Co-summit demonstrates force of cross-border collaborative software-intensive systems and services development in Europe
ITEA & ARTEMIS Co-summit 2011
Some 650 R&D actors and policy makers from industry, research organisations, academia and public authorities participated in the fourth European Co-summit organised by ITEA 2 –the EUREKA software-intensive systems and services Cluster – and the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking (JU) on embedded software in Helsinki, Finland on 25 and 26 October. While the conference focused on the importance of cross-border co-operation in research and development, the ever-growing project exhibition demonstrated clearly the solid results of such efforts with a special focus area on information and communication technology (ICT) for clean technologies.
“Cross-border co-operation in research is crucial,” emphasised ITEA 2 Chairman Rudolf Haggenmüller. “And we are open to co-operation beyond the ICT community, particularly through interactions with other EUREKA Clusters to meet common societal challenges such as in clean technologies.”
Aligning strategies
Close collaboration between ITEA 2 and the ARTEMIS JU has ensured a complementary approach to embedded software and software-systems and services research in Europe and helped develop a critical mass to boost competitiveness and the wellbeing of society. “We are strongly committed to working closely and have now formed a high-level umbrella group to align strategic issues and identify gaps between the two organisations,” explained Klaus Grimm, President of the ARTEMIS Industry Association.
The road towards ITEA 3
During the 2011 Co-summit, a meeting of the ITEA Directors Committee involving public authorities confirmed support for the road towards the third ITEA programme. This was warmly welcomed by Rudolf Haggenmüller.
ITEA 2 Vice Chairman Philippe Letellier outlined the changes expected in ITEA 3: “We will keep the same values but the new programme will be more agile with its living roadmap offering a dynamic shared view of future challenges, shorter times from project ideas to project starts and greater exploitation of the links with other clusters – both at European and national level.” The new roadmap will propose challenges from the projects and ITEA community, gather state of the art from the projects and open discussions with experts from other programmes to help evaluate the level of innovation in projects and aid consortia in ensuring the level of innovation delivered.
2011 ITEA Achievement Awards
The ITEA Achievement Awards reward high-level technical contributions based on real European collaboration providing significant results while promoting ITEA and its aims. “We’re very proud of all three short-listed projects and it was hard to differentiate between them,” Philippe Letellier, ITEA 2 Vice-Chairman, said. The result was two joint Silver award winners – UseNet and Metaverse1 – while the Gold award this year went to MULTIPOL.
Project results dominate
The Co-summit has become increasingly dominated by its project exhibition which provides an unrivalled opportunity to showcase the results of collaborative ICT research in Europe. Some 76 ITEA and ARTEMIS projects presented their results with achievements and demonstrations. A special focus area on clean technologies involved relevant ITEA and ARTEMIS projects as well as the EUREKA ACQUEAU water and EUROGIA+ low carbon energy Clusters. Other exhibitors included several national competitiveness clusters, Tekes, EIT ICT Labs and EUREKA.
The prize for the best and most understandable ITEA 2 project went to DIAMONDS, based on votes cast by participants.
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