DISCOVER-US — Research initiative on Ubiquitous Swarms — large-scale networks of distributed, physical and digital devices and agents embedded directly into environments to perform sensing, computation, or actuation, at the convergence of ubiquitous computing and swarm intelligence

The DISCOVER-US project aims to (i) Strengthen long-term collaboration between the EU and the US by creating networking and collaboration opportunities to promote cooperation on new concepts and visions for the computing continuum, distributed computing and swarm intelligence. (ii) Facilitate brokerage events for on-going and future work streams in EU and US projects addressing the edge-cloud continuum. (iii) Implement research exchange and fellowship programmes to encourage and initiate collaboration. (iv) Create a EU-US collaboration support infrastructure consisting of various services: networking, brokerage, training, vision building, communication and dissemination. Content-wise, DISCOVER-US will focus on the following four key research topics for the collaboration. (i) Managing complexity through high levels of abstraction. (ii) New concepts for distributed computing, the computing continuum, swarm intelligence and edge intelligent things. (iii) AI-based concepts for self-organized, dynamic, and adaptive management. (iv) Collaborative programming frameworks and software development tools. By addressing these research topics, DISCOVER-US provides support and coordination for EU-US cooperation initiatives and the European priorities addressing fundamental research on new concepts for the continuum of computing, distributed computing and swarm intelligence to enable the emergence of technological developments in distributed computing supported by open technologies and platforms and through the coordination of complementary activities structured around the cloud-to-edge-to-IoT continuum. In this context, the DISCOVER-US project will boost synergies, experience and knowledge sharing and lay the groundwork for creating EU-US collaborative activities and address the selected European priorities for strengthening the European distributed computing research ecosystem by identifying a set of best practices and research models that will facilitate the replication of results, thus improving the overall impact of the simultaneously ongoing transatlantic activities. The project will run for 35 months.