The Big Data Europe project’s public launch event took place on the 27th February at the Representation of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia to the European Union in Brussels, Belgium. Around 80 attendees were welcomed by the Project Officer, Kimmo Rossi, and Coordinator Sören Auer (Fraunhofer IAIS). Together with the Deputy Head of the Data Value Chain Unit, Beatrice Covassi, the Project Officer presented the Unit’s Perspective on Big Data challenges (“Perspective of the Data Value Chain Unit”), explaining the need for the project and the European Commission’s expectations. This talk was succeeded by an overview of the project, presented by Sören Auer (Fraunhofer IAIS) and Vangelis Karkaletsis (NCSR-D), whereby the second explained the planned community network and group system of Big Data Europe along the 7 societal challenges of the H2020 programme to the audience.
Image: Kimo Rossi (EC) and Sören Auer (Fraunhofer) opening the Big Data Europe Launch Event on 27th of February 2015 in Brussels, Belgium.
After this opening and introduction the event focussed on sessions of each of the seven H2020 societal challenges, vis-a-vis existing big data challenges, opportunities and requirements. As a starting point the audience was given an overview of the project partners which will be responsible for liaising with the target communities, and the consortium’s strategy for maximising the networking and interactions in view of the need to elicit technological requirements and identify pilot use-cases in each domain.
Each of the seven sessions consisted of a presentation by the respective Big Data Europe network partner as well as a presentation by the EC on this topic, followed by a panel discussion, most of which also included one or more European Commission member from a relevant Unit.
