Hello everybody, I'm John Adelko. I'm part of the block and the representative of the Romanian Space Agency, the strategic partner of this conference, and I kindly ask you to bear with me for the one of the last

events and talks of this conference. This, the main and the very interesting part of this section is the ceremony award or award ceremony of the FOS4G EO data challenge. And for introducing the the context of of this challenge, I kindly invite

Francesco Barbato from the European Commission to give us a keynote speech on the Copernicus program. Francesco, please. Thank you.

Let me see, should I speak here or should I speak here? I'll stay here at the computer. So I'll give you back this one. All right, so good evening everybody. I know it's quite late and the week of the conference is almost finishing and I think you're probably a bit tired and you're wondering what is this guy here doing on stage telling about Copernicus.

So first, let me tell you where I'm from. So I work for the European Commission. I recognize that here this is an international forum with quite international people coming from outside the United European Union and the European Commission, you can consider it a little bit as the executive bodies if you want the government of Europe.

So who implement design policies and implement policies. Policies that are of course approved by the CollegiLator Europe, which are the European Council and the European Parliament. But at the Commission in implementing policies, we do a number of quite cool things and two of them that are of interest for this community. One, you probably have heard of it, even if you're not

living in Europe. It's called Horizon 2020, which is one of the largest publicly supported research program in the world in which we've got quite a consistent part on ICT and space and the convergence of the two, of which also I will say a few words in my talk. And

the second thing, and you read it here on the slide, is Copernicus. So Copernicus, I'm sure that many of you will know and I'm very I'm very happy that the focus of this year's FOSFODG has been on data and that there is an obvious

handshake between what you do in developing interesting technologies for geospatial and satellite imaging, Earth observation and Copernicus. So Copernicus is not only the satellites. It's a wider network of things that I'm going to briefly introduce. So what I want to do is spend a few words on the program itself, just to put some facts straight and to tell you

about some interesting things, I hope. And then, just to keep you awake until the end, so I'll talk about a few funding opportunities through Horizon 2020 and the Copernicus World Program. So hopefully that will keep you alive until the end of the presentation. It won't be long.

After me, there's going to be the delivery of the Data Challenge Award. So I know that you're all curious probably about who are the winners of these awards that are going to wind out. So without much further ado, I will start my presentation. So, Copernicus. Copernicus is

what we call, as we call it, Europe's eye on Earth. So it's an Earth observation program that is quite comprehensive. It's done of what we call the Sentinel satellites, which many of you know for sure, because they've been the object of your studies and your work that has been presented here at the conference.

But it is also a network of in-situ data, so sensor networks that are available through various organizations that are put together at the disposal of Copernicus users. So the Commission, and this is something that I would like to say for, you know, for the European friends that are here, the Commission is the program manager of Copernicus. So the European Union has been

the starter of the Copernicus program, and this is something that I think we can all be very proud. You know, in Europe, the European Union, the European Commission for which I work, oftentimes, you know, we are in the press, not all the time actually, you know, with positive notes.

But there is a very positive part of the work that we do, that is to support a number of cool things. And one of these is try to help citizens, business, ourselves, our society, to keep an eye on the environment, and in addition to that, to develop cool applications based on satellites. And here I preached, you already converted, you know what I'm talking about.

So Copernicus was started as entirely as a policy support program. So the older of you might recognize an old acronym under which the program was known, GMES, Global Monitoring for Environment Security, which a few years ago has been rebranded to Copernicus.

As I said, policy support program. So this was done to serve the needs of governments, national governments, the European policymakers, to monitor the status of the environments and to supply services in different areas. And here

this is what we call the Copernicus service that you see in the slide. So as I said, Copernicus is a system. It's not only the satellite satellites. Sentinel satellites and the in-situ network produce the raw data, which are then processed into products, information products, by six different services,

which are active on the land, the marine, the atmosphere, the climate change, security, and emergency. So, variety, but all to support the policies of the Union and its member states. But, and again, this is something that you know very well, over the past 10-15 years

there has been a digital revolution that attached every sector of the economy, every possible economic domain, including Earth observation, which has already been quite an IT intensive domain from its start, and it's in quite an evolution of things. But the capabilities that we have today to deal with data, to deal with the volumes of data, with the velocity of data, and the variety of data, basically the three V's of big data as we know them,

are unprecedented. So, in addition to being a policy support program, Copernicus is now an excellent industrial support program. Industrial meaning that we are able to help and develop a number of applications for many different sector environments that were not thought out when the program was conceived

many years ago. And this is where you guys are also helping with your own work and your own applications. And this is what we call the downstream economy. So, in addition to supplying the data to the services for the information product and support to the policy, there are a number of users, and this community is one of those users, that develop

their own applications using the data that we make available. How do we make it available? So, here you see in bold. I hope the bold is visible, not very much. What is the strength, one of the strengths of these programs? One of the strengths is that the data are delivered under an open,

an open data scheme, which means that everybody is free to use it, reuse it, and do whatever they want, from research to commercial applications and everything between, including using this data for open source, for open source application. We have done something else

recently. Last year, we launched five different data and access platforms, which are called the Dias, which are basically modern cloud environment that not only distribute the data, but they offer cloud services for applications to be built on top of the data. And this is something that

we did, I think, with some perspective. So, you know that there are a lot of players, giant IT players, especially non-Europeans that are active in this domain in offering cloud services, also using this kind of data, in hosting this cloud of data. As Europe, we thought that it would have been nice to try to do

something in this realm and see if we could support some larger initiative and see if we could create some European capacity to serve these domains. And these Dias have been active for a year. Here you have the list of them. They're all very easily to find on the internet.

