Three are led by the CloudLab research group, coordinated by the researcher from the Department of Computer Engineering and Mathematics, Pedro García

As part of the Horizon Europe programme, the European Commission has approved four international projects in which the Universitat Rovira i Virgili takes active part. In fact, the University coordinates three of them. They are projects on cloud computing and artificial intelligence and are an important incentive for the Cloud and Distributed Systems Lab (CloudLab), a research group in the Department of Computer Engineering and Mathematics, led by Professor Pedro García. In total, they have a budget of 13,618,582 euros, 2,092,600 of which are for the URV.

The Cloudstars project aims to innovate in the cloud by developing applications with artificial intelligence techniques and involves fifteen European universities and four companies, including IBM. On 12 January, the members of the project participated in the kick-off – the first joint meeting – held at the University.

The URV coordinates two other projects, Cloudskin and Neardata, both of which also involve several universities and companies. They will officially begin on 1, 2 and 3 February, in Tarragona. Cloudskin is a project on adaptive virtualization to the limits of the cloud, while Neardata aims to design a platform to make extreme data more accessible by enabling people to analyse and process it without having to master programming languages.

The fourth project, Extract, is software for extracting extreme data. In this case, the URV participates as a collaborator, providing all the experience it has accumulated in extreme data, which goes one step further than big data. Because of the amount and complexity of the data that is constantly accumulating on the Internet, new tools are required to manage it all.

The decision to go ahead with the four projects is one more in a series of successes for the URV’s CloudLab research group. “It is a highly topical subject and we are very well positioned, with experience and many contacts. It is an incentive to continue working and innovating, to grow”, explains Pedro García. In addition, the research group is in the process of creating a spin-off, Datoma, together with the YanesLab research group, headed by the researcher from the Department of Electronic, Electrical and Automatic Engineering Óscar Yanes and which is along the same lines as the projects: it is an infrastructure in the cloud that allows data to be uploaded and processed, in a friendly interface, without the need for extensive computer knowledge.

The projects, which started on 1 January, have a duration of 36 months until 31 December 2025, except for Cloudstars, which will last another year.