With European science and research ministers sealing the deal on Horizon 2020 this week, researchers across Europe can now start to prepare proposals for the first batch of calls to be launched next week, December 11. In an on-going series, Science|Business looks at what’s on offer in these draft documents, continuing this week with “Information and Communication Technologies”, which will receive more than €6 billion in a bid to reinforce Europe’s position in advanced technologies and exploit opportunities in big data, social media, and other new growth markets.
The ICT challenges from FP7 have been regrouped under Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies in Horizon 2020, and projects will be funded under six main headings: new generation of components and systems; advanced computing; future internet; content technologies and information management; robotics; and micro-and nano-electronic technologies and photonics.
The programme has had a mixed reception, with Tom Phillips, Chief Regulatory Officer at GSMA, a mobile operator industry group, saying, “It has identified some of the main challenges that will affect the development of the digital market,” including spectrum sharing and cyber-security.
However, the European Association of Software Science and Technology (EASST) would have preferred to see an enlarged role for software science, “the missing key enabling technology”, in the programme, said Tiziana Margaria, Vice President. This is needed “to strengthen the role of Europe in worldwide software science and innovation, a field currently dominated by other players,” she said.
Internet for a modern Europe
The Internet has evolved to assume functions far beyond its original brief and a number of calls under the Future Internet theme will address its capacity to serve this multitude of new usages. There will also be research to investigate the power of the Internet to generate social and economic benefits, investigating the use of cloud computing to reduce spending and improve services in the public sector across Europe, for example.
The Commission anticipates that mobile traffic volumes will be 1,000 times larger by 2020, leading to a spectrum crunch. This is the motivation behind the 2014 call on advanced 5G network infrastructures. It is encouraging to see recognition of this issue, said Phillips. But while “research can contribute to building better networks to support unprecedented volumes of mobile traffic, we cannot expect real change without proper regulatory initiatives at the EU and national levels,” he said.
Robots and languages
The Commission estimates that worldwide “big data” technology and services will grow from €2.4 billion in 2010 to €12.7 billion in 2015, but before European companies and researchers can exploit these opportunities fully, some sort of order will need to be placed on the mountain of information being generated in different forms and different languages.
Under the content technologies and information management branch of the ICT work programme, Horizon 2020 aims to improve the ability of European companies to build multilingual data products and services. This part of the programme will also fund R&D in machine translation technology to allow for multilingual online communication and break down barriers in cross-border commerce.
The robotics theme will involve calls aimed at developing a new generation of robust, flexible and autonomous robots for use in manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce, as well as service robots for professional or domestic use. “Large and core business sectors including automotive, aerospace and agro-food or microelectronics, representing more than 20 per cent of our GDP would quite simply disappear from Europe without intensive use of advanced robotics,” according to the Commission.
Cross-cutting initiatives
2014 and 2015 will see four calls for cross-cutting ICT issues: Internet of things and platforms for connected smart objects, Human-centric digital age, cybersecurity and trustworthy IT, and transnational cooperation among national contact points.
“Continued innovation in ICT largely depends on consumers’ trust in new technologies,” said Phillips. “Making cyber-security and trustworthy ICT among the priorities of the work programme is a clear step in the right direction.”
R&D on platforms for connected smart objects will aim to capture the benefits of consumer-orientated platforms across many sectors, including e-health, intelligent transport and energy. mHealth services alone, which deliver healthcare information in real-time using mobile phones or tablets, “have the potential to deliver cost savings in healthcare delivery of up to €99 billion, whilst adding €93 billion to European GDP by 2017,” said Phillips. At the same time, mhealth will also address issues around quality of life and mortality rates for millions of people, he said.
Next generation technologies
A significant chunk of the new work programme will be dedicated to R&D on a new generation of components and systems, which includes electronics, microsystems and embedded systems found in devices such as mobile phones, credit cards, washing machines, cars and planes.
Under the advanced computing pillar researchers will work to reduce the energy consumption of computers and data centres.
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