GovSatCom conference for European Defence and Security

On 23 November 2016, the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technolohy (LIST) together with SES, the Ministry of Economy, Luxinnovation and the University of Luxembourg, supported GovSat in the organisation of the GovSatCom conference that took place at the SES headquarters in Betzdorf (LU).

160 participants attended in this event gathering users from the defence and security sectors, representatives from the European Union (EU), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the North Atlantic Treaty Oragnization (NATO), as well as institutional defence and civil security agencies, and national/international research and development community. The objectives of the conference were to promote the LuxGovSat program to its targeted security and defence users, to promote Luxembourg as nation pioneering, promoting and supporting innovation and integrated applications in the EU GovSatCom context. And last but not least, GovSatCom was aiming at stimulating the momentum and further development of an integrated application ecosystem in Luxembourg and the Greater Region.

In this framework and as part of it activities in the environmental domain, LIST was invited to participate in GovSatCom and was represented by Dr Lucien Hoffmann, Director of the Environmental Research and Innovation (ERIN) department. Dr Hoffmann gave a presentation during the panel on ‘Integrated applications and solutions’. The context was keeping citizens safe and healthy is a key concern for governments and a challenge which is constantly evolving. In this panel, the national GovSatCom perspective on areas such as crisis management, humanitarian aid and surveillance of civil protection, key infrastructures and borders were outlined. The evolution of big data was also be looked at in relation to secure data aggregation and dissemination, and high-performance computing systems. 

ERIN’s Director intervened on “Integrated space applications for environmental disaster management”, presenting the department’s approach of integrating the different space assets (Earth observation, positioning, telecommunication) to develop new and innovative decision support systems for the management of environmental crises, following for example floods, during their whole cycle. In his talk, he highlighted the need of a necessary infrastructure, including data centers and high-performance computers, to handle the vast amounts of data that need to be processed and visualized by the crisis management center.