Glancing back at the ITEA PO Days 2022 and Family reunion in Helsinki
Three days of familiar onsite inspiration and innovation
ITEA Call 2022 for project proposals was launched on 13 September 2022 in conjunction with the ITEA Project Outline Preparation Days (ITEA PO Days) in Helsinki on 13 and 14 September. After two years of meeting online, many were happy to finally reunite in real life. The Scandic Marina Congress Center in Helsinki provided a perfect backdrop to celebrate this occasion during the PO Days and the following ITEA Family reunion on 14 and 15 September.
Driving innovation face-to-face again
This year around 310 participants from 21 different countries registered for the online sessions of the ITEA PO Days and about 230 of them joined the event in person in Helsinki. After years of online conferences, many were happy to finally be back again and meet their possible collaboration partners face-to-face. It became clear that the companies and researchers attending not only represent the leading edge of software innovation, but they also form our thriving ITEA Community.
ITEA Chairwoman, Zeynep Sarılar,
comments:
“During the pandemic, we
learnt many things such as the value of
technology to keep seeing each other
and the importance of physical meetings,
especially with our families. Therefore,
it was great to have the onsite ITEA PO Days and Family Reunion in Helsinki
this year to be able to meet and to
collaborate in a physical environment.”
Combining best of both worlds
For the first time, the ITEA PO Days were also partly online to combine the best of the online and physical PO Days. An online preparation session, 11 online country information sessions and an online project idea pitch session (with 34 pitches) were organised prior to the physical event in Helsinki. This optimised the time for networking and consortium building during the PO Days and opened up participation to a broader group of people that otherwise would not have been able to attend due to busy schedules or difficulties with travelling across the globe.
This combination of online and onsite sessions was highly appreciated by most of the participants; 81% of the survey respondents indicated that it was a big success and another 18% felt that ITEA partly achieved in combining the best of both worlds, providing at the same time good suggestions to further improve for future events.
Mehrdad Saadatmand at RISE
Research Institutes of Sweden
expressed his view:
“The ITEA PO
days, in general, serve as a great
forum for representatives from various
industries and market sectors as well
as academic and research partners to
come together, exchange ideas, and identify industrial research challenges
and project topics that are of high
impact. The ITEA PO Days 2022 event was
of special importance since it was the
first physical and in-person PO days
event after two years of having it only
online due to the pandemic. Thanks to
the excellent organisation of the event
by the ITEA office, the PO Days 2022
enabled us to not only meet our old ITEA
friends once again, but also establish
new international collaborations and
contacts.“
Innovative powered Community presenting solutions for the future
In addition to the plenary sessions in Helsinki, there was plenty of time for interaction during the poster session – in which 32 project ideas were presented – and the many lively brainstorm and workgroup sessions to exchange, discuss and develop new ideas together. The group discussions resulted in 17 plenary project idea presentations with numerous very concrete projects in the pipeline.
Ramon Schiffelers, Public Private
Partnerships Manager at ASML draws a
positive conclusion from his premiere
participation at the ITEA PO Days:
“ITEA brought the best of the online
and offline worlds together by providing
an online event a few days before the
PO days in which most project ideas
were pitched. Due to this there
was more time available on the PO
days itself to brainstorm and to form consortia face-to-face. Together with
one of our suppliers, we went to the PO
days equipped with (just) some ideas.
At the end of the PO days, there was a
project outline, a consortium spanning 6
different countries, and lots of energy to
turn it into a project proposal!”
Public Authorities showing strong commitment
This year, a record number of ten representatives of the Public Authorities attended the event, showing their strong commitment to the ITEA PO Days. They combined their online country information session with a poster in a dedicated poster area at the event, informing participants about national priorities, eligibility criteria and funding outlook. Of course, participants were also able to discuss their first ideas for their project proposal one-on-one with the Public Authority representatives at the Scandic Marina, creating an early dialogue, which is very important to improve the chances for funding.
Mika Niskanen, Business Finland
(Finland NCP for ITEA), shares his
thoughts:
“The ITEA PO Days 2022
were my first experience of the
PO Days. My expectations were
to understand the character of the
event, meet customers, meet my
ITEA colleagues and hear about ITEA
projects under preparation and finished
projects. My own task related to ITEA
projects is to work with evaluation
and funding of national applications and thus the PO Days event was an
excellent opportunity to discuss the
coming projects and to understand the
results of finished projects. Definitely
the most important dimension of the
ITEA PO Days was to meet live with my
ITEA colleagues who during the last two
years have only been images on the
screen. I enjoyed this possibility to learn
more about my colleagues as persons
and also to get to know the whole ITEA
Community. We have worked well
together before online and I think we will work better together in the future.
