“Porto offers the perfect setting for the new Fraunhofer Centre,” said Alfred Gossner, CFO of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. “There is an excellent university close by, the […] building is surrounded by innovative spin-off companies, there are well-qualified engineers and a population that is receptive to new information technologies.” As with its counterpart Fraunhofer Institutes, the Centre is intended to form an interface between basic research and practical applications.
The foundation stone has been laid and the Centre, under the management of Dirk Elias, will move into a new building within the university in the summer of 2009. During the five-year building phase, the Centre will have a total budget of €16 million, financed jointly by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia FCT), the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, and by third-party funds.
Around 100 researchers will be employed at AICOS after 2012. “Our objective is to close the digital gap, which is constantly growing at the moment,” says Elias. “Society is divided: on the one hand there are those people for whom information technology is a part of daily life, who use the Internet, mobile phone, laptop or Blackberry to communicate and to obtain information without even thinking about it. On the other hand, there are groups in society who have no access to information technology whatsoever.”
Elias aims to develop applications for groups that are ignored by the industry: people who are old or fragile, who live in rural areas, who cannot read or write, or who simply aren’t interested in complicated technology. “We want to use existing solutions in order to generate new products, computer networks and sensors, for example, or wide area networks and mobile radio systems for data transmission.”
“Everybody involved will benefit from the cooperation,” said Gossner. “Fraunhofer researchers will become acquainted with the Portuguese markets, and Portuguese scientists will become acquainted with applied research at the Fraunhofer. For the industry, new product ideas will be the result. For the consumer new, user-friendly technologies will be the result.”
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