ICOS 1st Open Call

Description

T6.2. Open Call Management From GA: This task oversees the management of 2 Open Calls and the Financial Support (a total of 1.9M€) provided in the form of lump sum to the third parties selected through the Open calls (covering O6.2). The Open Calls are: 1) Solutions Development projects open call, to be launched in M12 to fund up 5 consortia (tech provider and sectoral end-user), to develop ICOS implementation in 5 verticals (different to the pilot cases), and 2) ICOS uptake projects, launched at M21, to fund 15 SMEs aimed to use ICOS platform in one of the 9 verticals (from pilot cases plus those from 1st Open Call). The management of the Open Calls and FSTP entails the following subtasks: (i) Open Call preparation, which will start 3 months before launching the Open Calls to prepare the Open Call package of Documents and the Communication Toolkit; (ii) Open Call launch and dissemination which will last 2 months to properly disseminate the Call among potential beneficiaries; (iii) Selection process and SGA signature where the FSTP beneficiaries will be selected through an exhaustive selection process, overseen by the Selection Committee, which guarantee transparency, equal treatment, conflict of interest and confidentiality (see Annex 1 for detail). The formal check and the ethics assessment of the beneficiaries will be done and the SubGrant Agreements (SGA) signed; (iv) Third parties projects execution where the 3rd parties projects will be executed according to the specifications included in the Individual Mentoring Plan (IMP) annexed to their SGA. A Mentoring Committee will be assembled to provide technical support to the 3rd parties in their interaction with ICOS and to evaluate the deliverables produced by the third parties according to their IMP; (v) 3rd parties follow-up and payment, where the Milestones Reviews to assess the performance of the FSTP projects and to validate the payments will be organized (see Annex 1 for detail on the Milestone review process). FBA will lead all the subtasks, except subtask (iv) for 3rd parties execution, led by ATOS, and FBA will chair and moderate the Mentoring Committee to ensure the alignment with the Milestone Review process implemented for the 3rd parties follow-up and payment. A detailed description of the Open Call and FSTP Management procedures is provided in Annex 1. Output: 2 OC published, 5&15 selected finalists, 20 SGAs signed, 20 funded projects using ICOS platform, 1.9M€ distributed as FSTP. From GfA: ICOS (https://www.icos-project.eu/) is a project funded by the European Commission (under the topic: HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01-05 and Grant Agreement number: 10107017) covering a set of challenges emerging from the continuum paradigm. ICOS project will embed a well-defined set of functionalities, ending up in the definition of an IoT2cloud Operating System (ICOS). The main objective of the project ICOS is to design, develop and validate a meta operating system for a continuum, by addressing the challenges of: i) devices volatility and heterogeneity, continuum infrastructure virtualization and diverse network connectivity; ii) optimized and scalable service execution and performance, as well as resources consumptions, including power consumption; iii) guaranteed trust, security and privacy, and; iv) reduction of integration costs and effective mitigation of cloud provider lock-in effects, in a data-driven system built upon the principles of openness, adaptability, data sharing and a future edge market scenario for services and data.  In order to achieve its goals ICOS project is looking for: 1.   Solutions development projects (1st Open Call): at least 2 organizations (SME/midcap; technology provider, and an end-user to validate the developed project) to partner for the project to develop a use case within a specific sector, through the ICOS technology. 2.      ICOS uptake projects (2nd Open Call) : is oriented to technology providers (mainly SME/midcap) working as service providers in the sectors of the pilot use cases and the projects from the 1st Open Call. They will test their applications and services through the ICOS infrastructure to improve them. The unstoppable proliferation of novel computing and sensing device technologies, and the ever-growing demand for data-intensive applications in the edge and cloud, are driving the next wave of transformation in computing systems architecture. The resulting paradigm shift in computing is centered around dynamic, intelligent and yet seamless interconnection of IoT, edge and cloud resources in one computing system, to form a continuum. A continuum (cloud continuum, IoT continuum, edge-to-cloud or fog-to- cloud) is expected to provide the means for data processing both in the edge and cloud, while inferring and persisting important information for post-mortem and offline analysis. We envision a holistic approach towards the solutioning of this technology trend in future systems, by architecting, designing and implementing the continuum as extensible, open, secure, adaptable, AI-powered as well as well highly performant and technology agnostic, managed through a meta OS, i.e., IoT2Cloud Operating System (ICOS).

Beneficiary & submission

Detailed information about the ICOS 1st Open Call submission and evaluation process can be found on the ICOS website: https://www.icos-project.eu/ and ICOS 1st Open Call microsite: https://icos.fundingbox.com/

Further information

A more complete overview of the Open Call and proposal guidelines can be found on the official Open Call website here https://icos.fundingbox.com/. Email address for further information: icos@fundingbox.com, or elena.japundzic@fundingbox.com Project website: https://www.icos-project.eu/