Let’s hear what users think about the Horizon Dashboard!

His name is Luca POLIZZI and he works as a Policy Officer of DG R&I in the role of research attaché in the EU Delegation to the State of Israel. Luca uses the Horizon Dashboard as a support to his work and he is giving us a sneak peek into how he is doing it.

Could you let us know a little more about your job?

As part of my job, I contribute to support synergies between the EU and Israeli scientific and innovation ecosystems across a number of sectors and areas. I promote a better understanding of Horizon calls, priorities, connections between different EU programmes, and how to align Israel research priorities with EU big tickets such as the European Green Deal, the Digital Agenda and the overall energy transition towards carbon neutrality by 2050.

When did you start using the Horizon Dashboard?

I started using the Horizon Dashboard since the very beginning in 2018 when I worked as Policy Assistant to the Director of Industrial Technologies, Peter Droell. I followed one of the first trainings offered soon after the launch and immediately I was taken away by the great potentiality and user-friendly approach of the application.

Has it improved your daily tasks? How?

Intelligence on participation to Horizon, analysis and interpretation are central to my daily work. Horizon Dashboard is extremely useful in this perspective. The Dashboard became a regular working tool for me, and I am sure there are potentialities that I am not familiar with. Additional training would be welcome, including online tutorials.

What are the most used features?

I use the Dashboard primarily to check participation from a thematic, pillar, and country based perspective, the summary and networking visualisations are the most interesting to me, recently I used extensively the COVID-19 country profiles. I use it a lot for country groupings but not easy to gather all the information needed, e.g. countries, themes, entities, funding per entity, overall funding, and who is networking with who in a specific areas of work.

What would you like to see improved?

An area I would like to see improvements is the selection of the indicators with cross references. For instance, in many cases I have to check who worked with who across two, three or more countries on certain themes or subject areas, e.g. selected projects in the areas of batteries involving Israel, Sweden and Austria. It would be good also to link the Dashboard with Compass so have immediate access to project officers' names for projects one is interested to have more information on. I would find also very useful predefined groupings such as EaP, EU 27/28, EU 13, EEA, Associated Countries, EU and the rest of the world, etc. Another area which is missing in the Dashboard is data on the Joint Undertakings and Art. 185 initiatives such as PRIMA. Thematic groupings such as Green, Energy, Digital, AI, etc. would be also very interesting to have. Looking at the future, it would be great to have access to all data and visualisation on the upcoming Horizon Europe Partnerships and R&I Missions.

I would like to use this opportunity to thank deeply colleagues working on data mining and statistical analysis and visualisation, this made my work much more complete, dynamic, and fun with fast access to data for briefings and intelligence in real time. I always like to impress audiences in my interventions at conferences and meetings with participation to Horizon data which are dated the day before the meeting itself! This is great image for Europe in terms of capacity, credibility and reliability. THANK YOU!

As Luca, would you like to tell us what you think about the dashboard? Please do not hesitate to contract us by email at RTD HORIZON DASHBOARD.