Open Call Workshop in Cantabria

On the 23th September, the Regional Development Agency of Cantabria (SODERCAN) with the cooperation of the University of Cantabria and Santander City Council, organized a workshop for the dissemination of the First Open Call of the project FIESTA IoT amongst potential companies, entrepreneurs and University Research departments (20 persons overall attended the workshop; 454 SMEs were informed about the workshop through invitation e-mail). The main workshop’s target group has been Small and Medium Size companies and entrepreneurs in order to get a business scope and with the goal of involving those companies with experience in the field of advanced and innovative developments in the Internet of Things that leverage the Experimentation as a Service platform and the underlying IoT testbeds that are provided by the FIESTA-IoT Consortium.

The workshop was officially opened by the Deputy Mayor of Santander City Council, Ms. Gema Igual together with SODERCAN’s expert involved in the project Mr Ignacio Abaitua.

The workshop was structured in two parts: the first one was a thorough explanation of the project’s first Open Call with a practical scope, developed by the project’s expert Dr. Luis Sánchez. Dr. Sanchez received both the Telecommunications Engineering and Ph.D. degree by the University of Cantabria, Spain, in 2002 and 2009 respectively. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Communications Engineering at the University of Cantabria. He is active on IoT-enabled smart cities, meshed networking on heterogeneous wireless scenarios and optimization of network performance through cognitive networking techniques.

The second part of the workshop focused on best practices about IoT testbeds’ integration in the field of Smart Cities, acting as a speaker Mr José Luis Maté Gómez , Master in Telecommunications Engineering by Universidad Politecnica, Madrid. Jose Luis has developed his professional carrier in the field of of innovation, especially in the areas of security, mobility, Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things. From 2009, Jose Luis is the CTO&Deputy Head of the Cloud Convergence Business Unit in NEC Europe where he is responsible of the product area for Cloud, Big Data and IoT, embracing the Smart Cities initiative.

During the workshop all the attendees actively discussed issues related to the Open Call, mostly related to eligibility criteria and other practical requirements for the submission of proposals.