ENCORE started its activity on the first of January, and the kick-off meeting was celebrated on January 24 and 25 in the beautiful city of Cáceres, hometown of one of ENCORE’s partners, Junta de Extremadura. During these two-days meeting we planned the work for the next six months focused on the creation of a clear concept that can guide the research and development activities of the first half of the project.
The first session was opened by the Directorate General of Architecture from the region of Extremadura, Mª Angeles López Amado, and after the interviews with local press, we held fruitful discussions about our main research issues: we talked about the convenience of LiDAR and photogrammetric technologies embarked in drones for the gathering of data, about how to engage end-users in the collection of data from buildings with mobile technologies or how these solutions could be used to follow-up the works carried out by the construction crews. We also figured out how Artificial Intelligence could support architects or designers for improving the workflows of BIM generation from Point Clouds or photo streams, or which should be the energy efficiency and comfort parameters to be observed by ENCORE in order to provide effective simulations to the end-users.
After an inspiring guided night tour through the world heritage city of Cáceres and a delicious dinner to recharge stamina, on the second day we celebrated the first workshop for the gathering of requirements. It was open to the participation of third parties, and our architect colleagues from INTROMAC provided a good bunch of interesting ideas. It was time for divergence, and more than one hundred requirements were collected from the perspective of all the expected end-users (architects/designers, constructors, dwellers) and the system itself.
ENCORE Kick-off Meeting Round Table 
The ENCORE Consortium
