News about Smart cities

The Local and Regional Digital Indicators framework (LORDI) aims to support digital transformation efforts across Europe by providing the necessary evidence about what is happening at the local and regional level. It helps cities and communities benchmark themselves against others and benefit from peer learning in order to develop better policies and actions. The European Commission, European Committee of the Regions and European Observation Network for Territorial Development (ESPON) need to know what is important for your city. How should digital transformation and its impact be measured?

Broadband Competence Offices will play a catalytic role in ensuring that the digital budget of the Recovery and Resilience Fund will reach the market and end in long-term and robust investments. At a webinar on ‘Telecom’s Role in the Recovery: Infrastructure, Innovation and Sustainability’, organised by the Financial Times, Jan Dröge, Team Lead of the BCO Network Support Facility, together with Anthony Whelan, Digital Policy Adviser to the European Commission President, outlined the most important factors that Member States should take into account in order for the Fund to be most effective.

The EU is launching a new €30 million initiative, with rural digital service platforms, innovation ecosystems, the smart village approach, and standards at the forefront. Entering Europe’s Digital Decade, the European way of digital transformation Living-in.EU provides minimal – but sufficient – interoperability of data, systems and services between smart cities and their suppliers. The two new large-scale pilot projects offer the opportunity to extend these Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms to rural smart communities.

In this pre-commercial procurement, the university of Murcia aims to equip their infrastructure with a collective intelligence that improves campus resource management and enables the university to offer new services. Innovative solutions should improve current smart cities/campus solutions based on opportunities offered by advanced Internet of Things technologies for data capture, fast broadband 5G communications, distributed computing and integration of Artificial Intelligence in decision making. Deadline to submit offers: 28/12/2020

The cities of Copenhagen, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Paris, Tallinn and Stavanger invite innovators/companies to submit offers for their AI4CITIES pre-commercial procurement. This aims to develop breakthrough AI solutions - in combination with other enabling technologies such as big data application, 5G, edge computing and IoT - to accelerate the Cities' transition to carbon neutrality, in particular for smart mobility and energy. Deadline for submission of offers: 28/2/2021

The Commission has just published the results of a study for greener cloud services and data centres. Results show that energy consumption of data centres in EU Member States is expected to increase from 2.7% of the electricity demand in 2018 to 3.2% by 2030. The study provides technical and policy options to limit this increase.

The EU funding program COSME provides EUR 5 million funding for transnational consortia with minimum 2 public buyers to implement public procurement of innovation solutions (PPI). The call is open to proposals that are interested to deploy innovative solutions for any domain of public sector activity (health, digital, climate, transport, education, energy etc.). The deadline for submission of proposals for the 1st and 2nd stage of the evaluation process is 19/01/2021 and 08/06/2021 respectively.

MIVB-STIB invites interested bidders to participate in the open market consultation for its Muntstroom pre-commercial procurement. The aim is to develop novel data driven solutions for smart predictive monitoring of people flow, for use cases including transport, COVID-19 and security analytics. A Living Lab is envisaged for testing the solutions in the Brussels Capital Region. The solutions are needed for the Collection, Combination, Storage, Analysis of and Smart Access to people flow-data. Register to the 19/11/20 webinar before 18/11/20 and complete the OMC questionnaire by 4/12/20.

As “5G’s great potential brings some security challenges”, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity – ENISA – has published a study on the “Threat landscape for 5G networks” as well as contributed to the “EU 5G Toolbox”. In this video interview, Dr. Louis Marinos, ENISA Senior Risk Management Expert, explains the key measures and recommendations for creating and running secure 5G networks.

Pula municipality launched a pre-commercial procurement to develop innovative solutions: Firstly, to equip lagoon outlets with an intelligent structural system aimed at making them safe from hydrogeological risks and limiting the decrease in fish stocks. Secondly, to enable continuous monitoring of physical, chemical and biological descriptors and their correct processing, with dynamic forecasts about the productive and environmental structure of the lagoon. The pre-commercial procurement is co-financed from the European Regional Development Funds. Submission deadline: 30/11/2020