IoT Horizontal activities -

Specific Challenge:

The challenge is to ensure a sound coherence and exchanges between the various activities of the Focus Area, and notably cross fertilisation of the various pilots for technological and validation issues of common interest across the various use cases. Issues of horizontal nature and topics of common interest, such as privacy, security, user acceptance, standardisation, creativity, societal and ethical aspects, legal issues and international cooperation, need to be coordinated and consolidated across the pilots to maximise the output and to prepare the ground for the next stages of deployment including pre-commercial or joint public procurement. A related challenge is to foster links between communities of IoT users and providers, as well as with Member States' initiatives, and to connect with other initiatives including contractual Public-Private-Partnerships (e.g. in the area of Big Data, Factories of the Future, 5G-infrastructure), Joint Technology Initiatives (e.g. ECSEL), European Innovation Partnerships (e.g. on Smart Cities), other Focus Areas (e.g. on Autonomous transport), and RRI-SSH issues.

A related challenge addresses inter-operability and integration, through open IoT platforms across application areas such as FIWARE, CRYSTAL or SOFIA. It addresses the reference implementation of promising IoT standards serving the interoperability and openness objectives, by consolidating results obtained through standard implementation and pre-normative activities at the platform and/or pilot levels.

Scope

Proposals should cover one of the following set of activities (a or b):

a. Co-ordination of and support to the IoT Focus Area

• Focused Action level coordination ensuring consistent exploitation of the outcomes of the various projects forming the FA: coordination of the projects and related pilot areas through mapping of pilot architecture approaches; interoperability and standards approaches at technical and semantic levels for object connectivity, protocols, data formats, privacy & security, open APIs; exchange on requirements for legal accompanying measures; development of common methodologies and KPI for design, testing and validation and for success and impact measurement; federation of pilot activities and transfer to other pilot areas, facilitating the access for IoT entrepreneurs/API developers/Makers and SME in general. The corresponding activities will be developed and consolidated together with the pilots at FA level, and include where appropriate results from other relevant activities in the Factory, smart city, and vehicle domains.
• Horizontal support: further development and exploitation of security and privacy mechanisms towards best practices and a potential label (“Trusted IoT”); legal support in relation to data ownership and protection, security, liability, sector-specific legislations; contribution to pre-normative activities and to standardization both horizontally and in various application areas, also linked with IoT Governance. The corresponding activities will be developed and addressed in the pilots and consolidated at programme level under this horizontal support activity line. Promotion for sharing of conclusions and road-mapping with similar activities in countries and regions outside Europe, including convergence and interoperability of European and non-European IoT reference architectures/platforms. Exploitation of the combination of ICT & Art for stimulating innovation and acceptance; preparation for the next stages of IoT deployment including through pre-commercial or joint public procurement.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU up to EUR 3 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts. A minimum of one proposal will be funded.

b. RRI-SSH support to IoT

• Pilots shall be citizen-driven, involving existing and local communities at an early stage and addressing a combination of sustainability areas. The corresponding activities should accompany the pilots, analyse societal, ethical and ecological issues related to the pilots, and develop recommendations for tackling IoT adoption barriers including educational needs and skill-building. Consortium participation requires at least two entities from domains different than ICT technologies (e.g. social sciences, psychology, gerontology, economy, art, etc.).

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU up to EUR 1 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected Impact:

• Ensure efficient and innovative IoT take-up in Europe, building on the various parts of the initiative (pilots, research, horizontal actions)
• Efficient information sharing across the programme stakeholders for horizontal issues of common interests
• Extension and consolidation of the EU IoT community, including start-ups and SMEs
• Validation of technologies deployment, replicability towards operational deployment
• Validation in usage context of most promising standards and gap identification
• Strengthening of the role of EU on the global IoT scene, in particular in terms of access to foreign markets.

Cross-cutting Priorities:

International cooperationSocio-economic science and humanitiesCross-cutting Key-Enabling Technologies (KETs)

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