In April 2016, a series of surveys were opened to all ERTICO partners in order to express interest and ideas for the different 2017 H2020 calls. The answers were collected by the ERTICO office up to mid May 2016. During this period, ERTICO programme leaders organised a series of information webinars to encourage partners engagement.

On the basis of the partners inputs, the programme leaders have identified possible approaches to the identified calls. They have interacted with the different partners who have expressed strong interest and innovative ideas. Whenever needed, the programme leaders have organised additional webinars dedicated to specific calls.

In the context of this Workshop, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, in the person of Alfredo Favenza, will introduce the activities of the BDVA in order to create a link between ERTICO and the Big Data Value PPP in the framework of the H2020 Calls at the convergence of ITS and Big Data technologies (ICT-15, MG-8.2)

Registration Link: http://goo.gl/forms/kSjEgNsuK47O7Smu1

The OI2 Forum will welcome innovation experts, policy-makers, people from Academia and citizens inthe vibrant city of Amsterdam, on 23rd and 24th May 2016!

The OI2 Conference will be held under the label of the Dutch EU Presidency, and it is co-organised by the European Commission DG CONNECT's Open Innovation Group (OISPG) together with Intel Labs Europe, Committee of the Regions, CGI, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, City of Amsterdam, and kindly supported by Dublin City Council.

The 2016 edition of the event is expected to gather more than 350 people around the following action oriented themes: Open Innovation 2.0 and Digital Single Market, ePlatforms, Data Driven Innovation, Urban Agenda, Future Cities, Living Labs and Business Challenges as cross-cutting themes, just to list a few, we have Power of Crowds; Experimentation and Prototyping; and Citizen Engagement in practise.

BDVA will be well represented in several workshops and speeches.

Link to the event: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/open-innovation-20-co...

The Workshop is co-located with ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers.

The purpose of this workshop is to provide a fertile ground for collaboration between research institutions and industries and in analytics, machine learning, and high performance computing.

Topics of interest are:
- High performance data analytics
- Machine and deep learning
- Data search and representation
- Architecture and system design
- Cloud-based big data solutions
- Software infrastructures

Important Dates:
- Submission Deadline extended: February 25, 2016
- Decision Notification: March 11, 2016
- Camera-Ready Copy: March 25, 2016

More information: http://www.computingfrontiers.org/2016/index.html

This conference brings together scientific experts on Computer Science, Statistics and Economics as well as other professionals offering solutions to secure current data management from the perspective of Big Data, Data Mining and predictive classical Statistics. From these disciplines all stages of the Data Management process are addressed: data collection, integration, storage, pre-processing, analysis and visualization.

Conference Webpage: http://www.wessex.ac.uk/conferences/2016/big-data-2016

In an increasingly networked, digitized, sensor-laden, information driven world, the ability to
efficiently process data sets using traditional technology is becoming more challenging as data sets take on varied properties such as volume, velocity, variety, variability and veracity. "Big Data" is the broad term given to address these emerging challenges. There is a broad agreement among industry, academic, and government stakeholders about the remarkable potential of Big Data to spark innovation, fuel commerce, and drive progress. Innovation in this space opens up a wealth of applications and ability to answer questions previously out of reach.
While there is also broad agreement on the ability of Big Data to overwhelm traditional approaches, the ability to create consensus-based vendor-neutral, technology and infrastructure agnostic solutions to enable Big Data stakeholders is essential.
The ISO/IEC JTC 1/WG 9 Working Group on Big Data would cordially invite Big Data experts to speak and participate in this International Workshop on Big Data Standards: European Initiatives.

The goals for the workshop is to:
● Introduce and overview ISO/IEC JTC 1/WG 9
● Promote global Big Data standardization with European partners
● Leverage existing expertise to augment the EU Standardization initiatives
● Explore public and private perspectives in Big Data
● Share European communities' Big Data initiatives and research results

The list of topics of interest includes, but is not limited to:
● Big Data Use Cases – provide application scenarios that require either mixed legacy system
and/or horizontal scalable from the analytics, platforms, and infrastructures environment;
● Big Data Analytics Processing – provide well-defined generic algorithms for distributed
computing, metadata extraction, search and retrieval, and data exploration;
● Big Data Architecture/Infrastructure – provide effective provision and configuration of
horizontal applications, databases, distributed resources and computing clusters.
● Big Data Security and Privacy – deal with infrastructure security, data privacy, data
management, integrity and reactive security;
● Big Data Management – monitor scalable distributed high-performance systems to ensure
Big Data applications are efficiently and securely executed; and
● Big Data Challenges and Opportunities – explore approaches to address heterogeneity,
scale, timeliness, complexity, security, and privacy problems in Big Data that can create value.

More information and registration: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/international-workshop-in-big-data-standards...

The rapidly growing data economy presents an enormous opportunity for Europe to increase productivity and competitiveness. Public sector institutions alone could save more than €100 billion annually from increased use of data. Moreover, data-driven innovation will likely play a key role in addressing a wide array of the most important challenges facing Europe, from supporting an ageing population to improving domestic security to combating human trafficking.
While the data revolution is poised to unlock enormous economic value, create new opportunities for scientific discovery, and improve quality of life for hundreds of millions of Europeans, these advancements will only be possible if Europe embraces policies to support innovation in the data economy. In some areas, such as public commitments to building smart cities and adoption of open data policies, European nations are in the vanguard. However, other areas need more work.
Join the Center for Data Innovation at the inaugural event for its Brussels office where it will host a thoughtful discussion about the future of data policy in Europe, including opportunities to build and expand on successes to increase the use of data throughout the public and private sector. The event will be followed by a reception.

More Information:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/seizing-europes-data-innovation-opportunity...

A special Information and Networking Day dedicated to H2020's ICT-15 'Big Data PPP: Large Scale Pilot actions in sectors best benefitting from data-driven innovation' (also known as Lighthouse Projects) will be organised by DG Connect - Data Value Chain Unit, on 1st December 2015 in Albert Borschette Congress Center in Brussels.

Lighthouse projects are large scale Innovation Actions aiming to practically demonstrate how big data technologies can be transformative for data intensive industrial domains. Lighthouse projects are expected to deliver commercial and technological impact. Possible industrial domains of applications include (but are not limited to) health, energy, environment, earth observation, geospatial, transport, manufacturing, finance, media.

BDVA will be present in the event Introducing the networking sessions: Industrial Challenges in PPP.

Agenda can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/document.cfm?action=display&doc_id=11049

Registration open since 12th october here: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/events/cf/big-data-value-ppp-lightho...

The workshop will explore how Europe and European research initiatives, could support generic efforts to physical and mental health which are key to a productive and joyful life, as well as economic growth and prosperity. The workshop will gather high level international stakeholders.

The aims of this workshop are to:

• Discuss and identify opportunities and challenges of bringing together different research communities, public and governmental agencies, and enterprises and industries to successfully and efficiently acquire, analyse and exploit large longitudinal multi-national and multidimensional population based data sets.
• Match-making with appropriate e-infrastructure and service provisions supporting multidisciplinary research, and public and commercial stakeholder communities.
• Explore issues related to ethics, coordination, standardization, resource allocation, education and training and safeguarding private, public and commercial interests and intellectual property.
• Identify required human and physical resources, and discuss the optimizing of existing and the development of new and innovative data acquisition, registration, quality, management, privacy and safety, sharing, integration, mining and exploitation infrastructures, technologies and strategies.