Enfield: European Lighthouse to Manifest Trustworthy and Green AI

Enfield: European Lighthouse to Manifest Trustworthy and Green AI

Iskraemeco is part of ENFIELD project, a collaborative effort to establish a leading European Center of Excellence in AI research, funded by the European Union. This initiative unites 30 consortium partners (20 research institutions and 10 industrial leaders) across 36 months (September 2023–August 2026) and is fueled by a €11.5 million investment.

What is ENFIELD?

ENFIELD‘s mission is to propel Europe to the forefront of AI development. Through four key pillars – Adaptive AI, Green AI, Human-Centric AI, and Trustworthy AI – the project will attract top minds and resources to conduct world-class research. This research will be directly applicable to critical sectors like healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and space. Ultimately, ENFIELD aims to solidify the EU’s competitive edge in AI and generate significant social and economic benefits for Europe.

Iskraemeco: Shaping a smarter and greener future

Iskraemeco’s participation in ENFIELD reflects our commitment to driving innovation and shaping a sustainable future. By collaborating with leading minds in Europe, we are well-positioned to develop cutting-edge AI solutions that will benefit various industries and society as a whole.

ENFIELD delves into four crucial areas of AI development

Green AI

This pillar focuses on developing novel AI approaches that minimize the carbon footprint while maintaining optimal performance, making AI more environmentally sustainable.

Adaptive AI

This area addresses the need for AI systems that can adapt to rapidly changing environments or evolving goals, ensuring optimal responses.

Human-Centric AI

ENFIELD strives to design AI systems that are explainable. This means users and developers can understand how the system arrives at decisions, fostering trust and collaboration.

Trustworthy AI

This pillar is dedicated to developing trustworthy AI tools through formal approaches to uncertainty modeling and data quality in learning tools.

The research aspects will be further enhanced crosswise along four critical infrastructure sectors:

Energy: The renewable energy and energy storage industry also applied AI in use cases such as short-term forecasting and predictive maintenance, dispatch of energy batteries. Recent breakthroughs in AI (e.g., deep learning, transfer learning, reinforcement learning, automated ML) are boosting once again the AI potential for the energy sector.

Healthcare: Recent advances in health digitalization, sensory data, simulated systems biology data, lead towards clinical Big Data, given the growing volume of data as well as their inherent complexity the analysis and inference become rather demanding.

Manufacturing: The key question the manufacturing vertical is going to address is: how to incorporate Green, Adaptive, Trustworthy and Human-centric AI in the new Industry 5.0 paradigm and along the dimensions of Smart Autonomous, Product-Service and Hyperconnected Factories of the Future?

Space: This project aims to tackle the main challenges for the adoption of AI technologies in the Space and AAM industry, especially for operational phases.

Iskraemeco's role in shaping the future of green AI

As one of the 10 industrial partners, Iskraemeco plays a pivotal role in ENFIELD. We are entrusted with co-leading the Energy Vertical, a sector where cutting-edge research will be applied and validated. Iskraemeco is actively involved in defining the thematic direction for Green AI within the Energy field.

Here’s a glimpse into Iskraemeco’s contributions:

Shaping Green AI’s future: We are defining topics and use cases for the Open Calls program, which will support top researchers in tackling specific AI challenges.
Driving innovation: Iskraemeco is providing ideas for small-scale projects that will push the boundaries of AI in the Energy sector.
Fostering collaboration: We are co-organizing a workshop to bring together the consortium’s 30 members and facilitate knowledge exchange.
Data sharing for progress: Iskraemeco is contributing valuable energy datasets to empower research efforts.

By leveraging our position within the Energy ecosystem and expertise in AI/ML, Iskraemeco aims to expand its capabilities and establish itself as a leader in the Green AI landscape. We will also utilize this platform to showcase our innovative Edge compute module and solidify our foothold in the AI domain.

Iskraemeco’s ENFIELD team consists of five members, all coming from the Innovation department; (Tomaž Dostal, Jure Germovšek and Klemen Žbontar as project leader, assisted by Amadej Pavšič and Tine Rozmanič). The team is well-rounded and possesses the capacity to assimilate and act accordingly with the knowledge gained during the duration of the project.

“The ENFIELD project presents a unique opportunity for Iskraemeco to connect and collaborate with some of Europe’s most prominent research entities in the field of AI. The project kick-off meeting and recent technology and research focused workshops undoubtedly proved that the consortium members collectively hold deep knowledge and understanding of the AI field. Interaction with various actors is on a high level and so far, results in efficient teamwork. I am looking forward on the following months of collaboration with our colleagues from various EU countries,” comments Klemen Žbontar, ENFIELD project lead and Lead Innovation Engineer at Iskraemeco.

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Open Calls

76 researchers will be selected (15 per each pillar and 4 per each vertical) following Third-party Exchange Scheme (TES) through the Open Calls. TES is designed to attract the top-level researchers to conduct foundational research activities related to specific scientific and technological challenges raised by the relevant pillar or vertical, to disseminate the most advanced knowledge and contribute to the ENFIELD network creation and expansion to European AI labs and countries that are not presented in the consortium.

18 small-scale projects will be funded (4-5 per each vertical) following Third-party Innovation Scheme (TIS) through the Open Calls. TIS is designed to conduct applied research activities in energy, healthcare, manufacturing, and space verticals in the context of the use cases proposed by the ENFIELD industry players, while these use cases link to the pillars. The selected small-scale projects will also contribute to networking activities and disseminate the latest knowledge in Europe. This scheme is applicable for R&D intensive establishments (research centres, start-ups, SMEs and large companies).

Get details and apply to the latest open calls now.

Latest project updates

Iskraemeco joins Horizon Enfield general assembly

At the end of September, Iskraemeco representatives took part in the Horizon Enfield General Assembly meeting held at Eindhoven University of Technology.

1st Innovation Scheme Open Call

The ENFIELD project is offering grants to support at least 18 innovative research projects focused on technical challenges in energy, healthcare, manufacturing, and space. Apply now and help build a stronger European AI network.