Highlights from ICT 2018

 ICT 2018 took place in Vienna on 4-6 December 2018. This research and innovation event focused on the European Union’s priorities in the digital transformation of society and industry and presented an opportunity for the people involved in this transformation to share their experience and vision of Europe in the digital age.

Throughout the event, DataBench had the opportunity to showcase its work and meet interested stakeholders at the Big Data Value PPP Village, which hosted the PPP projects, and during the networking session “Impact of the data-driven AI in business sectors”, held on the 5th of December and organized by the Big Data Value and Robotics PPP.

The session started from discussing how Artificial Intelligence has experienced an incredible boom over recent years. With the digitalization of industry, an ever increasing amount of data is available, which facilitates machines to learn from individual cases and experiences. The collection of data via robotics application and IoT brings a new dimension and the demand for a close integration with these application and technology areas. This is complemented by advances in machine learning techniques (deep learning) and special purpose processors. However, so far only 20% of organizations that are aware of AI actually apply it in their business, most of them wondering what AI can do for them.

During the session, we reflected about what is driving today’s progress in AI, whether we should be afraid of AI or not, and what will be the steps to take the capabilities and adoption of AI to the next level. The session brought together DataBench with representatives of the four big data lighthouse projects TransformingTransport, BigMedilytics, BOOST4.0 and DataBio, which are working on the sectors of transport and logistics, health, manufacturing and bio-economy respectively. Each project introduced its own experiences on how the availability of data has fostered data-driven AI in its sector, and opened the discussion about how the combination of data, advanced machine learning and AI will contribute to the competitiveness of its industry and business sector.

Richard Stevens (DataBench Coordinator and Consulting Director at IDC) discussed how AI is driving benchmarking in analytics and presented DataBench work in the field of benchmarking big data technologies.