The Science Summit at UN General Assembly

New York and Online, 12–29 September 2023.

The Science Summit at the UN General Assembly will take place in New York and online from 12-29 September 2023. It will focus on the role and contribution of science in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This will be the ninth edition of the Science Summit.

The objective of the Science Summit is to develop and launch science collaborations that will demonstrate global science mechanisms and activities to support the attainment of the UN SDGs, Agenda 2030 and Local2030. Finally, it will also prepare input for the United Nations Summit of the Future, which will occur during UNGA79 in September 2024.

The Science Summit will examine what policy, regulatory, and financial environments. These serve to implement and sustain the science mechanisms and support global scientific collaborations across continents, nations, and themes. Scientific discovery through the analysis of massive data sets will be necessary if the SDGs are to be achieved. Science is not just one of many tools in the quest to achieve the SDGs; it is foundational. It provides the knowledge, techniques, and innovations necessary to address the world’s most pressing challenges.

The Science Summit will begin with the opening session on Tuesday, 12 September 2023. 350 sessions will follow, bringing together 1400 speakers and building on the successful Science Summit at UNGA77 in 2022.

For more information, please visit this page.

Two broad themes

The Science Summit at the UN General Assembly will have two broad themes:

Inclusion: The term “inclusion” encompasses a broad spectrum of meanings. Within the context of the Science Summit, it signifies “data inclusion.” For globally impactful data-driven science, ensuring open access to and utilisation of scientific data is paramount. While the EU and other nations are ushering in data protection and AI regulations, designing an inclusive process is key to achieving the true potential of these benefits. Regulations should be crafted with input from all affected nations, the principle being “no regulation without representation.”

Development Finance: For the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the over 450 Development Banks (which account for more than 10% of world investment) to invest more significantly in science, they must recognise the direct and indirect linkages between scientific advancement and socio-economic development. They must acknowledge the direct and indirect connections between scientific progress and socio-economic development. These institutions have traditionally focused on infrastructure, health, education, and economic stability. By recognising science as a crucial development pillar, they can allocate more resources and play a pivotal role in promoting science in their member countries. This, in turn, can support health policies, drive technological innovation, encourage economic growth, and build long-term resilience.

ALL-READY Workshop – Accelerating the Agroecology Transition

ALL-Ready

Seville, Spain / online, 11 May 2023.

The upcoming 2nd ALL-READY Project Workshop, entitled “Accelerating the Agroecology Transition: Your potential role and benefits of contributing to a European Network of Living Labs and Research Infrastructures.”

 This interactive discussion session will take place on 11 May 2023, at the LifeWatch ERIC ICT-Core premises in Seville, Spain, and will also be available online as a hybrid event.

More information in our news item.

Register Here

AgroServ European Research Services on Agroecology Conference

European Research Services on Agroecology Conference

Prague, Czech Republic / Hybrid, 5–6 June 2023.

The first annual conference on research services on agroecology will be held by AgroServ (a project in which LifeWatch ERIC is partner) from 5–6 June 2023 at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague (in-person and online).

The AgroServ project uses a multi-scale approach to respond to diverse research questions; from the level of the molecule and the organism, to the large-scale from farms to entire ecosystems. Since the transition towards a sustainable and resilient agricultural system needs to consider ecological, societal and economic factors, the active involvement of practitioners and scientists from different fields is crucial.

This first edition of the AgroServ Conference will thus be devoted to the research community where it will present the diverse agroecological services accessible via AgroServ and the different facets that shape research in the emerging field of agroecology.

To promote and encourage interdisciplinary approaches to address the agroecological transition, AgroServ’s first call for Transnational Access (TNA call) to access AgroServ services will be launched during this event.

Time will be devoted to discussions and hands-on workshops to brainstorm, meet researchers from different fields and to build ideas for potential proposals.

More information will be shared soon at this link.

European Blue Forum – Official Launch Event!

European Blue Forum

Brest, France / Hybrid, 26 April 2023.

As a part of the European Blue Forum, the European Maritime Spatial Planning Platform (MSP) is creating Europe’s Blue community. A community of different users of the sea, passionate and committed to working together to deliver bold and ambitious change to our shared challenges of nature and climate change. As part of the Forum, stakeholders will have the opportunity to influence the structure and direction of the European Blue Forum in a balanced and inclusive way, and through this, the future of Europe’s Sustainable Blue Economy.
 
