2nd KATY Progress and Assembly Meeting

The KATY consortium met for two days of intense discussions on the project's progress and further planning

Being 30 months in the project, the consortium for the second time met in person for a packed two days of work package updates, focus group discussions and patient inputs. Hosted by KATY partner UEDIN, the meeting was held in the facilities of the Informatics Forum of the University of Edinburgh on June 12-13, 2023.

The work package (WP) updates were kept short as the consortium wanted to more focus on thematic group discussions of WP 3 "KATY platform", WP 5 "A unified framework" and WP 6 "Large Scale Pilot and Validation". Prior to the meeting, those three WPs were asked to provide demo sessions on their specific topic that were discussed afterwards in the plenum. The focus group presentations resulted in lively discussions and were considered as helpful to the whole consortium to understand the current challenges of each WP and its potential impact on others. The first day of the meeting was closed with the successful and appreciated format of "KATY Talks" introduced last year at the first Annual Progress Meeting in Rome. Four early-stage researchers presented on what they are currently working on for the KATY project or just gave a quick status of their thesis. This format was also highly welcomed by KATY's Ukrainian partner NTUU/KPI to talk about explainable AI approaches from a more general perspective since, for VISA reasons, they were not able to attend the meeting in-person.

The second day of the gathering was dedictated to patient organisations and their involvement as stakeholders in cancer research. To exlpoit potential aspects of engagements in the KATY project, hosting partner UEDIN brought together representatives from the International Kidney Cancer Coalition (IKCC), Action Kidney Cancer (AKC, UK) and Das Lebenshaus (DL, Germany) to discuss the current management of metastatic kidney cancer, the patients' perspective on management priorities and an overview of the current progress of KATY with patient and clinician feedback. After fruitful and insightful discussions it was agreed to schedule further meetings in the future with patient advocacy groups to discuss the patient requirements from KATY in more detail.

The meeting closed with an internal session on Project Exploitation & IP Management which becomes more and more important with the project proceeding to early identify items and issues needed for impact maximisation and how to finally commercialise the KATY platform. With this regard, an Exlpoitation Committee was appointed to continue with the exploitation strategy in a more decisive panel.

Overall, the KATY project is on track with its implementation without major delays and is looking forward towards to the delivery of the system prototype.