So, thank you. I'm Aurora from the University of Murcia.
And I'm Michael from the University of Passau.
And we will be presenting the NGA Search and OpenWeb Search.U projects.
Two sister initiatives for a paradigm change in open search and discovery on the internet.
We will have a common introduction and then each of us will delve in the projects that
we are involved in.
The short disclaimer before we start, in the last two days at FOSTA, we have heard a lot
about personal lifetime projects.
This is quite different because it's not personal.
These are European institutions involved.
And it's not lifetime, but these projects, they are just starting up and have nice ideas
and require your attention and contribution.
So, NGA Search is a European project that will welcome entrepreneurs, tech-dates, developers
and socially engaged people that have challenging ideas about the way that we will search and
discover information and data on the internet.
So basically, we will find projects that are focusing on several topics that I will explain
in a minute and they are compliant with the European values of openness, transparency,
privacy and trust.
The applicants can be natural persons and organizations and they can apply individually
or as a consortium of three members of a team.
OpenWeb Search is a project funded by the EU and has the goal of developing an open European
infrastructure for a web search.
There are several research and computing centers involved and the project started in September
last year and has a time frame of three years.
It's quite interesting that it's the first project which is funded by the EU and has
the goal of developing Europe's own web index.
And for those who don't know, a web index is a data structure which allows the vast
access of web data.
It is the fundamental core of all current search engines and it enables the development
of all kind of web search and web data retrieval services.
So for us, let me present you the project partners.
We are Link Novene, Aros University, the University of Murcia, OW2, a funding box.
These are some of our phases.
We will organize five different open calls and we will welcome these innovative projects.
We will provide them financial support up to 150,000 euros and as well we will not only
provide financial but also technical, business and innovation support and the projects are
expected to take 12 months.
The first open call is already closed, the evaluation is ongoing and it was a technological
based call, meaning that we were looking for products, finalized products.
And then we will select nine to 10 projects in the topics that you see on the screen,
base voice assistants, NLP, semantic analysis, social computing and data visualization.
But let me delve a little bit more on the second open call topics which may caught your
attention.
I hope you can resonate with some of them.
The second open call will open in April, the first of April and it's a little bit more
research oriented but please have a look because we have plenty of space for everything.
And let me explain each topic.
The first one is power cognitive search by reinforcement learning.
Today we look for mechanisms of self-learning and all kinds of algorithms that can contribute
to our reinforcement learning system that is able to then with the interactions how
to choose the right data and algorithms in order to make any search more relevant towards
the objective of it.
Then the second topic is machine based data, Internet of Things data.
Today we look for algorithms for search and pattern discovery that are adapted or that
can adapt to IOT characteristics which means we will look for edge computing, times, algorithms
that can deal with time series, with events, with different localizations and so on.
We have also AI based taxonomies.
We look for the automatic creation and expansion of existing taxonomies that are machine based
and machine interpretable semantics by using AI techniques.
Basically we want to model the interdependency among new concepts so we want to adapt to
the dynamic and the dynamicity of the data.
The next topic is network analysis.
Basically we want to find other ways to create knowledge graphs which are an interlinked network
of distributed resources that can be searched.
We can do this looking for, the objective can be to make them more scalable, to test
the quality of the creative models, to create different semantics, to make them compliant
with diversity and dynamicity of data and so on.
Then we have AI based search tools and content generators.
As you know nowadays AI based content generators are quite popular.
Here I have some names that have been coming up in FOSM many times, check GPT, GitHub co-pilot,
co-PAI.
So we welcome projects that can help evaluate the privacy of these kind of tools.
Also look for research at the logical gaps on them as well as the completeness of their
answers.
Then we have the topic of ethics in search and discovery.
We want to have projects that specifically focus on testing that the developments of
search and discovery are compliant with human rights, that they are not biased towards
minorities, towards gender, so that they promote equality but also private, they are private
and they take care of the data confidentiality.
And finally we have new ways of discovering and accessing information, which is a broad
topic so that we don't leave anything behind.
How are we going to do that?
We are going to provide technology mentoring and advice on technologies to access store
managed data and also on algorithms and the platforms are tailored to the projects.
We are going to leverage the reach out beta testing platforms, a platform for beta testing
campaigns, then we are going to link the projects to different standards and promote
the conversations with different foundations that will be related to them.
We will have a program for market readiness.
We will create workshops for pitch training so that they can try to pitch their solution
or their project to potential investors and users.
Business modeling advice and coaching and as for innovation, we will give information
about which kind of open source license they can have, they can use, how to manage it and
how to make their research and their solutions reproducible so following open science principles.
So as to conclude for my part, the next three years there will be five open calls that will
challenge the way that we search and discover information on the Internet.
We have synergies with the NDI mission of looking for a more human centric Internet
and these are our core values, open source, contributions to the wider community, collaboration
and open science principles as well as transversal challenges that include sustainability and
equality.
I give the floor to my colleague.
Thanks.
So now switching to the second system project, open web surge.
As I said before, there are several computing and research centers involved in the project
and it's good this way because all of these have different competences like universities
or businesses and this underlines one specific point about the project.
In contrary to the web index which is operated by Google for example, this project does not
follow a centralized approach but it tries to build up a web index collaboratively and
distributed among several European institutions otherwise it would just not be possible to
build up a web index from scratch.
I will keep the motivation short because it should be clear why it is a good idea to have
your own web index in Europe, the first thing is the imbalance in the surge engine market.
There are four big global web indexes out there from big tech companies and this dominance
of these companies has a lot of negative effects on the critical infrastructure web
surge so to say and the solution is to strive for more plurality.
Another thing is that web data is a driver for innovations and an example, just one
out of many examples that has drawn a lot of attention lately is the training of large
language models such as JetGPT which works on its basis with web data.
The project goals are developing the core of an open web index so two remarks on this
point, this will be done with open source and open configuration and it is not expected
that at the end of the three years of the project there will be a production ready index
but the goal is to have an index which contains at least 50% of all text web pages and then
that can be worked on and that shows as a prototype that it is possible to create it
collaboratively and distributed among several institutions.
Another goal is to build an ecosystem around the index and make it publicly available in
this way.
As I said before it serves as a feasibility study in some way to show that it is possible
to do it collaboratively and that is why along the way it should be established a network
among European infrastructure partners.
The overall vision of the project is to give open access for innovators and businesses and
researchers on web data to enable them to build new business ideas for example or to
work on their ideas on web search and web analysis.
As for the NGI search project there are also ways to contribute to openwebsurge.u through
third party calls there will be three public calls with a fixed amount of funding and the
first of them focuses on the legal aspects of the project.
There are two tracks the first one focuses contributions on legal and business and social
aspects of web search in general and the second track focuses on the legal compliance of the
crawling so the acquisition of the data from the internet which is then stored in the index.
This call will open on the first of March this year.
There are also other opportunities to contribute which is covered by the upcoming calls and
this course overview of the architecture should just give you a hint on where these contributions
can be located so if you have an idea on how to develop a search and discovery application
this can be done for example as a vertical search engine on top of the web index infrastructure
or it can be a content analysis method which enriches the data which is then stored in
the index.
So as a conclusion the openwebsurge.u project wants to open up web search and strives for
more plurality to give new business ideas a chance and new alternative search engines
a chance therefore the project partners collaborate and build up an European open web index which
is then publicly available.
For researchers innovators and businesses there is the possibility to contribute either
by developing your own business model which sets upon the open web index or by involving
in one of the three public calls.
The first one of them as I said opens on the first of March.
So thanks for your attention and we open for questions.