NGIatlantic.eu keeps building bridges: 23 EU-US applications submitted to the 2nd Open Call
The second cycle of the NGIatlantic.eu 5 Open Calls has just been closed on the 30th of September. A total of 23 European coordinators have submitted their projects through our Grants Platform, in order to get a chance to fund their research experiment in collaboration with their US counterparts. A good advantage for the participants in search of a partner has been the possibility to team-up and find their counterpart across the Atlantic thanks to the existence of a dedicated Twinning Lab. This is a space for researchers, innovators and start-ups that want to establish complementary partnerships in addressing NGI challenges across a number of topics (e.g. 5G, Big Data, IoT, Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence and others). Most of the applying teams (19 out of 23) requested to fund their project in the Long Term category (six month duration), whereas the 4 remaining projects have requested a Short Term funding of three months, with an average funding request of 120.000€. Twelve EU countries and 18 US States have been involved. Just as in the previous open call, the main objective of NGIatlantic.eu is that of incentivizing EU – US NGI teams to carry out experiments of NGI results using EU and/or US based experimental platforms, such as Europe’s FED4FIRE+ and 5G-PPP, amongst others, and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Wired and Wireless funded programs, such as ENTeR / GENI, FABRIC, and Future Cloud Platform, PAWR, US Ignite, and by the dedicated US-EU Internet Core & Edge (ICE-T) programmes. An innovation has been introduced in the Open Call topics, compared to the first open call, which was the possibility to apply with projects dedicated not only to experiments to be carried out on already existing platforms, but also to the development of new experimental platforms to be used as testbeds for future experiments. On the type of organisations requesting the NGIatlantic.eu research funds, 14 of the applicants on the EU side come from industry, mainly SMEs, while 12 were submitted by Research/Academia, and 4 by non-profit organisations. This result is in line with the types of organisations applying to the open call one. On the US side, once again a high number of applications come from the Research & Academia sector (16), 7 from large companies & SMEs, and 4 from non-profit organisations. The whole application process has been supported by two webinars entirely dedicated to the proposers! The webinars were tailor-made on the proposers’ questions, including the one collected from the first Open Call (in that occasion, two events were organised as well to offer a step-by-step support to the applicants and maximise their possibilities to be selected). Moreover, this has also been a great chance to share with our applicants some lessons learnt from the first Open Call. In the following phase, each application will be reviewed by three members of our External Pool of Evaluators before reaching the decision of selecting the winning projects (click here if you are curious to know more about the winners of the first open call). The External Evaluators are recognised experts in one or more NGI technical domains, who support NGIatlantic.eu with the review process. Each External Evaluator is selected through an ad hoc Open Call in order to ensure transparent and consistent evaluation of the applications. Moreover, each Evaluator gets assigned an Open Call in line with his/her specific experience in the field, for the review to be as relevant as possible. The assigned evaluators have to sign a non-conflict and confidentiality agreement and will be briefed on the principles guiding the calls, application and selection criteria and evaluation process. The next Open Call will start on 1st December 2020. Every update concerning the open calls, selection of winning projects and proposers’ webinars will be regularly published on our Twitter and LinkedIn channels and communicated via our official newsletter.
