2019 was quite a busy year for DITCOM! For a proper overview of the year, the various activities have been compiled into the ‘DITCOM Annual Report 2019’; here you can find descriptions of the various projects, events, publications, and more happening at the centre.

A highlight of 2019 was the successful completion of SynchroniCity, a 15 Million Euro three-year large-scale pilot involving 21 cities in 12 countries funded by Horizon 2020. SynchroniCity brought together 34 international partners from government, academia and business to develop standards to improve procurement and delivery of services at scale through IoT deployment in cities and communities, which resulted in ‘A Guide to SynchroniCity’. SynchroniCity has already achieved wide impact and lives on as source of inspiration for the new deployment programme Digital Europe and Living-in.eu, an initiative that promotes the European way of digital transformation in cities and communities supported by the European Commission.

Another highlight of 2019 was the completion of a scoping paper for building a roadmap for the Next Generation of Internet of Things (NGIoT), which DITCOM is coordinating. NGIoT is an ongoing three-year Coordination and Support Action (CSA) that started in November 2018. A major goal of NGIoT is to create a ‘a sound and forward-looking roadmap’ that will indicate future directions that will guide European IoT research, innovation, policies and investments, respecting to core European values of openness, inclusion and participation. The scoping paper, an important preliminary step for the creation of the roadmap, was completed in September 2019. The objective of the paper was to analyse Internet of Things (IoT) research, innovation and implementation challenges, present a set of recommendations for future IoT-focused investments in the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programmes for 2021-2027, and guide other initiatives in Europe and beyond. “In 2019, DITCOM has entered a phase of scale-up and consolidation,” said centre leader, Martin Brynskov. “From being centred around individual projects, the DITCOM strategy and team now embodies a portfolio-based capacity to deliver on key AU missions: research, education and societal impact – on a global scale as well as locally.”

Read the annual report to know more about the continued projects and further plans for DITCOM.