Time Machine - Initiative for a joint European large-scale research project

How can you get involved?

What would the world look like if we could access documents from the past just as easily as we could access data from the present? Can we use it to make better forecasts for the future? Can the year-by-year, month-by-month records of harvests, yields and livestock be used to re-model climate trends and changes? Can historical 4D simulations improve our knowledge of European history? Which innovative business models promote tourism, transport and planning?

Time Machine aims to develop the big data of the past, a huge distributed digital information system mapping the European social, cultural and geographical evolution across times. This large-scale digitisation and computing infrastructure will enable Europe to turn its long history, as well as its multilingualism and multiculturalism, into a living social and economic resource.

By pushing the frontiers of scientific research in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), Time Machine will strongly impact key sectors of European economy: ICT software, especially Augmented / Virtual Reality (AR/VR) applications; the creative industries; and tourism. Moreover, it will offer new perspectives in urban planning, land management and developing smart cities.

Time Machine will have strong positive long-term effects on European cohesion, economy and society, with concrete contributions to promoting critical thinking at all levels of decision making, to strengthening the feeling of European identity, as well as to boosting scientific and technological competitiveness, entrepreneurship and employment in knowledge intensive and creative sectors across the European Union.

Goals of this initiative

  • Introduce a series of fundamental breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ICT, making Europe the leader in the extraction and analysis of enormous sets of noisy, heterogeneous and complex data referring to our past and present activities and achievements.
  • Enable Social Sciences and Humanities to address bigger issues, allowing new interpretative models to be built on a superior scale
  • Be a driver of open science, as well as open (public) access to public resources.
  • Provide a constant flux of knowledge that will have a profound effect on education, encouraging reflection on long trends and sharpening critical thinking,
  • Act as an economic motor for new professions, services and products, impacting key sectors of European economy.

Key areas of action – the research and innovation pillars

  • Addressing the scientific and technological challenges in AI, Robotics and ICT for social interaction, for developing the big data of the past, while further advancing these key enabling technologies (Pillar 1).
  •  Designing and building the Time Machine operation, by putting in place the constituent parts of the Time Machine infrastructure and the management principles and processes for sustainable Time Machine communities across Europe and other parts of the world (Pillar 2).
  • Creating innovation platforms in promising application areas, by bringing together developers and users for the exploitation of scientific and technological achievements, and therefore leveraging the cultural, societal and economic impact of Time Machine (Pillar 3).
  • Developing favourable framework conditions for the outreach to all critical target groups, and for guiding and facilitating the uptake of research results produced in the course of the initiative (Pillar 4).

More information can be found at: www.timemachine.eu

Why should you get involved?

  • Contribute: As part of the Time-Machine consortium, you have the opportunity to contribute to the research roadmap for a large scale research program.
  • Get first-hand knowledge: As part of a network of over 300 well renowned European research institutions, business enterprises and associations, you will have direct access to key players and first-hand information.
  • Giving cultural heritage a political voice: The Time Machine is making cultural heritage and digitality politically visible and strengthen the awareness of decision-makers at local, state, federal and EU level for this topic and for the institutions involved.

How can you get involved?

Individual support: Individuals can register as "endorsers" and are named on the European Consortium's website and included in the information distribution list.

Support as an institution: Institutions can register as consortium members by: https://timemachine.eu/accession/ 

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