From September 19th to 23rd, the EGI community has finally met in real life again for #EGI2022.
Hosted by CESNET in Prague, more than 250 delegates gathered for a packed conference labelled ‘Together for Tomorrow”; not an empty tagline, but a guiding principle to how we built our programme – with a focus on our community, the ways we collaborate and support each other.
Additionally, almost 70 speakers and participants joined us virtually for dedicated sessions.
During EGI2022, three projects had their kick-off meeting:
Other dedicated meetings included the Global Open Science Workshop (GOSC); a meeting investigating the integration of health services in EOSC (LETHE, HealthyCloud); data-driven policy making in the public sector (PolicyCloud, DECIDO, AI4PublicPolicy); Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (EGI-ACE, AI4PublicPolicy, StairwAI, LETHE, iMagine); services for start-ups, SMEs and industry (EUHUBS4Data, EOSC DIH), and the official launch of the EGI Digital Innovation Hub (EGI DIH).
We also investigated EGI contributions to the EOSC Core, had a number of sessions about EGI Services (HPC, HTC, AAI, …), and several projects that EGI plays a prominent role in had dedicated sessions (EOSC Synergy, C-Scale). We were also excited to reach out to newer areas of interest, such as Green Computing and the food sector.
It has been a true joy to meet old and new colleagues at EGI 2022. Being at the conference to me means building trust, collaboration and mutual support. EGI would not be possible without the inspired and dedicated minds of its people.
Tiziana Ferrari, Director EGI Foundation
In the first plenary, we welcomed two new EGI Council members: ACOnet (Austria) and Vilnius University (Lithuania), and heard from Ludek Matyska (CESNET) about the impressive developments towards the EOSC taking place in the Czech Republic.
During the panel on digital infrastructures for data-intensive computing, Sergio Andreozzi (EGI) presented the EGI Service Strategy, prof. Jana Klanova talked about EIRENE – the European Research Infrastructure for Human Exposome Research, and Christian Cuciniello presented the EC’s commitment to Open Science.
A second panel, with Eric Yen (ASGC), Jianhui Li (CNIC) and Giuseppe La Rocca (EGI) on international collaboration for excellence in science, brought representatives from institutions collaborating with EGI on the global level, to explore existing challenges and benefits for international collaboration and the way forward.
The closing plenary explored pathways for e-Infrastructures to improve cross-infrastructure coordination to jointly deliver and support integrated access policies, service delivery, and overall an integrated environment Fotis Karayannis presented the e-IRG White Paper, and panellists Natalia Manola (OpenAIRE), Paul Rouse (GEANT), Matthias Schramm (TU Wien), Maria Girone (CERN); Antti Pursula (EUDAT), Josephine Wood (EuroHPC JU) and Tiziana Ferrari (EGI) discussed how collaboration can help to better serve the user needs, including aspects like governance, sustainability, and related policies.
On Wednesday, we had the opportunity to (remotely) welcome Sergiy Svistunov, the Ukrainian representative in the EGI council, who joined us for a dedicated session and explained, how he himself, his colleagues and the digital infrastructures supporting research in the country have been coping during the past months of the war. We also discussed how EGI can help to reorient the Ukrainian research community to use the EGI resources by enabling the infrastructure, dedicated training, tailored cases studies, etc.
As we wanted to make use of the opportunity of us all being together in one venue, #EGI2022 delegates hada chance to attend a number of live workshops (a nice change after two years of virtual training and webinars!). Delegates could get a FITSM certification and learn more about EGI Services such as Check-in, Binder, Notebooks, and DataHub.
Over several sessions, more than 45 members of the EGI Community presented their project, work, tool or service in a lightning talk or a demonstration. 22 posters were submitted – leading to an ex- aequo in the impromptu poster contest, but we would like to make a special acknowledgement to some of our youngest participants: the authors of ‘Analysis of Pierre Auger Observatory open data using EGI Jupyter notebooks are all still in high school!
We would like to say thank you to all the people involved: the local organisers CESNET, the hotel staff, the programming committee, all EGI staff and leadership, all workshop and session hosts, but most of all, we would like to thank you for attending! It was wonderful seeing you all again, and we’re looking very much forward to meeting you next fall for #EGI2023 in …
