Exa4mind – Extreme Analytics for Mining Data spaces

The European Big Data Value Forum (EBDVF) 2024 took place from 2 to 4 October in Budapest, Hungary. The three-day conference, organised by the Big Data Value Association (BDVA), in collaboration with AI&AUT EXPO, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Ideal-ist, Neumann Technology Platform and the Institute for Computer Science and Control (SZTAKI), brought together industry professionals, business developers, researchers and policy-makers from all over Europe and other regions of the world to advance policy actions and industrial and research activities in the areas of Data and AI. Following the success of the 2023 edition, EXA4MIND returned to EBDVF, this time as part of the DataNexus cluster.

Under the theme “Europe for global leadership in AI & Data”, the EBDVF 2024 featured 43 workshops, sessions and plenaries bringing together 180 speakers. The DataNexus cluster contributed to these impressive numbers with a 90 minutes session entitled “Innovative Approaches to Extreme Data Challenges”. 

This session and the cluster played an essential role during EBDVF in addressing a topic still uncharted, even to the big data and AI community: extreme data and its challenges. “The DataNexus is a very interesting combination of projects working on addressing challenges on extreme data. I think this will give us a very nice result, bringing the whole community together around extreme data. We expect a lot from this cluster,” stated Savvas Rogotis, Data Ecosystem Senior Project Manager at BDVA, and the moderator of the session.

The session consisted of two parts in order to achieve an understanding of how each of the six projects combines innovative technologies and tools for data mining, analysis and visualisation to create robust frameworks that can tackle Extreme Data challenges. First, there was a round of presentations entitled “New technologies for handling and exploiting extreme data and extreme data use cases”. Here, each project representative explained to the audience gathered in the room how their project addresses the challenges of extreme data and what makes their project unique. Finally, there was a panel discussion followed by a round of Q&A moderated by Savvas Rogotis.

In the case of EXA4MIND, Stephan Hachinger from BADW-LRZ and scientific and co-design coordinator of EXA4MIND, participated in the round of presentations. He showcased EX4MIND’s platform for Extreme Data analytics at supercomputing centres with automated data management and support for integration by design with European data ecosystems.

After the session, Stephan underlined the importance of this cluster not only for the external public but also for the people involved in each project: “On the one hand, we have many use cases in the different projects, and these use cases can be mapped to the technologies in all our projects to generalise our technologies and make them as broad as possible. On the other hand with the IT methods that we apply, we have a wealth of complementary offerings that sometimes overlap with other methods. So we can analyse what is best for the customers and their extreme data, and then condense a common portfolio of technologies”.

The other speakers were Pedro García from University Rovira i Virgili representing NEARDATA, Yannis Theodoris from University of Piraeus representing EMERALDS, Radu Prodan from Institute of Information Technology, University of Klagenfurt representing Graph-Massivizer, Xinxin Wang from Wageningen Food Safety Research representing EFRA, and Doaa Almhaithawi from Mathema representing EXTRACT.

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