Recent developments (September 2014)
Pioneering results and opportunities: international cloud cooperation
An EU-Japanese project has combined cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to develop smart city applications that keep citizens up to date on events, emergencies, weather, traffic and more. Meanwhile, find out more about a call for EU-Brazil cooperation in future networks and e-infrastructures at the ICT Proposers’ Day.
EU-Japan project unveils smart city apps
The ClouT project is creating a smart city infrastructure with near-to-infinity data processing and storage capacity. The data will come from trillions of people and ‘things’ that are integrated via cloud services.
Four apps keep citizens informed of what is going on around them:
- The Santander app allows the local authorities to send alerts to citizens’ mobile devices on problems with public services, traffic incidents and cultural events;
- The Genoa app stores data on weather, traffic, flooding and closed circuit TV cameras in the cloud. Historical data is analysed and alerts sent out should danger arise.
- The Fujisawa app captures information on city events via social networks or sensors and displays the information – be it emergency information or advice for tourists – via smart projectors
- The Mitaka app provides support for the city’s elderly residents by creating communities based around activities such as going for a walk. It also seeks to involve the elderly in city life by keeping them informed of events, special offers and coupons.
EU-Brazil call – future networks and e-infrastructures – ICT Proposers’ Day
The EUB call (due mid-October 2015 – please check Horizon 2020 Calls for Proposals, pillar "Industrial Leadership", LEIT) lays the ground for:
- developing common positions, standards and interoperable systems for cloud computing;
- a high performance computing environment;
- promoting the federation of experimental resources in Brazil and Europe.
For more information, consider attending the ICT Proposers’ Day on 9-10 October. A session on the call will take place on the second day.
The project has also organised meetings on fostering EU-Japanese collaboration on cloud computing and IoT, and formulated recommendations (resulting from a workshop) for taking collaboration forwards.
Original article from net-cloud magazine (January 2014):
Through ongoing ICT international dialogues, the European Commission is currently discussing aspects of key cloudbased services with the USA, Japan and Brazil. This includes certification, model contract terms for cloud computing services and standards. All sides are looking into closer collaboration.
For research and innovation, the plan is to progress towards joint technological approaches and reach consensus on future standards. This will guarantee a minimum level of interoperability and portability. The result will be more competition in the cloud services market.
A number of joint research initiatives are already in place with Japan and Brazil; further work will begin under Horizon 2020 in 2014/15. Joint projects will address topics such as cloud interoperability and data portability, which were identified as areas of common interest through consultations with industry in all relevant countries.
On the Policy side:
EU-Japan
Policy collaboration activities with Japan started two years ago through various workshops in Tokyo and Brussels, either alongside the EU-Japan ICT dialogues or on other occasions. Ongoing discussions in the context of the EUJapan structured dialogues have attempted to focus on areas where there is a chance of concrete outcomes – standards, SLAs and certification.
A second EU-Japan ICT Dialogue took place on 4 December 2013 in Brussels. Aspects of cloud computing policy were discussed and both sides agreed to carry on with the collaboration activities and include the industry’s views in their discussions the following year. Prior to this dialogue, an informal meeting took place on 2 December between the Japanese Industry Federation (Keidanren) and the Cloud Select Industry Group (C-SIG) to exchange information and discuss possibilities for more concrete collaboration on aspects of cloud policy. Both sides have agreed to work closely in the next year with a view to setting up a bilateral industry working group that will provide support and industrial feedback to the policy dialogues.
EU-Brazil
Policy collaboration was bolstered through a workshop in Brasilia in November 2013. The focus was on identifying barriers that may preclude the adoption of cloud-based services in the EU and in Brazil. It also identified concrete joint initiatives to minimise such barriers. A series of recommendations have been put forward to strengthen cooperation, including the establishment of an EU-Brazil working group involving representatives from the Brazilian Ministry of Science Technology Innovations, the Ministry of Planning, the European Commission and the private sector, in order to advance EU-Brazil policy cooperation.
The group will draft a position paper based on the recent workshop and organise a follow-up working session in the first half of 2014. Since the Brazilian Ministry of Planning faces public procurement challenges similar to those of Europe, both sides also agreed to promote liaison between the Ministry’s pre-commercial procurement initiatives and the EU’s Cloud-for-Europe project.
EU-US
Cooperation is ongoing in the context of EU-US structured dialogues, which focus on areas where there is an opportunity for concrete outcomes, such as exchange of best practices, common contractual aspects, SMEs, cloud standards mapping and interoperability.
Bilateral negotiations on a Trade and Investment Transatlantic Partnership (TTIP) also began in July 2013 and continued in November and December 2013.
In research…
EU-Japan
Research collaboration is yielding significant results. A first EU-Japan coordinated call for proposals was published under FP7, resulting in a number of interesting joint projects. They got underway in June 2013 at the official launch event in Tokyo. ClouT, for example, is drawing on cloud computing and the Internet of Things to create smart cities (see below). A second EU-Japan coordinated call is due in 2014/2015, addressing:
These topics were agreed between the Commission, Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication and Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies.
EU-Brazil
An EU-Brazil coordinated call on cloud computing, including security aspects, is foreseen for 2014/2015. Ensuing projects will develop innovative technologies for cloud-based service provision that take security concerns into account. This is part of the third Coordinated Call jointly funded by the EU and Brazil, which focuses on Advanced Cyber Infrastructures. This collaboration is expected to advance cloud-centric applications for Big Data, and go some way towards facilitating policy coordination between the EU and Brazil. It will subsequently be expanded to other partners in Latin America.
The Brazilian programme “Science without Borders” has issued a Call for Brazilian researchers who wish to be hosted by European partners involved in eight ongoing FP7 ICT projects (Call 10) in the cloud computing sector.
Giving ClouT to smart cities
ClouT is the first joint research project between the EU and Japan on cloud computing. The objective is to integrate cloud computing and Internet of Things approaches, providing an efficient communication and collaboration platform that exploits all possible information sources on smart cities. This will help stakeholders prepare urban areas to tackle emerging challenges such as efficient energy management, economic growth and development.
The project will build a smart city infrastructure with a huge processing and storage capacity for data from trillions of sources that are integrated in the cloud via virtual services and are interoperable. It will also build a set of platform level tools and services to facilitate application development, deployment and supervision for the Internet of Things.
ClouT services will be tested during field trials in four pilot cities: Santander and Genova in Europe, Mitaka and Fujisawa in Japan.
(Article from net-cloud future magazine (2013)- - for complete magazine click here)
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- Technologies combining Big Data and Internet of Things in the Cloud
- Access networks for densely located users
- Optical communications
- Experimentation and development on federated Japan – EU testbeds.