Projects

  1. AI4Copernicus: Reinforcing the AI4EU Platform by Advancing Earth Observation Intelligence, Innovation and Adoption
  1. January 1, 2021 - December 31, 2023
  1. AI4Copernicus aims to make the AI4EU AI-on-demand platform the platform of choice for users of Copernicus data along the value chain (scientists, SMEs, non-tech sector). AI4Copernicus will achieve this by exposing AI4EU resources on DIAS (data and information access services) platforms, making it easy to procure computing power and large EO data, as well as to access training material and expertise. AI4Copernicus proposes to reinforce and optimise the AI4EU platform service offering with AI4Copernicus datasets, tools and services relevant to Copernicus data to facilitate the use and uptake of the platform resources in domains of high economic and societal impact, such as in Agriculture, Energy and Security. A series of 4 open calls have been planned, leading to 8 small-scale experiments (smaller, single-beneficiary experimental projects targeting technology-advanced users) and 9 use-cases (larger-budget projects, involving at least one non-technology user). The open calls will necessitate the utilisation of DIAS platforms, Copernicus data, the AI4EU platform and the services and resources that will be provided by the AI4Copernicus project. Through organising, facilitating and mentoring these Open Calls, AI4Copernicus will reach out to new user domains and boost the use of the AI4EU platform. More specifically, AI4Copernicus aims to: (1) Expand and deepen the integration of AI4EU with DIAS platforms to enrich the AI4EU service offering and enable far-reaching innovation; (2) Kickstart the innovation cycle by incentivising diverse AI4EU and Copernicus communities to solve real problems of business and societal value; and (3) Drive the evolution, uptake, and impact of all involved platforms: AI4EU and the DIAS platforms, especially WEkEO, CREODIAS and MUNDI.
  1. AI4EU: A European AI On Demand Platform and Ecosystem
  1. January 1, 2019 - December 31, 2021
  1. AI4EU will efficiently build a comprehensive European AI-on-demand platform to lower barriers to innovation, to boost technology transfer and catalyse the growth of start-ups and SMEs in all sectors through open calls and other actions. The platform will act as a broker, developer and one-stop shop providing and showcasing services, expertise, algorithms, software frameworks, development tools, components, modules, data, computing resources, prototyping functions and access to funding. Training will enable different user communities (engineers, civic leaders, etc.) to obtain skills and certifications. The AI4EU Platform will establish a world reference whilst interoperable with existing AI and data components and platforms. It will mobilize the whole European AI ecosystem and already unites 80 partners in 21 countries including researchers, innovators and related talents. Eight industry-driven AI pilots will demonstrate the value of the platform as an innovation tool and research on five key interconnected AI scientific areas will be carried out using platform technologies and results.

    The pilots and research will showcase how AI4EU can stimulate scientific discovery and technological innovation. The AI4EU Ethical Observatory will be established to ensure the respect of human centered AI values and European regulations. Sustainability will be ensured via the creation of the AI4EU Foundation. The results will feed a new and comprehensive Strategic Research Innovation Agenda for Europe.
  1. Fair for Fusion - open access for fusion data in Europe
  1. September 1, 2019 - August 31, 2021
  1. The European fusion community has become increasingly collaborative over the last few decades with more experimental devices becoming available for broader groups of researchers. The diversity of devices is a great strength of the programme, but as each facility largely has developed their own data technologies, philosophies and access methodologies it has in some cases also presented challenges in sharing data even between collaborating scientists. Opening the data up and making them more easily available on a pan-European basis is a key ingredient in exploiting the investments in the research infrastructures made so far.

