A European research roadmap for optimizing societal impact of big data on environment and energy efficiency

Abstract— We present a roadmap to guide European research efforts towards a socially responsible big data economy that maximizes the positive impact of big data in environment and energy efficiency. The goal of the roadmap is to allow stakeholders and the big data community to identify and meet big data challenges, and to proceed with a shared understanding of the societal impact, positive and negative externalities, and concrete problems worth investigating. It builds upon a case study focused on the impact of big data practices in the context of Earth Observation that reveals both positive and negative effects in the areas of economy, society and ethics, legal frameworks and political issues. The roadmap identifies European technical and non-technical priorities in research and innovation to be addressed in the upcoming five years in order to deliver societal impact, develop skills and contribute to standardization. Keywords— big data; research roadmap; societal impact; environment; earth observation; energy efficiency I. INTRODUCTION ICT and particularly Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are now being intensively applied when addressing energy efficiency challenges: they range from already traditional systems performing automation to the ones addressing more innovative aspects, for example, behavioral change [1]. What is common in such systems is that the use of IoT solutions leads directly to the generation of Big Data of various kinds: building and transport data, environment data, context data, user data [2]. Consequently, Big Data, commonly characterized by its volume, velocity, variety, variability, and veracity [3], create a large societal impact in general, and in particular in the energy efficiency, sustainability and environment sectors. Issues to address comprise ethical considerations, data licensing, user data management, privacy and security, and open data publication among others. The use and misuse of IoT- generated Big Data are on the rise, witnessed for example in the recent news headlines about ransomware, i.e. electrical appliances controlled from outside and not by their owners. A growing number of projects and initiatives are investigating the effects of the publication of IoT energy and environment data as open data. As an example, the OpenFridge project has been producing and publishing refrigerator data as open data, and studying the user perception and possible uses of such data [4]. To ensure an effective data value chain, it is highly important to investigate interdependencies between different data sets. For example, environment data is a natural crucial enabler for energy efficiency aims. On the one hand, it provides information of the status quo of our environment, on the basis of which ICT tools for energy efficiency can be built. On the other hand, the same kind of data are to be used later in the evaluations and accountability of the taken energy efficiency measures. The goal of the present roadmap is to provide incremental steps necessary to maximize the societal impact of big data research on environment, and its related influence on energy efficiency and sustainability. It is aligned with a broader, multi- sectorial research [5] and policy [6] roadmap that has resulted from the Big data roadmap for cross-disciplinarY community for addressing societal Externalities (BYTE) Project, a three- years European project involving the research, industry and civil society community, and with the Big Data Value Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (BDV SRIA) that defines the overall goals and technical and non-technical priorities for the European Public Private Partnership on Big Data Value [7]. A community of research, civil society organizations and industry partners, has been built around the roadmap with the purpose of implementing its recommendations and best practices and further develop and update it. The community has initially focused on the environment, healthcare and smart city sectors. This paper is organized as follows. Section II presents the scope of the roadmap (research areas covered, time span and desired impact) and the methodologies used in the environment case study and roadmapping process. Section III summarizes the case study that forms the base of the requirements analysis for the roadmap, and Section IV outlines the research priorities, timeline and expected impact. We conclude in Section V with some remarks on the expect

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