Sparkle Wins Cloud Tender for Seven European Research Projects

As OCRE framework provider and Google Cloud integrator, Sparkle has been awarded seven research projects in five different EU countries (Belgium, France, Italy and The Netherlands). With Sparkle’s support, academic institutions and research centers will adopt cloud for innovative digital solutions and services to support research agility and improved results.

Through a call for tenders launched in the summer of 2022, the Open Cloud for Research Environment - an EU-funded initiative for cloud adoption in R&E - awarded funds totaling around EUR 6 million through a mechanism whereby cloud providers teamed up directly with researchers to apply. 

Of the 15 winning projects in the call, the seven awarded to Sparkle relate to the health and digital technology sectors, and include: 
•    in France, project by the University of Burgundy to build a training solution for health professionals and students in the Metaverse, and the project Deep Learning for GRAPHS by the Computer Laboratory of Burgundy which aims to automate the use of semantic content to make it accessible without further processing;
•    in the Netherlands, project by Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology to create a Comprehensive Childhood Cancer Commons, harmonized data collection of childhood cancer genomes and perform state-of-the-art data analyses to support innovations in childhood cancer research, diagnostics and treatment;
•    in Belgium, the iCANDID project from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven will develop a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable Reusable) data hub for the Social Sciences and Humanities to speed-up the data collection and preprocessing. The University of Antwerp’s Human Molecular Genetics (HMG) research group will use cloud resources for genetic analysis and data storage on newly identified biomarkers for diseases;
•    in Italy, the Università di Padova along with the Università Svizzera Italiana have been funded in their project to study federated machine learning cloud systems for precision medicine and to work on a second project focusing on a Machine Learning paradigm called Incremental Learning.

The awarding of these projects recognises the strength of Sparkle's offer to the European education and research sector and is part of the company's broader commitment to reducing the costs and complexity of the transition to the cloud.