On Tuesday January 26th 2010 the ICIS community presented the results of five years of research on Interactive Collaborative Information Systems. More that 150 people attended the full day program at the Art Centre Delft. As chairman of the ICIS consortium board Prof. Jaap van den Herik opened the day with a plenary presentation of the highlights of ICIS. He first thanked the many universities, research institutes and businesses for their contribution to the project as research and as valorization partners. He then highlighted the scientific achievements. With more than 500 publications in journals, proceedings, technical papers series and a special scientific book there is good reason to celebrate the results. It deserves special mention that ICIS may take credit for some 20 dissertations. Van den Herik went on to explain to the audience how the project was built up and developed with numerous internal and public events. In a stepwise fashion the project expanded its efforts from scientific research to special valorization projects to integrate its results and to demonstrate their practical value. 

Project leader, Paul Burghardt, completed the opening session by thanking the researchers and the communication team for so elaborately making their results accessible to the international research community and to the general public. He showed how the project site (www.icis.decis.nl) presents the 60+ projects by clustering the work in five major themes: Enhanced situation awareness, Collaborative Decisionmaking, Computer Human Interaction Modelling and also Architecture, Integration & Demonstration. This site is in English. Next to the project descriptions it provides overviews of all publications. In addition to this site prof. Robert Babuska and prof. Frans Groen compiled an elaborate scientific book on the ICIS project that is available via the Springer website.

Additionally a special dutch-language site (www.icis.nu) was developed to present the results to the general public. Here the project results are presented per application area: safety & security, traffic management an mobility and healthcare. In addition to well illustrated web articles most project descriptions here can also be downloaded in the form of two-page flyers that provide concise explaniations of the projects, with links to further information.

From 10:30 to 16:00  the many presentations and demonstrations (see program) were given in the pleaseant ambiance of the Art Centre Delft. Organized in four tracks the 150 attendees could visit more than 35 presentations and demonstrations. During the lunch break the central hall was busteling with people networking, discussing the demonstrators and also enjoying the Mediterranean Lunch. The coordinator of the ICIS project, Eddy van der Heijden, ensured that everything ran smoothly, as did the project as a whole.

The director of the D-CIS Lab, Kees Nieuwenhuis, and initial developer and project leader of the ICIS program,  closed the day at 4 PM thanking the consortium board, the project management team and the especially the researchers for their effort and collobartion. He went on to explain that ICIS project (www.icis.decis.nl) elaborated and expanded concepts also emerging from the  Combined Systems project. (www.combinedsystems.nl) project.  It has become clear that the collaborative systems of many human actors and many artificial agents are a necessary new architecture for complex information systems, needed to solve complex problems in today’s information driven society. The many national and European FP7 projects in which ICIS partners, in various clusterings, now participate are an important practical aspect of the continuation of the research. The D-CIS lab strategic research agenda is another example of anchoring and furthering the research results and underlying concepts of ICIS. In addition, some of the ICIS partners have already signed up for partnership of D-CIS. The D-CIS lab will therefore maintain it’s focus on Actor Agent Communities (AACs) for many years to come.