director of many European and National projects - many of which are mentioned above.
Role and services of Subcontractors
Most of the UCL activities will be carried out directly by UCL-CS.  However, the medical seminars of WP12 will be carried out in conjunction with the Middlesex Hospital (part of the UCL medical school), and some of the relevant audio-visual work will be subcontracted to our A/V unit.
5.5.8	Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada
The Organisation
CRC is the primary federal government laboratory for research in advanced telecommunications and information technologies.  The roles of CRC are to conduct research that contributes to the orderly evolution of the Canadian communications infrastructure and to the development of new communication services and to support industry through the transfer of knowledge and technology generated by research.  CRC is located west of Ottawa, along the Ottawa River, on a campus that is shared with the Canadian Space Agency and the Defence Research Establishment.
The core research areas at CRC include radio science, satellite communications, broadcast technology and communications networks.  CRC houses a number of special facilities including the Broadband Applications and Demonstration Laboratory (BADLab), the Advanced Television Evaluation Laboratory, the Optical Components Laboratory and the Microelectronics facility.

Contribution to the Project
CRC's main contributions to the Project will be in the workpackages on Usability (WP 4) and on Network Support (WP 6).  In addition CRC will support the Seminar series under WP11 and the Surgical Workshop under WP 12.

Team Leader
The CRC effort will be lead by John Robinson.  John holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Western Ontario in Canada.  John has been active in research on computer networks since 1980, first at CRC and from 1986 to 1994 at the SHAPE Technical Centre in the Hague.  He returned to CRC in 1994 where he is presently a Research Scientist in the Network Technologies Research Directorate.  He is involved in research projects in communications protocols, network design and management and distributed computing.

Role and services of Subcontractors
Most of the contribution from CRC will originate in the Networks Technologies Directorate.  The CRC BADLab will play an important role in setting up and maintaining the trans-Atlantic ATM connection and in support of the Seminar and Surgical Workshop activities.

5.6	The Contributions of the Sponsoring Partners
5.6.1	UKERNA - The UK Education and Research Networking Association
The Organisation
The JNT Association, a not for profit company limited by guarantee, has been set up by the Higher Education Funding Councils.  The company began trading as UKERNA (UK Education and Research Networking Association) on 1 April 1994.
UKERNA's objectives are "to take responsibility for the networking programme of the education and research community in the United Kingdom; and to research, develop and provide advanced electronic communication facilities for use in the community and in industry; thereby facilitating the extension of any classes of trade through its own and the community's links with industry."
The JNT (Joint Network Team) was established in 1979 by the then Department for Education and Science and pioneered JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork) as part of a major networking programme in the academic and research community.
More recently, with policy guidance and financial support from the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils, the SuperJANET pilot has been established. The  SuperJANET pilot will extend JANET to a broadband network. Currently there are 60 SuperJANET connections, which includes Higher Education, Research and other institutions.  For example both the British Library, Boston Spa and Olivetti Research Limited have SuperJANET connections.
The staff of the JNT have all been transferred to UKERNA, which has been given a remit to continue and expand the already well-established networking programme of UK higher education and research, and to bring its benefits to other communities.
Funding is in place to extend SuperJANET connections to all universities and similar institutions over the next three years, and plans are being drawn up to connect appropriate industrial and other organisations. JANET with its SuperJANET connections is, in effect, the first nation-wide operational Information Super Highway.
JANET is linked internationally to Europe via Europanet and to the U.S., and through these links to the global Internet. The SuperJANET pilot is connected to the European ATM Pilot Network. UKERNA liaises with European bodies including the European Commission and DANTE, and has extensive contacts with equivalent organisations across the world.  The company is based at the Atlas Centre, Oxfordshire.
Contribution to the Project 
UKERNA will be making several important contributions to the project:
•	providing access to SuperJANET;  here they will be providing a premier testbed for the deployment of the technology, and will support such a deployment directly.  This access is costed at £516,000 based on:
1 x   34Mbps @   £95,900 pa
1 x 155Mbps @ £163,000 pa
including connection charges which consist of the following elements:
SuperJANET connection
Interface to ATM switch
Physical link connection
Physical link rental for one year
One year IP service, including MBONE
•	supporting a number of related measures such as the British multimedia national support centre;
•	providing a considerable body of relevant equipment - for example the Codecs for hardware assist for the conference rooms at UCL.
•	giving input to WP4 on Usability, and possibly providing other User Groups.
Team Leader 
Jeremy Sharp is the UKERNA Video Project Manager.  He is responsible for managing the development of the SuperJANET Video Network. Additional areas of interest and responsibilities are in the fields of Computer Supported Collaborative Working (CSCW) and Structured Document Interchange.  Jeremy has been a member of the Joint Network Team since February 1992, until its transformation into UKERNA.

5.6.2	HEWLETT-PACKARD
The Organisation
HP is represented in the MERCI project through 2 entities:
•	The Technical Planning & Education Centre (TPEC), based in Isle d'Abeau, France;
•	HP Laboratories (HPL) in Bristol, UK,
TPEC is responsible for the education program for all European support work force, and is already using advanced technologies for distance learning and information distribution.  It is particularly interested in the application of MERCI solutions to the European education needs in HP.  HPL is responsible for technology investigation as part of the World Wide HP LABS structure. Their role is to interface with HP Divisions, and to bring state of the arts products solutions to the project.
Contributions to the Project
There will be three types of  contribution of HP to the MERCI project:
1.	Provide important relevant equipment to develop solutions and the build the validation demonstrations of WP11 and WP12;
2.	Open access to current HP experiences in education and to participate in the definition of the needs as planned in WP4;
3.	Implement internally the MERCI solution to support education and remote meetings - thus contributing to the industrial validations of WP13.
To aid the first, HP has already supplied:
•	a 180 GB jukebox to act as the platform for a multimedia server for MERCI;
•	several powerful workstations;
•	an ATM switch & a number of primary rate and basic rate ISDN interface boxes.
HP will donate more equipment to MERCI university and research institute partners during the duration of the project. The additional donations will include PC's,  workstations, network interfaces and peripherals.  Their value will be in the range of 100 - 150 KECU during the two year period;  the actual nature will be decided in discussion with the project staff.
As part of the second and third contribution, TPEC will deploy the MERCI solutions for expert training. It has already put up the earlier MICE solution, and run its first course remotely from Isle d’Abeau using MICE tools.  In this trial, we reach 7 countries.  In this context, satellite communications systems will be used to broadcast to smaller audience (<50), as well as adapting the technique for  large audiences (>100). As the MERCI developments become  available, HP will test their applicability, and will implement them as soon as they seem reliable enough for a production pilot.  HP expects to devote around 6 man months over the 2 years in this activity - implying a further contribution of 60 KECUs.
To show the importance of the project to HP, we intend to be involved in the internal MERCI project meetings, and to be early testers for the MERCI solutions: we expect, for example to take up not only the external, but also the internal deliverables.  For example, we expect to help test the early PC solution for MERCI, and would use them in some early pilots.  We will participate in some of the weekly  conferences via an  ISDN link.
We are considering developing a feature additional to MERCI, if we cannot purchase it elsewhere;  this is a feedback, test feature we use in broadcasts. The presenter can ask a question to all the audience, and each one answer on the keyboard (multi choice).  equipment then immediately analyses the responses to provide statistics on the respondents and their responses.   This is specially useful for training, but should also be applicable to larger co-operative work groups.
It is probable that the training component will develop into a full-scale demonstrator, but the details of this phase of the project have not yet been finalised.

