Dear Reader,
We are pleased to announce the newsletter for the second year of the EU project knowlEdge. A year full of innovations and progress.
Looking back on the last year, the knowlEdge project, whose aim is to develop a new generation of AI methods, systems, and data management infrastructure, has successfully continued with 12 partners from across 7 EU countries.
Among the many activities, a knowlEdge internal workshop has been conducted with the objectives of updating scenario definitions and creating user-journey maps to gather more insights about the different pilot partners. By means of multiple interviews, status quo processes and interactions between software, machines, and users have been defined in an As-Is scenario. In addition, a vision regarding the first implementation possibilities has been created in a To-Be scenario. The To-Be scenario has then been used to create user-journey maps to structure existing information and align the user needs and technological requirements and to foster the dialogue between pilot and technical partners.
One of the innovations that have been advanced during the project is the knowlEdge marketplace, which enables users to trade AI/ML models and relevant software artifacts in a trusted and secure environment. For this purpose, AI/ML models will be traded as Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs) by making use of blockchain technology and smart contracts in the back-end side. Based on its rich functionality, the knowlEdge marketplace serves as contact point between companies from the industrial sector as well as data scientists, researchers, and developers.
Vast amounts of data are generated in the edge-to-cloud continuum along complex manufacturing processes. To cope with the huge amount of heterogeneous data from various shopfloors, a modular, secure, and scalable data collection platform has been developed. In this way, interoperability, privacy, and validity can be maintained for production data in transit, in use, or at rest.
Alongside technical developments, the knowlEdge consortium has also considered the business model implications from different stakeholder perspectives, including marketplace, AI technology providers, and manufacturer perspectives, respectively. Business model canvas and platform canvas have been used as analysis frameworks and a survey has been carried out among project partners to collect their initial views on the different aspects of business models. As a result, a first business model regarding the knowlEdge marketplace has been drafted.
Besides a multitude of online meetings and discussions, we were happy to conduct the first physical consortium meeting in May 2022 in Espoo, Finland. Nearly 30 participants from the project partners were able to discuss the project’s progress, achievements and upcoming plans and challenges. Topics covered included updates from the technical work packages and issues of general interest, such as exploitation, evaluation, and standardization.
Another physical meeting has taken place in June 2022 at the production plant of Kautex Textron located in Tessenderlo, Belgium. This pilot project workshop allowed all attendees to gain in-depth insights into the production processes as a basis for the further analysis of the process data with AI-based methods and to intensively discuss production data from real production processes as well as from simulation processes. This face-to-face workshop was a great success for all 17 participants from the different project partners with industrial, technical or research background.
In September 2022, the knowlEdge project has successfully passed the midterm review, which has been held online. The review meeting was attended by the representatives of all project partners as well as by the EU project officer and the reviewers in charge and was used to present the status-quo of the different work packages as well as to discuss the forthcoming challenges and next steps.
From a scientific perspective, the knowlEdge project has achieved several scientific contributions, which can be found online on the project website.
We look forward sharing future highlight and project outcomes with you in the final year of the project.