Summary
The objective of the project is to address the shortage of highly skilled personnel in designing and manufacturing embedded systems. The consortium is composed by four European technical schools (Politecnico di Milano; ALaRI Institute in Lugano; EPF Lausanne; Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya) and by a group of microelectronics and related companies (ST Microelectronics, Mentor Italia and TXT in Italy; IPLS in Ireland; IMEC in Belgium; INTRACOM in Greece; Infineon in Germany). The project provides for a number of training initiatives, built around the "Master of Engineering in Embedded Systems Design" held at ALaRI. They are: grants for students from candidate countries; support to joint master projects with industry; dissemination of course contents through summer schools and in-house courses at industry's premises; set-up of a mobility scheme for students (ECTS) and of a support infrastructure for remote learning and tutoring.

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Objectives
The main objective of the project is to address the shortage of highly skilled personnel for the European industrial segment involved in design or manufacturing of embedded systems. More precisely ANTITESYS aims:

• at preparing researchers/designers oriented to industrial needs, endowed with a cross-disciplinary education as well as with basic soft skills;
• at providing re-skilling for employed personnel in companies, supporting life-long learning;
• at creating a strong collaboration between Academia and Industry not only in research, but also in designing and organising a training initiative;
• at the organisational level, at establishing a training network in microelectronics, which allows for high flexibility of training and for mobility of trainees between training institutions and between industry and academia.

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Description of work
The ANTITESYS project will be centred on the master course in microelectronics at the University of Lugano and provide for the following activities:

• Support to master students coming from candidate countries through grants and help for the integration in their study and work context;
• Set-up of a mobility scheme between the academic partner institutions (ECTS credits), going beyond the classical mobility of undergraduate students and allowing such students, as well as PhD students, to attend lectures by top-level experts and to interact with them in research projects;
• Organisation of targeted courses for students and for employees of the partner companies, to address specific training needs. The courses will be held in the form of elective courses (in Lugano), summer schools (in Lugano, Lausanne, Barcelona and Athens), and in-house courses at industry's premises;
• Development of applied research projects by master students. The projects will be on subjects defined together with industry. Students will be directly tutored by industrial research experts (and work at the industry's premises) and industry will own project results, while supporting the students through grants;
• Set-up of an on-line infrastructure to access training contents, allow for remote tutoring while students move around in the network, and train students in remote team-work.
  Finally, during the last part of the project, we will evaluate the economic viability of each of these activities and define a business and marketing plan for the further development of the training initiative.

NUMBER WORK PACKAGE TITLE WP1 Administrative and technical co-ordination WP2 Grants for candidate countries and support to students WP3 Student's mobility WP4 Training network WP5 Applied research projects WP6 Remote training WP7 Valorisation

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Milestones and expected results
The following main results are expected from the project:

• Masters courses and applied research projects successfully completed by students;
• Summer schools and in-house courses realised with industrial participation;
• Remote training facilities functioning and regularly used;
• Economic viability of the training network demonstrated and basis for the follow up of the training initiative laid down.

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Expectations
The outcome of ANTITESYS is an advanced specialised training "centre" for microelectronics serving Europe, "centre" denoting in this case a co-operation of institutions located in different geographical points but strongly connected to each other, sharing common training activities and exploiting remote-learning technologies to support a common training project. Adoption of European standards for evaluation of teaching units facilitates graduate students' European mobility; at the same time, a teaching offer, of such high level, will avoid excessive mobility towards USA centres, and thus contribute to avoiding the brain-drain too often perceived in the hi-tech areas.

Partners of ANTITESYS foresee actions (such as workshops, publicity at student fairs, dissemination of information through suitable organisations etc.) to increase, in particular, public awareness of this European initiative's achievements and of its students' success. The creation of a small "alumni network", while fostering placement and re-placement support, will also contribute to create a European awareness to the added value of post-graduate studies in scientific and technological areas - a value up to now seldom perceived (contrary to the common awareness to the added value of MBA and similar degrees).

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