UNICORN partners attended the ICT 2018 Conference in Vienna, where 6 plenary sessions on topics such as Artificial Intelligence, Next Generation Internet, Digital Skills and High-Performance Computing took place.

What is more speakers from policy circles, academia, civil society and industry highlighted their perspectives and priorities, and discussed how each can contribute to the successful digital transformation of Europe.

Our consortium partners had the chance to attend the conference in Vienna where they promoted UNICORN’s validation contest to the public. Find more information on the contest here

It is with great pleasure that today, we are officially launching the UNICORN VALIDATION CONTEST for start-ups/SMEs. Twelve applicants among participants will be selected and receive a 10,000 € validation contract, with which they will validate the Unicorn platform.

Participants will make use of the platform in order to develop their own applications as from April to October 2019, to test and validate the platform by developing their own software or use-cases using the UNICORN framework.

During the development phase, participants will have access to the UNICORN platform and to all the resources needed for a successful validation including Cloud hosting services, and UNICORN training and examples, among others.

Meanwhile they will have the opportunity to attend related events and get trained by UNICORN experts where they will also get the chance to demonstrate their progress and results and get introduced to the Start-up Europe entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The call of participation will be officially closed by the end of February 2019!

Don’t think about it twice! Hurry up and fill in the participation form that you will find here! http://unicorn-project.eu/index.php/contest/.

The UNICORN consortium wishes Good luck to all participants!

UNICORN attends today Dockercon Technology conference, where customers and community come to learn, share and connect with each other. Attendees are a mix of developers, systems admins, architects, and IT decision makers.

Our partner from SUIT5 is attending and will disseminate UNICORN in the conference by presenting its product and what it has to offer.

You can find more on the event here

Partners from the Cloud Incubator HUB of the UPCT attended South Summit 2018 on October the 3rd. South Summit is one of the largest startups and innovation fairs in Spain, and in this edition the numbers were beyond expectations 650+ investors, 3500+ startups participated and $1.4+ billion raised.

UPCT partners were able to contact some of the startups attending the fair, and described in detail the UNICORN platform and the double opportunity it offers: on the one hand, utilizing a beyond-state-of-the-art cloud computing platform that simplifies (1) the deployment and orchestration of micro-services based applications, (2) the continuous monitoring and reporting of several parameters related to application performance, and (3) the detection of intrusions and cyber attacks by continuously supervising network activity in order to detect attack patterns; and on the other hand, participating in UNICORN validation contest to get one of the twelve 10.000€ validation contracts we offer, which will allow them to have early access to the platform and to the experts who develop it.“

A CWA is an agreement developed and approved in a CEN Workshop; the latter is open to the direct participation of anyone with an interest in the development of the agreement. From Unicorn the partners who will get involved are UCY, CAS, UBITEC, SUIT5 and the Cloud Incubator HUB.

CWA is not formally a European standard and involves no obligation at national level, but it is much faster and flexible in its production as well as an essential step towards the development of the European standard.
The CWA will allow UNICORN project to faster and better use the project results, as it increases the interoperability and enables the comparison of UNICORN’s outcomes with the products that already exist in the market. Lastly this will help the project to better disseminate its results to a wider community.

The kick-off meeting in Athens led by DIN will focus on introducing the CEN and the workshop concept, the election and appointment of the workshop Chair and Vice chair, while also the project plan will be adopted, and future actions and meetings will be discussed

Unicorn consortium is holding its plenary meeting in Athens on 8th and 9th November 2018, and its hosted by Ubitech. Apart from the usual talks such as the status of the project and the status of current deliverables, partners will also participate in interesting workshops such as the Workshop on communication roadmap which will be organised by European DIGITAL SME Alliance and FORTH.

Additionally, the consortium partners will kick-off its further standardisation activities with the launch of the CEN Workshop Agreement on the Analytics Insights and Scaling Policies for Microservices. The activity is led by UNICORN partner DIN.

Lastly, the final preparations of the Idea Innovation contest will take place, and the responsible partners (UCY, UBITECH, CINCUBATOR, DIGITAL SME) will be setting up the technical infrastructure for the contest, planning the communication activities, etc.