Programming tools for decentralised intelligence and swarms
26 - 27 November,
2025
Bedford Hotel
Brussels, Belgium
The event is organised by TaRDIS, OASEES, P2CODE, SmartEdge, and OpenSwarm projects funded by the European Commission under the HORIZON-CL4-2022-DATA-01-03 call.
Overview
Swarm Intelligence Projects, of the HORIZON-CL4-2022-DATA-01-03 cluster, address emerging challenges in decentralised intelligence and swarm-based systems for dynamic, edge-capable IoT environments. They focus on novel abstraction models, cyber-physical systems (CPS), and next-generation IoT, leveraging advanced communication paradigms, lightweight AI/ML, and neuromorphic computing.
The aim is to enable IoT nodes to self-organize, adapt to changing environments, scale efficiently, and ensure system resilience. These technologies support swarm applications by embedding AI/ML, facilitating collaboration among devices, and transforming sectors like smart energy, mobility, agriculture, health, automotive, and smart cities.
Swarm computing is key in a computing continuum, ensuring efficient, secure data management—especially relevant for trends like the Metaverse. Processing data closer to the source reduces latency, improves privacy, and cuts energy, storage, and communication costs.
Europe’s growing swarm computing community is vital for achieving digital sovereignty and building an open, inclusive digital society. Collaboration across diverse research and innovation communities is essential to avoid fragmentation and realize this vision.
Audience
The 2-day open event will gather private and public organisations as well as individuals active in the European swarms community, that are also actively engaged in several related research domains, such as artificial intelligence, ICT security and connectivity, or working on topics acting in those domains, such as interoperability, open source and ICT standardisation.
General contact
For inquiries: [email protected]
The attendance will be free of charge; however, it will be subject to availability.
Learn from and exchange know-how with the major EU funded initiatives and projects on data and computing technologies.
Showcase and promote your work within the broader European R&I context for further adoption, exploitation and impact of your project’s outcomes.
Establish liaisons and contacts within the swarms and IoT community to identify common interests and foster synergies and collaborations.
Learn about industrial best practices/use cases across several industrial sectors where European organisations are playing a significant role.
Learn about policy/funding plans priorities and help refining the plans to deliver the European Strategy for data grounding the Digital Decade vision.
Take stock on the progress of swarm technologies across sectors like energy, mobility, industries, logistics.
09:00-17:15 | Central European Time (CET)
09:00 – 09:30
Welcome and opening remarks
09:30 – 10:45
Swarm Concept
The word “swarm” has many meanings, each equally valid. In this session each of the 5 projects will introduce their definition of “swarm” to show the varied work that is carried out. The projects will set the scene for the scientific perspective that they have taken to present.
- OASEES: Swarm Concept and Enabling Technologies: Trustworthy Swarm Data and Decision Making via DAOs
- OpenSwarm: Between Low-Power Wireless and Robot Swarms
- P2CODE: Swarm Intelligence – Autonomous Collaboration at the Edge
- SmartEdge: Anatomy of a Swarm
- TaRDIS: Engineering Decentralised Swarm Systems the TaRDIS Way
10:45 – 11:15
Coffee Break & Demo Session
11:15 – 12:30
Architectures per Sector
Moderator
Dr. Monique Calisti, CEO, Martel Innovate
The purpose of this session is to introduce the different sectors the projects have contributed to, showing the wide variety of use cases for swarms. The various sectors that will be covered under this topic are: Industrial, Mobility, Health, Energy and Security applications.
12:30 – 13:45
Lunch Break & Demo Session
13:45 – 14:45
Success Stories
The purpose of this session is to celebrate the achievements of all projects by putting a spotlight on three types of success stories.
- Scientific success stories: Here, we highlight major scientific achievements, including foundational publications, scientific awards, and technical performance exceeding expectations.
- Impact success stories: Impact can happen through different means, including standardization, open-source contributions, education or policy.
- Exploitation success stories: Innovation is a research idea finding a market, and exploitation is the ability for the projects to serve as catalysts for that relationship. Here, we highlight both project outputs that have a clear path towards commercial exploitation, and the creation of startup companies
14:45 – 15:15
Coffee Break & Demo Session
15:15 – 16:15
Distribution of Processing, Latency, Energy Efficiency
In this session we look at the benefits of distributed processing harnessed by swarm-based architectures and systems, in terms of latency and energy efficiency. The presentations focus on the swarm-based enablers and the capabilities that they bring at edge environments, and which can reduce latency and increase energy efficiency in various aspects.
- Coordinating a Swarm of 1,000 Robots
- Orchestrating Edge AI Workloads Across Cloud and Edge
- Babel: A framework for developing performant and dependable distributed protocols
16:15 – 17:15
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
In this session we focus on the use of AI and ML enablers in a swarm computing environment, from different angles and approaches. These include, but not limited to, federated learning in swarm-based architectures, execution of AI workloads in resource-constrained devices, use of edge acceleration for enhanced ML processing, harnessing the swarm aspect for AI. Last but not least, this session discusses the role of Generative AI and its potential contributions, risks, challenges it can bring in the swarm realm.
- Flexible and Efficient Feature-level Fusion with Wireless Acoustic Sensors using Graph Attention Networks
- Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
- AI-empowered Swarm Solutions for Smart Health
After 17:15
Informal Networking
09:00-13:15 | Central European Time (CET)
09:00 – 10:00
Interoperability, Standardization, Open Source
Standardization is often perceived as an administrative activity with limited technological impact. In this session, we break this stereotype by going over the standardization activities done in the context of the projects.
- Building Decentralized, GAIA-X Aligned, Swarm-Driven Data Services
- Advancing Open, Secure Edge-Orchestration Models
- Impact and Standardization of SmartEdge Swarm Solutions
- Standardization Activities of the OpenSwarm Project
10:00 – 11:00
Cybersecurity and Robustness
This session presents the different cybersecurity enablers, tools and methodologies developed and integrated within the EU swarm ecosystem, and their role in addressing different emerging security and sovereignty risks and challenges. How swarms can enhance data privacy, fortify highly distributed systems and build open and robust tools to put EU in the front sheet of the global data economy.
- Securing Edge Data with Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE)
- Swarms for factory automation: design, composition, implementation, and verification
- Securing Intelligence in Highly Distributed Systems
11:00 – 11:30
Coffee Break & Demo Session
11:30 – 13:00
Future Directions
Moderator
Dr. Monique Calisti, CEO, Martel Innovate
The purpose of this session is to provide ideas on futuristic technologies that can benefit swarm computing the future.
- Scaling Intelligence and Trust at the Edge
- Secure 3C Network and 6G Communications
- Fully Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems
13:00 – 13:15
Closing remarks