Digital Innovation Hub

The Concept:

The main concept behind the ERATOSTHENES CoE is to be a fully functional Digital Innovation Hub and a Research Excellence Centre for EO in the EMMENA region, creating an ecosystem where the state-of-the-art sensing equipment, cutting edge research, targeted education services and entrepreneurship come together. It is based on the paradigm of Open Innovation 2.0 (OI2.0), which is based on the Quadruple Helix Model, where Government, industry, academia and society work together to drive change by taking full advantage of the cross-fertilisation of ideas.

The ECoE adopts a two-axis model, as depicted below.

1. In Y axis is the value-adding process, from raw data generation, to research through professional education and finally to innovation and commercialization. Accordingly there are four distinct functional areas, namely Infrastructure, Research, Education and Entrepreneurship, a scheme to ensure that value adding chains are developed in ECoE.
2. In X axis are the thematic clusters of the ECoE. These relate to the environment, the society, and data technology, forming the equivalent thematic clusters:
   1. Environment & Climate with a global applicability, having at its core the supersite for calibration/validation, and aerosol and cloud monitoring. ECoE exploits both the state-of-the-art infrastructure and Copernicus data and core services.
   2. Resilient Society, with an impact to both the public sector and the industry, focuses on research and services tailored to ensure the societies’ wellbeing, make economy sectors resilient, exploit efficiently the available resources, and protect civilians and businesses from natural threats and illegal actions in respect to smuggling/refugees trafficking in the surrounding sea The thematic cluster includes a portfolio of several research fields but the emphasis is on Disaster Risk Reduction and Access to Energy.
   3. Big Earth Data Analytics, tailored to EO data, to allow the discovery of new information that is hidden in the data and promote the value adding combination with non-EO data streams. The Cluster will research and develop technologies related to data mining, machine learning, visual spatio-temporal exploration of big geospatial and temporal data, semantic enrichment of EO data and products, fusing EO and crowd-sourced data generated from smart sensor technology and finally geoinformatics.

Research Excellence:

The ERATOSTHENES CoE advocates that the Centre will be a European focal point for cutting edge Earth Observation research in five main application domains:

1. Adaptation to Climate Change, by setting up an active remote sensing supersite in Cyprus for monitoring aerosols, clouds, climate, dust and pollution in EMMENA region using the relevant expertise from TROPOS.
2. Disaster Risk Reduction, by transferring relevant expertise from NOA’s BEYOND Center of Excellence for EO-based monitoring of natural disasters.
3. Access to Energy, by combining EO data, with physical modelling and machine learning to focus on energy nowcasting, projections, and short-term forecasting, using the relevant expertise from NOA.
4. Management of water resources resulting from climate change variables, including droughts, water shortages, water quality, freshwater aquifers and land desertification, using the relevant expertise from DLR.
5. Data management and analytics for researching explorative algorithms to improve information retrieval from petabytes of remotely sensed data using the relevant expertise from DLR.