Statements for IoT and Edge: Instruments, Priorities and Partnerships

AI, cloud computing and IoT remain at the forefront of a digitised industry characterised by very high levels of automation, hyper-connectivity and widespread intelligence applications. With the next wave of emerging Internet of Things associated with a massive increase of data, Edge computing will harness the advances in AI and computing power at the device level enabling processing closer to the source of data generation, “things” and users.
Europe should invest in this next wave of digital innovation in order to regain its strategic autonomy and strengthen its industry. With the paradigm shift from cloud to edge, Europe has the opportunity to gain back market shares in the data economy building on its strengths in sensors, microsystems, control and automation systems and its application in key industrial sectors.
It is time for building consensus for a European strategic agenda for ‘Cloud-to-Edge-to-IoT’

Rolf Riemenschneider, European Commission

As we need to halve global carbon emissions by 2030 to stabilize the climate, IoT and edge should follow this ambition both with regard to its footprint and its enabling effects.

Pernilla Bergmark, Principal researcher, ICT sustainability impacts

As the IoT is all about connecting what was previously unconnected in order to acquire, analyze and leverage data from the assets and devices that contribute to our goals, then all the data from connected assets (could be industrial machines such as robots, generators, intelligent building components, anything really) we need an architecture to enable this. By moving intelligence to the Edge and, by definition, decreasing network latency, such an architecture is enabled by Edge computing, with the essential vision: speed in general and in critical or remote contexts; saving bandwidth, storage, time and costs by limiting the data that needs to be transmitted.

Emilie Jakobsen, Research Assistant, Aarhus University

I am doing research on IoT Edge & Blockchain. So this would be very helpful.

Parwinder Singh, Research Assistant, Aarhus University

Edge computing is about decentralisation, which has many benefits. Data needs to be able to travel with just enough context, to allow it to be understood and also acted upon in a trustworthy manner. This requires a new level of minimal but sufficient interoperability, between essentially Edge digital twins. After a decade of extreme centralisation, we are now realising how important it is to get to this next level, in order to deliver on the green-digital transformation in a fair and just manner.

Martin Brynskov, Professor, Aarhus University

In a future world fully connected where information is the key for taking decisions, driving industrial operations and improving our quality of life, IoT technology is key. However, usually our factories are not a green field where we can just deploy those technologies. We need to understand to they can be introduced fast enough and in a sustainable way, combined with their custom reality. Otherwise we will see how under the current pressure for being competitive, our factories stay far from which they could be in the close future.

Andrés Escartín, Innovation manager , BSH Electrodomésticos España S.A.

Which instruments for collaboration would create most value? An ecosystem of partners bringing broad level of expertise to achieve technological, cultural and political integration Partnerships among vendors to achieve interconnectivity and data sharing among IoT solutions Collaboration among Individuals, businesses, governments and other organizations is needed -Which barriers are the most critical ones identified? Cybersecurity, data security and privacy concerns, interoperability and lack of standards -Who are the relevant European key players that can drive the seismic shift from Cloud to Far Edge? How to support SMEs to contribute? key players: EC, CEN/CELENEC, IEC, NGI, (maybe) some IoT public-private partnership How to support SMEs: Encourage SMEs to participate in “IoT public-private partnerships”, provide incentives for experimentation/piloting, leveraging EU research results on far edge computing.

Artemis Voulkidis, Technical Director, Synelixis

Collaboration among businesses, governments and SMEs is needed to achieve highest adoption. Cybersecurity, data management and interoperability can be considered as the main barriers. The relevant European key players include the European Commission, European Smart City municipalities, NGI. An IoT-PPP would be significant. Provide incentives for SMEs to exploit EU research results on far edge computing.

Terpsi Velivassaki, Senior Software Engineer, Synelixis

The more comfortable consumers are with innovative solutions, the faster and wider their adoption will be. IoT and Edge computing represent a step towards improving notably efficiency and sustainability, but service providers have to set a relationship of trust with the consumer. The role of the IoT-Edge-AI ecosystem and an industrial approach is key for achieving success in delivering transformative solutions to the mass market.

Juan Rico, Head of IoT, Teka group

Connect anything anywhere while adhering to security and privacy constraints imposed by business functions.

Usman Wajid, Technical Director, Information Catalyst

IoT Will change dramatically as intelligence comes to the edge. Hardware and software tools must be developed that cover the whole development and commissioning cycles. Nevertheless it urges that Europe positions itself at the forefront of AI framework software development.

José Barbosa, Scientific director, MORE colab

Momenta invests, advises and places key talent in Digita Industry (energy, manufacturing, smart spaces and supply chain/logistics). We’ve long since made a bet at the edge of computing given our background in Operational Technology, and see this as a key opportunity for Europe to regain its digital leadership. To that effect, we’ve just launched our third Digital Industry venture capital fund at $50M.