Please, if you don't know them, take a look. This may be something interesting for your own work as well. All this information that I'm giving, they're not only part of this presentation, which I hope will be distributed later on, but also they're very easily accessible on the Copernicus.eu website.

So, of course, the data are accessible through these ones, but also they're accessible through the usual channels of the European Space Agency, which I forgot to mention before. The program is conceived and is managed by the European Commission, but we implement it through our entrusted entities, which are our partners in the operations of the European Space Agency and UMasset.

Then, we've got seven satellites in orbit today. I'm not going to describe them. You probably know them better than I do. So we've got Sentinel-1, two satellites. We've got Sentinel-2, another two satellites. Sentinel-3, another two satellites.

Sentinel-5P, one satellite. So we have more coming online. There will be more satellites in the future. So this is just the start. And the growing volumes that we have today, they're posing already quite some challenges. And this is actually something that I would like to connect to the future slides.

These are big data problems that we have today in managing and making sense of this data. I have seen a lot of many different, very interesting applications here based on artificial intelligence and the like, you know, the new popular technologies. We have a problem of scale here. So I've seen lots of examples which are, you know, based on the needs

of the requirements that started the work on these applications. But we got full archives that are available for you to work on. They are, you know, these satellites, they continuously acquire data. We produce in excess of 16 petabytes of data every year.

And this is all including the raw data. So the services themselves, the six ones that I mentioned before, they produce their information products, which are also released as open data. And they are there for you to uptake and to use. So what we're trying to stimulate, you will see again in a slide or two, is the use of the archives,

which require quite some capacity, quite some vision, quite some backing of technology. I think it's important as a union, so once we have invested in the system, not only we want to multiply the users of the data that we produce,

but also we would like to make sure that through new technologies the entire archives are used and exploited. This is the scope of the work that we do, and you guys are instrumental in achieving these kind of objectives. Then I will not spend very much time on the applications,

but because you guys know very well, but I would like to give you some policy context on something else that we're working on at the Commission. So you know very well that in order to fuel technologies like artificial intelligence, we need data and we need vast volume of data to train the machine learning and the like.

So we've got a big program that is upcoming to support artificial intelligence in the Commission. So this is starting to be deployed already in Horizon 2020, and you will see more coming online in the future framework program for research, which is called Horizon Europe and the Digital Europe program. But we've got already something to work on.

And the two to work on are the finding opportunities that I'm going to describe in a moment. What I want to introduce here, and so that you would better understand the discussions that I would make when I would present the calls, is the concept of European data spaces. So here, this community works very nicely on geospatial.

This is your Horizon data. But I've seen already in your applications throughout this week that there are many integrations of data with other data sources. This is not only the geospatial layer, but oftentimes I've seen lots of Twitter feeds, for example, social networking. If not sensors coming from other domains, they are not necessarily the space domain.

So there is a scope that we call European data economy to create opportunities by putting together different data value chains, of which geospatial data are an integral part. Why is that so? Because everything is based on geography.

Everything is geospatial. Everything has to be localized. And we've got great resources that tells us the state of our environment, basically in real time, almost in real time with the satellites that we put in orbit. So there is a great deal of chances to work on integrating these valuable data assets with data assets coming from other industrial domains.

This is something that we believe very much because this creates new opportunities, not only for a community of developers, but also for the business. And the kind of solutions that you provide, open source, they are, as you well know, also very well placed mechanism to support business operations.

So it is important that, and this has been demonstrated actually through a lot of work of open data that has been done, not only on earth observation, but many other kind of open data that the government have been open up in these years,

that they become much more valuable for users when they are integrated with other data sets. And this is the same kind of paradigm they would like to support with European data spaces, which are not technical platforms. So don't imagine a cloud environment, but imagine just an environment where things can happen,

where you've got data sets that have got the right formats, they've got the right interoperability mechanism, they're machine readable, they're standardized across sectors so that they can talk to each other. So you probably, I'm sure you're familiar with the linked open data paradigm. So those kind of connectors and opportunities that they open up, we are trying to implement in different domains of the economy and across sectors.

These all to fuel artificial intelligence. So based on the data value chains that I just described, a lot of things can be built on top.

And this is something that is going to be very visible in the next programs that would be launched in 2021, successor of Horizon Europe, including work on high performance computing. So here we've got a lot of, there have been some presentations on HPCs, I've seen, we've got an opportunity, Europe is building a high performance computing capacity.

And here we've got a win-win situation, they're building the capacity that will be open to communities to use. And here we've got lots of data that we'd like to use for simulations, various simulations of planet Earth. So these are, this is a little bit the policy context on things that are happening right now, and that you will see develop more clearly in the following years.

