Over the past few years, we have been witnessing an increasing presence and usage of wearable sensing and quantifiedself devices. The rise of embedded and wearable computing is expected to bring the next revolution of the Internet of Sports, enhancing fitness, performance health, productivity and safety as well as creating new jobs and opening new markets.
Nevertheless, at a European level, there is a recognized shortage of highly skilled researchers, scientists and engineers with transferable skills and entrepreneurial experience, trained in building IT platforms and service infrastructures capable of hosting innovative collective sensing services and applications. The RAIS consortium comprising 6 beneficiaries and 7 fully committed partner organizations, aspires to establish the core for a fertile multidisciplinary research and innovation community with strong entrepreneurial culture that will advance:1) wearable sport-sensing and quantified-self devices and accompanying middleware;2) technologies of Big Data mining and analytics that are needed to capture a broad range of users’ sports- and wellness-related information.The main objective of RAIS is to provide world class training for a next generation of researchers, computer scientists, and data engineers, emphasizing a strong combination of advanced understanding in both theoretical and experimental approaches, methodologies and tools that are required to develop decentralized, scalable, and secure collective sensing infrastructures and platforms. RAIS training network will fund 14 ESRs, 3 workshops, 1 Hackathlon event, 1 entrepreneurship event, 3 summer schools and a final Conference. To meet this goal, RAIS will focus on developing new technologies on Big Data Analytics on the Edge, Data Stream Processing, Distributed and Decentralized Machine Learning, Blockchain as well as Security/Privacy. These topics include important and timely research challenges with an immediate exploitation potential.