The event will provide a platform for everyone, whether part of a large organisation or not, and regardless of how well established the sector or topic you work on is, to share your priorities, challenges and ideas, and contribute to building a common and united path towards the vision of the Sustainable Blue Economy.
 
The Launch Event is only the beginning of the European Blue Forum’s activities!

More information at this link.

EGI2023

EGI2023

Poznań, Poland, 19–23 June 2023. 

At the annual EGI conference, international scientific communities, computing and service providers, European projects, security experts, community managers, and policy makers gather to take research and innovation in data-intensive processing and analytics forward.

  • Meet the scientific communities that are at the forefront of innovation, learn about their success cases, new requirements and solutions for data discovery, access and processing, and start new collaborations
  • Help research communities and industry joining their efforts to find common solutions to data access and data spaces
  • Meet the largest community of research cloud providers in Europe and their IT strategies
  • Learn about state of the art in scientific computing in Europe and meet a large community of cloud, High-Throughput-Computing (HTC) and High Performance Computing (HPC) providers that provide core facilities to today’s European computing infrastructures 
  • Share your achievements in cutting-edge topics from distributed computing, such as federated trust and identity, data spaces, artificial intelligence, digital twins
  • Learn about the status and future of the EOSC Compute Platform during the final event of the EGI-ACE flagship project of the EGI community
  • Stay up to date with the latest technical development in cybersecurity, scientific applications, data processing and analytics, and digital twins

Join EGI2023 for the core conference days 20–22 June.

The EGI2023 Call for Posters will remain open until 15 April – email your proposal to events[@]egi.eu 

EOSC Symposium 2023

EOSC Symposium 2023

Madrid, Spain, 20–22 September 2023.

The EOSC Symposium 2023 will take place in Madrid in the context of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The event is organised by EOSC Future together with the EOSC Tripartite collaboration (the EOSC Association, the EOSC Steering Board and the European Commission).

Last year’s event, which took place in Prague on 14–17 November 2022, marked the EOSC Symposium’s return as an in-person event with over 400 participants. This year, the event will be fully hybrid, facilitating broader exchanges – in person and online – between stakeholders from ministries, policy makers, research organisations, service providers, research e-infrastructures and research communities across Europe and beyond.

You can get a glimpse of EOSC Symposium 2022 in the event recap video here.

EOSC Symposium 2023 will offer plenty of opportunities to engage with the community. A call for application will open soon at #EOSCsymposium23 website.

Stay tuned for programme and event updates soon!

SIGN UP TO THE PRE-REGISTRATION

EOSC Symposium 2023: Context

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is an EU flagship initiative aimed at enabling Open Science practices in Europe, as codified in the 2022-2024 European Research Area Policy Agenda. It is also recognised as the science, research and innovation data space which will be fully articulated with the other sectoral data spaces defined in the European strategy for data.

EOSC will provide a federated web of FAIR data and associated services to researchers across and outside Europe. EOSC builds on existing infrastructure and services supported by the EC, Member States and research communities. It brings these together in a federated ‘system of systems’ approach, adding value by aggregating content and enabling services to be used together.

SORTEE Conference 2023

SORTEE Conference 2023

Online, 17–18 October 2023.

SORTEE (Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) conferences are informative, fun and low-cost.

There will be multiple participatory events organised by SORTEE members (you can submit a proposal a few months before the conference – watch out for content submission announcements).

SORTEE wants to facilitate lively exchanges of ideas, and so the following three participatory event types are the heart of the conference:

  • Unconferences: Facilitated discussions of ideas for how to make ecology, evolutionary biology, and related disciplines more open, reliable, and transparent. Facilitation involves moderating the conversation with ideas and examples, but there are no formal presentations.
  • Hackathons: Group projects with well-defined goals (papers, techniques, software, protocols, organisations, etc.).
  • Workshops: Facilitators will teach tools for implementing open, reliable, and transparent practices.

SORTEE strongly encourages proposals for all contribution types from people at a wide range of career stages and from members of underrepresented groups.

For facilitated sessions (Workshops, Unconferences, and Hackathons), SORTEE welcomes proposals from small teams (as well as individuals). SORTEE encourages teams to include diverse perspectives, for instance with facilitators from different countries and balanced in terms of gender and career stage. Facilitation by early career researchers (students or early career postdocs) is warmly encouraged.

