22nd - 24th January 2020 in Bologna, Italy

AI4DI Consortium members and guests met in Bologna for a three-day event of project’s technical meeting, vision meeting, and the AI4DI Symposium.

The 22nd of January was dedicated to project’s internal technical meetings, addressing the developments in the Supply Chains and following the activities defined in Work Package 2 ‘System Level Design for Industrial AI Solutions’.

The second day of the gathering, the 23rd of January, was dedicated for a large-scale AI4DI Symposium, titled ‘AI for Digitising Industry Symposium – Exploring the Future (AI4DIS 2020)’. Over 100 attendees gathered for the Symposium, and this event became an impressive venue for researchers, scientists, system developers, manufacturers, practitioners, and standardization experts to share a joint interest in the research and developments of AI, embedded systems, communication, and IIoT technologies for the digital transformation of industry.

AI4DI Symposium started with a welcoming speech by Reiner John and Cristina DeLuca from Infineon Technologies AG, followed by opening address by Enrico Sangiorgi, UNIBO. AI and digitizing industry in Europe topics were then covered, by presentations from Marta Calderato, APRE, Georgi Kuzmanov, ECSEL JU, and Michela Milano, UNIBO. Attendees were then treated to inspiring speeches titled ‘Smart Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategy in Emilia Romagna Region’ by Patrizio Bianchi, Regional Councilor for Emilia Romagna and ‘BI-REX Competence Centre 14.0 for Big Data and Research Excellence’ by Francesco Millo, Coordinator of IoTwins.

The second part of the Symposium’s day was focused on the theme of edge computing and AI, with presentations from Sanzio Bassini, CINECA, and Enrico Callegati, SCM Group. The Symposium provided an excellent platform for industry stakeholders to discuss current AI-related challenges and shared obstacles, and representatives from Infineon Technologies, Audi AG, STMicroelectronics, Sintef, and other companies presented their success stories, new technologies and applications, as well as innovation needs. AI4DI, Arrowhead Tools, NextPerception, and other projects were presented. Furthermore, early-stage researchers were informed about the developments in research and industry, as numerous PhD students attended the event.

The objectives of the AI4DIS 2020 were met as the day presented an opportunity for multidisciplinary perspectives and brought together experts from the fields of electronic components and embedded systems. Recent advances made in the area of embedded AI were presented, the future of research directions was discussed, applications’ experiences were exchanged, and policy issues with respect to the development of digitizing industry applications were addressed.

The technical workshop on 24th of January was focused on presenting the state of play of AI technology following the 10 technology stack layers used by AI4DI project to identify the state of the art and the technology trends in AI research and innovation to support defining the research roadmap for future AI related activities. Key targets for the consortium were set and the upcoming work was planned out.