FeatureCloud team at Egnosis

After four and a half years of collaboration in pan-European research and AI development, the FeatureCloud project team has finally arrived in Romania to hold its 10th Steering Committee meeting. For Egnosis, it was a great honor and excitement to be the local host of this meeting. We welcomed in our spectacular region leaders, researchers and coworkers of the project. The three-day stay amid wild nature surrounded by mountains boosted the team’s energy to prepare the final deliverables for the project.

About the project

FeatureCloud is an all-in-one platform to run, develop and publish federated and privacy-preserving machine learning algorithms. It envisions a future where doctors can easily and safely store, access, and manage primary medical patient data without risking a privacy breach. At the same time, patients will have full control and can change their minds about what information they want to share or keep private. The FeatureCloud platform implements a software toolkit for substantially reducing cyber risks to healthcare infrastructure by employing the first worldwide privacy-aware federated all-in-one approach.

Egnosis is responsible for the platform and app store’s system architecture and software development within the project. As Béla Bihari, CEO of Egnosis, stated, the main contribution of Egnosis is to bring its industrial and technical experience gained over the years into the research projects. He is convinced that building a bridge between the industry and the medical science world is, vice-versa, beneficial cooperation.

FeatureCloud in the finish line

The project reached its final year and the consortium is operating on the final deliverables. As Jan Baumbach, the coordinator of FeatureCloud, stated, “We are more than just on the track. We have shown that federated learning works in practice, and it results in some of the key problem points of training diagnostic and prognostic artificial intelligence models to be applied in medicine. FeatureCloud consortium, the whole team, all package leaders and all partners fit perfectly. It needs much luck to bring such a great consortium together. We have some key players, but even the minor partners did a tremendously good job to make everything fit together.“

As the scientific coordinator highlighted, they wanted to show that federated learning works in practice, delivers accuracy and reduces privacy risks, and they could also demonstrate this. Although the project has not yet reached everyday use in clinics, it is progressing toward that goal.  

Steering Committee Meeting in Romania

On 11-13 June this year, the 10th Steering Committee meeting of the consortium took place in Romania, in the stunning and nearest area of the Saint Anna Lake natural reservation. The location is very close to the Egnosis headquarters, so the event was a striking highlight in the company’s life as a Romanian project partner. “It is a deep honor for us to host this year’s steering committee meeting and welcome the FeatureCloud team at Egnosis. I’m also delighted that we are apart from the city noise and can exploit the beautiful nature while sharing our experiences and the project’s current status. I can already conclude that we will have productive discussions and results for the upcoming research and collaborations“, remarked Bela Bihari.

During the three-day stay, besides meetings and workshops, the committee took a chance to visit the project partner Egnosis and also Pro-Vitam, an important WP8 collaborator and local partner of ours. The FeatureCloud team had a positive impression of the city and the two companies, which were vibrant, modern, open-minded, and artsy.

The only thing better than welcoming the esteemed FeatureCloud team at Egnosis is the promise that they will return.