SORTEE encourages people with any questions about accessibility in the submission process or the events themselves to contact conf.sortee[@]gmail.com.

More information on the SORTEE website.

International Data Week 2023

International Data Week 2023

Salzburg, Austria, 23–26 October 2023.

The International Science Council’s Committee on Data (CODATA) and World Data System (WDS), and the Research Data Alliance (RDA) are delighted to announce International Data Week 2023: A Festival of Data.

IDW 2023 will be hosted by the University of Salzburg through its interdisciplinary Data Science group and the Geoinformatics department, supported by the Governor of Salzburg and with assistance from the Austrian Academy of Sciences – GIScience and the European Umbrella Organization for Geographic Information.

International Data Week brings together a global community of data scientists and data stewards; researchers from all domains; data, interoperability and informatics experts from all fields; industry leaders, entrepreneurs and policymakers.

This event will be an inclusive and celebratory Festival of Data, with in-person and virtual components, highlighting the opportunities for the positive transformation of our world in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and other global challenges.

IDW 2023 will combine the RDA Plenary Meeting, the biannual meeting of this international member organization working to develop and support global infrastructure facilitating data sharing and reuse, and SciDataCon 2023, the scientific conference addressing the frontiers of data in research organized by CODATA and WDS.

Refer to these links to learn about SciDataCon 2023 themes and the call for sessions, presentations and posters.

Website: https://internationaldataweek.org

For more information on IDW 2023, contact:

  • Meredith Goins, WDS Executive Director
  • Hilary Hanahoe, RDA Secretary General
  • Simon Hodson, CODATA Executive Director

AERAP Africa-Europe Science and Innovation Forum 2023

Aerap Science 2023

Brussels, Belgium, 7–10 March 2023.

The 2023 edition of the AERAP Africa-Europe Science and Innovation Forum is taking place 7–10 March 2023. The Forum will be designed to inform and engage with policy makers to ensure that the role and contribution of science, enabled through digital technologies, is reflected in European Union and its Member States’ policies concerning Africa. The meetings will also be designed to increase the level of participation and reinforce the networking by African nations’ with their partners in related EU programmes and science and innovation programmes supported by European Union member states and some associated countries. Digital capacities, existing and new, for expanding science inclusion and citizen participation by all groups in society across Africa, will be explored.

LifeWatch ERIC will be represented in the following sessions:

Wednesday 8 March

09h00 – Microbial sciences for a sustainable future (Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC CTO)

11h00 – Africa-Europe research cooperation on the Accelerator Partnership to support the future implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBIF–LifeWatch ERIC Session)

14h00 – How EU missions tackle big challenges in health, climate and the environment (Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC CTO)

Thursday 9 March

09h00 – Science for Food Systems Transformation in a Conflict Area – The Sahel. Organised by Wageningen Research (Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC CTO)

 11h00 – Science for Climate Resilient food systems in Africa (José Manuel Ávila, LifeWatch ERIC Agroecology Coordinator)

Agroecology Living Labs & Research Infrastructures in Europe – experiences from ALL-Ready & AE4EUALL-Ready final conference

ALL-Ready final conference

Brussels, Belgium, 27 September 2023.

ALL-Ready, in collaboration with AE4EU, is organising its final event in Brussels on 27 September 2023. The conference will be hosted by the Committee of the Regions.

The one-day conference will show how the two projects paved the way for a European Network of Living Labs and Research Infrastructures. Experiences from involved Living Labs and Research Infrastructures will give practical insights and a focus will be on how Regions can best support the agroecology transition with the help of Living Labs and Research Infrastructures and what role the future European partnership “Accelerating farming systems transition: agroecology living labs and research infrastructures” will play.

Through a series of panel discussions, the event will discuss how Living Labs and Research Infrastructures can support the agroecology transition. The conference will focus on how Agroecology Living Labs and Research Infrastructures can translate theory into practice and will explore lessons learned from three years of project work.

The closing session will focus on how regions can best support Living Labs and Research Infrastructures to drive the agroecology and urban transitions. The role of the Common Agriculture Policy network, local authorities, and the future European partnership “Accelerating farming systems transition: agroecology living labs and research infrastructures” will be discussed.

To register for the conference, please visit this page.