NexusForum.EU – Boosting European Computing Continuum Ecosystem

A new CSA in Martel’s project portfolio – and the next chapter in the European Cloud-Edge-IoT Continuum consolidation

Martel is proud to announce the official kickoff of a new project – NexusForum.EU.

NexusForum.EU is a European Commission’s (EC) funded Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action (CSA) project answering to the call HORIZON-CL4-2023-DATA-01-06 — CSA Cognitive Computing Continuum Research & Policy. The 30 months project officially started in January 2024 and will continue until June 2026.

A brief context 

In the last years, during the transition of the EC funding programmes from Horizon 2020 (H2020) to Horizon Europe (HE), the European ICT ecosystem evolved along an ongoing mega-trend in the area of modern IT and telecom infrastructure: the convergence of Cloud Computing (CC) and Internet of Things (IoT). This convergence has had significant impact in Europe at scientific, technological, socio-economic, and geopolitical levels, as these traditionally separated communities have gathered into a much larger ecosystem now sharing a number of common challenges and key priorities.

This transition and the move of the whole community of EC-funded projects and related initiatives towards a closer cooperation with industry is what the NexusForum.EU project aims to support and facilitate by focusing on consolidating research and policy along the Cognitive Computing Continuum, thus providing a clear, consistent vision for future research and innovation topics in this EU strategic area.

About NexusForum.EU

NexusForum.EU will boost the consolidation of the European Computing Continuum ecosystem building on the valuable activities and impact generated so far within the existing EUCloudEdgeIoT (EuCEI) initiative, as well as provide a forward-looking and bold vision in new areas and directions that have not been explored so far.

With this objective, NexusForum.EU will :

• Deliver a strategic outlook on the Cognitive Computing Continuum future, effectively combining the vision, priorities, and advancements by the IPCEI-CIS and the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge, and Cloud.
• Produce annual research & innovation roadmaps & policy recommendations in key strategic areas, incorporating a forecast analysis on the long-term economic, social, and ethical implications that new EU digital policies might have, identifying gaps, opportunities, and international synergies.
• Nurture the European computing constituency, incorporating investors, market leaders, and users from different sectors—especially SMEs, start-ups, university spin-offs, and social economy companies.
• Engage research and industry ecosystems and relevant initiatives in non-EU strategic democratic countries —with a special focus on Japan and South Korea as highly valuable (soon-to-be) Horizon Europe associated countries.

Martel’s role in the project

Martel is a key partner in this consortium and is the link with the EuCEI initiative. Martel has been coordinating and contributing towards recommending the strategic agenda and roadmapping of the cloud, edge and IoT trends in Europe, via the predecessor initiatives like the Horizon Cloud that have been followed upon and expanded multifariously by the EuCEI.

In NexusForum.EU, Martel is leading the overall impact creation activities of the project as well as defining the data, legal, gender and ethical framework for the project. This activity will ensure compliance with relevant data management regulations and needs, will evaluate work upholding ethical principles and research integrity and define actions for gender balance and inclusion.

Martel will also manage the established and future Research & Innovation (RIA) projects on Cognitive Computing Continuum, in cooperation with the EUCEI and other relevant CSAs, handling the extended project portfolio and will go beyond the CSA/RIA space to reach industries and initiatives.

The EC vision

In the kickoff meeting, members of the EC also joined to share the European vision and mission as well as their expectations from the NexusForum.EU project with respect to providing the European cloud-edge-IoT roadmap and future trends. They emphasised the European data strategy and the cloud-related goals within the 2030 Digital Compass (creating over 10,000 climate neutral highly secure edge nodes in Europe and adoption of the cloud technologies by over 70% European companies). The EC expects NexusForum.EU to provide the supporting structure for the European cloud computing ecosystem, deliver a yearly research and innovation roadmap for the computing continuum and create NexusForum.EU as the hub for the European cloud-edge-IoT research and innovation community.

With the given guidelines from the EC and the know-how of the partners, the NexusForum project is fully charged to take actions in order to provide the EC with concrete short term results and strategically plan the longer term ones.

The consortium is powered by 7 partners, coordinated by RISE (Sweden) in cooperation with OpenNebula (Spain), Tecnalia (Spain), F6S (Ireland), Martel Innovate (Switzerland), Meiji University (Japan) and Yonsei University (South Korea).