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Digital Assembly 2016 was co-organized by European Commission and the Slovak Presidency of the Council of the European Union in Bratislava on 28-29 September 2016. Aslihan Kagnici, Projects Consultant of TAGES and Erdem Gulgener, Board Member of TAGES attended Workshop 1 – Digitising European – Industry boosting Digital Innovation Hubs across Europe and Workshop 5 – Internet of Things and ePrivacy as the representatives of the Digital Turkey Platform.
ICT Proposers’ Day 2016 was followed by Digital Assembly 2016 on 28-29 September, 2016 in Bratislava with the participation of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, the Slovak Vice-Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, European Commission’s Vice-President Andrus Ansip and Commissioner Gunther Oettinger, high-level officials from EU Member States and European Institutions, policy-makers, representatives of industry and academia, start-ups, NGOs, etc. Digital Assembly started with 6 parallel workshops on the key topics of the Digital Single Market strategy; WS1 Digitising European – Industry boosting Digital Innovation Hubs across Europe, WS2 E-Commerce and Online Platforms, WS3 Improving access to content in the DSM, WS4 Connected and Automated Driving, WS5 Internet of Things and ePrivacy and WS6 Gigabit Society where the participants and panellists discussed and shared their ideas especially on the required standards and regulations. TAGES team attended WS1 and WS5 as the representatives of the Digital Turkey Platform.
The WS1 focused on building, boosting and sustaining Digital Innovation Hubs. This workshop aimed at exploring how Member States and regions can join the European effort and focus their own investments alongside the same industrial priorities and which actions they could put in place to leverage further private investments to boost the innovation capacity of Europe. In particular, discussions addressed how the set-up and reinforcement of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) can be stimulated across Europe, including for less developed regions. In detail panellists explained different regional policies representing the bottom-up wave of creation and expansion of DIH’s.
The WS5 was focused on how to build trusted IoT environment and the importance of IoT trust labelling system. During the 1st panel of the WS5 workshop, it was discussed that there were four main challenges in IoT; interoperability, big data, energy consumption and security & privacy. It was very important that users trust the IoT because of the reasons of cyber-attacks, lack of confidence on being watched, personal data protection, etc. Therefore, it was emphasized that IoT trust labelling system was very important. This would make users trust the IoT products which have an EU label. However, smart regulations were needed based on certified labels. During the 2nd panel of the workshop, the focus was on the regulations needed on GDPR (general data protection rules). It was told that traffic location data would be included in GDPR.
On the second day, the plenary sessions including opening speech by Peter Pellegrini, Deputy Prime Minister of Slovakia; keynote speeches by Andrus Ansip, Vice-President of the European Commission for the Digital Single Market, Günther Oettinger, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society were realized. Günther Oettinger announced the new action plan about European Data Free Flow and Data Protection and Privacy perspectives. Oettinger also stressed the initiatives on European Digital Single Market and its boundaries.
Commissioner Oettinger received a Scaleup Manifesto from the European community of startups and scaleups at the Digital Assembly in Bratislava, the event that puts the Digital Single Market at the heart of Europe, ‘A Manifesto for Change and Empowerment in the Digital Age’ is proposing concrete ways to leverage the strength of the digital single market for European entrepreneurs’ global success.
Welcoming the Scaleup Manifesto Günther H. Oettinger said:
“Europe has fantastic entrepreneurs – with great imagination and tremendous technical skills. We need to come together around a common agenda which puts the strength of the digital single market behind our entrepreneurs for global success. This is a powerful beginning. I look forward to working with European startups and scale ups to drive progress in the weeks, months and years ahead.”
The recording of the web stream is available:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmex2dzGKcI&list=PLyMUk47rPuqoAF44gq-a2Q3LdpFxHQ7jL
Besides the keynote speeches and the panels, one of the most attractive sessions is the inspirational speeches made by Maja Pantic, Imperial College London on analysis of human behavioral cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behavior like laughter, social signals, and affective states;Juraj Vaculik, CEO Aeromobil on flying cars; Grainne Dwyer, Ludgate Ireland on 1Gigabyte Town.
As TAGES we’ve got two important messages for TURKEY from ICT Infoday and Digital Assembly:
– ICT communities, associations and networks are very influential for the content of upcoming research work programmes, regulations. Currently only a few Turkish companies are members of those kind of communities and therefore a little or no impact of Work Programmes and upcoming calls although Turkey as an associate country contributes to the budget of those programmes. As a result we believe that the Turkish companies must be encouraged to respresent themselves in ICT communities, associations and networks.
– In Digital Assembly Günther Oettinger clearly drew the borderline of European Digital Single Market boundaries as European Union Member Countries, European Economical Area Countries (Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway) and Switzerland, which is pretty different than the physical European market which formed by European Union and Turkey’s Custom’s Agreement signed in Ankara 1995. Many European ICT Communities and Networks refer to Günther Oettinger’s statement and limit the membership eligibility to the European Digital Single Market Boundaries. Turkey currently is out of this picture. Even without European Digital Single Market restrictions, Turkish companies are already handicapped compared to their EU member counterparts, since they don’t have a free roaming right throughout Europe for establishing trade agreements (visa restrictions). As a consequence of it, Turkey will get less and less benefit from Framework Programmes although Turkey contributes to full budget.
You can visit the following hashtags on Twitter to get more detailed info about the Digital Assembly 2016:
#da16eu
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