Editorial

Dear ITEA Community,

Régis and I are very pleased to bring you our first editorial for the ITEA Magazine, which has been sharing news and insights from our programme and projects since 2008.

In this edition, you’ll find a wrap-up of the PO Days in Antwerp, a spotlight on our valuable partnership with Canada, and our Community Talk with our ‘Coach' Erik Rodenbach.

But most importantly, we are featuring stories about you and your projects. Régis and I are particularly inspired by the paths taken by the technology you develop within the projects to generate impact in the real and virtual worlds. Whether your work leads to new products, standards, IP, or open-source contributions, that is up to you! What drives us is maximising the impact of your efforts! Our entire ITEA Office team, including Régis and myself, are here to support and listen to you. So, please feel free to reach out anytime with your ideas or feedback.

Recently, we all greatly enjoyed the PO Days 2024 in Antwerp! What an inspiring Family gathering; more than 300 creative participants exchanging ideas and planning new projects during these days! Have a look at the details at https://itea4.org/podays2024.

The opening speech at the PO Days 2024 was especially meaningful for me. Not only did it mark my first time opening this event, it also took me back to a keynote I gave in Antwerp 18 months ago at the DATE23 conference on the Cyber-Physical Metaverse titled 'Where Digital Twins and Humans Come Together'. You may recall that I briefly talked about this topic at the ITEA PO Days again – not from a lack of fresh topics, but because I genuinely believe we are on the edge of a new industrial revolution that will significantly change how we and machines interact. This revolution will be the result of mixing recent advancements in ICT and AI – and, more specifically, bringing the power and efficiency of cloud computing to any place where a (real or virtual) machine might need it. Reliably and in real time.

This capability will allow people and machines, as well as machine networks, to interact seamlessly between both real and virtual worlds. To help spark new ideas for proposals in the upcoming Call, we’ll be organising an in-depth Community exchange on this topic next year. If you’re interested in contributing to this event, please let us know!

Finally, much has changed over the last 16 years since we first published the ITEA Magazine, both in ITEA and in our (working) environment. We have seen progress in where we work, the way we share and consume information and, of course, the technologies that enable all of this.

With this in mind, we’re exploring new and improved ways to share information with you. Since this magazine is created for you, we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can keep improving. Have a look on page 28 and share your feedback with us.

All the best and enjoy reading!

Dirk Elias & Régis Cazenave