The cros-sectorial character of Big Data revealed in the networking session organized by the Big Data Initiative and AMETIC

23/10/2015

Lisbon, October 22, 2015

Big Data has become one of the main topics within the Horizon 2020 European Research, Development and Innovation priorities and, in particular, it is a key topic for the ICT 2016-2017 programme which was widely introduced during the past ICT 2015 event in Lisbon. The great interest and activity around the Big Data PPP was manifested both in the conferences as well as in the twelve networking sessions focused on this subject that took place during the event.

The Spanish Big Data Initiative, along with AMETIC, organized one of these sessions, focused on the promotion of cros-sectoral business models based on Big Data. The session counted on experts from three countries of the European Union, Spain, Hungary and Sweden, who presented various national initiatives in this regard, as well as a speech dedicated to the professional profiles needed to develop this cros-sectorial character of Big Data.

With regard to Spain, Daniel Sáez, member of the board of the BDVA, as representative of Planetic, exposed the Big Data Initiative that coordinates this platform and has a wide participation of both sectors and technologies through platforms as Food4Life, Environmental Technologies, Innovative Medicines, Manufacturing KET, Logistop, Sanitary Technology, Water, eNEM and es.INTERNET, forming as a whole an example of cross-sectoral collaboration in Big Data and R&D+i. Daniel explained two specific initiatives promoted from this group, aiming at building two proposals of iSpaces in water management and biomedicine respectively.

From Hungary, Donat Magyari, independent expert and contributor to European initiatives such as EUDECO, presented the main challenges for a true European Market based on data as well as proposals to address those challenges. Besides, Donat provided specific initiatives from the Hugarian perspective that include topics such as geolocation or transportation.

Björn Hovstadius, from the Swedish research institute SICS, focused his speech on datacenters and concepts such as «experiment as a service» in which their Cloudberry facilities are based, giving access to conducting experiments on technologies like Hadoop. Björn also identified energy consumption as one of the major challenges to be addressed by supercomputing centers.

On the other hand, Jorge Calderon, member of the management boards of U-Tad, Zed Worldwide and BDVA, exposed the need to train professionals with interdisciplinary skills that combine technical aspects of Big Data with those related to business. In addition to tackle independent work, new proffesionals are expected  to be able to work within multidisciplinary teams together with experts from different areas. Jorge also stressed the need for continuous professional training in a constantly changing environment.

More info: slides below and this link