Abertay to join £1.8m EU project

The University of Abertay Dundee is to take part in a £1.8 million project to develop new ways of delivering computer applications through the internet.

Abertay was the only UK body invited to join the consortium, under the European Union's Fifth Framework Programme, which includes academic and industrial partners in Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Israel, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Abertay's International Centre for Computer Games and Virtual Entertainment (IC-Cave) will research the technology needed to ease the transfer of information around networks.

Peter Astheimer, director of IC-Cave, said: "This is a project that is aimed at taking the pain out of maintaining and keeping a personal computer up to date."

The two-year project, to be launched in April, will investigate application service provision, which allows users to access software programmes held on a central computer and hosted on a remote server.

ASP was originally aimed at the business sector, but the consortium believes that it could soon be adopted by the mass market.