Making a difference in people’s lives

Over 600 R&D actors and policy makers participated in the third ITEA & ARTEMIS Co-summit in Ghent, Belgium on 26 and 27 October. The combined conference and exhibition was about how mobile and cloud computing can make a real difference in people’s lives.
   
Mobile and cloud power
The title of this year’s ITEA & ARTEMIS Co-Summit was “Mobile and cloud power enabling massive scalability and opportunities for growth”. The participants and stand holders came from industry, research organisations, academia and public authorities from Europe and further afield. The message that they brought across to the 600 visitors was that electronics can make a real difference in people’s lives, in terms of safety, health, mobility and general well-being.
  
ITEA 2 is the EUREKA Cluster on software and software-intensive systems and ARTEMIS is the Joint Undertaking (JU) on embedded systems. Close collaboration between these two programmes has ensured a complementary approach to software and software-system and embedded research in Europe. It has also helped develop a critical mass in an ecosystem focused on boosting competitiveness and the wellbeing of society. “We should all work together for a better electronics industry in Europe,” insisted ARTEMIS JU Director Eric Schutz. “There is one mission and two instruments to create the conditions for growth in terms of new business and new jobs,” ITEA2 Chairman Rudolf Haggenmüller added.
  
Highlights
Day 1 of the two-day event offered an opportunity for ITEA 2 and ARTEMIS participants to see the progress made by their communities.
On Day 2, opening speaker Wim De Waele, Chief Executive Officer of IBBT, talked on behalf of Ingrid Lieten, Vice Minister-President of the Flemish Government and Flemish Minister for Innovation. He explained how the Flemish region is committed to open innovation focused on societal challenges with support for projects, infrastructure and nurturing entrepreneurs. Keynote presentations included:
  
Markus Vehlow of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, who provided a first view of the results of a study on cloud computing;
Pierre Musso, Professor of Information Sciences and Communication who reflected on the changing nature and greater user focus of innovation;
Pietro Perlo of Centro Ricerche Fiat on the development of electromobility and its convergence with renewable energy as the environmental answer to transport in the 21st century.
Parallel sessions covered cloud computing, multicore systems and innovation processes. There was also a dedicated tutorial for Belgian Master and PhD students, who could visit the exhibition of projects and witness first-hand the exciting R&D projects that are presently underway in the industry.
  
Important highlights of the Co-Summit 2010 were the project exhibitions which included 70 ITEA and ARTEMIS projects as well as national competitiveness clusters, Flemish projects, several EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) projects and EUREKA.
 
The conference finished with the presentation of a number of awards that recognised the progress and achievements that have been made to date. ITEA presented the ITEA Achievement Awards 2010. The standard of projects finishing in 2010 was high, making the choice of three winners particularly difficult. ESNA and ParMA were joint Gold award winners, while Cam4Home was the 2010 Silver award winner. Based on votes cast by participants in the Co-summit, ARTEMIS project SOFIA and ITEA project DiY Smart Experiences won the 2010 Exhibition Awards for being the best and most accessible projects.
  
Flemish Nocturne
Running up to and in collaboration with the Co-summit 2010, IBBT organised a Flemish nocturne on Monday the 25th at the ICC in Ghent. The evening was filled with testimonials on how Flemish companies can successfully participate in European projects. Three graduation dissertations and a PhD research project were also presented with an Alcatel-Lucent Belgium Innovation Award.