    The overall objective of this work is to make European funde data more widely available to the fusion community, other science communities, funding bodies, and the public at large in order to maximise the impact of, the data and demonstrate the importance of the work done at relevant sites. We aim in this proposal to achieve all of the goals specified in this call by not only providing a reference architecture for such an open data platform, but to both demonstrate and elicit feedback from existing users within the fusion domain, to ensure they are both exposed to the benefits of such an open science approach and that we are able to obtain feedback to provide input into the design. We will also demonstrate these tools to other communities involved in open data initiatives (such as EOSC partners) to gain insight based on their existing experience. Tools will be created to support some underpinnings of FAIR and Open data based on policies obtained from existing which can be used both as stand-alone services and as building blocks in a future open data platform. Where possible, we will make use of existing services and tools, adapting them where necessary to meet the needs of the fusion community.
  1. DARE: Delivering Agile Research Excellence on European e-Infrastructures
  1. January 1, 2018 - December 31, 2020
  1. DARE aims to provide scientific communities with a unifying hyper-platform and development context to allow for user-friendly and reproducible carrying out of huge data-driven experiments, and rapid prototyping. DARE specifically addresses the requirements of innovating teams of research developers and scientists, who work on the intersection of software engineering and scientific domains, and on data, complexity and computing extremes. The size and complexity of scientific data, as well as the difficulty in formulating domain-specific solutions in reproducible and reusable ways, may often lead to throw-away, unsustainable end-user products, or long release cycles. This complexity increases exponentially with the size and diversity of input and produced data. Furthermore, widely used big-data technologies and analytics, while they are known to lead to increased productivity in commercial settings, they are often not taken advantage of in scientific. The requirement to deal with diverse exascale data resources dictates the need to ensure and increase productivity through the controlled disruption of the current modus operandi of European RIs. DARE aims to be the technological pivot for this transition, while providing transparent, traceable and developer-friendly bridges over existing infrastructures and services. Building on extensive experience in research e-infrastructures, semantification and the handling of metadata, and on bigdata technologies and domain applications, DARE will equip teams of innovators with meaningful abstractions and tools allowing for rapid prototyping of reproducible and efficient research solutions. DARE will improve further and integrate tried and tested programmatic dataflow specification APIs, big-data technologies and provenance/data-lineage solutions to address the requirements of European RIs, initially of EPOS, on Earth science, and IS/ENES2, on climate.
  1. BigDataEurope: Integrating Big Data, Software & Communities for Addressing Europe's Societal Challenges
  1. January 1, 2015 - December 31, 2017
  1. BigDataEurope will provide support mechanisms for all the major aspects of a data value chain, in terms of the employed data and technology assets, the participating roles and the established or evolving processes. The effectiveness of the provided support mechanisms will be assessed in different domains pertaining to Europe’s major societal challenges with respect to the needs and requirements of the related communities. To this end, BigDataEurope focuses on providing an integrated stack of tools to manipulate, publish and use large-scaledata resources; tools that can be installed and used freely in a customised data processing chain with minimal knowledge of the technologies involved and integrating and industrially hardening key open-source Big Data technologies and European research prototypes into a Big Data Integrator Platform, i.e. an ecosystem of spec-ifications and reference implementations that are both attractive to current players from all parts of the data value chain while also lowering the entry barrier for new businesses. In order to realise its objectives, Big Data Europe will focus on two clearly defined coordination and support measures:

    1. Coordination: Engaging with a diverse range of stakeholder groups representing particularly the Horizon 2020 societal challenges Health, Food & Agriculture, Energy, Transport, Climate, Social Sciences and Secu-rity; Collecting requirements for the ICT infrastructure needed by data-intensive science practitioners tack-ling a wide range of societal challenges; covering all aspects of publishing and consuming semantically interoperable, large-scale data and knowledge assets;

    2. Support: Designing, realizing and evaluating a Big Data Aggregator platform infrastructure that meets requirements, minimises the disruption to current workflows, and maximises the opportunities to take advantage of the latest European RTD developments, including multilingual data harvesting, data analyt-ics, and data visualisation. BigDataEurope will implement and apply two main instruments to successfully realize these coordination and support measures:

    a) Build Societal Big Data Interest Groups in the W3C interest group scheme and involving a large number of stakeholders from the Horizon 2020 societal challenges as well as technical Big Data experts;

    b) Design, integrate and deploy a cloud-deployment-ready Big Data aggregator platform comprising key open-source Big Data technologies for real-time and batch processing, such as Hadoop, Cassandra and Storm.

    BigDataEurope aims to provide an adaptable, easy to deploy and use solution, which will allow the interested user groups and stakeholders to extend their Big Data solutions or introduce Big Data technology to their business processes, based on a concrete methodology for producing a technically sound solution and maxim-izing its out-reach to the relevant communities.