Exploitation

The "end users" at whom our research is targeted are the organisations that create major segments of the global information infrastructure, and/or run very large distributed applications over this infrastructure.

This end user population is well represented in MAFTIA by our partners from IBM and DERA, and by the projects Industrial Advisory Board, who together represent a cross-section of the types of industrial organisation which can best exploit the ideas and prototypes that the project will produce.

Board members will provide additional use cases to guide the research based on their actual or planned major systems and on realistic threat scenarios; as the project progresses they will play an ever-increasing role in helping us set up appropriate avenues for exploiting the projects results.

Formally, this will be done via the bi-annual Advisory Board meetings - in practice, our expectation is that as the research progresses, Board members and their colleagues will develop close links with those parts of the Project that are of particular relevance to them. But we are not assuming that all responsibility for achieving exploitation can be delegated to the Industrial Advisory Board. Rather, we are confident that we will be able to take great advantage of the existing technology transfer expertise among the project partners, since even the academic partners have extensive and close links with industry.