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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DATA4WATER (Excellence in Smart Data and Services for Supporting Water Management)

Teaser

Summary

\"The overall objective of the project is to strengthen research in the field of smart data driven e-services in water resources management, made available to international community and/or specific stakeholders such as companies, citizens, and authorities. The complexity of research related to water resources management is extremely high and requires deep expertise in several ICT-related research domains such as: Big Data and Smart Data; semantic Internet of Things; context-aware and event-based systems; Cloud computing; Web services;, and social Web.
The main goal of the project is to bring the Romanian level of excellence near the value of the other partner countries.
The project concept is based on two pillars: the development of scientific competences and the development of organizational skills, specific for the research activities.
The first pillar, Enhancement of scientific competences, is realized through trainings on selected, advanced scientific topics, staff exchanges, summer schools, organization of scientific events, participation to conferences and workshops. The expected result of these activities is the overall increase of scientific results, in terms of increased peer-reviewed publications, increased impact factors in terms of citations, increased number of submitted project proposals.
The second pillar, Enhancement of organizational capability is realized through trainings and workshops on topics related to research methodology, quality assurance and assessment in the research activity, intellectual property, patent writing. Networking with relevant stakeholders from research, companies, public administration, or interested groups is a priority of this pillar.
A Knowledge and Networking e-Environment - Knowledge Lake - was developed as a support for networking and to ensure the access to scientific resources and general information in the field. The \"\"Knowledge-lake\"\" platform has a major impact on the dissemination of the project activities, as well as of the related scientific events and research results in the research field. Knowledge-lake allows different access to information, from public to classified, based on a multi-level user account system. Knowledge-lake facilitates the rapid access to most of the on-line resources related to networking and partnership opportunities from a central point.
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Work performed

\"During the project, events were organized by combining several activities in order to obtain better results with optimized use of resources: scientific events had dissemination and/or of networking component; information events included scientific knowledge sharing, training activities were finalized with joint publications. Some activities were organized by the project partners (including UPB) and rolled out on the premises of one of the partners; others were attended by UPB staff at third parties or were organized by UPB staff at third parties.
A Technology survey was elaborated by the UPB team in collaboration with the partner institutions, in the first 6 months and updated towards the end of the project, for a better understanding of the conjunction between the ICT principles, tools, methods and resources and the application field â€“ water resources management. A printed concise version of the survey was distributed to the participants at the project closing event. The Roadmap was a natural consequence of the Technology survey, filtered by the interests and assets of the research group of UPB. A Research Quality Assurance System was set up and a Handbook on RQA was elaborated.
The partnership and networking activities included both specific actions and continuous activities that required a permanent connection between the research group, the partners and / or potential beneficiary. A total number of 19 staff exchanges took place in which selected research themes and topics were discussed and developed with the visited partner institutions.
Three planned and two additional Information Events where organized. They were attended by researchers from UPB and from other institutions, companies and master and PhD students. Tey were organized in Bucharest, Berlin and Milan.
The project was disseminated also at events organized by third parties: Fraunhofer Big Data Alliance meetings; World Water Week; ICT 2018 Imagine Digital - Connect Europe. A LinkedIn social media group â€œData4Water: Network of Excellence and Partnership in Smart Data for Water Managementâ€ was established. Additionally, D4W information and networking activities were disseminated through Twitter #Data4Water and the broad Fraunhofer network and mailing lists.
Training was focused on: specific research topics in the field of ICT, relevant for the research field; on smart data & services for water management topics; on topics related to generally increasing professionalism & management competencies in research.
Three summer schools were organized in Bucharest during the project: Hydroinformatics approaches for river basin related problems, in 2016; Using Data Science for Urban Water Management, in 2017 and Emerging research trends in ICT-supported water resource management and the water nexus, in 2018. The Summer schools were organized back to back with the corresponding training on the same topic so that the participants at the summer school could follow the corresponding training component.
7 PhD students participated at short term on-site training at partners.
Four workshops with participation of all partners were organized and offered the frame for preparation of deliverables, planning activities and discussion of scientific subjects.
UPB participated at the organization of several scientific events, all reflected on Knowledge-Lake.\"

Final results

The research team of UPB identified the most important targets that enhance the research and innovation indicators: the development of a suitable, stable and sustainable framework for the scientific strategy enforcement. Our research strategy based on the Technology Survey; on the Roadmap and on the implemented Research Quality Assurance System. The main results supported by the project activities are: 69 peer-reviewed publications (14 open-access publications) - 11 in the first half of the project; 58 in the second part of the project; total impact factor 49.322 ; involvement of 7 PhD students in the project activities; increase of the researchers\' competences in the specific research field and in general topics related to research, through targeted training and participation in scientific events; increase of visibility of the research team by organizing scientific events with European participation.
The valorisation and exploitation of project results is oriented towards elaboration of common project proposals. A constant concern of the project team was participation to writing new project proposals. Thus, both national and European research plans were taken into consideration. We won 3 projects financed by national research plans and submitted 5 H2020 proposals - one of them is under evaluation. The valorisation and exploitation of project results is also oriented towards improving the teaching content, mainly at master level, by enhancing the content of lectures and project topics with elements of the Technology Survey or of the issued scientific papers. Some of the disciplines that benefited are: Decision support systems, Cloud computing, Research methodology, Integration of information systems.