€1.175m in Cloud Funding Awarded by OCRE to 15 Innovative Research Projects PRESS RELEASE 26 January 2021 Fifteen innovative research projects will benefit from commercial cloud solutions through EU cloud project Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE), demonstrating the effectiveness of cloud services in research. Digital Economy Industrial Technologies Fundamental Research © OCRE €1.175 million will be distributed to the successful applicants, each receiving between €50,000 and €100,000. In its first call for the adoption of the cloud services available through the OCRE IaaS+ framework agreements, OCRE received 31 applications. All applications were screened by the OCRE cloud adoption funding team and overseen by the OCRE External Advisory Board. The distribution of cloud adoption funding is a key milestone in OCRE’s goal of piloting a digital single market for cloud and digital services for European research. The research projects will be able to benefit from 27 different commercial cloud-based platforms that were sourced through the OCRE IaaS+ Tender concluded mid-2020 and will be made available in the OCRE Service Catalogue in the first quarter of 2021. Through this single procurement, thousands of research institutions across the European Research Area will be able to benefit from easy and procurement regulation-compliant access to commercial cloud services. OCRE Adoption Funding Lead Jan Meijer (Uninett) said, "thanks to the good response to the call for projects we managed to assemble a balanced portfolio of 15 projects; showcasing the benefits of commercial cloud services on research outcomes from different angles. Our hope is that these showcases will inspire other researchers to follow in their footsteps and leverage the benefits of the OCRE portfolio of services for their research." Among the OCRE-supported projects in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are Utrecht University’s ASReview, which uses AI to reduce the manual work to review large quantities of text; University Singindunum of Serbia training algorithms for the intelligent control of swarms of drones; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven of Belgium which is creating self-supervised neural networks to analyse videos and images in order to give answers about their contents; and University of Debrecen, Hungary, which is examining how theoretical models applied in real-world tasks can be substituted by robust machine learning-based solutions. Several projects relating to healthcare are Medicopus’s research into the role of positron emission tomography screening data in predicting cancer treatment response; ETH Zurich’s use of AI to make volumetric medical image analysis techniques more flexible and effective across domains; and Heriot-Watt University’s improvement of respiratory drug administration techniques by simulating the way aerosol drug particles are delivered in the lungs - a previously unachievable simulation made feasible using the powerful cloud computing services supported by OCRE. In materials science projects supported by OCRE, the University College London is using quantum chemistry to find materials that can convert waste heat directly into electricity. Another project from the University of Bath, United Kingdom, is investigating the quantum mechanics of new two-dimensional materials, linked to experimental data from several synchrotrons. The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Systems and Device Technology IISB is developing a new intelligent power inverter by... READ MORE: https://www.ocre-project.eu/news-insights/news/cloud-funding-awarded-ocre-15-innovative-research-projects Further calls are expected to be launched in 2021. To be informed when calls are launched, join the OCRE community network at www.ocre-project.eu/join About OCRE OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments) is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Union that aims to enable and facilitate research institutions to use commercial digital services in a safe and easy manner. The Consortium delivering the project includes GÉANT (coordinator), CERN, RHEA and Trust-IT. Contact ● Website: https://www.ocre-project.eu ● Twitter: https://twitter.com/OCREproject ● LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ocre-project/ ● Email: info@ocre-project.eu Keywords OCRE, funding, CLOUD, IaaS+