It was a pleasure to participate in the
ITEA PO Days 2022.”
Apart from initiating new innovative ideas, the PO Days 2022 also provided the opportunity to have a look at the great achievements of ITEA projects that were recently completed. On Wednesday 15 September, during the ITEA Awards of Excellence ceremony, ITEA’s four most outstanding software innovation projects – that finished between mid-2021 and mid-2022 - were celebrated for their impressive results. This year's award winners are:
CyberFactory#1 - 17032
Addressing opportunities and threats for the Factory of the Future (FoF)
- Project leader
- Airbus CyberSecurity SAS (FRA)
CyberFactory#1 aims at designing, developing, integrating and demonstrating a set of key enabling capabilities to foster optimisation and resilience of the Factories of the Future (FoF). It will address the needs of pilots from Transportation, Automotive, Electronics and Machine manufacturing industries around use cases such as statistical process control, real time asset tracking, distributed manufacturing and collaborative robotics. It will also propose preventive and reactive capabilities to address security and safety concerns to FoF like blended cyber-physical threats, manufacturing data theft or adversarial machine learning.
IMPACT - 17021
Intelligence based iMprovement of Personalized treatment And Clinical workflow supporT
- Project leader
- Philips Medical Systems Nederland B.V. (NLD)
Healthcare faces many challenges like improving patient outcome and working more cost-effectively in the face of growing demand, declining staff capacity and the rapid succession of new clinical and technological developments. The IMPACT project will address these challenges by building on preceding ITEA projects like MEDIATE and BENEFIT to add the next logical step: from evidence-based towards intelligence-based healthcare. To achieve intelligence-based healthcare the IMPACT project will promote automatic data collection and artificial intelligence throughout the complete clinical pathway.
PANORAMA - 17003
Boosting Design Efficiency for Heterogeneous³ Systems
- Project leader
- Robert Bosch GmbH (DEU)
The goal of PANORAMA is to research model-based methods and tools to master development of heterogeneous embedded hardware/software systems in collaboration with diverse and heterogeneous parties by providing best practice, novel analysis approaches, and guidance for development. To that end, the main line of action is geared to extending the scope and interoperability of current system level analysis approaches, particularly by enhancing existing abstract performance meta-models. The enhanced meta-model and the related tool framework will be a common and open platform to support collaborative development.
OPTIMUM - 16043
OPTimised Industrial IoT and Distributed Control Platform for Manufacturing and Material Handling
- Project leader
- Demag Cranes & Components GmbH (DEU)
Today’s control of industrial processes is done in a highly centralised and hierarchical manner. Future concepts like component based and collaborative automation require much more distributed control functionalities. To support this development, OPTIMUM addresses enhancing the aspects of distributed control, adaptation of IoT technologies to industrial needs, enhancement of control and assistance applications by context and location awareness as well as common-model based 3D engineering and supervision. Thus it will support partners and industry in general to get ready for Industry 4.0 challenges.
ITEA congratulates the ITEA Award of Excellence winners for their impressive results contributing to a better society!
ITEA Family reunion
On the back of the ITEA PO Days, we celebrated the ITEA Community getting back together again during the ITEA Family reunion. The programme consisted of inspiring sessions with SME Stars and well-respected ITEA Family members, a keynote speech “Should innovation become maintenance?” by Sietske Rozie, Radiologist M.D. and the ITEA Awards of Excellence ceremony, combined with the opportunity to reunite for drinks, a dinner and a longawaited chance to socialise. Maria Rimini-Döring, of Robert Bosch and a member of the ITEA Steering Group attended the ITEA Family reunion:
“The two-day Family reunion followed a proved “choreography” according to the motto “no future without a past”. Wednesday was devoted to the history, the very special persons, traditions and values of ITEA which made and make up its strong spirit of collaboration and cohesion. This kind of “intensive care” we feel for each other, the projects and, I dare adding, the work as a whole creates the solid ground for the sparkling innovations envisioned and awarded the next day. It was great to look from the stage into so many happy faces! I felt so proud and honoured to be part of this great ITEA family.”
After two years online, we can definitely say the physical ITEA PO Days are back! It was inspiring to see the ITEA Community reunite, reinforcing the event as the must-attend event for a large international community of large industry, SMEs, start-ups, academia and customer organisations to create innovative solutions and collaborate in funded projects focusing on software innovation. We look forward to meeting you all again next year!
The organisation of these PO Days was supported by Business Finland, the Finnish government organisation for innovation funding and trade, travel and investment promotion, for which we are very grateful.
More information and and recordings & presentationshttps://itea4.org/podays2022/index.html
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