In Horizon 2020, the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme, ICT49 was the call on Artificial Intelligence on demand platform.
Meet the ICT49 sibling projects
Today’s rapidly changing marketplaces are constantly bringing new ways of transforming business operations and require companies to be flexible and dynamic. One solution that offers great value by transforming business operations and increasing their efficiency is the use of Artificial Intelligence tools and techniques. Companies are already benefiting from AI technologies such as prescriptive analytics solutions to enhance the experience of their customers or optimal use of limited resources. These AI tools and mechanisms are continuously evolving and will trigger further innovation and thus require businesses to prepare. SMEs in particular can benefit from AI solutions in four main areas, namely Customer Engagement, Business Operations, Talent Management/Hiring and Financial Reporting. What facilitates the implementation of AI solutions is the fact that not only can companies across many verticals gain value from them, but they also have universal applicability.
Nonetheless, successfully implementing such solutions requires planning and preparation, a coherent business strategy, strong data management processes, a strong understanding of the companies’ technology and systems capacity and needs and the will to engage with the required technology, policy and ethical expertise during implementation.
The EU ICT-49 projects aim to facilitate the implementation of AI solutions by focusing on different challenges. The ICT-49 call is connected to the project “A European AI On Demand Platform and Ecosystem (AI4EU)” which was funded under the H2020-ICT-2018-20 call. The ultimate goal of this project was a European AI-on-demand platform mobilising the European AI community to support businesses and sectors in accessing expertise, knowledge, algorithms and tools to successfully apply AI thereby generating market impact.
The ICT-49 projects build on the AI-on-demand-platform and aim to facilitate the integration of AI into applications and to consolidate the ecosystem by bringing in a larger user community and by reinforcing the service layer of the platform to ensure it is a compelling solution for users, especially from non-tech sectors. The ICT-49 projects contribute to the platform by providing AI-related knowledge, algorithms, tools, access to related infrastructures, equipment, data resources and expert support.
In addition to StairwAI there are five more related ICT49 projects.
AIPlan4EU focuses on using AI for automated planning and scheduling and to identify a course of actions that achieves a specific goal. (https://www.aiplan4eu-project.eu/)
BonsAPPs delivers end-to-end, containerized, ready-to-integrate and re-usable solutions and covers experimentation, benchmarking, deployment, and secure licensing of AI solutions at the Deep Edge, such as the AI embedded in all our everyday smart devices. (https://bonsapps.eu/)
AI4Copernicus bridges Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the Earth Observation (EO) world by making the AI-on-demand platform, the digital environment of choice for users of Copernicus data, for researchers and innovators. (https://ai4copernicus-project.eu/)
I-nergy supports AI-on-Demand in the energy sector by capitalising on state-of-the-art AI, IoT, semantics, federated learning, analytics tools, which leverage on edgelevel AI-based cross-sector multi-stakeholder sovereignty and regulatory preserving interoperable data handling. I-nergy also works on evolving, upscaling and demonstrating innovative AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) Energy Analytics Applications and digital twins services. (https://i-nergy.eu/)
DIH4AI is focused on building and networking DIH-driven AI-on-demand regional platforms, linked to the pan-European AI4EU toolbox and experimental facility and will create a critical mass of AI services and seamless operation. (https://www.dih4ai.eu/)