Description: The Testing and Experimentation Facility for smart cities and communities is part of the strategy to bring technology from the lab to the market.
Basic Information
Reference Number: SC-023-66553
Project Type: DIGITAL-SIMPLE DIGITAL Simple Grants
Type of MGA: DIGITAL Action Grant Budget-Based [DIGITAL-AG]
Details
Location: –
Work programme part: Testing and experimentation Facility for smart cities and communities
Dates
Publication: 12.12.23
Closing Date: 12.05.24
Contact Information
Description
ExpectedOutcome:
Outcomes and deliverables
The Testing and Experimentation Facility for smart cities and communities is part of the strategy to bring technology from the lab to the market. The action should mobilise the necessary actors of the ecosystem, to ensure the readiness of both the supply and demand sides in the area of AI-enabled services and deliver the main elements needed to scale up the adoption of AI-based services by EU cities and communities. The action will result in one facility to be deployed for an extended period of time to be used in pilots, testing, experimentation, as well as for sandboxing and to support standardisation and the implementation of the AI regulatory framework.[1]
Expected outcomes include increased and faster integration of various AI and robotics systems in smart cities and communities, which will contribute to environmental goals such as carbon neutrality, increased robustness, security, and agility of smart community infrastructure, further increases in efficiency, as well as increased competitiveness of service providers in these communities.
Technological benefits will include validation in real conditions of next-generation AI-powered robotics and AI-based automation, decision-support and decision-making tools, benefitting from large-scale data access, sharing and integration, bringing them to a higher technology readiness level, as well as increased competitiveness of European developers of AI solutions, in particular SMEs, through the support provided by the TEF, to bring their products to market.
Contribution to AI innovation:
- Boosting the competitiveness of the European industry, including SMEs in AI, a technology of high strategic relevance;
- Contributing to boost European IP and products based on European technology;
- Creation of world-class experimentation facilities in Europe, offering a comprehensive support combining the necessary expertise, meeting the needs of European innovators. The organisations running the TEFs and their process will ensure the highest level of trust and security for the users of the TEFs, and highest quality of the testing and validation to guarantee trust and security in the tested solutions, key for their broad diffusion
- Contributing to European technology sovereignty and open strategic autonomy in AI, and AI-enabled solutions;
- Contributing to the implementation of the New European Bauhaus[2] initiative
Objective:
To provide a testing and experimentation facility for AI and robotics in cities and communities and make their resources accessible to EU cities, communities and innovative academia and industry stakeholders (including SMEs) that would enable them to validate novel AI-driven services in close-to-real-life environments before their further massive deployment.
The Testing and Experimentation Facility will actively collaborate with the project validating the blueprint for a common European data space for smart cities and communities (see section 2.2.1.2) by making any infrastructure created by the pilots widely accessible on a longer-term basis to other stakeholders in line with the Testing and Experimentation Facility context.Scope:
