ITEA 2 Co-summit 2011 Cross-border cooperation for clean technologies

Some 650 participants from industry, research organisations, academia and public authorities joined the fourth European Co-summit organised by ITEA 2 – the EUREKA Cluster on softwareintensive systems and services – and the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking (JU) on
embedded software in Helsinki, Finland on 25 and 26 October.

Day 1 focused on the Co-summit theme with a plenary programme including keynote presentations and a panel session, and in the afternoon parallel sessions on various topics. 

Day 2 focused on the ITEA and ARTEMIS communities. 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.” 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. 

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 have been organising this cosummit for four years now,” pointed out Rudolf Haggenmüller. “We are already operationally close and will now be closer strategically with the high level umbrella structure supported by Sherpa-style working groups on various topics.”

The event concentrated on the importance of cross-border co-operation in R&D with an ever-growing project exhibition with 76 ITEA and ARTEMIS projects demonstrating clearly the solid results of such efforts. The exhibition also included a special focus area on clean technologies. 

Three ITEA 2 projects were shortlisted for the 2011 Achievement Award. “We’re very proud of all three short-listed projects and it was hard
to differentiate between them,” said Philippe Letellier. The result was two joint Silver award winners – UseNet and Metaverse1 – while the
Gold award this year went to MULTIPOL.

"Cross-border co-operation in research is crucial, 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."

Rudolf Haggenmüller
ITEA 2 Chairman