The project involves three European and one Australian research groups actively working on protocol design and specifically on the ALF/ILP concepts. The Australian partner (UTS) also has previous experience in this field. This ensures a high coordination of effort due to the complementarity of the competence.
The collaboration between the European and Australian partners
will last throughout the duration of the project. Researchers
will be able to interact frequently using IVS, a videoconference system
for the Internet recently developed at INRIA. They will meet in
person during the mid-year meeting,
and during the end-of-year review and workshop. We intend the workshop
to be a high-quality forum for the presentation and exchange of ideas and
techniques. Each workshop will be organized as a traditional workshop, i.e.
with widely distributed call for papers, published proceedings, etc.
The theme of the first workshop, which will be held in Sophia-Antipolis
in December 1994, is ``Integrated Protocol Engineering''.
The collaboration will be reinforced by the exchange of researchers and
students between the partners. This will create strong
scientific and personal links, and should lead to continued
cooperation even after completion of this project.
The geographic distance between the partners, which could be an
annoying hindrance for another project, fits well with our
objective: it will be possible to test the communication
modules generated by the compiler in diverse local environments
and over great distances. As an added benefit,
it will be possible to evaluate, and then improve, IVS (the INRIA
videoconference system mentioned above) so that it is truly
useful to support cooperative work between geographically distant
partners.