Winner of the Faculty’s Innovation Award 2020: Claudio Pica
Claudio Pica's innovations make the work of researchers and companies easier.
Claudio Pica receives this year's Innovation Award for his work on developing the SDU eScience Center, which he established in 2013. In this connection he ensured that Denmark's first national supercomputer came to SDU.
Over the years, the SDU eScience Center, led by Claudio Pica, has helped both private companies and research colleagues solve complex problems with supercomputer power.
As there is a growing demand for digital data sharing and processing, Claudio Pica and his team at the SDU eScience center have developed the UCloud software platform, which allows integration of supercomputers and more user-friendly apps, so that researchers without a background in computer science can program, analyze, store, share and process their data themselves.
– A good and ready-to-use solution for these everyday tasks makes a real difference, and it allows researchers to focus on research, not to worry about infrastructure, says Claudio Pica, who has 15 years of experience with supercomputers, continuing:
”I am very happy to receive this award. In the past few years, the SDU eScience Center team and I have worked very hard to provide innovative services for all researchers at SDU, including solutions for research data management, big-data analytics and AI. It is an honour to receive this recognition for our work.
Why spend time and resources establishing and developing the SDU eScience Center?
– I believe that the innovation we foster is making a difference for our researchers at the university level, but also at the national and international levels, both in the Nordic countries and the EU. We have started many new national and international collaborations based on unique solutions such as UCloud. As a researcher myself, these new tools make my work and the work of my group more effective, and they offer fast solutions to problems that would otherwise take weeks or even months to solve. But there is still a lot of exciting work ahead of us! All the positive results obtained so far are a big incentive to continue to innovate and develop ground-breaking solutions at the SDU eScience center, says Claudio Pica.
Recently, the SDU eScience Center has been the first of its kind in Denmark to receive an ISO27001 certification, which is an internationally recognised quality mark.
The Innovation Award comes with DKK 25,000, which can be spent on research or teaching activities.