5.6.3	SHELL RESEARCH
The Organisation
Shell undertakes research and development at fifteen research centres world-wide.  Two of the main centres are Thornton near Chester, UK, which is the main Oil Products laboratory and is primarily focused on research into fuels and lubricants, and Amsterdam in The Netherlands, which supports the Chemicals business and focuses on process R&D. Both laboratories employ staff from many disciplines, including Chemists, Physicists, Engineers, Mathematicians and Materials Scientists.   Substantial research effort is also carried out for Shell by Extra-Mural Research (EMR) partners at UK and European Universities.

Shell's objectives in the development and use of MERCI technology are to investigate the feasibility of improving the effectiveness of such EMR arrangements in support of Shell's business, with a view to enabling greater use of EMR.  Secondary objectives address the desire to exploit such technology within the Company to improve communication and access to scarce skills across the globe.  We plan to introduce MERCI technology to staff working on EMR projects, and to evaluate the results.

Contribution to the Project
Shell's contribution to MERCI is intended to offer access to specific business-oriented research team activities where the teams are distributed between two Shell laboratories (Thornton and Amsterdam) and specific EMR partners. By these means it is anticipated that Shell will assist the project to expand the effective application of the technology to the business world.   Specifically, it is hoped that Shell will be able to assist the MERCI project in developing tools that are of direct value to research scientists working in a business environment.  User aspects, such as usability, training, and effectiveness of specific software tools, and technical issues, such as effect of degradation of communications, security, logging, and the storing and retrieval of information, etc. will be able to be evaluated.  In addition, the actions necessary to brief senior management about the availability of such tools and their effective use will be tested. 
Team Leader 
The Shell team leader will be Eur. Ing. Stuart Gillies who is located at the Thornton laboratory.
5.6.4	Multimedia National Support Centre, Austria
The Organisation 
The NSC in Austria is run by the Zentraler Informatik Dienst of the Kunsthochschule in Linz.

Contribution to the Project
The NSC will work with the MERCI toolsets, feeding back information on their robustness and usability.  It will participate in pan European events using the JAMES network.  These will include the MERCI seminar series and other ad-hoc events.  They will contribute to the testing and evaluation of both the high speed network and the tools.

Team Leader 
Dr. Schahram Dustdar (Schahram Dustdar (dustdar@khsa.khs-linz.ac.at).
5.6.5	Multimedia National Support Centre, Belgium
The Organisation 
The NSC in Begium is run by ULB, formerly a partner in the Esprit MICE project.  ULB runs the EuroDemo site in Brussels.

Contribution to the Project
The NSC will work with the MERCI toolsets, feeding back information on their robustness and usability.  It will participate in pan European events using the JAMES network.  These will include the MERCI seminar series and other ad-hoc events.  They will contribute to the testing and evaluation of both the high speed network and the tools.

Team Leader 
Frederic Huygens (mice-nsc@helios.iihe.rtt.be).
5.6.6	Multimedia National Support Centre, Italy
The Organisation 
The NSC in Italy is run by CNAF, the National Networking Center of INFN in Bologna.

Contribution to the Project
The NSC will work with the MERCI toolsets, feeding back information on their robustness and usability.  It will participate in pan European events using the JAMES network.  These will include the MERCI seminar series and other ad-hoc events.  They will contribute to the testing and evaluation of both the high speed network and the tools.

Team Leader 
Tiziana Ferrari (mice-nsc@infn.it).
5.6.7	Multimedia National Support Centre, Portugal
The Organisation 
The NSC in Portugal is based at INESC, a non profit making private association with the official status of an organization providing a service considered to be a public utility.  It is involved in a wide variety of activities ranging from basic scientific research to the incubation of business projects including scientific and technology training in the Information Technology and Telecommunications sectors.

Contribution to the Project
The NSC will work with the MERCI toolsets, feeding back information on their robustness and usability.  It will participate in pan European events using the JAMES network.  These will include the MERCI seminar series and other ad-hoc events.  They will contribute to the testing and evaluation of both the high speed network and the tools.

Team Leader 
Carlos Picoto (mice-nsc@inesc.pt).

6.	RELEVANT REFERENCES

1.	Handley, M.J. et al : Multimedia integrated conferencing for European researchers (MICE): piloting activities and the conference management and multiplexing centre.  Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1993, 26, 275-290.
2.	Schindler, S. et al :  Desktop Videoconferencing with EUROVISION, Proc.  BRIS ‘95, 1995, .
3.	Turletti, T.  : The INRIA Videoconferencing System (IVS), ConneXions - The Interoperability Report, 1994. 8, 10,  20-24.  
4.	Eriksson, H :  Mbone: The Multicast Backbone.  Communications of the ACM, 1994, 37, 8, 54-60.
5.	Clayman, S. et al : The Interworking of Internet and ISDN Networks for Multimedia Conferencing, J. Information Services and Use, 1995, 15, 75-101, IOS Press.
6.	Sasse, M.A. et al : ReLaTe: Remote Language Teaching over SuperJANET,  presented at UKERNA Networkshop, March 28-30, 1995
7.	Sasse, M. A. et al : Remote Seminars through Multimedia Conferencing: Experiences from the MICE project, Proc.  INET'94/JENC'5, 1994., 251-258.
8.	Kirstein, P.T. et al : Recent Activities of the MICE Conferencing Project, Proc. INET’95, 1995, 445-453.
9.  MICE National Support Centre: User Documentation.  URL http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/mice-nsc/tools

Part C - Project Resources & Deliverables

C.1 Work-Package List

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of 1	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Lead 
Contractor
ID
(b)	pms

