e-shape adds 5 new Pilots to their portfolio of  Earth Observation solutions

Following the second Call for EO-based products, e-shape has selected 5 new Pilots that will join the project, expanding the EuroGEO community.
 
The e-shape General Assembly concluded a successful onboarding process. 33 applications from private entities, research institutes, and academia from all over Europe and beyond, showcasing added-value and on-the-edge services to foster the awareness of EU Earth Observation capabilities were received.
 
The 5 new Pilots are and are led by:
 
1. FRIEND Flood Risk & Impact assEssment through automatic chaNge Detection of S-1+S-2 images, MEEO, Italy (Showcase Disasters)
2. DynaCrop – unlocking EO services for the food production value chain, World from Space, Czech Republic (Showcase Agriculture)
3. EYWA (EarlY WArning System for Mosquito-Borne Diseases), National Observatory of Athens, Greece (Showcase Health)
4. Super resolution air quality monitoring service, Murmuration SAS, France (Showcase Climate)
5. MountaiNow, One Earth Sarl, Switzerland (Showcase disasters)
 
The newly onboarded Pilots will benefit from e-shape project support including co-design methodologies, deployment support, user uptake, capacity building and liaison, sustainability & upscaling, communication, dissemination and Help Desk.

>> More information here
>> Press Release is available here

General Assembly 2022: e-shape accelerates EO solutions

The 2022 e-shape general assembly is a turning point in our project and activities towards an increasing users’ uptake and towards sustainability of the now 37 pilots we are supporting.

The support of e-shape to EuroGEO within GEO and to the EO community was largely demonstrated since our last GA. The activities and progresses are numerous: fine-tuning and generalization of our co-design methodology, full support to Clouds’ use and platforms interactions, interoperability, in-situ measurement integration, operationalization for each pilot, development of tools for FAIR and GEO principles assessment, Capacity building sessions, Support to investment readiness and business plans development, and of course a lot of fruitful actions on communication, dissemination and awareness. In addition, our activities are also supporting the fourth priority of GEO, adopted by its plenary in November 2021, the urban resilience.

The second phase of development of the pilots, what we called our Sprint 2 is close to its end, and will allow us to capture and synthetize the lessons learnt from our pilots in terms of interoperability, platform usages etc. This Sprint takes into consideration all activities into account across the conveyor belt of e-shape.

This General Assembly was the moment to gather, take stock and exchange on our progresses, our challenges, and setting the path for moving ahead toward users’ uptake and sustainability.

For the second time in e-shape, this large event had to be held online. This was mostly a human challenge, as interactions will be less spontaneous.

But at the same time, it was an opportunity to engage with a larger number of colleagues. Each of us been online on our computers was a great opportunity to show what we are doing, share and engage with our colleagues.

For this event, we dedicated ample time for demonstrating our results through live demos, online engagement and exchanges, and transmitting the sense of community and ownership of e-shape and EuroGEO we all feel.

>> More information here

EYWA our new onboarded pilot wins the 1st EIC Horizon Prize on Early Warning for Epidemics

Congratulations to our new onboarded pilot EYWA for winning the first “EIC Horizon Prize on Early Warning for Epidemics”. This accomplishment is a significant milestone and an exceptional example of the unlimited Earth Observation power and the societal benefits that can derive from harnessing space technology.

In April 2018, the European Commission launched a €5 million prize for an early warning system for epidemics. It was one of six European Innovation Council (EIC) Horizon Prizes, which were part of the EIC pilot run under the Horizon 2020 European Research & Innovation programme.

The prize rewards the development of a scalable, reliable and cost-effective early warning prototype system based on Earth observation data to forecast and monitor outbreaks of vector-borne diseases.

The winning solution provides an early warning capability to help prevent and mitigate the impact of infectious diseases on local, regional and global scales. It uses Earth observation data from Copernicus and the Global Earth Observations System of Systems (GEOSS), as well as epidemiological and other geo-located data including socioeconomic data. Climate information is also used to monitor and predict distribution and longer-term trends.

 >> More information here

GEO Individual Excellence Award for our      e-shape pilot!

Deputy Director of the Space Research Institute of Ukraine Prof. Nataliia Kussul won GEO Individual Excellence Award for outstanding personal contribution to the activities GEO.

The award ceremony took place on November 26, 2021 as part of the GEO Plenary Week. Nataliia is Deputy GEO-Principal in Ukraine and a representative of Ukraine in EuroGEO High Level Working Group. As a member of Ukraine's representative office in GEO, Natalia has made efforts to bring Ukraine into the European caucus of GEO. She has been PI for numerous national and international projects in GEO domain from National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, State Space Agency of Ukraine, EC-FP7, ESA and Horizon-2020. She is coordinator of GEOGLAM-Ukraine initiative, JECAM-Ukraine test site, Co-PI from Ukrainian side Horizon-2020 “ERA-PLANET” project, coordinator from Ukraine of one of the pilots within e-shape. A team of scientists led by Natalia was awarded grants for the development of cloud computing for intelligent satellite monitoring tasks within GEO-Amazon Earth Observation Cloud Credits Programme and GEO-GEE program.

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Highlights of co-design methodology

Initially produced mainly for scientific goals, EO data are now made available to every economic actor, through ‘open-data’ policies. Socio-economic applications of this data seem to be diverse and promising for a large variety of socio-economic stakeholders: research communities, but also public authorities, private companies, academia, citizens. However, in practice, developing usages from EO data seems to be particularly challenging.

Indeed, this effort could be schematically described as connecting various and highly heterogeneous socio-economic ecosystems: the ecosystem of Earth-observation data and the various ecosystems of potential usages, that do not share the same dynamics, time horizons (e.g. very long cycles to develop new measuring instruments compared to short timeline of actions in the data usage context), performance logics and competencies (e.g. data processing might require very specific technical expertise while data usages might also require specific domain expertise).

Co-design precisely aims at connecting these various and heterogeneous ecosystems of data and usages, through the development of EO-based services, and support their dynamics in a long-term perspective.

In e-shape, a co-design model considering EO specificities is progressively designed and tested with e-shape pilots, through a dedicated work-package (WP2). A first analytical framework has been built and described in D2.1, D2.2, and D2.3 deliverables (https://e-shape.eu/index.php/resources), especially highlighting that a co-design model adapted to EO context should involve two distinct phases: (1) a critical “diagnosis process” to identify the co-design needs, classified in four main types of co-design, (2) the implementation of co-design actions to address these co-design needs.

>> More information here.