Following the Fellows - Impact Report from funded applicants to the StandICT.eu 2023 Fellowship Programme - 9th Open Call

This report marks the final batch #9 of the funded fellows under the StandICT.eu 2023 Programme. It shares perspectives of fellows that were selected and funded under this ninth open call. The ninth StandICT.eu 2023 Open Call was launched on the 15th of December 2022 and closed on the 15th of February 2023. The StandICT.eu Open Calls target European ICT standardisation experts contributing to the international SDOs, work groups and/ or technical committees at any of the priority topics, as taken from the Rolling Plan for ICT Standardisation. This Open Call identified the areas of IoT, Cloud and Edge as priority areas, in line with the StandICT.eu 2023 EUOS engagement in providing two standards landscape reports in these areas. The Open Call was, however, completely open for applications tackling a broad range of ICT domains (as encompassed in the ICT Rolling Plan for Standardisation) and treated as equally valid. In this funding batch, in total 40 fellowships were granted, tackling the five policy areas as defined in the ICT Rolling plan 2023: 

• Foundational drivers: 8 fellowships focusing on cybersecurity (5 fellowships) and on e-identification / e-Privacy (3).
• Key enablers and security: 12 fellowships focusing on Artificial Intelligence (6 fellowships), 5G/6G (3), Cloud (2), open source (1).
• Societal challenges: 5 fellowships focusing digital product passport (1), circular economy (1), eHealth (1), e-learning and skills (1), justice (1).
• Innovation for Digital Single Market: 7 fellowships focusing on blockchain and distributed ledger technology (4), semantic interoperability (2) and building trust (1).
• Sustainable growth: 8 fellowships: focusing on Smart Cities (2), Global standards governance (1), Intelligent transport systems (1), Smart grids (1), Robotics and autonomous systems (2), ICT Environmental impact (1).