Projects about Investing in network and technologies

85% funded by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development, the PRIP2 project’s goal was to bring Next Generation Access to agri-businesses in rural areas where there was no connectivity and no commercial interest in providing it. Through 342.6 km of optic fibre infrastructure, PRIP2 provided the ‘backbone’ necessary to bring service providers to these areas, where they only need to build the ‘last mile’ connection to end users. These customers – farmer homesteads, food processing companies and other agricultural business centres – then have the choice of operators and services.

Bringing high-speed broadband to islands is challenging and can be expensive if submarine cables are necessary. In the case of the remote Croatian islands of Rab and Cres, a cost-efficient alternative employed a hybrid solution of optical and microwave radio links to create a mainland-to-island multi-gigabit connectivity project.

The Shadow Robot Company designs and develops highly dexterous robotic hands that are as realistic as possible to human hands and makes them available to researchers within the Human Brain Project. The goal is to integrate them into the robots of the future.

The Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) project DREAM created a unique humanoid robot setup that allows for Artificial Intelligence (AI) cognitive processing while the robot is in a sleep-like phase.

In 2019, 10 public research organisations from 7 EU countries completed the EU funded Helix Nebula Science Cloud pre-commercial procurement (HNSciCloud) and kick-started the uptake of new cloud-based systems with big data storage and analysis tools needed by large scientific projects. The HNSciCloud consortium won the 2019 Procura+ Award ‘outstanding innovation procurement in ICT’. May 2020, an extended buyers group of 40 countries started buying the larger rollout across Europe of cloud research services based on the HNSciCloud results.

The Internet of Things technology unlocks the potential to take autonomous driving to the next level. AUTOPILOT is a large-scale pilot project (LSP) supported by the European Commission. It brings together 43 partners from 14 European countries and 1 from South Korea with the objectives to increase safety, provide more comfort and create many new business opportunities for mobility services.

The AllScale project has developed a new tool chain that helps programmers to overcome the typically problematic imbalance between the increase of performance and the reduction of energy consumption in parallel programming in High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.

Although Lithuania has some of the lowest rural population densities in the EU, it managed to provide some of the highest fibre coverages for these areas through the PRIP project. PRIP brings Next Generation connectivity to rural activity centres such as farmer and rural tourism homesteads, agricultural and food processing companies, advisory offices, State forests and rural communities. The European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (90% of the 5.9 million budget) enabled creating access to broadband infrastructure, including broadband access lines, network nodes and ground structures.

The Baltic States have some of the best fibre coverage in the EU. An example of this is the “Estonian Wideband Infrastructure Network” project, EstWin, which seeks to solve the rural connectivity challenge in an area underserved by telecom operators. EstWin aims to bring ultra-fast internet access within 1,5 km of all rural households, enterprises and institutions in the project area. Funded almost 100% by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD), this project was a finalist in the European Broadband Awards.

ANTAREX, an EU-funded project, used the Marconi supercomputer to accelerate drug discovery.