Gdańsk Tech will spend PLN 55 million to build a cloud platform | Gdańsk University of Technology

On 19 June in Warsaw, Krzysztof Gawkowski, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digitization, and Michał Gramatyka, Deputy Minister of Digitization, opened a conference inaugurating the implementation of four projects in the field of infrastructure and cloud technologies selected in the KPO IPCEI CIS competition, which the National Center for Research and Development is implementing from the funds of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Gdańsk University of Technology will be the only university among the competition beneficiaries to implement the project "Cloud platform (CAISE - Cloud Artificial Intelligence Service Engineering) for the creation of universal intelligent services for various application areas", for which it will receive funding of almost PLN 55 million.

– This innovative project is intended to contribute to the development of solutions supporting the national digital economy, but also to increasing competitiveness in this area from a European perspective. Thanks to funds from the KPO (National Reconstruction Plan) and its own potential, Gdańsk University of Technology will have a chance to play a significant role in achieving this goal - says Prof. Krzysztof Wilde, rector of Gdańsk University of Technology. – New opportunities for cooperation with companies and universities from Poland and other European countries are opening up for our university.

The CAISE platform will be embedded in the TASKcloud computing cloud, which has been developed for several years and operates at CI TASK, which will be enriched with further open software, creating an environment supporting the production of intelligent cloud services and applications. The functionality of the platform will also be supplemented with services for the effective management of manufacturing processes and cloud resources, so as to minimize service delivery time and energy consumption.

The project integrates several key technologies: large-scale computing, cloud computing, large-scale data and artificial intelligence, including deep machine learning methods.

– Such an integrated approach will be used to analyze the content of digital documents used in public activities, in sectors such as justice, health care or education, and will contribute to the further digitization of these sectors and the improvement of their activities – says Prof. Henryk Krawczyk, PhD, DSc, Eng., project manager. – The CAISE platform will be implemented by the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics and Gdańsk Tech CI TASK, and will offer new categories of cloud services created on it related to document processing, such as interpretation of business notes in order to make the right decisions, processing of images available in DICOM format for recognizing selected medical problems or hybrid documents composed of text descriptions and images, for example automatic analysis of the structure of a book page - explains Prof. Krawczyk.

Thanks to the use of high-power computers (HPC), the possibilities of using deep learning methods and Big Data methods providing appropriate data for machine learning will significantly increase. The quality of both the provided data, machine learning methods and the entire process of producing intelligent services will be checked. For this purpose, specialized mechanisms will be offered for monitoring the process of producing intelligent services and the functioning of the CAISE platform.

Gdańsk Tech anticipates cooperation with four foreign companies in the field of creating multicloud solutions and three Polish companies whose task will be to fully verify the functioning of the platform. Thanks to this cooperation, real sector data for machine learning will be obtained and specific use cases will be considered, with which the comprehensive operation of the platform will be tested. Such verification is intended to ensure the achievement of the highest level of technological readiness and the use of the platform in at least three public administration sectors. It will be an original implementation of a cloud AI solution, constituting a significant product innovation.

The possibility of using the CAISE platform in a multicloud environment is expected to contribute not only to the development of the national digital economy in the area of public activities, but also to enable further digital transformation in these EU sectors.

CK STOS – one of the most modern IT centers

– The unique infrastructure of the STOS Competence Center will play an invaluable role in the implementation of the CAISE project – adds Mariusz Miler, Chancellor of Gdańsk University of Technology.

The STOS Competence Center was opened in spring 2023. It is one of the most modern IT centers in this part of Europe. The key element of the complex is a server room hidden underground, containing seven chambers. This is where Kraken - the supercomputer of Gdańsk University of Technology - is located. The creation of the center is one of the largest and most important investments of Gdańsk University of Technology in recent years.