Big Data Info Days in Luxembourg

On 15 January, the European Commission organised an information and networking day focusing on the Big Data Innovation-related objectives of the Horizon 2020 Work Programme for 2014-2015. The first ICT call for H2020 opened 11 December and closes the 23 April.

The event gathered more than 400 participants with the aim to share information and present ideas on the objectives:

  • ICT 15  (Big Data and Open Data Innovation and take-up)
  • ICT 17 (Cracking the Language Barrier)
  • ICT 22.a  (Multi-modal and Natural Computer Interaction)

At the opening of the event, the European Commission provided an overview of on-going activities on Big Data, mentioning also the set-up of the Big Data Value partnership currently taking place together with NESSI and other stakeholders. Thereafter, the participants were informed on several new elements of Horizon 2020 related to the eligibility criteria, funding rates, evaluation criteria as well as the new types of actions in H2020 which include:

  • Research and Innovation Actions (to be compared to previous FP7 STREPs and IPs)
  • Innovation Actions (to be compared to previous CIP Pilot B projects)
  • Coordination and Support Actions (same function as before but now no distinction between Coordination or Support Action)

The objective ICT15.a will cover two innovation actions (IA) and ICT15b. three themes for Coordination and Support Actions (CSAs).

The indicative budget for ICT15.a is 39 million euro which will be distributed across two actions. The first action includes one collaborative project with the aim to establish a European open data integration and reuse incubator for SMEs to develop open data supply chains. The idea is that the larger project will manage “mini-projects” with the size of about 50.000-150.000 euro which will run 6-12 months. The second action under ICT15.a is dedicated to several smaller projects that focus on innovation and technology transfer in multi-lingual data harvesting and analytics solutions and services. For this objective, it is mandatory that any proposal sets out from a clear business strategy to ensure the focus on innovation rather than research. Furthermore, ICT15.b has an indicative budget of around 11 million euro which will be distributed over three topics:

  • Exchange and re-use of data assets across industry sectors, national boundaries and/or language barriers.
  • Capacity building, designing and coordination of EU skills centres
  • Creation of an integrator platform for H2020 data projects

The ICT16 Big Data research call will open on 15 October 2014 and close 14 April 2015. The objective covers two themes for Innovation actions (38 million euro) and one theme for a CSA (1 million euro). ICT16 is meant to provide extremely large and complex datasets, experimental subjects, user-defined challenges (industry shall define the problems), operational capacity as well as data management plans.

More information about the call (including ICT17 and ICT22.a) as well as the different project ideas presented at the info day can be found on the event´s page.

- See more at: http://www.bigdatavalue.eu/index.php/news/47-lux#sthash.LzDExCfG.dpuf