(c)	Start
Month

(d)	End
Month

(d)	Phase

(e)	Deliverable
IDs
(f)	
  1	Management	C 1	18	1	24		D1.20	
  2	Activity with External Groups	C 1	24	1	24		D2.5	
  3	Conference Components, Other Platforms	C 3	39	1	21	3	D3.3	
  4	Usability and Assessment	C 6	22	1	24	4A	D4.6	
  5	Interworking	C 7	20.6	1	21	3	D5..4	
  6	Network Support	C 4	41.6	1	24	3	D6.2	
  7	Multimedia Server	C 4	20.3	1	21	3	D7.2.	
  8	Conf Management/Control	C 1	21	1	18	3	D8.4	
  9	Conf Room Support	C 5	16	1	21	3	D9.2	
10	Security	C 2	34.9	1	21	3	D10.3	
11	MERCI Seminars	C 1	17.5	3	24	4A	D11.4	
12	Surgical Workshop	C 1	  9.4	9	24	4A	D12.2	
13	Commercial Trials	C 2	  6	6	24	4A	D13.3	
Note that the Deliverables of WP3 - WP10 will be combined into a major demonstrations with supporting documentation at months 9, 15, 21 and 24.
Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	Responsible contractor for the work (see form A.2)
(c) 	pms = direct labour in person months
(d)	of the form:  'n' where n = 01 - ~ 36 i.e. project month not calendar months
(e) 	Ref. Work Programme Project Life-Cycle: 1 = 'Identify User needs' : 2 = 'Functional Specification' : 3 = 'Demonstrator build' : 4a = 'Validation - verification'  : 4b = 'Validation - demonstration' : 5 = Exploitation Plan
(f) 	ID of the form 'Dn.m' where n = n in 'WPn' : m = deliverable number for that work package i.e.  m = 1 - <total number of deliverables in WPn>

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of  13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
1	Management	Commencement Date	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C1	Project Director	1	2	2				  4	
C1	Project Manager	2	7	7				14	

									

									

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	2 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
2	Activity with External Groups	Commencement Date	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Project Manager	2	1	1				2	
C1	Staff Member	3	1	1				2	
C2	Staff Member	1	1.5	1.5				3	
C3	Staff Member	3	0.5	0.5				1	
C3	Staff Member	4	1	1				2	
C4	Staff Member	1	2	2				4	
C5	Staff Member	1	1.5	1.5				3	
C6	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	
C7	Staff Member	1	1.5	1.5				3	
C8	Staff Member		0	2				2	

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

 C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	3 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
  3	Conferencing Components,
Other Platforms	Commencement Date	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	9	3				12	
C 3	Staff Member	3	.5	.5				1	
C 3	Staff Member	4	4.8	4.8				9.6	
C 3	Staff Member	5	.7	.7				1.4	
C 5	Staff Member	1	2	2				4	
C 6	Staff Member	1	3.5	2.5				6	
C 7	Staff Member	1	3	2				5	

									

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	4 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
  4	Usability and Assessment	First User Meeting	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	2	2				4	
C 5	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	
C 6	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	
C 7	Staff Member	1	1	2				3	
C 8	Staff Member		1	10				11	

									

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	5 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
  5	Interworking	Delivery of MICE Tools	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	1	2				3	
C 2	Staff Member	1	1	2				3	
C 3	Staff Member	4	1	1.3				2.3	
C 6	Staff Member	1	2	2				4	
C 7	Staff Member	1	5.3	3				8.3	

									

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	6 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
  6	Network Support	Commencement Date	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	3	4				  7	
C 3	Staff Member	4	1.3	1				  2.3	
C 4	Staff Member	1	5.3	5				10.3	
C5	Staff Member	1	2	2				  4	
C6	Staff Member	1	1.5	1.5				  3	
C7	Staff Member	1	2	0				  2	
C8	Staff Member		1	12				13	

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	7 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
  7	Multimedia Server	Commencement Date	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	3	3				  6	
C 4	Staff Member	1	5.3	5				10.3	
C 5	Staff Member	1	2	2				  4	

									

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	8 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
  8	Conf Management/Control	Commencement Date	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	5	3				8	
C 4	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	
C 5	Staff Member	1	1.5	1.5				3	
C 7	Staff Member	1	5	5				10	

									

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	9 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
  9	Conf Room Support	Commencement Date	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	2	2				4	
C 4	Staff Member	1	1.5	1.5				3	
C 5	Staff Member	1	4	3				7	

									

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	10 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
 10	Security	Commencement Date	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	5	5			10	
C 1	Professor	1	1	1			  2	
C 2	Staff Member	1	7.6	7.3			14.9	
C 4	Staff Member	1	1.5	1.5			  3	
C 7	Staff Member	1	2.5	2.5			  5	

								

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	11 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
11	MERCI Seminars	January 1996 term	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	1	1				2	
C 2	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	
C 3	Staff Member	3	.25	.25				0.5	
C 3	Staff Member	4	.75	.75				1.5	
C 4	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	
C 5	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	
C 6	Staff Member	1	2	2				4	
C 7	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	
C 8	Staff Member		0	1.5				1.5	

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	12 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
12	Surgical Workshop	4 months before workshop	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 1	Staff Member	3	2	2				4	
C 4	Staff Member	1	0.9	1				1.9	
C 6	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	
C 8	Staff Member		0	1.5				1.5	

									

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.2 Work-Package Resources

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	13 of 13	

Work-Package
ID
(a)	Title	Starting Event
(b)	
13	Commercial Trials	Commencement Date	

Participants
Code	Labour category
(c)	Rate Code 
(c)	Yr. 1
pms
(d)	Yr. 2
pms	Yr. 3
pms	Yr. 4
pms	Yr. 5
pms	Total
pms	
C 2	Staff Member	1	2	2				4	
C 7	Staff Member	1	1	1				2	

									

									

Notes
(a) 	ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10
(b) 	e.g. Commencement Date - or Deliverable 01.1
(c) 	as in form reference S 2
(d) 	pms = direct labour in person months

