Initiatives for cooperation: The Smart Anything Everywhere initiative and the Advanced Computing and CPS Collaboration Workshop

The “Smart Anything Everywhere” (SAE) is a Horizon 2020 initiative centered around networks of digital competence centers for supporting SMEs and mid-caps across the economy in digital value creation. These centers, usually research technology organizations (RTOs) or technology transfer-oriented university institutes, cluster a wide spectrum of technical and application knowledge to support digital innovation.

SAE innovation hubs gives SMEs an opportunity to experiment with new digital technologies, try them out in their processes and work together with technology suppliers to adapt it to their specific needs. In June, CISTER researcher Vincent Nelis represented CISTER at the SAE workshop organized in Brussels. The workshop brought together high-level speakers from the European Commission, industries, competence centers, and key players in European digital technologies to share ideas on topics related to the reindustrialization of Europe and the key role to be played by SMEs.

Also in June, Vincent Nelis gave a pitch on the P-SOCRATES project, an FP7 project led by CISTER, at the "Advanced Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems Collaboration Workshop", organized along with the SAE event by HiPEAC. This collaboration workshop brought together the "Cyber-Physical Systems", "Advanced Computing" and the “Mixed Criticality Systems" project clusters financed by the European Commission under FP7 ICT Call 10 (2013), H2020 ICT Call 1 (2014) and Call 4 (2015). The main objectives of the workshop were to identify synergies and possibilities for cooperation between projects/participants; provide a better overall understanding for both the Commission staff and the project partners, of what is happening in this area of research and innovation, with possibility for Project Officers and project partners to informally assess the global progress; and identify and exchange of best practices, especially in the areas of standardization, exploitation, platform and ecosystem building.