AICloudEdgeOpenLab

Scope and industry’s pain points

The scope of OpenLab program is largely determined by the AI & Cloud & Edge industry pain points as well as the specific European context:

• Standardisation for interoperability and portability
  • The OpenLab intends to collaborate with existing initiatives e.g. Gaia-X, AI4EU, EBRAINS, as guiding programs on behalf of the European Commission digital strategy.
  • The OpenLab provides the platform where stakeholders can test new standards and develop new approaches and open source (reference) implementations to comply with new standards or become de facto standards (if not provided).
• Vendor lock in
  • This necessitates open source and standards, which best can be provided through a vendor neutral environment where all players can meet, collaborate and share information in a safe and open environment (in terms of antitrust, legal, code of conduct)
  • The OpenLab can guarantee such an environment through proper proven open principles, governance and (specification a.o.) processes.
• Speed of innovation
  • This requires permissionless open innovation principles applied to the development, test and implementation cycle
  • The open source nature of the OpenLab practices en principles enables shorter time to market, as a central place where the ecosystem can freely access platforms and testbeds to develop, test and implement AI & Cloud solutions
• Privacy, ethics and security
  • These are major items on the EC digital agenda to be addressed industry wide
  • The open source approach and the collaborative environment provided by the OpenLab will enable specific auditable services to be developed in the context of the OpenLab
• Fragmentation within the industry
  • The emerging AI sector is still heavily siloed in terms of technologies, organisations and solutions
  • A vendor neutral common ground as provided by the OpenLab will facilitate and promote synchronous releases, federation of technologies, complementary solutions.
• Lack of collaboration between research and industry
  • Lots of new innovations in the AI & Cloud field come from universities and lack some key features required by the industry like providing performance benchmarks, reproducibility.
  • The OpenLab will provide a comprehensive ecosystem mix of companies, research institutes.