Workshop Fostering Innovation for Cyber-Physical Systems, Advanced Computing & Manufacturing

date: 20.02.2014

category: News

On the 19th and 20th of February the Workshop: Fostering Innovation for Cyber-Physical Systems, Advanced Computing & Manufacturing: Opportunities under Horizon 2020 LEIT-ICT Work Program 2014/15 and the regional dimension was held. The scope of the workshop was to showcase the new measures that are being funded to boost innovation in the fields of Smart Cyber-Physical systems (CPS-ICT1), low energy consumption computer systems (ICT4) and IT systems for factories of the future (FoF9). To stimulate this program both types of measures were presented, this are: 
1.    Building platforms and ecosystems
2.    Networks of competence centers to support experiments and use cases

The opening speech was held by Mr. Khalil Rouhana (EC), who presented the H2020 guidelines. Mr.Max Lemke (EC) further outlined the importance of connection between regional founds (e.g. structure founds and interreg programs) and programs within H2020. This was later followed by the presentation of the currently open calls. FoF9 that is founding projects supporting manufacturing SMEs was presented by Mrs. Francesca Flamingi (EC) and represents a sort of continuation of the projects under the I4MS initiative, that was founded by FP7 in 2013. As experts in offering HPC services to SMEs, Arctur has a noticeable role in two out of seven I4MS projects: Fortissimo and CloudFlow. The second day of the workshop was dedicated to the opportunities in connecting EU and regional clusters and ecosystems and also combined financing from EU framework projects and found for smart specialization (ESRD). This is especially interesting for competence centers that are already active in EU initiatives like I4MS and would want to expand the regional dimension of their work. In the “Exploring the Regional dimension” part of the workshop Mr. Tomi Ilijaš the CEO of Arctur presented the interregional competence center HPC5 (High Performance and Cloud Computing Cross border Competence Center), that came into existence by connecting various high-tech companies from both sides of the Slovenian-Italian border. The further development of the HPC5 network is important not only for the direct development of the involved companies but also provides great indirect influences delivered by advanced computer simulations for R&D intensive companies in the region. At the end of his presentation Mr. Ilijaš expressed his hopes that with the help of Slovenian and Italian structure founds and also foreign partners they will be able to build a new international HPC center. To achieve this goal the first step is that Slovenia accordingly includes high performance computing into its Operational plan.