iTRACK Kick-Off meeting

On May 10th and 11th 2016, representatives from each partner, came together in Kristiansand, Norway to launch the project.

The project is coordinated by the Centre for Integrated Emergency Management at the University of Agder from Norway and also includes three other research and academic partners, providing expertise on logistics, policy analysis and remote sensing: the HUMLOG Institute at the Hanken School of Economics from Finland, Delft University of Technology from The Netherlands and Teknova AS from Norway. The consortium includes two Humanitarian Organisations, the United Nations World Food Programme and iMMAP from Washington DC.

Five Small or Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) and one industrial partner are also involved. The industrial partner is INTRASOFT International, based in Luxemburg, an IT company which will be responsible for architecture and implementation of the integrated of the iTRACK software platform. Two UK-based SMEs are involved, Trilateral Research, a consulting company which provides expertise in privacy and ethical issues and K-now, which specializes in commercializing research based knowledge management technologies. Treelogic, an SME providing ICT based research and development in ICT is based in Spain, Teleplan Globe, an expert in secure communication systems, is a Norwegian company and ARTTIC, a French consulting SME, serves as the project administrator and lead the activities related to dissemination.

With 4 million € funding from the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Programme, iTRACK will build a distributed intelligent tracking platform that empowers aid workers on the ground to detect and react to risks and threats as they emerge.

This ambitious multidisciplinary project will last three years and its results will be implemented, deployed and tested in simulations with humanitarian practitioners with pilot applications with the World Food Programme and iMMAP in on-going conflict disasters in the Middle East (Syria, Yemen and Iraq).