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The European Union Satellite Centre is organising a workshop on Big Data in Secure Societies, which will be held the 3rd of October 2017 in Brussels (SOST, Rue du Trône 62).

Preliminary agenda

09.00 – 10.30: Registration and Coffee

10.30 – 10.40: Welcome and Workshop presentation (Sergio Albani, RTDI Project Manager, European Union Satellite Centre)

10.40 – 11.00: Big Data and Societal Challenges (Kimmo Rossi, Head of Sector R&I Execution in the DVC, EC CNECT.G3) TBC

11.00 – 11.20: Big Data and Secure Societies (Pascal Legai, Director, European Union Satellite Centre)

11.20 – 11.40: Big Data challenges in building GEOSS (Barbara Ryan, Secretariat Director, GEO)

11.40 – 12.00: Space Data for Secure Societies (Daniel Quintart, Policy Officer, EC GROW.I3)

12.00 – 12.20: Space-based applications and Big Data (Rita Rinaldo, Head of Institutional Projects Section, European Space Agency – TIA)

12.20 – 12.40: Big Data initiatives in the Space & Security domain (Sergio Albani, RTDI Project Manager, European Union Satellite Centre)

12.40 – 14.20: Lunch

14.20 – 14.40: The BigDataEurope project (Simon Scerri, BDE Deputy Project Coordinator, Fraunhofer IAIS)

14.40 – 15.00: The BigDataEurope “Secure Societies” pilot (Manolis Koubarakis, Professor, University of Athens)

15.00 – 15.20: The use of Big Data in cyber risk assessments and incident investigations (Nineta Polemi, Programme Manager, EC CNECT.H1)

15.20 – 15.40: Summary, Outreach and Feedback (Kimmo Rossi, Head of Sector R&I Execution in the DVC, EC CNECT.G3) TBC

15.40 – 16.00: Closing Note and Farewell (Pascal Legai, Director, European Union Satellite Centre)

16.00: End of workshop

Objectives

The workshop will address a wide audience comprising key stakeholders, data users and service providers from a variety of domains in Secure Societies such as Space & Security and Cybersecurity.

By dedicated interactive sessions on specific topics, the workshop aims to:

• Go into current and future Big Data needs and challenges in Secure Societies;
• Contribute to the building of a community sharing Big Data requirements and strategies;
• Discuss real user scenarios and use cases related to the provision of products and services in the Space & Security domain;
• Present the outcomes of the BigDataEurope project and in particular of the pilot for Secure Societies.

Background

The workshop is the 3rd of a scheduled series within the BigDataEurope project for the H2020 Societal Challenge “Secure Societies – Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens“.

The “Secure Societies” Horizon 2020 Societal Challenge is related to the protection of freedom and security of Europe and its citizens. The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are: to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters; to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure; to fight crime and terrorism; to improve border security; to support the Union’s external security policies; to provide enhanced cyber-security.

An example of major activity within the Secure Societies Challenge is the provision of geospatial products and services, mainly resulting from satellite data. In fact the datasets used in the Space and Security domain comply with the definition of Big Data in terms of variety (Earth Observation data, aerial imagery and collateral data), volume (several governmental and commercial satellites are currently in orbit), velocity (24/7 availability to users requiring fast responses), veracity (decision making and operations require reliable sources) and value (provision of useful and clear information).

BigDataEurope is providing support mechanisms for all the major aspects of a data value chain, in terms of employed data and technology assets, the participating roles and the established or evolving processes. BigDataEurope is engaging with a diverse range of stakeholder groups representing the Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges and implementing a Big Data Aggregator Platform Infrastructure comprising key open-source Big Data technologies for real-time and batch processing to meet their requirements.

1^st Workshop on Big Data in Secure Societies

The 1^st workshop on Big Data in Secure Societies, organised by the EU SatCen in the framework of the BigDataEurope project, was held in Brussels the 30^th of September 2015. 

The event was a success with 45 participants coming from EC (DG CNECT, DG HOME, DG GROW, DG RTD, JRC), ASD-EUROSPACE, CDTI, DLR, EARSC, EDA, ESA, EUROPOL, Frontex and a number of private companies and other entities covering the domains of Space & Security, Fight against Crime and Cybersecurity. 

2^nd Workshop on Big Data in Secure Societies

The 2^nd workshop on Big Data in Secure Societies, organised by the EU SatCen in the framework of the BigDataEurope project, was held in Brussels the 18^th of October 2016. 

The event was a success with around 60 participants coming from EC (DG AGRI, DG CNECT, DG EAC, DG ECHO, DG GROW, DG HOME, DG RTD, EASME, Eurostat), CDTI, EARSC, EDA, ESA, Frontex, GEO and a number of key stakeholders, data users and service providers from a variety of domains in Secure Societies such as Space & Security and Cybersecurity.

Other Info

Contact

Sergio Albani (Secure Societies Domain Leader)

MSD IT in Czech Republic, Prague, has organized a bioinformatics meet-up dedicated to the issues surrounding usage of High Performance Clusters (HPC) and Big Data technologies for the data analysis and analytics in the pharmaceutical domain. MSD (in the United States and Canada known as Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ USA) is an innovative, global healthcare leader committed to improving health and well-being in 140 countries around the world.

Ivan Ermilov from Institut fuer Angewandte Informatik (InfAI) has been invited to the meetup to present the BigDataEurope project and as a Semantic Web/Big Data expert. He talked about the technical outcomes of the project so far and how the developed technological platform can help bioinformatics domain. The presentations were followed by a panel discussion on the topics of HPC, Big Data, Data Quality and Semantic Web technologies. The slides from the presentation can be found on our slideshare. 

Following the success of the first Open Harvest event in 2016, the bar had already been set high! And Open Harvest 2017 proved to be even better than the first one. You can read here for more inside details on what exactly happened during the three days of Open Harvest in Crete. 21 different organizations from France, United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, United States, China, India, Bulgaria, Greece and Brazil were represented in the Open Data workshop.

Participants covered all spectrum of the agri-food ecosystem ranging from data scientists and researchers to policy makers and agronomists and presentations have been provided, among others, by representatives from the French National Agronomic Institute (INRA), the Wageningen University & Research (WUR), the CGIAR, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), the Indian Statistical Institute, CABI, University of Guelph, and the Global Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN). The outcome of Open Harvest 2017 was that the participants have spoken with one voice through the 2nd Chania Declaration, which was a call to action for all organizations that were present. This declaration is paving the path for addressing grand challenges in the agri-food chain by combining data with technology.

Having all these people from all around the world, gathered together and reflecting on the opportunity of data and technology to support research and innovation in the agri-food chain, that was the perfect opportunity to present the 2nd cycle our use case pilot demonstrator, namely “VITIS”, that is being developed by Agroknow with support from the BigDataEurope Horizon 2020 project.

The most important thing was to help participants understand what are the problems encountered by vine growers in the field and how these problems can be addressed through research and applications, like our use case pilot demonstrator, and how it applies in real life.  This time, during the hands-on-visit to a traditional vineyard, participants were asked to use their mobile phones and scan the barcodes found on selected vines in the vineyard and see in real time how all the related information on grapevine varieties can be seen directly in front of them and all this from a data spectrum that is so heterogeneous and big that combines information from satellite, weather, genomics, phenotypic descriptions, as well as images. Typical data collection, management, processing and visualization are challenges that still exist, and valuable feedback was collected through discussions on the pilot from different perspectives, depending on each participant’s background.