Information Overload and FP7 Funding Opportunities in 2009-10

Abstract

Physical tools like the lever and the loom amplify human strength and dexterity and are often introduced, as in the case of the agricultural harvester, because a sudden abundance of one quantity of interest (wheat fields) introduces scarcity in other related quantities (the human labor needed to harvest them). The rate at which digital information is becoming available (both to organisations and individuals) is creating a similar scarcity in our ability to interpret it to make decisions that benefit us. In this talk I will describe funding opportunities that the EU will make available through its Framework Programme 7 to tackle this scarcity. I will discuss several trends that make the ILP community ideally placed to contribute to these efforts, together with some general patterns that have proved very effective in the engineering of successful proposals in the recent past.