C.3 Deliverables List

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of 1	

Deliverable
ID
(a)	Title	Delivery 
date
(b)	Nature

(c)	Dis-semination
Level
(d)	Type
ID, PD or X
(e)	Work-Package
ID
(f)	
D0	Initial Software Deliverable.	3	TO	RP	PD	WP2, WP3	
D1	MERCI S/W Deliverable - I	9	TO	RP	ID	WP2, WP3, WP6, WP8, WP10	
D4.1	User Feedback I	9	RE	LI	X	WP4, WP11	
D10.1	Security Architecture	9	SP	PU	PD	WP10	
D11.1	Seminar Deliv - I	9	PR	PU	PD	WP11	
D2	 MERCI S/W Deliv -II	15	TO	PU	PD	WP2, WP3, WP5, WP6, WP7, WP8, WP9, WP10	
D4.2	User Feedback - II	15	RE	LI	X	WP4, WP11, WP12, WP13	
D11.2	Seminar Deliv - II	15	PR	PU	ID	WP11	
D12.1	Surgical W/Shop - I	15	PR	PU	ID	WP12	
D13.1	Commercial Trial - I	15	PR	PU	ID	WP13	
D11.3	Seminar Deliv - III	18	PR	PU	X	WP11	
D3	MERCI S/W Deliv -III	21	TO	PU	PD	WP2, WP3, WP5, WP7, WP8, WP9, WP10	
D4.3	User Feedback - III	21	RE	LI	X	WP4, WP11, WP12, WP13	
D4	MERCI S/W Deliv -IV	24	TO	PU	PD	WP2, WP3, WP5, WP6, WP7, WP8, WP9, WP10	
D4.4	User Feedback - IV	24	RE	LI	X	WP4, WP11, WP12, WP13	
D11.4	Seminar Deliv - IV	24	PR	PU	PD	WP11	
D12.2	Surgical W/Shop - II	24	PR	PU	PD	WP12	
D13.2	Commercial Trial - II	24	PR	PU	PD	WP13	
Notes
(a) 	ID of the form 'Dn.m' where n = n in 'WPn' : n = number of the work package and m = deliverable number for that work package i.e.  m = 1 - <total number of deliverables in WPn> - in chronological order down the page
(b) 	of the form:  'n' where n = 01 - ~ 36 i.e. project not calendar months
(c) 	PR = Prototype (Demonstrator) : RE = Report : SP = Specification : TO = Tool : OT = Other.  PR, TO & OT will have an associated document for contractual purposes.  All deliverables will be accompanied by a 'peer' review report
(d)	PU = Public Usage of the result : LI = limited to programme participants : RP = restricted to project participants (Public documents shall be of a professional standard in a form suitable for publication)
(e) 	ID = An internal deliverable : PD = A 'Project deliverable' as defined in Article 4 of the contract : X = Submitted on request deliverables where appropriate available for review or dissemination purposes limited to participants of the TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS Programme
(f) ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10

C.4 Equipment List

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of 1	

Description
	Month
 of
purchase
(a)	Cost
ECU	Depre-ciation period
(b)	% alloc.
 to project
(b)	Resp. contractor
ID
(c)	Amount to be allowed
ECU
(b)	
Upgrade of electronic whiteboard 
including videoprojector	0	19493	60	40	C5	3119	
Audio/Video switch		0	6112	60	40	C5	978	
Echo canceller	0	3056	36	40	C5	815	
Video camera with sync-scan	0	8680	60	40	C5	1389	
Pen for electronic whiteboard	0	2983	60	40	C5	795	
16 channel microphone mixer	0	6112	60	40	C5	978	
Video compression card	0	3912	36	40	C5	1043	
Video monitors	0	2934	60	40	C5	469	
ATM adapter	0	2445	36	40	C5	652	
Wireless microphone	0	2567	60	40	C5	411	
Video time base corrector	0	2078	60	40	C5	333	
PC with ISDN I/F and A/V	0	7000			C7	2333	
							
					Total	13315	

Notes
(a) 	of the form:  'n' where n = 01 - ~ 36 i.e. project month not calendar months
(b) 	For allowable costs calculation see Article 19.2 of Annex II
(c) 	Responsible contractor for purchasing the equipment

C.5 Other Significant Specific Project Costs

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of 1	

Description
	Resp. contractor
ID
(a)	Amount to be allowed
ECU
(b)	
Maintenance of large jukebox, servers & workstations,			
Consumables - discs, tapes, paper, printer supplies	C1	32300	
			
Attendance at IETF and related meetings outside the EU (Included in individual travel budgets)	All Partners	12000	

			

			

			
		44300	

Notes
(a) 		Responsible contractor for purchasing the specific items
(b) 	For allowable costs  see Article 19.6 of Annex II

Supporting Information - Financial justifications

Form S.1 Cost Summary per year in KECU

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of 1	

Participants Code2 	Person-month3 	1.
Personnel	2. 
Equipment	3. 
Third Party Assistance
(subcontractors)	4. 
Travel and  Subsistence	5.
Consumables and Computing	6. 
Other Significant Specific Project Cost	7. 
Overheads	Total 	% of EU Contribution4. 	EU Contribution	

Year	1	

C 1	  42	129.5			    8.9	  15.7	    3	  31.4	  188.5	100%	188.5	
C 2	  14	  69.0			  10.0	                   		  69.0	  148.0	  50%	  74.0	
C 3	  10.8	126.1			    7.5				  133.6	  50%	  66.8	
C 4	  18.2	  81.7			  15.5	    3.0			  100.2	100%	100.2	
C 5	  15	  35.3	  11.0		  12.5	    3.0	    1.2	  12.6	    75.6	100%	  75.6	
C 6	  12	  53.9			    8.3			    5.9	    68.1	100%	  68.1	
C 7	  20.1	247.3	    2.5		    7.5		  10.0		  267.3	  50%	133.7	
C8	    2	  14.0	  12.0		    2.0				    28.0	    0%	nil	
Total	134.1	756.8	  25.5	      0.0	  72.2	  21.7	  14.2	 118.9	1009.3	  70%	706.9	

Year	2	

C 1	  42	134.6			    9.2	  16.6	    3.3	  32.8	  196.5	100%	196.5	
C 2	  12.9	  65.5			  10.0	                   		  65.5	  141.0	  50%	  70.5	
C 3	  10.8	126.1			    7.5				  133.6	  50%	  66.8	
C 4	  18.3	  81.8			  15.5	    3.0			  100.3	100%	100.3	
C 5	  14	  32.9			  12.5	    3.0	    1.2	    9.9	    59.5	100%	  59.5	
C 6	  11	  51.8			    8.3			    5.7	    65.8	100%	  65.8	
C 7	  20.2	247.3	    2.5		    7.5		  10.0		  267.3	  50%	133.7	
C8	  27	190.0	    9.0		    7.0				  206.0	    0%	nil	
Total	156.2	930.0	  11.5	      0.0	  77.5	  22.6	  14.5	 113.9	1170.0	59% 	693.1	

S 2 - Labour Rates and Overheads

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of 8	

Contractor Code1:	C1	

MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration	
Organisation Name: University College London	

National Currency:	UK £	Conversion Rate:	1.28	

Overhead recovery rate used (as a percentage of total cost):   20 %

Year	Person-month	Yearly Cost including Overheads(Nat. curr)	Yearly cost (ECU)	
1	42	121433	129529	
2	42	126188	134600	
Total	84	247621	264129	

Year	Name or Category	Rate Code	Monthly Rate (Nat. Curr.)	Person months	Yearly Cost (Nat. Curr.)	Yearly Cost (ECU)	
1	Professor	1	4006.25	3	12019	15384	
1	Proj Manager	2	2743.75	8	21950	28096	
1	Staff Member	3	2168.75	31	67231	86056	
2	Professor	1	4206.25	3	12619	16152	
2	Proj Manager	2	2743.75	8	21950	28096	
2	Staff Member	3	2277.34	31	70598	90365	

