Due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation, the organization of co-location meetings has been prevented and all events during 2020 were online.

2nd Plenary Meeting (16-17 May 2019)

The second EOPEN Plenary meeting was held on 16-17 May 2019 in Thessaloniki, Greece. Among other topics, the first prototype of the EOPEN platform was demonstrated.

2nd Technical Meeting and PhiWeek (9-13 September 2019)

The first week of September 2019 the EOPEN project had a double presence in Frascati, Italy. The 2nd technical meeting was hosted by SERCO, while Space Applications held a booth during the PhiWeek at ESA, communicating EOPEN to the attendees.

Info Day (23 September 2019)

The Info Day was held in September 2019 in Venice, where AAWA invited stakeholders from different public authorities, first responders, and technicians from many different authorities involved in flood management. During the Info Day, the EOPEN platform and the ASB service were presented. AAWA also provided an overview of the EOPEN services. At the end of the event participants completed questionnaires on the satisfaction of the EOPEN platform and the evaluation marked the platform over 4 on a maximum scale of 5.

3rd Plenary Meeting & participation to ACRS2019 (16-17 October 2019)

On the occasion of the ACRS2019, the EOPEN project has been the focus of dedicated sessions in which it has been presented and a live platform demonstration has been given; some stakeholders and a member of the EOPEN external advisory board were also present, showing their overall appreciation and enlivening the discussion.

H2020 Earth Observation Big Data Hackathon (7-8 November 2019)

The H2020 Earth Observation Big Data Hackathon was a joint event in Frascati, Italy, organised by five EU-funded Horizon 2020 projects that are developing cutting-edge software to process large amounts of Earth Observation (EO) data. Participants had the opportunity to learn about and gain hands-on experience with various innovative EO solutions being explored by the five projects: the EOPEN platform, the BETTER Data Pipelines, the CANDELA platform, OpenEO API, and PerceptiveSentinel’s EO-LEARN Python library.

External Advisory Board Online Seminar (28 April 2020)

After a successful second review, EOPEN has invited the members of its External Advisory Board to attend an online seminar on April 28, 2020. The video teleconference included a presentation of the project's progress and a live demonstration of the developed platform. The questions and comments made by the Board were of great importance towards the improvement of EOPEN.

ESA EO PhiWeek 2020 Virtual Event (28 September – 02 October 2020)

The EOPEN project was present at this year’s ESA EO PhiWeek virtual event, by hosting a side event on October 1st, 09:30 – 11:00 CEST, which presented the project’s achievements and also included a live panel discussion about the Digital Twin Earth challenge and how EOPEN assesses it. Moreover, an e-Poster about EOPEN was available online during the week with the opportunity to speak with members of the EOPEN project team. The e-poster can be now viewed at: https://eopen-project.eu/resources/

Field exercise (14 October 2020)

The field exercise was held online, as the foreseen practical exercise could not be organized due to the COVID-19, and demonstrated the platform and in particular the usage of EOPEN in the Italian use case, oriented in Flood management. Over 15 officers from several services have participated. During the exercise there were people with different backgrounds and experience in Earth Observation: from Veneto Region administration and Veneto Region Civil Protect Office, to municipalities and Land Reclamation authorities. During the event each participant tested the platform with a simple exercise; the storyline used was a reconstruction of the 2018 Vaia storm, so the participants could experiment the usage of EOPEN in those events. Many of them provided specific questions about the services and showed a lot of interest for the EOPEN platform and the algorithm we used.

Big Data Projects Final Event (19-20 November 2020)

A final event of the H2020 EO Big Data projects is being organized by the Project Officer. In addition to the 5 projects that participated in the joint Hackathon in Frascati last year, 3  new projects will introduce themselves. This event is mainly addressed to policy makers and aims to inform the European Commission and other stakeholders about the outcome of the projects. Participation is not restricted, but registration is needed:
https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/H2020EOBigDataAndAINov2020

Final review (3 December 2020)

The EOPEN final periodic review will be held virtually on 3 December 2020, with a duration of half day.

• Papers in Asian Conference on Remote Sensing 2019 (ACRS2019)
• Working notes paper in MediaEval Multimedia Evaluation benchmark 2019 (MME2019)
• Journal article in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
• Paper in 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2020)
• Journal article in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters
• Task overview paper in MediaEval Multimedia Evaluation benchmark 2020 (MME2020) (forthcoming)
• Article in European Research Journal (EuRJ) (forthcoming)

The H2020 Earth Observation Big Data Hackathon was just the beginning for fruitful collaborations between the EU-funded H2020 EO projects. In detail:

CERTH (EOPEN) and DLR (CANDELA) have prepared and submitted a collaborative publication with the title “Early and Late Fusion of Multiple Modalities in Sentinel Imagery and Social Media Retrieval”.

A joint exercise will be supported by Fraunhofer IAIS (BETTER) and CERTH (EOPEN) in the final BETTER Hackathon on October 29th, 13:30 – 17:30 CET. This step-by-step exercise will involve the conversion of Tweets to RDF for ingestion by SANSA for semantic geo-clustering and visualization. Registration is now open.

A pipeline is currently being implemented by CERTH (EOPEN) and DEIMOS and ETH (BETTER) that exploits Twitter data in order to identify locations of earthquakes and use the information to trigger EO data analysis. A joint publication is also foreseen.

The special session “Multimodal Analysis and Retrieval of satellite images” (MULTISAT2021) will be organized by CERTH (EOPEN) during the 27th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling in Prague, Czech Republic, and its programme committee includes people from EOPEN, BETTER, CANDELA, and openEO.

Furthemore, the coupled use of (H2020) MOSES ONDA-DIAS & EOPEN for in-season crop water demand monitoring in Andalusia, Spain will be displayed in a short promotional video to be issued next month.