Contribution to programme / key action objectives
The ANTITESYS proposal presents a new scheme for post-graduate and continuing education, addressing both graduate students (in IT engineering and computer science as well as in physics or applied mathematics) and industrial staff interested in re-skilling and life-long learning. The teaching plan is strongly modular, designed to adjust to the requirements of various classes of trainees - newly graduated students, junior designers wishing to achieve a Master's degree over several years (studying part-time), senior engineers or other staff interested in individual teaching units or in coherent blocks of teaching units. Teaching units involve both theory and practice based on state-of-the-art commercial or experimental tools; final evaluation for each teaching unit is preferably (whenever possible) effected through a class project, giving further relevance to the students' design skills.

To obtain their Master degree, students must have obtained a pre-defined number of Credits and complete a Master's project, a short or medium term research project, defined by industrial partners and during which students are tutored jointly by academic and industrial experts. Lecturers are invited to "tune" individual class projects to the Master's projects, so that students may learn also to examine the different aspects and figures of merit of a given design problem. Internships may complement the training project and provide an effective technology transfer phase.

ANTITESYS presents a European-level action, not only in that participants (partners as well as students) come from a number of European countries and are involved in a strongly cooperative initiative, but also because it is expected that part of the training activities be distributed to and/or repeated in different European environments (through summer schools, in-house courses etc.).

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Organization of the project
The whole ANTITESYS project involves industries on an equal footing with universities and research centres to define the educational project, to select lecturers, to approve a course syllabus, etc.

The project management structure is detailed in Figure 1 (ANTITESYS structure): cooperation between Academia and Industry is assured by two management bodies (the Steering Committee, deciding on ANTITESYS strategies, and the Scientific Board, charged with the operative decisions of the training plan). Faculty consists of experts coming from academic and industrial centres, belonging not only to the partners but to other leading institutions as well; tutoring and supervision (both industrial and academic) enable the development of Master's projects.

Applications from candidate students will be solicited worldwide and an effort will be made to support brilliant students with economic difficulties. Particular attention will be given to students from countries applying for EU membership and from other Eastern Europe countries, which usually grant a good basic training in mathematics, physics and also in the general theoretical aspects of engineering and computer science. Owing to present scarcity of local high-technology companies, up-to date training on technological aspects is less frequent in these countries. ANTITESYS aims at selecting good graduates from universities of the countries mentioned above and award them grants (including basic living support) to follow the entire Master's course. Master's graduates will then be able to either find jobs in the more industrialised countries or return to their own home countries, having acquired not only specific training but also a set of useful contacts with multinational companies and research environments. One of the secondary objectives of ANTITESYS is the creation of an "alumni network" that will support former students through their professional careers. Figure 1. ANTITESYS project structure. Information on ANTITESYS will be widely disseminated among university students and within the industrial environment in order to increase their awareness of the need for life-long learning.

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