Breakdown of chargeable Person Year

Person Year: 
Number of Person Months	12	Person Months:
Number of Person Days	21	Person Day:
Number of Hours	7	

S 2 - Labour Rates and Overheads

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	2 of 8	

Contractor Code1:	C2	

MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration	
Organisation Name: GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH	

National Currency:	DM	Conversion Rate:	1.85	

Overhead recovery rate used (as a percentage of total cost):   .............. %

Year	Person-month	Yearly Cost including Overheads(Nat. curr)	Yearly cost (ECU)	
1	14	256224	138499	
2	12.9	242334	130991	
Total	26.9	498558	269490	

Year	Name or Category	Rate Code	Monthly Rate (Nat. Curr.)	Person months	Yearly Cost (Nat. Curr.)	Yearly Cost (ECU)	
1	Senior Scientist	21	23664	2	47328	25583	
1	Scientist	22	18700	8	149600	80865	
1	Programmer	23	14824	4	59296	32052	
2	Senior Scientist	21	24480	2	48960	26465	
2	Scientist	22	19235	6.9	132718	71739	
2	Programmer	23	15164	4	60656	32787	

Breakdown of chargeable Person Year

Person Year: 
Number of Person Months	12	Person Months:
Number of Person Days	17	Person Day:
Number of Hours	8	

S 2 - Labour Rates and Overheads

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	3 of 8	

Contractor Code1:	C3	

 MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration	
 INRIA	

National Currency:	 FF	Conversion Rate:	 6.45	

Overhead recovery rate used (as a percentage of direct labour cost): ..........0....... %

Year	Person-month	Yearly Cost including Overheads(Nat. curr)	Yearly cost (ECU)	
1	10.8	813345	126100	
2	10.8	813345	126100	
Total	21.6	1626690	252200	

Year	Name or Category	Rate Code	Monthly Rate (Nat. Curr.)	Person months	Yearly Cost (Nat. Curr.)	Yearly Cost (ECU)	
1	Staff Member	3	82128	1.25	102660	15916	
1	Staff Member	4	77248	8.85	683645	105991	
1	Staff Member	5	38624	0.7	27037	4192	
2	Staff Member	3	82128	1.25	102660	15916	
2	Staff Member	4	77248	8.85	683645	105991	
2	Staff Member	5	38624	0.7	27037	4192	

Breakdown of chargeable Person Year

Person Year: 
Number of Person Months	12	Person Months:
Number of Person Days	17.5	Person Day:
Number of Hours	7.8	

S2 - Labour Rates and Overheads

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	4 of 8	

Contractor Code1:	C4	

 MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration	
Organisation Name:    Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan	

National Currency:	SEK	Conversion Rate:	1ECU=9.5 SEK 	

Overhead recovery rate used (as a percentage of direct labour cost): .........20........ %

Year	Person-month	Yearly Cost including Overheads(Nat. curr)	Yearly cost (ECU)	
1	18.5	787265	82870	
2	18	765985	80630	
Total	36.5	1 553 250	163500	

Year	Name or Category	Rate Code	Monthly Rate (Nat. Curr.)	Person months	Yearly Cost (Nat. Curr.)	Yearly Cost (ECU)	
1	Engineer	1	42554	18.5	787265	82870	
2	Engineer	1	42554	18	765985	80630	
3							

Breakdown of chargeable Person Year

Person Year: 
Number of Person Months	12	Person Months:
Number of Person Days	20	Person Day:
Number of Hours	8	

S 2 - Labour Rates and Overheads

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	5 of 8	

Contractor Code1:	C5	

MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration	
Organisation Name: Universitetet i Oslo	

National Currency:	NOK	Conversion Rate:	8.1810	

Overhead recovery rate used (as a percentage of direct labour cost): ..20........ %

Year	Person-month	Yearly Cost including Overheads(Nat. curr)	Yearly cost (ECU)	
1	15	346504	35300	
2	14	322946	32946	
Total	29	669450	68246	

Year	Name or Category	Rate Code	Monthly Rate (Nat. Curr.)	Person months	Yearly Cost (Nat. Curr.)	Yearly Cost (ECU)	
1	Staff Member	1	19252	15	288789	35300	
2	Staff Member	1	192352	14	269528	32946	

Breakdown of chargeable Person Year

Person Year: 
Number of Person Months	12	Person Months:
Number of Person Days	19.44	Person Day:
Number of Hours	7.5	

S 2 - Labour Rates and Overheads

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	6 of 8	

Contractor Code1:	C6	

 MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration	
Organisation Name: Universitaet Stuttgart, Rechenzentrum 	

National Currency:	DM	Conversion Rate:	1.9	

Overhead recovery rate used (as a percentage of direct labour cost): 11 %

Year	Person-month	Yearly Cost including Overheads(Nat. curr)	Yearly cost (ECU)	
1	               12	                113612	     59796	
2	               11	                109352	     57554	
Total	               23	                222964	   117350	

Year	Name or Category	Rate Code	Monthly Rate (Nat. Curr.)	Person months	Yearly Cost (Nat. Curr.)	Yearly Cost (ECU)	
1	Staff Memb.	       3	     9467.70   	       12	     113612	 59796	
2	Staff Memb.	       3	     9941.12	       11	     109352	 57554	

Breakdown of chargeable Person Year

Person Year: 
Number of Person Months	12	Person Months:
Number of Person Days	16.75	Person Day:
Number of Hours	7.7	

S 2 - Labour Rates and Overheads

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	7 of 8	

Contractor Code1:	C7	

 MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration	
Organisation Name: TELES GmbH	

National Currency:	DM	Conversion Rate:	1,87	

Overhead recovery rate used (as a percentage of direct labour cost): ................. %

Year	Person-month	Yearly Cost including Overheads(Nat. curr)	Yearly cost (ECU)	
1	22,3	511.794,27	273.687	
2	18	413.107,50	2209 13	
Total				

Year	Name or Category	Rate Code	Monthly Rate (Nat. Curr.)	Person months	Yearly Cost (Nat. Curr.)	Yearly Cost (ECU)	
1	Project Manager	1	22.950,41	4,3	275.404,92	147.275,35	
1	Staff Member	3	22.950,41	18	275.404,92	147.275,35	
2	Project Manager	1	22.950,41	4	275.404,92	147.275,35	
2	Staff Member	3	22.950,41	14	275.404,92	147.275,35	

Breakdown of chargeable Person Year

Person Year: 
Number of Person Months	12	Person Months:
Number of Person Days	17,5	Person Day:
Number of Hours	8	

S 2 - Labour Rates and Overheads

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	8 of 8	

Contractor Code1:	C8	

 MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration	
Organisation Name: Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada	

