During the last two days we have had one of the latest meetings of the SALTED project before it is officially finished. However, SALTED is only a beginning, and while the project is officially coming to an end, interesting synergies have emerged that will allow us to develop future technologies based on the results of the work carried out during the project lifeime. Thus, new collaborations are for sure envisioned in the future, so stay tuned!

The meeting was held at the Universidad de Cantabria premises, in the beautiful city of Spain, and during the last two days, we have established the final touches to the project before its completion. In particular, the work on the different applications that are taking advantage of the DET platform, is about to be released, including real innovative solutions in different areas, including Smart Agriculture, Smart Cities and Risk analysis. In the forthcoming weeks we will be releasing an online working demo of all of them, so anyone will be able to taste what they have to offer.

SALTED has been present in one of the latest seminars organized by Schloss Dagstuhl, a presitigous institute to foster world-class research in computer science by facilitating the communication and interaction between researchers.

Our colleague, Dr. Gurkan Solmaz from NEC Laboratories, presented a talk during the Dagstuhl-Seminar 23432 "Edge-AI: Identifying Key Enablers in Edge Intelligence". This seminar addresses challenges such as:

1. Large-scale deployment of the edge-cloud continuum.
2. Energy optimization and sustainability of such large-scale AI/ML learning and modelling.
3. Trustworthiness, security, and ethical questions related to the intelligent edge-cloud continuum.

The talk at Dagstuhl included a short introduction to the concept of Data Spaces based on the recent developments of IDSA, Gaia-X and FIWARE, and the challenges of data interoperability and data value. The recent work from the Data Ecosystems and Standards (DES) group at NEC Laboratories Europe focuses on solving those challenges using real-world sensor data and geographic data from the case studies of City Liveability Index (CLI) of SALTED project, Smart Campus Murcia, and Humanitarian Landmine project. The data enrichment and contextualization platform is utilized in the case studies through the technologies such as TrioNet, FIWARE Scorpio Broker, FIWARE FogFlow and AI/machine learning for predictions and transfer learning.

If you want to read more about such challenges, a recommended read is the paper titled "Enabling data spaces: existing developments and challenges" where more details are given on Data Spaces.

Dr. Gürkan Solmaz from CEF SALTED has been invited as a keynote speaker by the AI Educational Initiative (AIEI) in Heidelberg, Germany on July 8,2023.  AIEI is a recently formed community to educate broader society on the AI. The keynote lecture was in general about the AI and its applications to the smart cities. Specifically, the lecture focused on the data enrichment through machine learning for the development of the concept “City Liveability Index (CLI)” in CEF SALTED to make cities smarter and more livable.

The public lecture started with a brief AI overview and followed by the smart city projects and specifically the AI for data enrichment for the smart city data and the SALTED smart city application CLI. The lecture ended with the open challenges of application of AI in smart cities or in general public spaces in the near future.

The keynote talk is followed by a panel discussion with lively exchanges between the audience and Dr. Gürkan Solmaz, joined by Dr. Ana Victoria Ponce Bobadilla, Dr. Jude Alsabah, and Dr. Magdalena Szczygiel.

About the AI Educational Initiative (from https://www.linkedin.com/company/ai-educational-initiative/) :

AI Educational Initiative was launched in 2023 to educate broader society about the chances but also risks associated with implementing AI into many areas of our lives. We hope to "de-hype" AI, preach online hygiene, calm down those afraid of mass job losses but alert those believing that AI will solve all our problems.

FIWARE Global Summit 2023, the grand annual event organised by the FIWARE Foundation, took place on June 12 and 13 in Vienna. Some of the SALTED team partners attended the event and had the opportunity to promote the project.

SALTED was present in the "Strategic FIWARE programs, Services and Products" session. A 10 minute slot allowed for a presentation of the project and its relation to the Smart Data Models initiative. As we have covered in previous articles, SALTED has a close relationship with the FIWARE ecosystem and Smart Data Models in particular, as the project adopts several models and has contributed to the initiative with five extensions and additions.

The attendees were able to learn about the philosophy and goals of the SALTED project, with an emphasis on the harmonisation of heterogeneous data sources. Additionally, the speaker explained our contributions to the initiative and linked them to the use cases of the project, which will derive in the applications that are currently in development.

You can see the slides below:

Partner Institut Mines-Télécom hosted the third face-to-face General Assembly meeting of the SALTED project on March 22 and 23 in Évry.

The whole consortium participated in the meeting, in which technical aspects regarding all of the active Work Packages were thoroughly discussed. Moreover, the applications envisioned for the project were fruitfully analysed in order to fully align with the SALTED goals. Some of them have already made the leap to the implementation and deployment stage, and partners were even able to test a brief demo.

Stay tuned if you are curious about these applications (you should!). Here is a sneak peek of two examples: Agenda Analytics will check the compliance of organisations with their own promises, while CLIFF will calculate a liveability index of european cities based on Open Data.

The second General Assembly face-to-face meeting of the SALTED project, organised by partner NEC, was held in Heidelberg on October 19-21.

The SALTED team deliberated about several aspects related to the architecture and the components of the Data Enrichment Toolchain (DET), predominantly technical. Some of these components are already deployed in our development infrastructure and provide services such as mapping heterogeneous data to NGSI-LD, or enrich these data by way of several approaches and technologies. Remember you can always check our deliverables for more technical information about these components.

The goals of SALTED project are already beggining to take shape and we are very happy with how the project is steadily coming together. Stay tuned!

The University of Cantabria hosted the first face-to-face General Assembly meeting for SALTED project in Santander within the first week of May.

In this meeting, mainly technical, the whole team from SALTED was able to participate and meet in Santander for the first time. Thanks to the fruitful discussions held during these days, the working group from SALTED manage to define and finalise the architecture, including its components and interfaces, which will be delivered as part of the project goals, and will lay the foundations for the enriched and linked SALTED data provision.

During the next weeks, the results of such discussions will be part of the first deliverable from SALTED, and will be included in this web, so stay tuned!

SALTED project has been featured in the website of the University of Cantabria, in which Luis Sánchez, project coordinator, review and explain the main goals of the initiative.

The article (in spanish language), emphasises on the importance of data compilation, homogeneization, contextualization and data enrichment, to enhance the possibilities that data can offer, leveraging the outcomes of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques.

It is about of metadata provision, enhancing the datasets with the information that contextualize them: such as sensor types, their quality or the time interval in which the data is offered…

Luis Sánchez

The Situation-Aware Linked heterogeneous Enriched Data (SALTED) project started with the first meeting among all its partners with the kick-off meeting where the basis of the work for the next months were set.

During the following two years, SALTED will focus on the data enrichment following the principles of linked-data, semantics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). To this end, the project consortium will rely on existing open components, such as the FIWARE Generic Enabler Scorpio context broker, to not only enable the data enrichment, but to predict anomalies and understand the situation in a real-time basis.

Besides, it is foreseen the development of innovative services in two domains, including Smart Cities and Smart Agriculture, fostering the opportunities for stakeholders to participate taking advantage of enriched linked data.

There is still a challenging work ahead in the data world, so stay tuned to our webpage as we will be sharing our advances!