EGI Fuels Collaboration and Innovation at EOSC Symposium 2024

The EOSC Symposium 2024, held in Berlin from 21-23 October, marked a pivotal moment in shaping EOSC beyond 2027, highlighted by the launch of the EOSC EU Node. The event gathered policymakers, funders, and leading figures from research institutions, communities, and data infrastructures to drive collaboration and exchange insights. Organised by the EOSC Association and NFDI, with support from EOSC Focus and ZBW, the Symposium was hosted under the patronage of the German Ministry for Education and Research. The EGI Foundation actively participated as a key player in the EOSC ecosystem, contributing to the discussions and initiatives looking at 2025 and beyond.

EGI has a long history of involvement in EOSC, through participation in the EOSC Association and contribution to the EOSC-Hub and EOSC Future projects that helped build the previous version of the EOSC Portal. Currently, EGI is participating in two of the three consortia that built the first EOSC node, the EOSC EU Node. 

After the technical launch on October 10^th, the Symposium marked the transition of the EOSC EU Node, and the services bundled with it, to be fully operational. 

The EU Node supports scientists at all stages of the research process, promoting increased collaboration and innovation in the scientific community across Europe. The new EOSC platform offers a comprehensive range of services that tackle crucial challenges in modern research processes. These services enable users to work effectively in data-intensive environments, fostering cross-border collaboration and empowering researchers to handle large-scale data, create advanced simulations, and perform complex computations - all within a secure and highly integrated environment.

“The EU Node garnered a huge interest; researchers were keen to find out more about it and had too many questions to answer in the limited sessions during the Symposium. The session Deep Dive into the EOSC EU node, where two pilot scientific use cases were presented, which took advantage of the EU Node’s services to show how researchers can advance their work using interactive notebooks, file sharing, and running VM-based and containerised workloads, was especially packed”, says Levente Farkas, Cloud Solutions Architect at EGI Foundation.

EGI colleagues participated in different sessions during the EOSC Symposium, reflecting the variety of our contributions to EOSC. These were, in particular:

As open as possible, as restricted as necessary: EOSC sensitive data exchange – In this session, a group of experts from biomedical research and social sciences convened to discuss the challenges of finding, sharing, and analysing data sets while adhering to ethical principles and data rights. Key topics included developing secure cloud and physical technologies, creating tools to assist data rights holders in anonymising and sharing data, and establishing operational, policy, and legal frameworks for FAIR sensitive data.
"There are several levels of sensitive data, and each has implications for technical implementations as well. Not all data requires the same restrictions or security measures, but when dealing with very sensitive data, the measures must also be at a high level. Risk assessment is also an essential tool for requirement specifications", says Ville Tenhunen, Data Solutions Architect, who took part in the panel discussion. 

“Dealing with sensitive data is not a narrow problem for the health and social sciences – sensitive data is everywhere, especially when we think about making connections between the research community and industrial data, such as in the Common European Data Spaces.  Figuring out how to do this in a reliable way will be important throughout EOSC,” said Mark Dietrich, Senior Advisor, who also participated in the panel discussion.

EOSC and the Digital Twins – This session brought together some of the most relevant Digital Twins initiatives in Europe (DestinE, BioDT, DT-GEO, interTwin and ILIAD/AquaInfra), highlighting new dimensions of interoperability at data and service levels. It represented a unique opportunity for the EOSC Community to discover the wide range of possibilities that Digital Twins can offer in all research domains and the role Digital Twin Platforms can play in future EOSC Nodes. 

Xavier Salazar Forn presented interTwin and chaired the panel discussion. “Digital Twins are spanning from their initial industrial use and demand is rapidly growing also across scientific communities. Nowadays, we are getting the first meaningful use case applications brought to operations using the whole compute continuum from Cloud to HPC, AI and Data Analytics. They have the potential to bring the social and scientific impact of EOSC to the next level.”  

EOSC Federation: Interoperability – The session addressed critical concepts of technical and semantic interoperability, the cornerstones of a truly interconnected research environment, tackling how to shape a more user-friendly EOSC, and empowering researchers with a powerful platform for scientific collaboration and discovery. 

“Interoperability is of outstanding importance for EOSC. In this session, we highlighted the key steps to establish an Interoperability Framework enabling EOSC Nodes to deliver added value for their users collaboratively”, says Diego Scardaci, Technical Solutions Lead, who took part in the panel discussion.

Keep following for updates on the EOSC EU Node and the Federation developments and how EGI contributes to the EOSC landscape development.