The University of Modena e Reggio Emilia participates with its Department of Information Engineering, whose research activities are mainly addressed to the sectors of Electronic, Computer Science and Telecommunication Engineering. The Department has presently a force of 23 professors and 16 researchers, plus an average of 40 temporary researchers. In 2003 the Department research has been funded by 25 national projects, 7 European projects and 68 contracts with local industries, for a total funding of about 2.000.000 Euro. With respect to the SEAMLESS project, solid competencies are available in the following fields.

Enterprise networking: innovative methodologies and ICT tools for constitution and operation of enterprise networks, with particular attention to those made of small companies. Specific techniques are studied to support partner search and distributed process design, technical data exchange in the distributed design of new products, distributed planning and workload assignment, functional integration of virtual factories (Esprit and IST projects: PLENT, COWORK, VIVE, GNOSIS VF, BIDSAVER, INDIA and PROVE-SME).

Mediation services: configuration of innovative services to SMEs accessible through a network of competence centres, as well as ICT support to the mediation role provided to SMEs by their entrepreneurial associations (Esprit and IST projects: NETCIM and SOSS).

Semantic web and agents: study of new search engines to allow an intelligent access to heterogeneous information sources available on the Web. (Esprit and IST projects: WINK initiative within EUTIST-AMI, SEWASIE). Moreover, the Department is member of the AGENTLINK I and AGENTLINK II networks of excellence with the responsibility of the ADK (Agent-based Data and Knowledge Management) working group.