In collaboration with a consortium of EU partners, researchers from Insight@UCD, will design and implement a digital marketplace for efficient and secure data trading within the EU. You can read about it in TechCentral.ie here.

The SEDIMARK (Secure Decentralised Intelligent Data Marketplace) project will contribute towards the goals of the recent EU Data Strategy, which aims to position the EU as the world’s leading data hub, promoting innovation in business, research and education. A key challenge identified within the EU Data strategy is that data often remains siloed within organisations, who are reluctant to make their data available within centralised marketplaces, where they are unlikely to retain full control. As such, the data remains mostly unavailable to the entities who are best positioned to extract value from it.

SEDIMARK will develop a decentralised data market platform integrating cutting-edge technologies like blockchain, enabling trustworthy security and data governance for data providers, while advanced techniques in distributed machine learning will provide consumers with both the assurance of high quality data, and secure, trusted, on-demand computation of analytics. The project will see test usage within a number of industrial and governmental organisations across the EU, including the smart city initiatives of Santander (Spain) and Helsinki (Finland), energy (Mytilinaios) and water (EasyGlobalMarket) utility companies.

Researchers at the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, UCD, led by Professor Aonghus Lawlor, Assoc. Prof. Neil Hurley, and Dr. Elias Tragos, will contribute their expertise in machine learning, recommender systems and system architecture, to the design and implementation of the SEDIMARK marketplace. The SEDIMARK project will run for three years, and is expected to create at least 4 new research positions within Insight at University College Dublin. The Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics is a joint initiative between researchers at UCD, NUI Galway, UCC, DCU and other partner institutions. The €150 million research centre is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and a wide range of industry partners.

Dr. Aonghus Lawlor, speaking at the project kick-off meeting in Santander, Spain, said that “the Sedimark consortium brings together diverse research expertise from across the EU. At Insight, we’re excited to be contributing our expertise in distributed machine learning and recommender systems towards the goal of creating a viable privacy-preserving decentralised data space for Europe.”

Assoc. Prof. Neil Hurley remarked, “In today’s data driven economy, there is a growing need to streamline the process by which industrial and governmental entities can make their datasets available to one another. While the EU’s data remains siloed within individual organisations, its potential for data-driven growth remains deeply constrained. The benefits that SEDIMARK will introduce through its use of blockchain data governance and distributed data analytics could be enormous.”

SEDIMARK is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe framework under the grant agreement no. 101070074. Researchers from a diverse set of research institutions and companies across the EU will participate within the project. These partners include Insight UCD, Universidad de Cantabria (Spain), INRIA (France), Fondazione LINKS (Italy), ATOS (Spain), Siemens (Romania), Mytilinaios (Greece), Easy Global Market (France), WINGS ICT Solutions (Greece), Ayuntamiento de Santander (Spain), the University of Surrey (UK) and Forum Virium Helsinki (Finland). Learn more on the project website here: https://sedimark.eu/