The extreme growth and adoption of Social Media, in combination with their poor governance and the lack of quality control over the digital content being published and shared, has led information veracity to a continuous deterioration. Current approaches entrust content verification to a single centralised authority, lack resilience towards attempts to successfully “game” verification checks, and make content verification difficult to access and use. In response, SocialTruth’s ambition is to create an open, democratic, pluralistic and distributed ecosystem that allows easy access to various verification services (both internal and third-party), ensuring scalability and establishing trust in a completely decentralized environment. The distinctive advantages are: a) avoidance of vendor lock-in through access to configurable combinations of various content analytics and verification services (with support for text, image and video content) via standard Application Programming Interfaces; b) distributed trust and reputation establishment powered by blockchain technology, ensuring immutability and auditability, revealing information cascades and empowering an information veracity observatory; c) integration of lifelong learning approach for detection of new paradigms of fake news; d) easy interaction through a Digital Companion that allows convenient everyday access of individual users to verification services from within their browsers. SocialTruth will benefit: a) Individual users to verify the validity of Social Media content and prevent misinformation spread; b) Media organisations, content authors and journalists to boost their investigative capabilities by enabling improved cross-checking of various multimedia information sources; c) Search engines, Social Media platforms and e-advertising networks to improve information veracity and contribute into a more sustainable and quality-oriented web and social media ecosystem.

Artificial Intelligence is a disruptive technology of our times with expected impacts rivalling those of electricity or printing. Resources for innovation are currently dominated by giant tech companies in North America and China. To ensure European independence and leadership, we must invest wisely by bundling, connecting and opening our AI resources. AI4EU will efficiently build a comprehensive European AI-on-demand platform to lower barriers to innovation, to boost technology transfer and catalyse the growth of start-ups and SMEs in all sectors through Open calls and other actions. The platform will act as a broker, developer and one-stop shop providing and showcasing services, expertise, algorithms, software frameworks, development tools, components, modules, data, computing resources, prototyping functions and access to funding. Training will enable different user communities (engineers, civic leaders, etc.) to obtain skills and certifications. The AI4EU Platform will establish a world reference, built upon and interoperable with existing AI and data components (e.g. the Acumos open-source framework, QWT search engine..) and platforms. It will mobilize the whole European AI ecosystem and already unites 80 partners in 21 countries including researchers, innovators and related talents. Eight industry-driven AI pilots will demonstrate the value of the platform as an innovation tool. In order to enhance the platform, research on five key interconnected AI scientific areas will be carried out using platform technologies and results will be implemented. The pilots and research will showcase how AI4EU can stimulate scientific discovery and technological innovation. The AI4EU Ethical Observatory will be established to ensure the respect of human centred AI values and European regulations. Sustainability will be ensured via the creation of the AI4EU Foundation. The results will feed a new and comprehensive Strategic Research Innovation Agenda for Europe.

SnapEarth will unlock new value, derive actionable service ideas on top of EO big data collections, and anticipate future priorities by leveraging cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence and Cloud technologies and tools. Thanks to an innovative cloud agnostic product, SafeScale that is already operational on Copernicus RUS project led by CSSI, users and service providers on top of SnapEarth will benefit, in a transparent way, from processing platforms and data collections provided by any of the future C-DIAS and any cloud provider. This cloud brokering solution is providing a performant, cost effective environment, also protecting their investment, for the future third parties which are building their own services. The major breakthrough of SnapEarth comes with a new data analytics service, EarthSignature, which aims to automatically extract semantic information from satellite imagery. The extracted semantic information will be indexed by QWANT search engine and then be easily accessible to a wide range of user communities. EO experts and third parties will be able to train deep learning processing chains using their database of labelled EO images. The database will be near real time enriched. Therefore, SnapEarth allows the market move from analysing EO Big Data towards realizing Fast Data. It makes possible to buy basic imagery analysis as a commodity – much like we buy foundation data today. Several user communities are ready to engage in this new approach. SnapEarth proposes already several pilots projects. The first one (EarthSearch) will boost QWANT number of users through access to this wealth of data through natural language. The second one (EarthPress) involves press users who are very interested having contextual data linked to news. The following ones are linked to several EO vertical markets: EarthClimate, Agri, and Food. The last one EarthSelf-service is dedicated to professional third parties in the same model of the DIAS but ensuring independence.

The Background to the development of the MOBIFREE project is the current mainstream mobile software ecosystem. This ecosystem is dominated by a small number of American technologies, which are known for collecting large amounts of data on users. They are closed-source and use proprietary data and standards, resulting user-‘lock-in’ and monopolizations of markets. Organizations in Europe are working to change this and to create a fair mobile software ecosystem that is pro-privacy and pro-openness, applying open-source principles and using open data and standards, contributing to digital sovereignty of Europeans. In MOBIFREE we bring together Europe’s leading organizations in this area to further develop Next Generation Internet (NGI) technologies to realize this. The Ambition of MOBIFREE is to support the digital sovereignty of European citizens and organizations by further developing open-source software that is human-centred and ethical, and by strengthening the ecosystem that provides these software solutions. The broader Objective of MOBIFREE is to scale up mobile software technologies in all four key areas of the mobile software ecosystem through co-creation and piloting with four key sectors of end-users, in order to improve the quality, privacy and openness of these software solutions, and create new business opportunities for the leading mobile software organizations in Europe making them. The Outcomes of MOBIFREE will include: • More freedom for European citizens and organizations, who will get access to improved human-centred and ethical mobile software solutions that build upon the outcomes of the NGI-programme. • New business and sustainability opportunities for the pro-privacy, open-source mobile software ecosystem in Europe and an expanding community of human-centred and ethical IT companies. • Europe’s top innovators in mobile software will be supported in improving, validating and implementing human-centred and ethical technologies.