EMPYREAN participated in the special session “Dynamic Intelligence and Connectivity in the Edge-Cloud Continuum”, held in conjunction with the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE/ITMC 2026), which took place from 22–24 June 2026 in Porto, Portugal.
The special session brought together research initiatives working on the evolution of intelligent, distributed and connected computing infrastructures, providing an opportunity to exchange approaches and discuss emerging challenges in the Edge-Cloud Continuum.
As part of the session, EMPYREAN presented the joint work “Building the Association-Based Continuum: From Resource Isolation to Federation.” The contribution presented EMPYREAN’s approach to moving beyond isolated computing resources toward a more flexible, collaborative continuum, where resources distributed across heterogeneous edge and cloud infrastructures can be federated and dynamically coordinated.
A key concept presented was the Association-Based Continuum, which enables groups of heterogeneous resources to be dynamically organised into Associations and supports collaboration and resource sharing across different infrastructure domains. This approach supports the EMPYREAN vision of a distributed and autonomous computing continuum capable of supporting dynamic applications and services across edge, fog, and cloud environments.
The session also provided an opportunity to exchange ideas with other Horizon Europe research projects addressing distributed intelligence, connectivity, resource federation and the Cognitive Computing Continuum. These interactions help identify synergies between complementary research efforts and advance common approaches for future intelligent computing infrastructures.
EMPYREAN would like to thank the organisers and all participants of ICE/ITMC 2026 for the valuable discussions and the opportunity to present and discuss the project’s research with the wider scientific community.
