European Data Forum: Exploiting Data Integration

Call for Contributions

The European Data Forum (EDF) is an annual meeting place for industry, research, policy makers, and community initiatives to discuss the challenges and opportunities of the Global and European data economy. Spurred by recent developments such as Big Data and Data-driven Business, data has become the fourth production factor (next to personnel, capital, and natural resources), which offers completely new opportunities and at the same time it confronts us with novel challenges. The forum balances technical, business-oriented and socio-economic, perspectives and approaches in order to develop a vibrant, interdisciplinary stakeholder community. Special focus will be devoted to innovation and business opportunities opened by data technologies and their exploitation, in the perspective of a digital single market in Europe.

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Conference Topics

The following is a non-exhaustive list of specific topics of interest at EDF 2015:

– More and more data is produced directly from sensors or other technical devices. Therefore, EDF wants to offer a forum for sensor systems as well as high performance computing and analytics on large-scale European datasets. Only by making sensor data smarter and at the same time increasing our analytics performance will we be able to handle the data tsunami expected. EDF will provide show off examples demonstrating how the European industry approaches those problems.
– It can be expected that European companies will predominantly benefit from the application of data-driven technology and business approaches to their application domains. Therefore, it is critical that we tackle the divide of domain knowledge (mainly available within expert’s heads) and big data analytics. Only the development of mechanisms which enable to utilize preexisting knowledge within analytics engines as well as discovering new knowledge from analytics results is essential. The EDF will be instrumental in bringing communities from research fields as different as human factors, visual analytics, and machine learning together.
– The European data economy will need a large number of data scientists of various types. Already now qualified personnel is scarce. It will be crucial to foster high-quality qualification programs both on the technical aspects of data science as well as in the application and sense making within the application areas. The EDF will address this need by offering a space to discuss qualification needs and possible programs as well as foster such programs on European as well as national level.
– Because of the strategic importance of multilingualism in Europe, a specific topic of interest of EDF is the integration and co-operation of the European data community with the language resources, natural-language and technology communities. The synergy of these communities is critical for new types of multilingual digital services and the creation of a European digital single market without language barriers.

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Submission of proposals: May 15 2015, 23:59 WET

Notification of acceptance or rejection: June 5 2015

Full EDF2015 program available: end of July 2015