VEDLIoT Open – FAQs

This call has been launched on 1st of March 2022, deadline for proposals is the 8th of May 2022 at 23:59 (CET). Applications shall be submitted via e-mail to vedliot-open-submission@vedliot.eu.

Applicants for VEDLIoT-Open can be small consortiums or single participants of any size or type (legal persons, e.g., Universities, Research Institutes, SMEs, startups, or bigger companies). The organisations shall bring use-cases that involve AIoT, Edge or related technologies, covering application areas such as wearables, transportation, agriculture, smart homes, health, energy and manufacturing.

Legal persons must have a registered office in one of the eligible countries. Financial support will be provided to legal entities with a permanent Participant Identification Code (can be a provisional one at the moment of proposal submission). Eligible countries are the Member States of the European Union and associated Countries according to the H2020 rules.

Applicants are not allowed to submit multiple applications. If that is the case, only the first submitted application will be considered. However, submitting refined versions of one application is permitted and encouraged.

Proposals shall be written in English in all their parts in order to be eligible.

• Machine learning
• Artificial Intelligence of Things
• Hardware acceleration
• Heterogeneous computing
• Near and far edge computing
• Reconfigurable computing and run-time reconfiguration
• Energy and Resource-efficient system architectures
• Security and Privacy for IoT and Edge computing
• Federated learning

Indicative budet for proposals is up to 120,000 € (including 25 % indirect costs, at a funding/reimbursement rate of 70 %) . E.g., if your eligible direct costs are 88,000 €, the associated indirect costs are 22,000 €, resulting in a total project cost of 110,000 €. From this, you will receive 77,000 € as a contribution from VEDLIoT-Open.

In VEDLIoT-Open, eligible costs are personal expenses (staff, travel) and other direct costs (e.g. consumables, hardware costs) needed to implement the project proposal. Subcontracting can be foreseen as well. However, overhead does not apply to subcontracting. Durable equipment is not foreseen to be included in the funding.

The run-time of your project should be in the range of 9 to 12 months. Please plan for your project to finish in June 2023 to be aligned with the overall VEDLIoT project schedule.

Selected projects will be supported by technical VEDLIoT mentors, who will help to extend the
application ofuse the VEDLIoT platform to awith more extensive set of new and relevant use cases.

Selected projects will be supported by VEDLIoT technical mentors who will help to expand the application of the VEDLIoT platform to a wider range of new and relevant use cases.

Please submit your proposal as PDF to vedliot-open-submission@vedliot.eu, please respect a reasonable file size (< 10 MByte). The minimum allowed font size is 10, and the font to be used is Arial. The format provided in the template shall be respected, including the page margins (25 mm for left/right/top, 20 mm for bottom). Please keep your proposal concise and short, e.g., submitting a complete proposal with just 10 pages (or less) is totally ok, 15 pages (counting content pages only) is the upper limit.

The use of VEDLIoT hardware is not mandatory, however, it is important to show the suitability for the VEDLIoT project and the technology that is developed. Using the VEDLIoT hardware platform is an easy way to do this, however, third party hardware can also be used.

VEDLIoT hardware is not limited to CPU, in fact, we are supporting a heterogeneous approach, supporting CPU, GPU, FPGA, specialized ASICs, etc. Different Nvidia Jetsons (like NX, AGX, Nano) are also supported. You can for example test different hardware architectures/variants using the VEDLIoT hardware platform during the open call, and then develop your own solution based on this, if you don’t see a fit for the final solution.

Yes, that’s a good fit.

In VEDLIoT, there are mixed exploitation models. While some partners are commited to open source (such as, for example, Renode from Antmicro), some are using a commercial licence model (such as the EmbeDL optimiser). In general, the following rules apply:

During the project, you have free access to all available VEDLIoT technology you need for your project. Furthermore, everything you develop during the project is fully owned by you after the project. In return, we (VEDLIoT partners) also have the right to know your use-case and use results for our work in the project (i.e., for research work, not for business). We will also support you in various ways, for example, in porting your applications, consulting on different architectural or performance aspects, or with a hardware loan, depending on our requirement.

After the project, if you want to use any VEDLIoT technology that was not developed by you, you need to contact the respective partner. For example, if you want to continue using the hardware, you need to buy it, it will be commercially available. If you want to continue to use parts of the toolchain for development, which are not open source, you need to obtain a licence. There are no special royalties involved, it would just be a regular commercial relationship that would also exist without the open call.

There are no extra points if you apply as a consortium. We expect most proposals to be from single participants, given the relatively low volume of the call. However, we did not want to exclude small consortia, as sometimes it makes sense to apply jointly (for example, because the subject you are proposing is actually based on work carried out between multiple entities). So if you see added value in applying jointly with others, it may result in a stronger proposal in the end.