National Currency:	$CAN	Conversion Rate:	1.71	

Overhead recovery rate used (as a percentage of direct labour cost): ................. %

Year	Person-month	Yearly Cost including Overheads(Nat. curr)	Yearly cost (ECU)	
1	  2	24 000	14 000	
2	27	324 000	190 000	
Total	29	348 000	204 000	

Year	Name or Category	Rate Code	Monthly Rate (Nat. Curr.)	Person months	Yearly Cost (Nat. Curr.)	Yearly Cost (ECU)	
1	Staff Member		12 000	  2	24000	14 000	
2	Staff Member		12 000	27	324000	19 0000	

Breakdown of chargeable Person Year

Person Year: 
Number of Person Months	12	Person Months:
Number of Person Days	20	Person Day:
Number of Hours	7.5	

S.3 - Confidentiality and IPR Handling

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of 1	

Most of the software developed in the MERCI project will be available to the MERCI partners (including  Sponsoring Partners) free of charge - though some will be distributed only in source form.
It will be available to not-for -profit organisations for European Union projects for their own use, and to all participants in EU projects for use in related projects.
Commercial development of the MERCI tools requires licences from the MERCI partners.

S 4.1- Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 1 of 16	

Participating Organisation (legal entity)
Full legal name, legal status	University College London, University	
Abbreviated name
	UCL	
Contractual role 
	Co-ordinator, C1
	
Type

Number of employees
	EDU

5000
	
Keyword Codes1 	A.1         B.18         B.34	

What is current turnover?	
      229  MECU	
What is highest % share of your company held by another legal entity?	N/A	
Registered Address		
Street Name and No.
	Gower Street	
Town/City	London	
Post Code / Cedex	WC1E 6BT	
Region + Region Code2 	UK55	
Country Code3 	GB	
Parent Organisation (legal entity)	
Full legal name, legal status of parent organisation4 		
Country Code3		

Form S.4.2. Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 2 of 16	

Department / Institute carrying out the Work

Full name

	
Computer Science Department, 
University College London	
Sector / Activity Keywords1 

	B7   B18	
Address		
		
Street Name and No.

	Gower Street	
Town/City

	London	
Post Code / Cedex

	WC1E 6BT	
Region2 	UK55	
Country Code3 
	GB	
Contact Person: 
Title, Name, First Name	Professor Kirstein, Peter 	

Telephone Number
	+44 (0)171 380 7286	
Fax Number

E-mail
	+44 (0)171 387 1397

P.Kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk	

S 4.1- Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 3 of 16	

Participating Organisation (legal entity)
Full legal name, legal status	GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH	
Abbreviated name
	GMD	
Contractual role 
	Contractor, C2
	
Type

Number of employees
	ROR

1200
	
Keyword Codes1 	A4         B34         B40 (Informatics Research)	

What is current turnover?	
      89  MECU	
What is highest % share of your company held by another legal entity?	N/A	
Registered Address		
Street Name and No.
	Schloss Birlinghoven	
Town/City	Sankt Augustin	
Post Code / Cedex	53754	
Region + Region Code2 	DEA2	
Country Code3 	DE	
Parent Organisation (legal entity)	
Full legal name, legal status of parent organisation4 		
Country Code3		

Form S.4.2. Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 4 of 16	

Department / Institute carrying out the Work

Full name

	
Institute for Telecooperation Technology (TKT)	
Sector / Activity Keywords1 

	B34        B40 (Telematics Research).	
Address		
		
Street Name and No.

	Rheinstr. 75	
Town/City

	Darmstadt	
Post Code / Cedex

	64202	
Region2 	DEA2	
Country Code3 
	DE	
Contact Person: 
Title, Name, First Name	Dr. BAHR, Knut	

Telephone Number
	+49-61 51 - 869 285	
Fax Number

E-mail
	+49-61 51 - 869 224

bahr@gmd.de	

4.1- Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 5 of 16	

Participating Organisation (legal entity)
Full legal name, legal status	 Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique
	
Abbreviated name
	INRIA	
Contractual role 
	Contractor, C3	
Type

Number of employees
	ROR

1300	
Keyword Codes1 	A.1.          B2         B7.	

What is current turnover?	                           
70   ECU	
What is highest % share of your company held by another legal entity?		
Registered Address	Legal status: Etablissement public a caractere scientifique et technique
Abbreviated name: INRIA
 Parent organisation (legal entity)
N/A
	
Street Name and No.
	2004 route des Lucioles, BP 93
	
Town/City	 Sophia Antipolis
	
Post Code / Cedex	 06902 
	
Region + Region Code2 		
Country Code3 	FR	
Parent Organisation (legal entity)	
Full legal name, legal status of parent organisation4 		
Country Code3		

Form S.4.2. Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 6 of 16	

Department / Institute carrying out the Work

Full name

INRIA Sophia Antipolis

Sector / Activity Keywords1 

	B7.        	
Address		
		
Street Name and No.

	2004 route des Lucioles,  BP 93
	
Town/City

	Sophia Antipolis

	
Post Code / Cedex

	06902
	
Region2 		
Country Code3 
	FR 82	
Contact Person: 
Title, Name, First Name	
Dabbous, Walid 

Telephone Number
	
+33 93 65 77 18
	
Fax Number

E-mail
	+33 93 65 77 65

dabbous@sophia.inria.fr	

S 4.1- Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 7 of 16	

Participating Organisation (legal entity)
Full legal name, legal status	Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan	
Abbreviated name
	KTH	
Contractual role 
	Contractor   C4	
Type

Number of employees
	EDU

2500	
Keyword Codes1 	A.1...........          B.18...........         B.............	

What is current turnover?	
             150M                              ECU	
What is highest % share of your company held by another legal entity?		
Registered Address		
Street Name and No.
	Valhallavägen 79	
Town/City	Stockholm	
Post Code / Cedex	100 44	
Region + Region Code2 		
Country Code3 	SE	
Parent Organisation (legal entity)	
Full legal name, legal status of parent organisation4 		
Country Code3		

Form S.4.2. Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 8 of 16	

Department / Institute carrying out the Work

Full name

	
Dept of Teleinformatics	
Sector / Activity Keywords1 

        B.7...........        B.18...........	
Address		
		
Street Name and No.

