The Nordic NRENs are participating in a scheme offering cloud services for Earth Observation to research projects, as way to promote the use of such resources in European research. The new scheme with has so far enabled 15 research projects across Europe to access cloud resources. Further calls are coming.
Fifteen European innovative research projects will benefit from commercial cloud solutions through a new EU mechanism established through coordinated efforts by the NREN community.
“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,” say Jan Meijer of Norwegian NREN Uninett. He is Adoption Funding Lead in the EU project Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE).
The aim of the OCRE projec is to accelerate cloud adoption in European research by bringing together cloud providers, Earth Observation organizations, and the research and education community, through ready-to-use service agreements and by reducing the complexities of procuring such services.
In this, the first OCRE call, more than one million EUR will be distributed to the successful applicants, each receiving between 50,000 and 100,000 EUR. The distribution of cloud adoption funding is a milestone in piloting a digital single market for cloud and digital services for European research, notes Jan Meijer:
“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 supported projects are use of Machine Learning to reduce manual work to review large quantities of text, use of neural networks to analyze videos, and use of artificial intelligence to make volumetric medical image analysis techniques more flexible and effective across domains.
Further calls are expected to be launched in 2021.
For more detials on the projects www.ocre-project.eu/news-insights/news/cloud-funding-awarded-ocre-15-innovative-research-projects
Researchers interested in being notified when calls are launched may join the OCRE network at www.ocre-project.eu/join
