Fourth TEMA meeting – 01 and 02 February 2024 in Salzburg
Sebastian Schmidt, Researcher at PLUS
On 01 and 02 February 2024, the fourth meeting of the European project TEMA, Trusted Extremely Precise Mapping and Prediction for Emergency Management, was held in Salzburg, Austria, as part of the European HORIZON research and innovation programme.
Hosted by the Department of Geoinformatics – Z_GIS, a technical partner dealing with the analysis of geo-social media data, at the University of Salzburg, the meeting was attended by 18 partners from Austria, Belgium Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
The aim of the project is to improve Natural Disaster Management with the potential beneficiaries primarily being Civil Protection Agencies and first responders. The main goal of the project is to create an integrated platform for managing and predicting emergency situations caused by extreme weather phenomena.
The Salzburg plenary meeting was used to discuss the progress of the project and identify necessary priorities. After a brief introduction by Prof. Bernd Resch, who hosted the meeting, in-depth discussions about the working packages were carried out. The meeting itself was then mainly moderated by Prof. Ioannis Pitas, who is leading the TEMA project on behalf of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
One focus of the meeting was on the technical architecture of the TEMA system, which is becoming more and more concrete, especially with the launch of the Digital Enabler, which will provide a central interface. In this context, Kubernetes was presented in detail as an orchestration tool between the software components. Consequently, a large part of the meeting was used to deepen the discussion on interfaces and data exchange. However, a lot of time was also given to the progress of the respective work packages, i.e. fundamental research. Developments in the field of generative AI and smoke modelling, for example, were presented in this context.
In addition, the plans for the case study scenarios were concretised. As part of the project, there will be trials in Germany, Finland, Sardinia, and Greece. The possible visualisation of the outputs within a Digital Twin was also presented. The usefulness of the data products as well as this final visual representation will then be tested in the trials.
On the evening of the first day, the project team gathered for a social event in the picturesque old town of Salzburg, where they enjoyed classic Austrian food, ranging from roast pork to apple strudel.
The second day of the project meeting ended with a visit to the iDEAS:lab, which is the outreach facility of the Department of Geoinformatics. Therein, countless workshops on topics of geodata, digitalisation, and artificial intelligence are held every year, mainly for high school students. For more information about the iDEAS:lab see https://ideaslab.plus.ac.at/.