On the 8th March 2019, the project “Aveiro STEAM City” was presented to the public at Teatro Aveirense. The “Aveiro STEAM City” project is a strong investment of 6.1 million euros with the financing of Community Funds of 4.9 million euros, resulting from the approval of the Aveiro City Council application to the “Urban Innovative Actions” (UIA) Community Programme. This project will bring to the city of Aveiro a new technological revolution, with the adoption of 5G and IoT (Internet of Things) infrastructures and technologies.
The Aveiro City Council application was one of the 22 chosen from among the 184 who applied for funding and secured a sinking fund of 4.9 million euros from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) of the UIA programme which is directly managed by the European Commission.
Aveiro is the only portuguese city with a project approved in the 3 competitions that have already taken place in the UIA Programme, and in which 55 projects from 26 European Union Member States were approved out of 768 candidates.
This project and this application are part of a strong institutional partnership, led by the Aveiro City Council, with the participation of Altice Labs, the Institute of Telecommunications ( IT), the University of Aveiro, INOVARIA and the Association for a Sustainable Development Studies Centre.
Altice Labs aims to develop in this project:
– An urban platform, central piece and aggregator of all the ecosystem information. The goal is to collect, process, analyze and share data and information from multiple sources. To achieve this, machine learning techniques and artificial intelligence algorithms will be used, also allowing the development and calculation of performance indicators.
– Implement and test the 5G communications infrastructure. With this network, Aveiro will be one of the first portuguese cities with commercial offer of 5G connectivity and the first where this technology will be available for experimentation. Some of the tasks are 5G radio planning, mobility services and 5G edge services, radio spectrum management and service management.
The presentation of the project by Altice Labs and our partnership, at Teatro Aveirense, was made by João Bastos, from the Technological Coordination and Innovation department.
At the closing ceremony of the session, the general manager of Altice Labs, Alcino Lavrador, stated that “Connectivity is also a factor of equity, correcting asymmetries of the past in access to information, and in the consequent production of knowledge. Thus, we cannot think of an urban transformation project, focused on Employment and Skills in Local Economy, without associating an intelligent connectivity component. This is, precisely, where the differentiation of this project is: linking STEAM Education – Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics – to a next-generation connectivity infrastructure: the 5G. This, in a Living Lab approach, where skills are acquired by doing and not just by teaching theory”.