AMBASSADOR M18 review meeting took place at the end of May 2014 in Brussels, Belgium.

The consortium presented various achievements of first 18 months towards definition framework and project specifications, proposal of initial use cases and business cases, selection of communication protocols, definition of the architecture, work on models for demonstration sites or definition of scenarios to be deployed there.

For the next period, the work will be especially oriented towards continuous development on models and optimization algorithms, validating the architecture, deploying the solution on sites, exploiting the District Simulation Platform and organising several dissemination and clustering event.

The consortium also received a strong encouragement from responsible EC Project Officer and assigned Project Technical Advisor.

As part of the organisation of the University Day for Raw Materials, that took place on June 19 2014 under the Greek Presidency to the EU Council, site visits of EU and govermental representatives was scheduled in Lavrion Park’s Hydrogen building in order to disseminate AMBASSADOR project results.

Industrial Technologies conference took place from 9 to 11 April 2014 in Athens, Greece in Megaron Conference Centre under the Greek Presidency of the Council of the EU. More than 1300 people from over 60 countries participated in the event.

As a part of the conference the IndustryTech 2014 exhibition the AMBASSADOR project was presented. At a joint booth of AMBASSADOR and TRIBUTE projects Schneider Electric and NXP sensors measuring and evaluating temperature, humidity and light were exhibited. The stand was a success as it was chosen to be among 10 finalists for the most innovative exhibitor award.

The AMBASSADOR’s coordinator Alfredo Samperio took also part in the conference programme Section 13: Innovative technologies for energy efficient buildings where he talked on the topic of Analytics for customer efficiency.

The AMBASSADOR video was launched during the conference. The overall project concept is presented  by different project’s partners. The video is available in AMBASSADOR homepage.

For more information on the outcomes of the conference, please see http://www.industrialtechnologies2014.eu/.

In April 2014, AMBASSADOR team was actively participating in the 4th Workshop on the Impact of EeB PPP that was jointly organised by the European Commission with the support of the Energy Efficient Building Association. The objectives of the Workshop were to address innovation and exploitation issues in running EeB projects and explore potential for cross-project clustering.

AMBASSADOR possible clustering activities were presented in cooperation with FP7 projects RESILIENT, E-HUB, TRIBUTE, PERFORMER and ENERGY IN TIME in Session 3: “Integration and demonstration of technologies for EeB”. The presentation was led by Alfredo Samperio, the AMBASSADOR project coordinator, who introduced the projects by highlighting how they complement each other to ensure the widest impact. This presentation as well as all the other is available here.

The second AMBASSADOR – RESILIENT meeting was organised as a follow-up to the workshop that was part of the ICT for Sustainable Places conference, organized within the RESILIENT project in Nice in September 2013. This second meeting took place on February 20 2014 in the premises of Schneider Electric in Paris.

The goal of the meeting was to have two parallel workshops in the morning discussing together topics that are closely related to both the projects – energy optimization and district simulation. In the afternoon a wrap-up session took place in order to summarize the activities from the morning workshops and to plan next steps for the future cooperation. It was agreed that publications on the optimization topic will be exchanged between the teams and as a next step a common paper on different energy optimization approaches on district level will be prepared. For the district simulation an overview of component models will be performed and work on a common use case will be started. The recommendation for the best tool for district simulation for future projects will be also targeted as a final output of the cooperation between the two projects.

Following the first face-to-face meeting, that took place in Nice in September 2013, FP7 projects AMBASSADOR and RESILIENT are meeting again this time in Paris in the premises of Schneider Electric in the middle of February 2014.

During this meeting two workshops will take place, the first one dedicated to the topic of optimization and the second one focusing on district simulation. At the end of the day activity plan for following cooperation will be also discussed.

On the occassion of the M12 meeting, the AMBASSADOR team met at the end of November in Neuchâtel, Switzerland (November 27^th – 28^th 2013).

In this two day meeting, AMBASSADOR progress in individual WPs was discussed including discussions in specific workshops dedicated to e.g. dissemination & exploitation or test sites.

AMBASSADOR EAB members also took part in the meeting through teleconference, the overal project progress was presented to them as well as the first project idea on the exploitation strategy.

The meeting was concluded with the General Assembly meeting, where some important decision were made on the future AMBASSAOR progress and where the next meeting would take place (btw. it will be in Brussels, in the second half of May 2014).

In the framework of the 2013 PPP information days organized by the European Commission on December 16 and 17 in Brussels, a brokerage event on the first call of the Public Private partnership on Energy efficient Buildings took place under the coordination of the European Commission and the Energy Efficient Buildings Association (E2BA). During this brokerage event, more than 30 contributions were presented by attendees including project ideas and request for partners for potential proposals. More information from the brokerage event including project ideas is available at the E2BA site here.

Recently the EeB PPP Project Review was published by the Energy Efficient Buildings Association in order to present the progress of 76 funded projects within the EeB PPP under the FP7 calls for 2010, 2011 and 2012. The collection of projects illustrates the diverse research needs and the importance of developing all aspects of the building sector as we strive towards our 2020 goals for energy and carbon emissions. The research projects respond to EU priorities for new technologies and systems, materials, information and communication technologies and retrofitting methodologies in order to achieve energy efficient buildings. The projects demonstrate scientific and technological excellence across all levels from early stage conception through to demonstration of the potential for commercialisation.

Among others AMBASSADOR project is also shortly presented (specifically on p.42 of the Review). The document is available for download here.

The AMBASSADOR team will meet again at the end of November in Neuchâtel, Switzerland (November 27^th – 28^th 2013).

A two day meeting has been planned in order to discuss further AMBASSADOR progress as well as give the opportunity to the General Assembly members to meet and make some important decisions on further AMBASSADOR activities. During this annual meeting, EAB teleconference will take place as well as a workshop on AMBASSADOR dissemination & exploitation plan and a workshop on test sites equipment and its deployment.