It is with great pride and joy that we announce that on August 19, 2025, Dr. Péter Antal, Associate Professor at the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Systems Design, Head of the Artificial Intelligence Research Group and the Bioinformatics Laboratory, and one of our company’s lead researchers, was honored with the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary (civilian division). This prestigious award not only recognizes his individual achievements but also highlights the scientific and innovative spirit that defines E-Group’s work.
Dr. Péter Antal is a respected lecturer at the BME Department of Artificial Intelligence and Systems Design, where he teaches key subjects such as bioinformatics, intelligent data analysis and decision support, and trustworthy artificial intelligence. Through his expertise and dedication, he introduces future generations of engineers to cutting-edge technologies.
His relationship with E-Group has a long and fruitful history. He has collaborated with us on several successful university-industry projects, including partnerships with the University of Veterinary Medicine and the SEFA project. Since December 2024, alongside his academic position, he has been strengthening our company as a part-time researcher. He actively contributes to research and development as well as business development, and currently, as a lead researcher in our FedEU.ai project, he applies his unparalleled experience in the fields of federated learning and artificial intelligence.
European-level recognition: IPCEI qualification for E-Group’s FedEU.ai project
In addition to Dr. Antal’s decoration, we can also share another significant achievement closely tied to his work. The European Commission has approved that seven member states – including Hungary – will provide a total of €1.2 billion in funding for an Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI) in the field of cloud-edge technologies.
The initiative, called Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (CIS), aims to create an interoperable and open-access European data processing ecosystem. Among the 19 highly innovative projects selected is E-Group’s FedEU.ai development. This project addresses one of the global challenges of artificial intelligence: the problem of large-scale access to data and its secure processing. The vision of FedEU.ai is to create a federated, privacy-preserving cloud-edge AI continuum in which data, algorithms, and analyses are completely decoupled, enabling secure and sovereign data analytics.
E-Group’s role in shaping the technologies of the future
E-Group has nearly 30 years of experience in the fields of trust services and intelligent data management. Building on our deep academic roots and knowledge-based innovations, we now focus on developing federated, distributed, and sovereign AI platforms.
Within the IPCEI-CIS program, we participate in the working group dealing with intelligent and advanced data processing (AI cluster). Our FedEU.ai project aims to create a scalable, cloud-native federated learning system and software framework that ensures the reliability of both data and models while applying advanced security and data protection protocols. Through our innovation, the development costs of AI models can be significantly reduced, and data providers can access new business models for data reuse. We also place a strong emphasis on sustainability: with our proprietary protocol, we can reduce the environmental footprint of large-scale federated machine learning processes by as much as 25%.
The project contributes to the realization of the European Data Strategy, the Digital Compass, and the AI Act, strengthening the competitiveness of the EU economy. E-Group also actively participates in the 8ra initiative, further enhancing its European networks and innovation capacity.
As a lead researcher, Dr. Péter Antal plays a key role in this working group, and his expertise is essential to the success of the FedEU.ai project. We warmly congratulate him on this high-level state recognition and are proud to work alongside him in shaping the future.
Source: https://www.bme.hu/hirek/250821/bme-allami-kituntetesek