Ken Forster, Executive Director, Momenta

Data processing and applications of AI in Industrial settings need to take place locally to the application with secure and connected systems.

John Cosgrove, Technical Director, Limerick Institute of Technology

Intelligent edge make more sense for filtering and contextualized data ,so that we can send only good data to the cloud and IT . Also for faster and quick action closed to assets based on advanced AI model running locally at the edge. Now it needs to build eco-system of players for more interoperable and standardized connectivity to OT and IT systems.

Sandeep Mishra, Nestle waters

Sustainability, (energy) efficiency, security, privacy and scalability of next generation smart digital services, strongly call for convergence at the edge of several advanced technologies. By bringing responsiveness and intelligence closer to where the data is generated and to where the users are, green cloud-edge-IoT technologies and solutions will fuel the digital transformation of several sectors and empower citizens and organisations.

Monique Calisti, CEO Martel Innovate

Too many silos. Too many proprietary offerings. Not enough security. If data is IoT’s superpower, then IoT standardization, like LwM2M’s, unlocking massive economies of scale, common data semantics, and zero-trust security services is required so data can securely and efficiently travel between data ecosystems, creating value.
Imagine a factory making a smart drug tailored to your genes. The site produces, consumes, and shares data with different corporate systems (ERP, supply-chain, etc.), third-party logistics providers, customs, and various health authorities until the medicine is delivered to your local doctor at which time you are contacted for an appointment.
Today this is not economically feasible. Everything is custom, brittle, costly. Standardization would create the economies of scale to make this practical to build and maintain. This brave new world is our final destination. How long it takes to get there depends on our starting point?.

Steve Lurie, IoTerop, France

Waiting backwards for the old normal is not an oppition. We have to lead forward and take responsibility. Current fragile environments show, that past answers in business models, socitety, public sector are not more appropriate and networks in sense of intelligence by using technologies and shared responsibilities are overdue. To be sustainable, you have to be forward thinking.

Otto Schell, CEO/Founder – IGDCR

The power of Eindhoven is daring! The Brainport region has a proven track record to make I(o)T stuff that actually works. Together with our QH ecosystem partners we believe that IoT and Edge computing, together with an Urban Data Platform and topped by data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and/or digital twinning and virtual reality can and will provide sustainable societal benefits. An interoperable market place will combine transaction management, (personal) data sovereignty and an explanation of the fairness of the used algorithms, so that all parties in the data chain can choose a fruitful, yet justified, business model. More info: see the Digital City Program ecosystem in the Urban Development Initiative.
(https://www.linkedin.com/company/urban-development-initiative/).

Rick Schager, ICT Architect, Municipality of Eindhoven

Related experience H2020 project (FOF, SPIRE), digital twin, security privacy of the data flow, domain application: industry4.0 IoT-based system, energy efficiency, process optimisation.

Sabine Delaitre, R&D&I manager, IDENER

We miss a one time opportunity, not moving in holistic intelligent networks and not accepting that future is about communit and not individum. Digitalization is an answer for now and not a question of tomorrow. Therefore we must addres all view including unpopular topics about coopetition betwenn human and AI and impct on our future environment.

Otto Schell, CEO/Founder, Institute for Global Digital Creativity and Relevance

5G and Fiber deployments will allow occurrence of “a Network of network” for the communcations at a worlwide status. Economic crisis due to covid pandemic has accelerated need of reinvent all business models and Public subvention in Eu cities, thinking localization inside territories first. This lead to EDGE computing methods naturally.

Marylin Arndt, Retired from OrangeLabs, Consulting, Expert IOT – 5GImpulse

Connecting things! We need a clear vision of edge computing which is competitive against existing solutions (local, cloud).

Christian Prehofer, Director, DENSO Automotive Germany

IoT is a critical infrastructure to support economic, social and human capital development of emerging markets.

Kahori Matsui, Sr. Investment Officer, IFC

Edge is that hinge which transmits the energy generated from data ‘combustion’ in Cloud/HPC engines to the deterministic gears of industrial automation, moving the ‘wheels’ of physical transformations.

Giuseppe Padula, University of Bologna

Would be great to have an open source, free cost online AI that can poll, retrieve and index the latest IoT news in a natural language search.

Calvin Tsang, Grad Cert Global Security student, Macquarie University

The “Internet of everyThing” is evolving with an accelerated pace. The differences between that “things” (‘smart’ sensors, ‘connected’ devices, etc.), the edge, and the cloud are getting blur, drawing a convergence scenario where AI and DLT are getting closer, fertilizing the ground for an eventual growth of some kind of “TrusTech” in the near future. A huge effort has been put from Europe for developing a rock-solid Digital Strategy. Data and AI interlinked strategies and action plans are deeply rooted in excellence and trust as core values; but we still lack a more consistent effort in developing some kind of “Technology Diplomacy” -I would say Science, Technology, and Innovation Diplomacy- to get the starring role we deserve in a changing, and demanding, global geopolitical scenario.

