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PISA – Italy, 24 May 2024 - StandICT.eu & EXA4MIND announce their collaboration with an introduction of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between the projects.

StandICT.eu is a European coordination action running since January 2024, as a follow-up to its previous editions since 2018. The programme fosters the participation of European experts in international ICT standardisation. To reach this goal, it has three main axes:  firstly, it will fund 400+ European standardisation experts in a series of 9 Open calls providing a total of almost 3M€ of funding. Secondly, it manages the European Observatory for ICT Standardisation (EUOS), which is an interactive online ecosystem including an up-to-date standards repository as well as working groups sharing insights about ongoing standardization efforts across different initiatives. Thirdly, via its Academy, it offers training content for future experts in ICT standardisation.  StandICT.eu focuses on horizontal and vertical ICT fields as defined in the Rolling Plan for ICT Standardisation[1]

EXA4MIND is a Horizon Europe-funded Project (2023 -2025), which aims to build an Extreme Data platform that brings together powerful infrastructures for data management (database & storage systems) and supercomputing. To do this, researchers will set up a unique, modular extreme data database and advanced analytics on High-Performance and Cloud-Computing systems powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. In terms of standardisation, EXA4MIND aims to leverage the active position in initiatives such as StandICT to immerse itself into the European data landscape. It will exchange data with Data Spaces, EUDAT and the European Open Science Cloud, supporting the FAIR principles wherever appropriate. The partnership between StandICT.eu and EXA4MIND will help to identify existing and upcoming standards meaningful for making the EXA4MIND plans reality, considering ongoing developments and the related technical committees in the field.

Both projects share intentions to foster future standardisation in management, processing and – most importantly – exchange and usage of huge datasets across Europe. This MoU will help to consolidate and realise these intentions on both sides.

“The StandICT.eu team warmly welcome EXA4MIND in our ever-growing community of ICT standardisation enthusiasts and experts! We hope to see this collaboration fruitful; supporting the European contribution to the standards framework for big data, ensuring the standards meet to the European stakeholders’ needs, but also that there are in line with the EU policies, values, and regulations…” reflects Mona Marill, Fellowship Programme Manager from StandICT.eu. Stephan Hachinger, Science and Co-Design Coordinator of EXA4MIND adds: "Compliance with European ICT standards is an important point for EXA4MIND: We will not only enable Extreme Data analytics workflows with unprecedented performance, leveraging European Supercomputing centres, but also have a strong focus on data exchange with European data ecosystems, e.g. Data Spaces and the EOSC. Cooperating with StandICT.eu, we can collaboratively explore, leverage and help to shape data and metadata standards, protocols and policies needed for this to succeed.”

Moreover, StandICT.eu manages several technical working groups gathering experts who analyse the existing standards and create landscape reports in the core ICT areas. During 2024, the project plans to launch a technical work group in the field of big data, where the EXA4MIND experts will be invited to join.

StandICT.eu 2026

Consortium: Dublin City University (IE) - Financial and Administrative Coordinator, Trust-IT Srl (IT) - Technical Coordinator, OpenForum Europe (BE), AUSTRALO (ES), European Digital SME Alliance (BE), and Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI (DE).

For more information on StandICT.eu 2026, contact us at info@standict.eu and follow us on our social media channels: X | Linkedin | YouTube

StandICT.eu 2026 has received funding from the EU’s Horizon Europe Programme under Grant Agreement no. 101091933. Views and opinions expressed are, however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.