July 20 - July 23
Kingston University London (KUL), represented by Prof. Youngseok Choi, has been invited to present the COP-PILOT Horizon Europe project at EKC2026 under the track “Science, Technology, Human Values and Socio-ecological Future in the Age of AI.” This invited presentation will serve as a dissemination activity to share emerging insights from COP-PILOT on how next-generation digital infrastructures, including Edge computing, IoT-enabled platforms, and AI-supported orchestration, can be evaluated not only through technical performance indicators but also through broader societal and human-centred value.
The presentation will focus on the theme of Inclusive Development, reflecting COP-PILOT’s ambition to move beyond a narrow efficiency-driven view of digital innovation. While conventional evaluation often relies on Key Performance Indicators such as latency, uptime, throughput, and system reliability, COP-PILOT explores how digital platforms can also generate relational, economic, environmental, and public value across diverse stakeholder ecosystems. This aligns with the project’s Key Value Indicator approach, which links technical performance to wider outcomes such as stakeholder trust, data liquidity, socio-economic resilience, SME participation, sustainability, and digital sovereignty.
The talk will discuss how large-scale European digital infrastructure projects can support inclusive socio-technical transformation across domains such as energy, smart cities, agriculture, and manufacturing. The emphasis will be on how AI and digital platforms can be governed and assessed in ways that make social value visible, ensuring that innovation benefits are not concentrated among dominant actors but are distributed across SMEs, citizens, public authorities, and local communities.
By contributing to the EKC2026 discussion on science, technology, human values, and socio-ecological futures, this dissemination activity will position COP-PILOT as a practical example of how European research and innovation projects can address the challenge of building digital infrastructures that are technically robust, socially legitimate, environmentally responsible, and inclusive by design.
