Recent advances in ICTs have seen the typical boundaries between media and networking technologies to fade, giving rise to a new scientific and technological era, the so-called 4G+, which can foster innovation and gear-up sustainable growth both at regional and national/global levels. Progresses in cloud computing, wireless/mobile communications, social networks, Internet of Things (IoT) and 3D/HD media are only some examples that paved the way towards a unified media-network ecosystem, where people and businesses are so interconnected that global antagonism is inevitable. To sort through this new working/living space, new engineers must possess multidisciplinary talents in order to deal with emerging challenges from a large portfolio of economic, cultural and societal activities.Surprisingly and in contrast to the volume, the intensity of the implemented research (a great part of this research takes place in Universities’ labs) and the number of publications in topics related to the “media over 4G+ infrastructures”, the Higher Education seems to be absent from the recent advances. Although parts of this new S/T domain have been included within a few HEIs’ postgraduate degree curricula, they are absent from the undergraduate curricula in the majority of the respective University Departments (Informatics, Networks & Telecommunications, Computer Science, Media and Social Media, ICTs, etc.). ELLINIKO MESOGEIAKO PANEPISTIMIO has identified this gap since 2012, taking the appropriate actions towards the education of undergraduate students of the respective Departments. Among these actions are the implementation of short courses in selected areas of networked media and future infrastructures, including tutorials and lectures for graduates, research/innovation weeks, and implementation of a series of intensive courses in the fields of pervasive networks, services infrastructures and their convergence at both application and platform levels. The curricula of these intensive programs have already adopted as part of the core syllabus/material of new undergraduate modules in many of the partner Universities. In this context, NEREUS project makes one step beyond, towards the modernization of the European undergraduate education regarding the S/T skills that young engineers must possess in the near future. NEREUS exploits its partners’ Erasmus network in the fields of networked media and Future Internet infrastructures and attempts to unify its Erasmus concentrated knowledge & skills in the areas of HD/3D media, open networks architectures and “green” protocols, cloud-based services, secure and trustworthy communications into a series of deliverables. Within a 3-years timeframe, NEREUS implemented the following deliverables:(1) Course design and implementation of educational material in the aforementioned topics, including presentation slides, multimedia content and hand-outs in electronic version, examination tests, which are accessible and free-of-charge to NEREUS learners as well as to the public. This also includes A/V resources and lecturing/training material available via the project on-line educational repository, as well as laboratory based material with interactive capabilities. (2) Short term learning activities in the form of Spring and Autumn Intensive courses, for evaluating and testing the implemented educational material, besides acquiring useful feedback for fine tuning them and adapting to the students’ needs. (3) Long term learning activities in the form of project assignments, for supplementing students’ theoretical skills with practical talents hands-on experience, besides enabling them to experience team-work in a multinational environment through blended mobility. (4) Integration of all modules into a semester’s curriculum at the partner Universities, which may have the form of “blended courses” and will combine videos, web-based learning material, presentations and ‘traditional’ teaching methods. (5) Accreditation (in terms of ECTS) of all modules and the course in total by the relevant HEI’s bodies and the national Quality Assurance & Accreditation Agencies, and recognition of them. Overall, NEREUS targets the undergraduate and young graduate engineers in the areas of Informatics & Computer Engineering, Computer and Multimedia Sciences, Mass Media and Social Media technologies, business and infotainment domain, e-healthcare and e-agriculture engineering. The educational material that was implemented is freely/openly accessible by the partner European HEIs and their colleagues in other countries, collaborating under the ERASMUS umbrella, thus giving a European dimension to all NEREUS results and their impact.
NEREUS is an ERASMUS+ project in the field of “Next generation networked media over 4G+ infrastructures”, funded by the State Scholarships Foundation of the Greek Ministry of Education (IKY) under the Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education (KA2) framework (2016-1-EL01-KA203-023637). Its main objective was to design, implement and deliver a multidisciplinary programme for skills development, involving principles from Informatics and Internet technologies, Telecommunications and Network engineering, Social Media sciences and Security. Towards this direction, NEREUS elaborated on cutting-edge topics that were of major importance for societal, cultural and economic prosperity, and with strategic impact in Europe’s 2020 Agenda for sustainable growth and competitiveness, focusing onto: i) Novel media coding and “green” transport mechanisms, ii) Open network architectures with service orchestration, iii) QoS/QoE modelling & management, iv) Next generation cloud-based services, and v) Secure and trustworthy communications. Towards obtaining these objectives, NEREUS team comprised of five European HEIs with identical but complimentary expertise. More specifically, NEREUS consortium comprised of the: • Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Hellenic Mediterranean University, Greece, which has extensive R&D experience and educational know-how in fixed/mobile communications, service/network virtualisation, Future Internet architectures, network management and administration techniques, and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). • Department of Communications and Computer Engineering (CCE), University of Malta (UoM), which has established know-how and expertise in resilient multimedia transmission techniques, 3D and Multi-view Video Coding technologies, protocols and applications for environmental-friendly media delivery. • Telecommunications department of the ENSEIRB-MATMECA school of engineers, Bordeaux INP (UoB), which has extensive R&D know-how in the fields of real-time network adaptation and dynamic resource allocation for multimedia provisioning, End-to-End QoS mechanisms and Network- and Content- awareness. • Computer Science department of the School of Sciences and Engineering, University of Nicosia (UoN), which has established know-how in high performance cloud and mobile cloud computing systems, modelling and simulation of mobile computing environments and protocol development, new ‘green’ mobility-based protocols for large-scale heterogeneous networks. • Engineering and Computing department (SEC), School of Computer Science and Mathematics (CSM), Kingston University (KU), which has extensively involved in wireless communications research, 5G networking, cognitive radio, wireless sensor networks, security and management protocols, emergency service communications, wireless multimedia and 3D applications. The efforts of NEREUS partners were focused on three types of activities at Managerial, Scientific/Technological/Educational, and Dissemination levels. At managerial level the efforts were on coordinating/monitoring the project’s S/T activities and establishing mechanisms to ensure quality of work and in time delivery of project’s Outputs, as well as on monitoring the budget related activities and assuring that these met the scheduled plan. The scientific/technological/educational efforts were focused on the design, implementation and fine-tuning of the project’s IOs, including the implementation of intensive courses for testing/evaluating the educational content with real/actual students. Dissemination efforts were focused on activities for raising awareness of NEREUS concept and results to the relevant stakeholders from the research, industrial and business sectors, as well as to the general public, including the organisation and implementation of multiplier events as well as dissemination through the web, leaflets, triptychs, posters, journal papers, conferences and scientific publications. As a results, NEREUS offered educational material for final year Bachelor and 1st year MSc students in the form of 5 modules, all of which were summarised in a whole course accumulating 10 ECTS in total (each module accumulating a work effort equal to 60 teaching hours, which correspond to 2 ECTS). Overall, it is anticipated that all NEREUS results constitute valuable outputs with high impact not only for the participating HEIs and their students, but also for other European/International HEIs and the relevant stakeholders. HEIs may adopt the NEREUS material towards updating their curriculum and programme of studies in the field of ICTs, students may acquire them towards improving/enhancing their skills in the fields of networked media and future Internet infrastructures, while stakeholders – and the society in general – may be benefited by the talented young engineers towards fostering innovation and gearing-up sustainable growth both at regional and national/global levels.