Antonio Fumero, CIO,Edosoft Factory, S.L.

IoT is a key enabler for sustainable solutions, we should take look on its applications.

Gaspard Nelly Uwumuremyi, IoT Specialist, KPLTechnology ltd

Generate trust into the hyper-connected world through appropriate cybersecurity assessments to secure our cross-border supply chains.

Jacques Kruse Brandao, Global Head of Advocacy, SGS

Machine Learning moves from cloud to edge.

Felix Freitag, Associate Professor, Technical University of Catalonia

I worry about the effect when thousands of edge computer controlled equipment gets connected via f.ex. 5G and act in unison, like a thousand wind generators acting on the same network price because they are run by the same open source software. I have written a thesis at Lund university about what to do this complexity. Can be downloaded from www.iea.lth.se

Thomas Gillblad, Lund University, Sweden

Europe needs to invest in its own IoT silicon products instead of buying chips from Asia and the USA. There are far too few fabless semiconductor manufacturers in Europe. Silicon valley became successful because of the investment made into startup and small fabless semiconductor manufacturers. Europe needs to invest to bridge this particular “valley of death” from research to product for all of the silicon involved in the IoT eco-system.

Michael Chapman, Cortus, France

The evolution to “next web” will expose composable services getting their information from IoT devices and sensors, associated with contract-based programming approaches that will specify functional and non-functional requirements such as response time and latency, energy requirements, migration of the service to a local computing resource (IoT device), cost, etc…. Applications will result from the orchestration of these composable services. Orchestrators will select services according to users’ preferences, and will orchestrate their execution in a coherent way. The orchestrator, or trustable distributed meta-level “OS”, will also be in charge of managing the in-bound (security, verification of trust) and out-bound (privacy and confidentiality) data, acting as the “Guardian Angel” of users’ assets. The “programming” of this orchestrator will be done using natural interfaces, such as voice, drawings and schematics, or even by examples, thanks to the innovation brought about by artificial intelligence techniques.

Marc Duranton, HiPEAC (CEA), France

As known from experiences regarding IoT testing there also exist multiple challenges for the Edge Computing quality assurance and automated testing process. Developers and QA experts need to understand specific requirements and possible approaches to be applied in Edge Computing Test design, definition and execution. Special attention is necessary to existing approaches, testing techniques and tools which follow standardized methods, are freely available and successfully applied for various mobile and fixed network solutions.

Axel Rennoch, Project manager, Fraunhofer FOKUS

Cross partnerships calls and collaborations should be encouraged .

Natalie Samovich, Head of research and innovation, Enercoutim

IoT and Edge Computing are important instruments to support future innovative services needed to strengthen the European economy. As a researcher, I see numerous opportunities to innovate and contribute to the advance of several open challenges.

Rodolfo Oliveira, Instituto de Telecomunicações, Nova University of Lisbon, Portugal

A Next Generation of Internet of Things (IoT) applications is bringing in new requirements such as support for mobility of devices and users; the need for data and user privacy; larger volumes of sensitive data to be analysed, and new requirements to handle such data. The support for such applications require handling traffic and data locality and to provide a higher degree of automation across Edge and Cloud. The need to advance smart Edge computing, by addressing requirements brought in by mobile end-user and field-level devices is of particular importance to advancing the Internet, economy, and society.

Rute C. Sofia, Industrial IoT competence center head, fortiss GmbH

Bridging the gap between theory and practise, lab and market.

Antonis Hadjiantonis, Manager, CyRIC Ltd

IoT and Edge Computing are important instruments to support future innovative services needed to strengthen the European economy. As a researcher, I see numerous opportunities to innovate and contribute to the advance of several open challenges.

Rodolfo Oliveira, Professor, UNL

IoT Device intelligence management at the edge ML and AI on constrained resource IOT device.

Eddy Bajic, Professor, University of Lorraine

In the world of a trillion internet connected devices we will have the data to monitor and take greater control of the technology that helps to increase our quality of life. Let us not forget though that the energy required to power these devices needs to be green.

Andreas Alexiou, Senior R&D Partnerships Lead, Digital Catapult

Our new digital life will more and more gravitate around Context information describing what is happening, when , where and why. Managing this information in a Digital Twin will provide us with capabilities to improve the quality of life of people living in cities or regions or people working in factories or organizations. At the same time it will be possible to reduce the cost of operating e.g. a city or a company. All of this needs to be operated based on European values be it in the cloud or in the future even more on edge and IoT level. GAIA-X will provide this Data Sovereignty on all levels for a trustful management of Digital Twin data.

