AETHER is the name of our european project, which is entitled Self-Adaptive Embedded Technologies for Pervasive Computing Architectures.

But why AETHER ?

In the future, we will be surrounded by computing elements (notion of pervasive computing), juste like the aether. The aether was believed to be the substance which filled all of space.

We define the self-adaptivity as the ability of a system to react to its environment in order to optimize its performances, which could be processing power, energy consumption or noise tolerance, for example.

The system could also change its behaviour to adapt its functionnality to a new mission, with respect to the environment and the user needs. For example, a user could listen to music and after that, could see a film or phone with the same system.

In the pervasive computing (or ubiquitous computing or ambient intelligence), we assume that in the future, the environment will be full of computing elements. For example, all systems such as watches, PDA, washing machines and so on will have a computing power. So, in short terms: pervasive computing could be defined as "computing everything for everyone, everywhere and at all times".

 The main question is: how to use this computing power to improve society? And how to manage this large amount of processing elements?

One answer could be to put in each of these elements a piece of intelligence to reduce the need of human management of the system and improve its self-adaptivity.

This is the goal of the AETHER project.

We are 14 different involved partners in AETHER. We belong to 9 different countries. All pieces of information could be found on the Partners Area.