NGIatlantic.eu: a successful transatlantic journey in research and innovation comes to an end

NGIatlantic.eu, the EU-funded project dedicated to fostering collaboration between the European Union and the United States in the domain of Next Generation Internet (NGI), has successfully concluded its activities with 120 applications, evaluated by 77 evaluators, 35 EU-US team funded and a total of 2.820.610 € allocated to collaboration on experimental platforms.

NGIatlantic.eu embarked on its journey in January 2020, just before the world was engulfed by the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. Led by the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) and supported by a team of five partners, this project received a substantial funding of 2.8 million euros. The primary mission of NGIatlantic.eu was to foster collaboration between European and American innovators, driving high-quality research and innovation experiments on the NGI EU/US experimental platforms. As one of the Research and Innovation Actions (RIAs) under the overarching NGI.eu, the project supported innovators and researchers through a series of five open calls focused on NGI topics. These included Distributed Ledger Technologies for NGI, Decentralised data governance, Discovery and identification technologies, Experimental Platform interconnections, Greening the Internet, Internet Data Sharing and Interoperable Services, Open Internet Architecture and Renovation, Privacy and Trust enhancing technologies, Service and Data Portability, Strengthening Trustworthiness and Resilience Of the Internet.

The international consortium is formed by Trust-IT, Eurescom, and the US universities Rutgers and the University of Utah, all coordinated by the guidance of James Clarke (WIT). Trust-IT played a key role in managing the open calls for NGIatlantic.eu. This included activities such as managing the continuous call for the selection of the External Pool of Evaluators, initial screening of the proposals, assigning the External Evaluators, and coaching them with the support of other partners. To facilitate these processes, the team created a dedicated platform called the TRUST-Grants™. This platform featured various tools tailored to handle these types of open calls, including a chat board for evaluators to discuss and harmonize their comments on the proposals, automatic calculation of weighted averages for the assigned scores, different interactions based on roles (evaluator, applicant, administrators), and the ability to upload deliverables and other documentation. Additionally, Trust-IT was responsible for engaging with applicants and handling activities related to dissemination, communication, and exploitation. The experiments funded by NGIatlantic.eu were regularly published on the online catalog of funded experiments.

The project concluded its activities with a very interactive final event that took place physically in Pisa on 16 and 17 February 2023. During this event, the EU and US coordinators had the opportunity to meet in person for the first time and showcase the highly impactful results of their collaborative work.

Following the project's final review in March, which marked the official completion of the project, NGIatlantic.eu has officially come to an end. However, if you are seeking funding for your own experiment, we encourage you to explore the ongoing projects on NGI.eu. There may be opportunities available to support your innovative ideas and research within the NGI framework.