BDVA Annual Report 2024

2024 marks a turning point in the history of BDVA, who celebrated at the end of the year its 10th anniversary! The community continues to grow steadily, united and strong, committed to its mission of supporting organisations, the public sector and society overall to create value with data and Artificial Intelligence. Researchers, academics, industry representatives, innovators, infrastructure owners, public sectors and NGOs all join forces under the BDVA umbrella to make this happen, linking communities of researchers and practitioners to policy, and moving research outcomes towards business, highlighting and obtaining their societal impact and value. Over 260 organisations took part in this adventure throughout 2024, with the association providing sustainable means for collaboration and growth.

In 2024, BDVA released an updated Strategic Agenda based on 5 guiding themes that complement each other providing an overall perspective of the community’s ambition and scope:

• Empowering European Industries and society for a human-centric digital future
• Expanding data-driven ecosystems across sectors and global value chains
• Making data and AI innovations fit for emerging infrastructures and platforms
• Sustainable data and AI: enhancing efficiency and resilience while reducing resource demands
• Integrating innovation, ethics and compliance

27 task forces led by member organisations supported and continue to support the implementation of the strategic agenda priorities by connecting knowledge, co-creating new projects, building synergies with results, and providing supporting guidance documents (5 major publications in 2024) and tools for companies and policy makers. A network of 31 federated regional and national data innovation spaces (the i-Spaces) helped connect the European community with the smaller players and innovators all over Europe, offering testing, experimentation, innovation, coaching and educational data and AI services. The Association was managed by 26 Directors throughout 2024, supported by an advisory Technical Board of 16 experts and a talented and multidisciplinary team of 10 professionals that represent the BDVA Office.

BDVA organised regularly online and in-person activities, either internally-focussed, or in collaboration with other communities or the general public, which helped establish collaborations, transferring knowledge, co-creating innovations and connecting with end-users. This has been a truly community effort!

As a private member of the EuroHPC JU, 2024 has also marked an important turning point for BDVA, with the launch of the AI factories as dynamic ecosystems to foster innovation, collaboration, and development in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), bringing together computing power, data, and talent to create cutting-edge AI models and applications. In 2024, BDVA worked closely with potential host organisations of AI factories, data spaces, AI and data specialists to start addressing the data challenge. The first AI factories were announced at the end of 2024.

BDVA continues developing and strengthening collaborations with policy makers, other associations, communities and platforms. Throughout 2024, the collaboration with the JU and the other JU Associations (ETP4HPC and QuiC), the DSBA Partners (Gaia-X, FIWARE and IDSA), the Computing Continuum and the collaboration with the AI, Data and Robotics Association (Adra) are the most notable ones. Additionally, BDVA has been participating in 6 different strategic projects covering areas of Data Spaces, digital skills, virtual worlds and in the context of the federation of data-driven innovation hubs.

Data Week took place under the umbrella of the Data Spaces Symposium 2024, in Darmstadt (Germany), continued on 5 June 2024, in conjunction with the LAILEC conference organised by KU Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium and concluded on 10 December 2024, in Luxembourg, through an event organised in collaboration with LIST, Netcompany-Intrasoft SA and Luxembourg National Data Service (LNDS). In total, Data Week gathered over 400 participants, who enjoyed over 40 sessions, covering burning topics for the Data and AI ecosystem.

BDVA organised the European Big Data Value Forum from 2-4 October 2024 in Budapest, Hungary. EBDVF 2024 was organised in collaboration with local partners Eötvös Loránd University, Ideal-ist, Neumann Technology Platform and SZTAKI. EBDVF brought together over 460 industry professionals, business developers, researchers and policy-makers from all over Europe and other regions of the world to advance policy actions and industrial and research activities in the areas of Data and AI, who enjoyed over 40 sessions, with the latest updates from top research and industry representatives. EBDVF was part of TechDays Hungary, a series of autonomously-organised events that took place from 30 September to 8 October in Budapest.

We invite you to discover all of the outcomes of the Data and AI ecosystem in 2024! Thank you for being part of our journey and we look forward to our continued growth in 2025!