Ulrich Ahle, CEO, FIWARE Foundation

The combination of computing resources (cloud-.edge) bring many challenges, such as potential security breaches; to make an analogy, instead of defending a “centralized” castle we have to defend a lot of farms. However, processing on the edge is needed for applications with real-time requirements and sometimes for efficiency. Aspects like energy consumption should also be considered.

Nuria de Lama, European Programs Manager, Atos

In 2003 I founded a now successful IOT company for wireless to internet temperature monitoring for the Food Safety and Healthcare markets (current growth rate 50%). 5 Years ago, I decided that Edge Computing would be a much more cost effective way to service these markets. Apart from price point advantage, increasingly customers don’t want all their data in the cloud. Finally, taking the Edge Computing approach makes the business much more scaleable. With a “zero touch” business model the market becomes global and upselling strategies like the “freemium model” become possible.

David Gray, CEO Nowlog Ireland

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) at the Far-edge:
AI and ML need not necessarily run on supercomputers, Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and Tensor Processing Units (TSUs). Thanks to emerging embedded machine learning and TinyML technologies it is nowadays possible to run ML on embedded devices and even microcontrollers. Imagine deep neural networks running on coffee machines, white appliances, temperature sensors, in your machinery, within animals or inside industrial machinery etc.
Embedded machine learning and TinyML open many exciting opportunities: They allow enterprises to take advantage of currently unused data, while saving bandwidth and storage. Most importantly, they enable true real-time applications and reduce the CO2 emissions of AI. Embeeded ML and TinyML will be important innovation enablers for future edge computing applications.

John Soldatos, INTRASOFT International, Luxembourg, EU-IoT Project

The challenges in defining what IoT means could be taken as a hint of being the time to move on: the IoT requirements can be supported with generic data platform capabilities of event and stream processing, ELT’s, orchestration and so on. The latest paradigms in data such as Data Mesh are shifting the focus from platforms towards data as a product, the data governance and especially roles and responsibilities in larger organisations such as cities that tackle with legacy systems and silos. Data products ought to be self-explanatory, not requiring separate metadata catalogs, be accessible and available.

Timo Ruohomäki, Forum Virium Helsinki, Finland

Strengthening Europe’s digital and technological sovereignty is an important strategic goal for the next decade. Centralizing data, communication flows and compute capabilities in cloud data centres, operated by a few dominant companies, is diametrically opposed to this objective. What is needed is an open standards-based ecosystem of distributed infrastructures and software components that enable important future technologies such as edge-driven artificial intelligence, disaggregated 5G campus networks, and privacy-aware data platforms.

Dr. Alexander Willner, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany

IoT + AI close to the edge will reduce latency and create new business models. AI does not need to work on the cloud, even in small devices we can deploy it. Cybersecurity will be a ley issue in moving from the cloud to the edge and even the device: privacy, less computing resources for executing security and privacy functions
Link of edge computing and IoT with SDN and the possibility of linking with netapps and VNF will create new and relevant insights

Prof Carlos E. Palau, UPV (SPAIN) ASSIST-IoT Project Coordinator

Use of cutting edge technology in industry must lead to a productivity increase, but never forget affordable costs – return of investment – and the use of standards which make the implementation not complicated and user friendly.

Oliver Martinez, Process Engineering Director, Robert Bosch España Fabrica Castellet

EU research initiatives and investments should focus on strengthening and fostering the EU’s position as a global actor and increase its relevance and presence in the IoT context. To achieve this goal, standardization, and policymaking, clustering, as well as national and international synergies, are the most valuable instruments for collaboration. However, many challenges await the adoption of new technologies; the application of new policies and standards in critical infrastructures, and pushing a good innovation into the market by SMEs in the IoT ecosystem. It is important to stimulate approaches for experimentation and training where SMEs and new innovative companies are considered equal partners with other stakeholders in IoT ecosystem. Top IoT EU companies like DELTAM2M, Ericsson Telecomunicazioni S.p.A., Net4Things, Wellness TechGroup, Overkiz and INTEGRON can help the market shift from Cloud to Far Edge.

Anna Triantafyllou, Research Associate, University of Western Macedonia

Edge compute is bringing computation closer to the place where data is generated and where information is being utilized. It enables services to process orders of magnitude more data on the edge than what could possibly be sent to the cloud, using less energy, achieving lower latency, resulting in more autonomy, and levels of privacy/security that were not possible in the cloud era. Building excellence in technologies behind the edge revolution, such as TinyML, MEC, Federated Learning, and edge orchestration frameworks is key to the sustainable growth of European industries.

Csaba Kiraly, Internet of Things Specialist, Digital Catapult

Edge computing will be a critical succesfactor for the energy transition. Key in the energy system of the future is not having data but sharing dats. The energy system of the future will not be build on the silo’s of the past

Peter Hermans, Dga / consultant, Valcre