Last month, ARMA-NL hosted their first Annual two-day conference in Lunteren, The Netherlands. Our founder, Paul Tuinenburg, went there to represent Impacter and immersed himself in the Dutch RMA-world.
Like every other event of ARMA-NL, you immediately notice the passion of everyone in sessions. A lot of interesting workshops about the future of RMA’s, the use of AI, best practices and in all these sessions lots of questions. The willingness of sharing insights and best practices is quite unique for the field since there are limited funds in the end. So, in a way, everyone is also a competitor, but the collective choice is made to collaborate which leads to the strength of the support system in the Netherlands.
Some highlights of the two day conference: obviously the session of Seán McCarthy about the way framework programmes are structured and how to write good pillar 2 proposals. Many of the important things in writing good proposals can be checked in Impacter! Relation to SDG’s, the link with other already funded research in the past and the easy to find references to the outcomes of a call topic all help to make it easy for referees to find the elements in your proposal. But in the end the advice is to start investing the time to understand how certain themes and call topics relate to each other before you start writing a proposal! Other interesting sessions were about useful tools for RMA’s. A wide range of tools was highlighted, including Impacter and our partners of ResearchConnect! Sessions about the role of universities of applied sciences and how collaborations between research universities, universities of applied sciences and medical centers could and should be improved. And last but not least, a very inspiring workshop about ScienceBase. A platform to visualize and benchmark EU funding for your institution in seconds.
We weren’t only visiting the conference to listen to all these wonderful presentations. We are also experimenting with integrating a LLM (large language model) into Impacter. By now, probably everyone knows about ChatGPT, but not everyone realizes that using that platform isn’t in line with GDPR and maybe also not the safest platform to use when still working on Intellectual Property you might want to patent one day. Therefore we are experimenting with open source versions that we can install on our own server, an environment we control, bound by the GDPR and bound by the same legal agreement we sign with all our customers. At ARMA-NL we reached out to people who would be interested in testing this new feature in Impacter. Luckily quite some people were, so we are now working on making this feature available to the first group of testers.
In short, the first ARMA-NL two-day conference was very successful with a great variety of interesting topics discussed in the workshops, a good atmosphere, lots of interesting people and a few testers for our new LLM feature in Impacter! If you are also interested in participating in the test, please feel free to let us know!