Digital Public Service News

On November 20 and 21, 2024, the first Base4NFDI user conference took place at Fraunhofer FOKUS in Berlin, with almost 200 international guests from the NFDI community. The conference was organized by Base4NFDI, an initiative for the joint development and provision of research data management (RDM)-capable services.

Prof. Dr. Nassrin Hajinejad, research associate at our Competence Center Public IT (ÖFIT), has accepted a professorship in media informatics at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (HTW) as of 1 October 2024. Her work will focus on the application of information and communication technologies in the areas of Smart City, Smart Country and Smart Society.

The application centre “Artificial Intelligence for Municipal Solutions (AZ KI4KL)” will be established in the city of Gelsenkirchen by the end of 2025 – Fraunhofer FOKUS contributes its scientific and technological expertise.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being incorporated into industrial applications. However, AI largely acts as a black box: the calculations are often opaque to users – resulting in a lack of trust. The European research project XMANAI, involving Fraunhofer FOKUS and 14 other partners, has therefore broadened the view into AI and made its decision-making processes comprehensible.

Supporting evidence-based policy making with technologies for data analysis and co-creation: This was the aim of the EU project DECIDO, which developed a portal featuring cloud-based tools for linking public policies and datasets. DECIDO also empowered citizen engagement in this process and underwent testing by public authorities in Italy, Finland, Spain, and Greece. With the project now completed, its outcomes are being disseminated freely on an open-source platform.

The Horizon Europe project ODEON was launched in January 2024: 34 organisations from across Europe collaborate to develop an ecosystem for the digital energy transition. The objective is to enable a fair and secure exchange of data between all actors in the energy value chain - and to develop data-based smart energy services on this foundation while making them flexibly available. As a project partner, we are contributing our expertise in data management and creating a marketplace for energy data based on piveau®.

From research to application: In the EU project AI-DAPT, which was launched at the beginning of January, 18 European project partners develop data-centred solutions for the entire life cycle of artificial intelligence (AI) in practical use. The services enable the automation of intelligent data AI pipelines – from data acquisition to the development of AI models and their execution. The AI-DAPT solutions will be tested in the fields of healthcare, robotics, energy and manufacturing.

How do activities, professional requirements, working methods and work culture change as a result of the digitalisation of the public sector? Which competences and qualifications will be increasingly important in the future? How must successful qualification 4.0, suitable learning and teaching for the public sector be designed? These questions were addressed by the “Qualifica Digitalis” project - a project of the IT Planning Council under the leadership of the Senator for Finance of the State of Bremen. The results of the project have now been published in five comprehensive volumes.

Submit applications simply online: this has also been possible for chambers of tax advisors since September 2023 As part of the Online Access Act, a portal has been created that bundles the administrative services of the chambers and is the point of contact for the communicative needs of the connected chambers of tax consultants. Tax consultant chambers and their examination centres can use the central portal to accept applications, authorisations and licences.

The Digital Public Services business unit has already cooperated with the Low-Code Association e.V. on several occasions. Since 9 November 2023, Fraunhofer FOKUS, represented by our group head Nadja Menz, is now also an official member of the association.