Discover Galicia: A Hub of Innovation and Tradition

One of Spain´s 17 autonomous regions, Galicia is located in the north west corner of the Iberian Peninsula. It covers 29,574 km2 and has around 2,700,000 inhabitants. It is a distinguished region with its own language and culture. Historically, Galicia strongly depended on agriculture and fishing until the 80s last century. Reflecting that history, the region has the largest fishing fleet in Europe. Due to this fact, the European Fisheries Control Agency is based in the territory. Nonetheless, today the service sector occupies more than 50% of the labor force. Industry is specially strong in agrifood, automotive, fashion-textile, shipbuilding, forestry, biotechnology and health. Moreover, Galicia has also become a significant tourist destination, with more than 5 million visitors every year.

The region has a consolidated innovation ecosystem with knowledge generation as one of its core elements. Three public universities, with their 8 research centers and 1.700 researchers, together with 8 private innovation and technology centers, articulate the research and innovation scenario.

Among them, one of the most relevant Galician private RTOs is Gradiant, an ICT technology center that has significant impact and support for innovation in the Galician ecosystem, through the development of digital and communication technologies and their transfer to industry and society. Gradiant’s national and international contributions include technologies for security and privacy; processing of multimedia signals; Internet of Things; biometrics and data analytics; and advanced communications systems. With more than 200 professionals and 14 applied patents, Gradiant has developed more than 800 R&D&i projects mainly in the fields of connectivity, intelligence and security. In 2023, Gradiant’s turnover reached 13 million euros, working with more than 400 clients in 30 countries over the past 15 years. As a result, it has become one of the main engines of innovation in Galicia and it is backed by a board that includes representatives of the three Galician universities and most of ICT Galician companies.

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Gradiant, along with other RTOs of the region, has carried out various collaborative projects in the field of Industry 4.0, contributing to the realization of this disruptive paradigm with technological developments in key areas such as artificial intelligence or cybersecurity. To this end, several lines of research and development constitute part of the organization’s core expertise, such as 5G/6G private networks, predictive and prescriptive algorithms, UEBA applied to industrial traffic for the detection of security anomalies, etc. The rich innovation ecosystem and collaborative approach among key players achieved in the region has enabled companies in the Galician industry, and also beyond its borders, to implant these technologies that have fostered their growth. Being able to derive value with the usage of these technologies from the vast amounts of data they can now collect, they have been able to make their processes more flexible and resilient. Moreover, little by little, they are also working towards new directions driven by the Industry 5.0 concept. The focus is now going one step further, not only focusing on process efficiency and automation, but also on concepts such as human-centricity, sustainability and resilience.

Notably in recent years, the use of Artificial Intelligence in industry has led to the development and adoption of solutions for predictive maintenance, process optimization, and artificial vision systems, for use cases both in the plant environment and in logistics aspects. The evolution of these AI models is key in order to enable their deployment at the Edge, given that requirements such as low latencies and low energy consumption, while ensuring data privacy, are critical particularly for industry use cases. Thus, the provision of solutions close to the industrial processes enable real-time applications and enhance the collaboration between humans and machines.

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The AI REDGIO 5.0 project is a great and tangible example of the positive impact of adopting AI and Edge Computing solutions in industrial companies. Specifically, in the case of the region of Galicia, it also demonstrates the power of a collaborative regional approach between a technology center such as Gradiant and a manufacturing company such as Quescrem, allowing the transfer of knowledge and cutting-edge technology to a real use case. During its 18 years of activity, Quescrem has always been heavily committed to innovation, by creating high-quality products for the food industry, the professional cooking and bakery as well as consumers. This commitment has led Quescrem to design and manufacture cream cheeses, mascarpone and other dairy products that are known for their creaminess, taste and functionality. The adoption of AI at the Edge will allow leveraging process data from its storage systems and real-time data from production lines, such as temperatures, pressures, nutritional characteristics of the ingredients, etc. This way Quescrem will be able to monitor the production process in real-time and obtain prescriptions of the optimal production parameters that not only minimize waste, but also enhance product quality, such as achieving a uniform cream cheese texture, improving the overall manufacturing efficiency.

Beyond the long list of benefits of adopting AI in the industry sector, it is important not to ignore the impact it may have on ethical and legislative issues. For this reason, different initiatives have been launched in order to ensure that the algorithms developed are reliable, transparent and fair. In this line, at the Spanish level, the creation of the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence stands out, with the aim of supervising, advising and promoting debates on ethics and security in AI. This agency will be located in the Galician city of A Coruña, a demonstration of the region's important role in innovative advances in this line of technology.

Moreover, besides the major role of research and technology centers like Gradiant, the implementation of the DIH strategy has brought together the R&D&I Galician ecosystem stakeholders, which are jointly promoting the digitization of the industry in those strategic areas defined in the RIS3. The aim of the plan is to allow the greatest possible number of SMEs to take advantage of the technology platforms and gain access to methods, tools, software and prototype solutions. Two Galician DIH have been labelled as strategic for the region and both applied to become (E)DIH, one of them succeeding to get it and the corresponding EC funding. Thanks to these opportunities the productive system of the region will have better access to programmes such as Digital Europe. Likewise, the collaboration with other European DIH and the benefit of their complementarities open up a wide range of resources available for companies in their digital transformation processes.

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Today, DATAlife is the Galician (E)DIH, which covers the agro-sea food, biotechnology, forestry-wood and healthcare value chains, and is expert in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, High-Performance Computing or Internet of Things. Among its members, we can find various and important organizations such as Televés, Vodafone, Zendal or Gradiant itself. The other strategic DIH, DIHGIGAL, integrates more than 450 entities from the food, automotive and shipbuilding sector to support companies in their digital transformation processes and to connect the technological demand of industrial companies with the technological and knowledge suppliers.

Finally, Galicia takes part in the Vanguard Initiative and ERRIN, two Brussels-based networks of innovative regions in the European Union. By connecting innovation ecosystems and sharing knowledge, Galicia is involved in interregional collaboration with other advanced industrial regions, stimulating innovation investments, strengthening open innovation and speeding up the introduction of disruptive technologies.

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