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New Call for proposal SSF -CHI: Computing and Hardware for ICT Infrastructures

The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) announces SEK 200 million in a national Call for problem-, challenge- or application-driven research projects that meet the highest international scientific standards. Alignment with relevant EU initiatives is encouraged.

The Call aims to stimulate collaborative interdisciplinary research within the area of Computing and Hardware for ICT Infrastructures (CHI), including related low-level software. The research should be of relevance to present or future Swedish-based industry and to society. The following ICT-topics are included in the Call:

  • Next-Generation Wireless Communication Hardware
  • Accelerated Computing Performance
  • Energy-efficient ICT

Selected projects will be supported by grants of SEK 4-7 million per year for a period of 5 years.

The digitalization of our societies is the major technological and societal change of our time. Some reports indicate that it will impact our way of living on a fundamental level comparable to the industrialisation.

Large-scale digitalization will lead to massive amounts of data. Much data will be generated by sensors and small systems at the “edge” of the computing systems where time-critical data analysis might be done locally (e.g. in “intelligent” cameras). More advanced analysis will require aggregated data from many such “edge” devices and will therefore need powerful computing resources. Advanced data analysis will thus be performed closer to the “core” of the systems (e.g. in data centers). This process, together with the expected intensive “edge” device-to-device communication, will result in massive data flows. Advanced data communication is thus required. As many of the “edge” nodes are believed to be autonomous, mobile and/or in difficult-to-reach locations, there will be a corresponding need for very powerful trustworthy wireless communication systems.

A digitally transformed society will be strongly dependent on its computing capabilities. Data is controlled, secured and transformed into usable information through computing. Surprising results in Artificial Intelligence are mainly based on the recent combined availability of big data sets together with powerful computing capabilities to process them. Access to advanced distributed, trustworthy and application-optimised processing power will thus be essential for future computing performance.

The foreseeable future will include a billion new Internet users and tens of billions of connected devices as societies digitalize. The current IT sector is estimated to consume more than 5% of global electricity. Some studies predict an IT energy footprint approaching 20% of the world’s electricity usage within a decade. Increasing the ICT energy-efficiency is thus both an important sustainability goal as well as a technological requirement for many systems to function properly.

Last day to apply is mars 3  2020, 14:00 CET at the latest.

Get the call to SSF-CHI here!

For more information, please contact:

Scientific Secretary Jonas Bjarne, jonas.bjarne@strategiska.se, 073 – 358 1673 

or

Research Programmes Manager Joakim Amorim, joakim.amorim@strategiska.se, 08 – 505 81 665