At the 31st IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE / IEEE ITMC 2025), held from 16–19 June 2025 in Valencia, Spain, the auditorium for Special Session SS14: Cognitive Computing Continuum was packed and buzzing with curiosity.
This high-impact session brought together six major Horizon Europe projects — including ENACT, EMPYREAN, Swarmchestrate, MYRTUS, HYPER‑AI and CoGNETs — each re-imagining how intelligence flows seamlessly from cloud to edge.
Usman Wajid served as Chair and Ioanna Kapetanidou as Co-Chair on behalf of ENACT, steering the conversation with clarity and vision and underscoring how ENACT is pushing the state of the art in the cognitive computing continuum. Their leadership ensured the discussion remained forward-looking, strategic and anchored in concrete research outcomes.
Key take-aways from the session included:
- The importance of complementarity: Each project contributes a distinct perspective within the continuum — whether that is autonomous orchestration, energy-aware deployment or secure multi-layer architecture. Together, they assemble a more complete puzzle than any of them could alone.
- That dynamic discovery, AI-driven automation and resource optimisation are no longer just futuristic concepts but are now being coded, tested and scaled in real-world settings.
- The Q&A session was notably active, with sharp questions and insightful answers that emphasised practical implications over theoretical abstraction.
By hosting this session, ENACT materially positioned itself at the core of Europe’s strategic agenda for distributed, intelligent computing across cloud, edge and IoT infrastructures (the so-called cognitive computing continuum). The collaboration of these Horizon Europe projects underlines both the complexity and the urgency of enabling interoperability, trust and scalability within resilient AI ecosystems.
We extend our sincere thanks to all participating projects and speakers for their concise yet deep presentations, and for contributing to a session that set a high bar for engagement and innovation. Moving forward, ENACT will carry the momentum generated in Valencia into its ongoing dissemination, exploitation and research efforts — reinforcing the mission to architect the continuum, not just theorize it.