However, Horizon 2020 is not over yet, and we've got the starter to it if you want. So in Horizon 2020, you will find the two different kind of blocks that are of interest for you. The first one is space, that is the one that is listed in this slide and I will describe in a moment.

But also the ICT part of the Horizon 2020 World Program is reachable opportunities for the European players that are in this room. Because for what concerns, for example, big data technologies or artificial intelligence, while they're not specifically targeting to geospatial applications, geospatial applications are very welcome.

So in the ICT World Program, please take a careful look at the big data technologies and artificial intelligence if you're looking for funding opportunities. For what concerns space, we'd characterize it for the usage of Copernicus. So here there are two calls that are opening up in October.

And they will close in, I'm sorry, in November. And that will close in March of next year. So one are research, one are calling for research projects, the other are calling for or call the research and innovation project. So let's start from DT Space 25. So what is this? So it's called big data technologies and artificial intelligence for Copernicus.

We're calling here for research projects that will basically build applications with Copernicus data at their core. At their core means that Copernicus, as I said before, can be used in conjunction with other data sets, with other data assets coming from other domains of the economy.

The integration of them is generating, is well, is actually helping to fulfill industrial requirements or societal requirements, which will drive the projects. So these are not, this is not about speculative research. This is about research driven by requirements. Being them industrial or societal.

The call is quite open. It doesn't prescribe too much in terms of application domains. Actually, it doesn't at all. So apart from having Copernicus data at the core of these applications, of these artificial intelligence application, the call is quite open. And if you want to try to scale up some of the applications that you've been developing within the scope of the conference or within your work,

this might be the place for you guys. So why do I say scale up? Because to speak very frankly, so a number of applications I saw here, as I said before, they are quite contained in terms of data volumes that they process. This is something that should be quite larger in terms of volumes that you process,

in terms of variety that you process as well. These are larger projects in the range of between two, three, four million euro, depending on what you guys are going to do. And probably some of you are familiar with the Horizon 2020 projects. They're required to partner with other companies or research centres in Europe.

At least three of them from three different European countries. These are the basic requirements. If you guys like to know more, so there will be information sessions down the road when the call will open. So if you Google Copernicus.u, you will find this information as soon as the date will be set,

so that we can explain more in detail what these calls are for. So this is about research. The second one, DT Space 01, is called Copernicus Market Uptake. This is not about research. This is what we call research and innovation. Innovation actions are not to develop new technologies.

They are to deploy new technologies. So these are actions they would like to see closer to the market, to bring something into the economic realm. So the scope is similar. Use Copernicus as core data assets to develop applications which are starting to be sort

of mature to have a path towards the market or towards the U. So when I say market, I also intend usage in public organisations, so to solve societal challenges. When you do so, we'd appreciate if you use European research infrastructures that are available. So for example, the DS that I mentioned before, but European Science Cloud or European TAP into data assets from European data portals

or national data portals, if not from industry. So these are, I think, opportunities that can be valuable, because they're quite scaled up for this community, and they would allow to enlarge a little bit the scope of the applications that you develop in conferences like this.

In addition to this, so these are the high-level applications they were looking for, but with the Copernicus World Programmes, we also do something else, and I probably have to go a bit quicker, right? So I'm looking at, but this is something I think many of you will find of interest. So we've got us start a programme within the Copernicus activities that is composed

of different blocks, starting from Copernicus hackathons that we run in member states at local level. We run 20 of them every year. If you look at, if you Google Copernicus hackathons, you find the full list. There would be one in almost all member states, basically. These are hackathons.

Maybe, you know, you think that, you know, the Commissioner reinvents the word, the meaning of this kind of quite well-accepted exercises. We are not hackathons or hackathons. These are sprint-like competitions. There is a challenge that is set by the local organising or local organisers. You will typically team up with other people to solve those challenges.

There is a nice prize that the Copernicus hackathons offer, which is one seat into the Copernicus accelerator. So the Copernicus accelerator, I guess we are not reinventing what it is, is a coaching programme that will last for a year in which you will be supported to develop your own business idea or business applications. And we've got, we support 50 companies every year,

and 20 of them come from the first, from the winners of the hackathons. So that's a nice prize, I think. Then, the third layer is the Copernicus incubation, in which we select every year 20 companies or 20 start-ups,

and we give them a 50,000 euro equity fee to develop their own business idea further and to bring it to the market, and hopefully to start working on their own and seek private investment.

I can tell you that this programme has been quite successful as we run it, so there are companies that have made it quite big, with private investors raising up to a million or two million euros in funding in the first round after the Copernicus incubation. So this is a six-month programme, and I invite you all to take a look if you're interested.

So these are competitive exercises, so making a request is not sufficient. You need to be very good at what you're doing, and you need to be very competitive in Europe. So compare it to the competitive landscape that Europe has to offer. I think this is it, and I hope you found this of a little bit of interest.

And, well, I wish you all good luck, and I think now it's time to give the word back to Jon for the prize. Thank you very much. Thank you for your attention.