On 16 June 2021, the European Commission has adopted the main work programme of Horizon Europe for the period 2021-2022, which outlines the objectives and specific topic areas that will receive a total of €14.7 billion in funding. These investments will help accelerate the green and digital transitions and will contribute to sustainable recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and to EU resilience against future crises.
A total of €5.8 billion will be invested in research and innovation to support the European Green Deal and the Union’s commitment to make the EU the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Another core objective of the programme is making this decade Europe’s Digital Decade and laying the groundwork for new digital enterprises even further into the future, which will ensure a substantial increase of investment in this area. The development of core digital technologies will be supported with around €4 billion over 2021-2022.
For the European Cloud Community, the most interesting funding opportunities might flow from the Call on “WORLD LEADING DATA AND COMPUTING TECHNOLOGIES” and more specifically the section “From Cloud-Edge-IoT for European Data”, which includes the following topics:
HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01-05:
Proposal results are expected to contribute to the following expected outcomes:
- Next generation of higher-level (meta) operating systems for the smart Internet of Things with strong computing capacity at the smart device, system and edge-level, embedded in a compute continuum from IoT-to-edge-to-cloud. Such Operating system should be device independent and implement advanced concepts such as ad-hoc clouds, time-triggered IoT, and decentralised intelligence.
- Increasing European autonomy in data processing required to support future hyper-distributed applications by building open platforms and an open edge ecosystem including business models, driven by European actors.
- Achieving trust in these (meta) operating systems among actors in diverse industrial ecosystems by leveraging open standards and – where applicable – open source.
- Emergence of an open edge ecosystem including midcaps, SMEs and start-ups that foster the up-take of an edge operating system, e.g. through a modular functional spectrum of executable apps and services, for nurturing a European network of innovators and developers.
- Demonstrators in key industrial and societal applications, which in future require more power at the edge.
Deadline: 21 October 2021 17:00 CET
All information about the call here
HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01-07
Proposal results are expected to contribute to the following expected outcomes:
- Supporting the Commission and the constituency in coordinating the proposal portfolio in particular resulting from HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01-05, HORIZON-CL4-2022-DATA-01-02, and HORIZON-CL4-2022-DATA-01-03 and ensure consistent exploitation of the outcomes.
- Exploring and exploiting synergies between relevant European national and private initiatives from Cloud to edge to IoT.
- Regaining European competitiveness in internet infrastructures through effective partnership models and the provisioning of open solutions as well as trusted & interoperable data-driven services in the core and at the edge.
Deadline: 21 October 2021 17:00 CET
All information about the call here
HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01-08
Proposal results are expected to contribute to the following expected outcomes:
- Support structure for the European Computing ecosystem: networking events and vision workshops for the academic and industrial computing community,
- Yearly updated roadmaps on computing addressing the area from a broad perspective from edge device to edge cloud to cloud to HPC, from scientific to industrial to societal and research applications, and addressing all relevant aspects such as real-time, security, etc.
Deadline: 21 October 2021 17:00 CET
All information about the call here
HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01-01
Proposal results are expected to improve the efficiency and the use of trustworthy digital technologies to address the requirements of citizens, companies and administrations/public organisations on privacy and commercial and administrative confidentiality as well as responsible, fair and environmentally friendly (e.g. in terms of energy/carbon/material footprint) data operations in data spaces, across the data life cycle.
Deadline: 21 October 2021 17:00 CET
All information about the call here
HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01-03
Proposal results are expected to provide new secure and energy-efficient data management tools improving the usability and discoverability of data in different contexts, covering data provenance, synthetic data generation, data quality management (such as data cleaning, validation, enrichment, co-creation, identification of bias and correlations), improving data interoperability, metadata management (automated ways of labelling and describing data, data linkage), and ensuring data security, privacy and integrity, especially in the context of data spaces.
Deadline: 21 October 2021 17:00 CET
All information about the call here
Next Steps
The first calls for proposals will open on the Commission’s Funding and Tenders Portal on 22 June. The European Research and Innovation Days on 23 and 24 June mark the occasion to discuss Horizon Europe amongst policymakers, researchers, innovators and citizens. Horizon Europe Information Days targeting potential applicants take place between 28 June and 9 July. Finally, the Information and Virtual Brokering Session “From Cloud to Edge to IoT for European Data” takes place on 7 July.