	Electrum 204	
Town/City

	Kista	
Post Code / Cedex

	164 40	
Region2 		
Country Code3 
	SE	
Contact Person: 
Title, Name, First Name	Professor Pehrson, Björn	

Telephone Number
	
+46 8 752 1481	
Fax Number

E-mail
	+46 8 751 1793

bjorn@it.kth.se	

S 4.1- Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 9 of 16	

Participating Organisation (legal entity)
Full legal name, legal status	Universitetet i Oslo	
Abbreviated name
	UiO	
Contractual role 
	Contractor, C5	
Type

Number of employees
	EDU

4500	
Keyword Codes1 	A2...........          B18........         B34......... 	

What is current turnover?	
                 251                       ECU	
What is highest % share of your company held by another legal entity?		
Registered Address		
Street Name and No.
	Blindern	
Town/City	Oslo	
Post Code / Cedex	0316	
Region + Region Code2 		
Country Code3 	NO	
Parent Organisation (legal entity)	
Full legal name, legal status of parent organisation4 		
Country Code3		

Form S.4.2. Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 10 of 16	

Department / Institute carrying out the Work

Full name

	
Center for Information Technology Services (USIT)	
Sector / Activity Keywords1 

	        B9............        B18............	
Address		
		
Street Name and No.

	Gaustadalleen 23	
Town/City

	Oslo	
Post Code / Cedex

	0316	
Region2 		
Country Code3 
	NO	
Contact Person: 
Title, Name, First Name	Pedersen, Geir	

Telephone Number
	+47 2285 2478	
Fax Number

E-mail
	+47 2285 2731

Geir.Pedersen@usit.uio.no	

S 4.1- Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 11 of 16	

Participating Organisation (legal entity)
Full legal name, legal status	Universitaet Stuttgart	
Abbreviated name
		
Contractual role 
	Contractor, C6	
Type

Number of employees
	EDU

109	
Keyword Codes1 	A..1..........          B.18...........         B..34...........	

What is current turnover?	
10.5                                           MECU	
What is highest % share of your company held by another legal entity?	0	
Registered Address		
Street Name and No.
	Keplerstr. 7	
Town/City	Stuttgart	
Post Code / Cedex	70174	
Region + Region Code2 		
Country Code3 	DE	
Parent Organisation (legal entity)	
Full legal name, legal status of parent organisation4 		
Country Code3		

Form S.4.2. Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	S4 - 12 of 16	

Department / Institute carrying out the Work

Full name

	
Rechenzentrum Universitaet Stuttgart (RUS)	
Sector / Activity Keywords1 

        B.7...........        B..18..........	
Address		
		
Street Name and No.

	Allmandring 30	
Town/City

	Stuttgart	
Post Code / Cedex

	70550	
Region2 		
Country Code3 
	DE	
Contact Person: 
Title, Name, First Name	Christ, Paul	

Telephone Number
	49-711-685-2515	
Fax Number

E-mail
	49-711-678-7626

christ@rus.uni-stuttgart.de	

S 4.1- Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	13 of 16	

Participating Organisation (legal entity)
Full legal name, legal status	TELES GmbH	
Abbreviated name
	TELES	
Contractual role 
	Contractor, C7	
Type

Number of employees
	IND2

90	
Keyword Codes1 	A.1.........          B..2........         B..7.........	

What is current turnover?	
          8 000 000             ECU	
What is highest % share of your company held by another legal entity?	0 %	
Registered Address		
Street Name and No.
	Dovestrasse 2-4	
Town/City	Berlin	
Post Code / Cedex	10587	
Region + Region Code2 	DE3	
Country Code3 	DE	
Parent Organisation (legal entity)	
Full legal name, legal status of parent organisation4 	none	
Country Code3	none	

Form S.4.2. Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	14 of 16	

Department / Institute carrying out the Work

Full name

	
TELES GmbH	
Sector / Activity Keywords1 

        B...2.........        B......7......	
Address		
		
Street Name and No.

	Dovestrasse 2-4	
Town/City

	Berlin	
Post Code / Cedex

	10587	
Region2 	DE3	
Country Code3 
	DE	
Contact Person: 
Title, Name, First Name	
Braun, Stefan	

Telephone Number
	
+49.30.399.28.065	
Fax Number

E-mail
	+49.30.399.28.01

sb@teles.de	

S 4.1- Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	15 of 16	

Participating Organisation (legal entity)
Full legal name, legal status	Communications Research Centre	
Abbreviated name
	CRC	
Contractual role 
	Contractor, C8	
Type

Number of employees
	ROR	Research organisation

420
	
Keyword Codes1 	A2 /B6 B34	

What is current turnover?	
323 MECU	
What is highest % share of your company held by another legal entity?	

0 %	
Registered Address		
Street Name and No.
	3701 Carling Avenue
Box 11490, Station H	
Town/City	Ottawa	
Post Code / Cedex	K2H 8S2	
Region + Region Code2 	N/A	
Country Code3 	CA	
Parent Organisation (legal entity)	
Full legal name, legal status of parent organisation4 	
None	
Country Code3	CA	

Form S.4.2. Participants details

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	16 of 16	

Department / Institute carrying out the Work

Full name

	
Network Technologies Research Directorate
Radiocommunications and Broadcast Research Branch	
Sector / Activity Keywords1 

	A2 /B6 B34

Address		
		
Street Name and No.

	3701 Carling Avenue
Box 11490, Station H	
Town/City

	Ottawa	
Post Code / Cedex

	K2H 8S2	
Region2 	N/A	
Country Code3 
	CA	
Contact Person: 
Title, Name, First Name	
Dr Robinson, John	

Telephone Number
	
+1-613-990-9456	
Fax Number

E-mail
	+1-613-998-9648

john.robinson@crc.doc.ca

S 5 - Contractual and Banking Information

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of  7	

(These information are only used for EU payment procedure)

	Information on behalf of the contractors1
	Contractor's name (=holder of the bank account)
University College London
	Address
Gower Street
London  WC1E  6BT

	Banking Information
	Name of the Bank
National Westminster Bank Plc
	Address
104 Tottenham Court Road
London W1A 3AJ
	
SWIFT CODE		
Sort Code	56-00-31	
Account Number	310/1/03291308 Ref:1007	

Date		Please send this form back to European Commission	
Contractor's
 signature	M. Griffiths
Deputy Director Research Grants	(Responsible, Unit, Office)
200, rue de la Loi
B - 1049 BRUXELLES
Fax: +32/2/ 	
Stamp

			

S 5 - Contractual and Banking Information

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	2 of  7	

(These information are only used for EU payment procedure)

	Information on behalf of the contractors1
	Contractor's name (=holder of the bank account)
GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH
	Address
Schloss Birlinghoven, D-53754 Sankt Augustin

	Banking Information
	Name of the Bank
Dresdner Bank AG Bonn
	Address
Muensterplatz 1-3, G-53111 Bonn
	
SWIFT CODE	DRES DE FF 380	
Sort Code	370 800 40	
Account Number	506 123 400/923	

Date	September 5, 1995	Please send this form back to European Commission	
Contractor's
 signature	Mr Norbert Fichtner
Head of Finance Department	(Responsible, Unit, Office)
200, rue de la Loi
B - 1049 BRUXELLES
Fax: +32/2/ 	
Stamp

			

S 5 - Contractual and Banking Information

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	3 of  7	

(These information are only used for EU payment procedure)

	Information on behalf of the contractors1
	Contractor's name (=holder of the bank account)
INRIA - Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatisme
	Address
2004 Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902, Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

	Banking Information
	Name of the Bank
Banque de France
	Address
39, rue Croix des Petits Champs, 75001 Paris, France
	
SWIFT CODE	BDF EFR PP CCT	
Sort Code	RIB key = 54, bank code = 30001,	
Account Number	61946	

Date		Please send this form back to European Commission	
Contractor's
 signature	P. Bernhard
Director of Sophia Antipolis Unit	(Responsible, Unit, Office)
200, rue de la Loi
B - 1049 BRUXELLES
Fax: +32/2/ 	
Stamp

			

S 5 - Contractual and Banking Information

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	4 of 7	

(These information are only used for EU payment procedure)

	Information on behalf of the contractors1
	Contractor's name (=holder of the bank account)

        Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan

	Address

        100 44 Stockholm

	Banking Information
	Name of the Bank
        NORDBANKEN
	Address
        Box 3311	       103 66 Stockholm SE
	
SWIFT CODE	        NBBKSESS	
Sort Code	        3217	
Account Number	         3217 - 10 - 09217	

Date		Please send this form back to European Commission	
Contractor's
 signature	B. Pehrson
Laboratory Director	(Responsible, Unit, Office)
200, rue de la Loi
B - 1049 BRUXELLES
Fax: +32/2/ 	
Stamp

			

S 5 - Contractual and Banking Information

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	5 of  7	

(These information are only used for EU payment procedure)

	Information on behalf of the contractors1
	Contractor's name (=holder of the bank account)
Universitetet I Oslo
	Address
Blindern, 0316, Oslo, Norway

	Banking Information
	Name of the Bank
Kreditlasem
	Address
Pb 83 - Blindern, 0313 Oslo, Norway
	
SWIFT CODE	6094.05.00780	
Sort Code	5-1300 00.01	
Account Number	0.3100 0.0370	

Date		Please send this form back to European Commission	
Contractor's
 signature	T. Saglio
University Director	(Responsible, Unit, Office)
200, rue de la Loi
B - 1049 BRUXELLES
Fax: +32/2/ 	
Stamp

			

S 5 - Contractual and Banking Information

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	6 of 7	

(These information are only used for EU payment procedure)

	Information on behalf of the contractors1
	Contractor's name (=holder of the bank account)

                           Universitaet Stuttgart
	Address
                             Kepplerstr. 7
                             70174 Stuttgart

Banking Information
	Name of the Bank               
                                           Baden-Wuertembergische Bank, Stuttgart
	Address
                              Kleiner Schlossplatz 11
                              D- 70173 Stuttgart
	
SWIFT CODE	600 200 30	
Sort Code		
Account Number	1 054 611 700	

Date		Please send this form back to European Commission	
Contractor's
 signature	J Schwarze
Finance Director	(Responsible, Unit, Office)
200, rue de la Loi
B - 1049 BRUXELLES
Fax: +32/2/ 	
Stamp

			

S 5 - Contractual and Banking Information

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	7 of 7	

(These informations are only used for EU payment procedure)

	Information on behalf of the contractors1
	Contractor's name (=holder of the bank account)
TELES GmbH

	Address
Dovestrasse 2-4
10587 Berlin

	Banking Information
	Name of the Bank
Deutsche Bank

	Address
Hardenbergstrasse 4-5
10623 Berlin
	
SWIFT CODE		
Sort Code	BLZ 10070000	
Account Number	4620001   (ECU Account)	

Date		Please send this form back to European Commission	
Contractor's
 signature	Henri Escola
Managing Director	(Responsible, Unit, Office)
200, rue de la Loi
B - 1049 BRUXELLES
Fax: +32/2/ 	
Stamp

			

S. 6 Validation Sites

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 26, 1996	1 of 1	
   
 Validation Sites for Verification

Institution
Organisation	Number of Users	Technologies used	City/Town	Region 1. 	Country 2. 	
UCL	50	MERCI	London	UK55	GB	
GMD	40	MERCI	Darmstadt	DE711	DE	
INRIA	40	MERCI	Nice	FR82	FR	
KTH	50	MERCI	Stockholm	SE01	SE	
UiO	50	MERCI	Oslo	NO	NO	
RUS	50	MERCI	Stuttgart	DE11	DE	
TELES	10	MERCI	Berlin	DE3	DE	
CRC		MERCI	Ottawa	N/A	CA	
Middlesex Hospital	  4	MERCI	London	UK55	GB	
Sahlgrenska Hospital	  4	MERCI	Gothenburg	SE052	SE	
HP	50	MERCI	Villeneuve	FR71	FR	
HP	  5	MERCI	Bristol	UK61	GB	
Shell Research	10	MERCI	Thornton	UK81	GB	
Shell Research	10	MERCI	Amsterdam	NL32	NL	
UKERNA	  5	MERCI	Didcot	UK52	GB	
MNSC, Austria	  3	MERCI	Linz	AT31	AT	
MNSC, Belgium	  3	MERCI	Brussels	BE1	BE	
MNSC, Italy	  3	MERCI	Bologna	IT4	IT	
MNSC, Portugal	  3	MERCI	Lisboa	PT13	PT	
MNSC, UK (England)	  2	MERCI	London	UK55	GB	
MNSC, UK (Scotland)	  2	MERCI	Edinburgh	UKA1	GB	
MNSC, UK (Scotland)	  4	MERCI	Glasgow	UKA2	GB	
MNSC, UK (Wales)	  2	MERCI	Aberystwyth	UK91	GB	
UPC	10	MERCI	Barcelona	ES51	ES	
Leeds U	  4	MERCI	Leeds	UK24	GB	
Deutsche Telekom 	  5	MERCI	Darmstadt	DE711	DE	

Validation Sites for Demonstration

Not applicable.
Form S.7 Cost Summary for Demonstration Work

Project ref.	Sector	Date	Sheet	
1007	RE	September 15, 1995	1 of 1	

Participants Code2 	Person-month3 	1.
Personnel	2. 
Equipment	3. 
Third Party Assistance
(subcontractors)	4. 
Travel and  Subsistence	5.
Consumables and Computing	6. 
Other Significant Specific Project Cost	7. 
Overheads	Total 	% of EU Contribution4. 	EU Contribution	

C 1												
A 1.1.												
A 1....												
Subtotal 1												
C 2												
A 2.1.												
A 2...												
Subtotal 2												
C  n												
A n.1.												
A n....												
Subtotal n												
Total												

Note

Please specify all costs occurred during the demonstration part of the Validation Phase. Note that the EU contribution normally should not exceed 33% of the total estimated allowable costs in this phase. These costs should be included in the A.2 and S.1 Forms.