For a completely working Digital Single Market, effectively enabling the cross-border exercise by citizens and businesses of their Single Market rights, Member States must address several challenges on delivering better services. DE4A is a Member State-driven pilot, aligned with strategic eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020 and EIF Implementation Strategy and with full regulatory compliance (SDGR, GDPR, eIDAS, Services Directive…), establishing a culture of co-creation, transparency, accountability and trustworthiness. Its goal is facilitating migration towards European Digital Public Services co-delivered across borders, across sectors and with different participants, reinforcing trust in public institution, and unleashing multiple measurable positive impacts on efficiency gains and reduction of administrative burden and costs. Starting from needs and capacities of Member States, DE4A’s scalable, holistic, flexible approach focuses on high-quality fully online procedures accessible through the SDG by building on an extended interoperability Toolbox and on state-of-the-art. It enables an open and comprehensive environment and platform for collaboration and innovation, leveraging common eGov baseline patterns for secure, privacy-preserving and trustworthy realisation of essential Once-Only and Relevant-Only principles, and with re-use of existing and new building blocks and Digital Service Infrastructures at national and EU-wide levels. Innovative technologies like blockchain, machine learning, self-emerging ontologies and zero-knowledge proofs will be addressed for effective sharing of common services. Pilots involving secure access to key administrative procedures of real life and business events, shall highlight aspects of the technical ecosystem available for the SDG implementation, prove their technical viability and gauge the performance and degree in which non-functional requirements can be accommodated. DE4A includes 23 partners and has a duration of 40 months.

The traditional media landscape is in the middle of a monumental shift: boundaries between professional media houses, prosumers and small creators are blurring, the speed of communication and publishing is increasing, audiences are seeking more user-driven and accessible multimedia experiences. MediaVerse (MV) is an answer to this shift: a decentralized network for intelligent, automated, and accessible digital asset management systems, where traditional stakeholders and other media owners can share, enrich, verify, and monetize multimedia content. With this, MV aspires to disrupt current practices of working in isolated silos, while enabling secure and traceable media exchange. An instance of MV can be deployed as a node in the decentralized MV network, and provides its users with a blockchain-enabled rights management solution, AI-powered identification services and smart contracts that automate cross-network rights negotiation and content monetization. Following the European way, MV aspires to help users create and publish content, while keeping control over the content shared. For this, several AI-driven features are implemented towards supporting automated editorial content moderation and identification, authoring immersive experiences, making content accessible, and providing actionable insights through social analytics and collaboration tools. Integrated content adaptation services ensure the distribution of the created media over several networks, platforms and end-devices. The project will be validated through large scale pilots in the field of citizen journalism and co-creation of immersive and inclusive media, foreseeing also a STARTS-inspired use case that involves artistic experiments and practices, pushing forward creativity for a critical approach to user-centric media.

CyberSEAS (Cyber Securing Energy dAta Services) ambition is to improve the resilience of energy supply chains, protecting them from disruptions that exploit the enhanced interactions and extended involvement models of stakeholders and consumers in complex attack scenarios, characterised by the presence of legacy systems and the increasing connectivity of data feeds. It has 3 strategic objectives: 1) countering the cyber risks related to highest impact attacks against EPES; 2) protecting consumers against personal data breaches and attacks; and 3) increasing the security of the Energy Common Data Space. All three objectives are equally important, since cyber-criminals are shifting tactics to favour multi-stage attacks in which stealing sensitive data is a precondition for the real attack, and enables them to maximise damage and profits (while traditionally infrastructure cyber-attacks used to be direct attacks to the machinery and typically targeted control systems, not data). Threat actors, especially large ones such as nation states, also carry out complex attacks that leverage supply chain dependencies, and this trend continues to grow, as highlighted in the July 2020 analysis by the Atlantic Council. Likewise, with the transition to scenarios where users are proactively involved, prosumer data is becoming more and more sensitive. To achieve these objectives, CyberSEAS delivers an open and extendable ecosystem of 30 customisable security solutions providing effective support for key activities, and in particular: risk assessment; interaction with end devices; secure development and deployment; real-time security monitoring; skills improvement and awareness; certification, governance and cooperation. CyberSEAS solutions are validated through experimental campaigns consisting of 100+ attack scenarios, tested in 3 labs before moving out to one of 6 piloting infrastructures across 6 European countries. Out of the 30 solutions, 20 will reach TRL8+ and 10 TRL7.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, the frequency of severe weather incidents has quintupled over the last five decades, causing more than 100 000 fatalities and 1.5 trillion euros of economic losses in Europe (EU). Consequently, disaster management capabilities need to be enhanced in this fast-evolving context. Robotics can play a crucial role to improve first responders’ safety and effectiveness in their operations. HURRICANE is a 15 partners multidisciplinary consortium aiming to overcome limitations that are still holding back these cutting-edge innovations from becoming a disaster management standard. HURRICANE will unlock the potential of UGV operation in hazardous environment, relying on enhanced vision capabilities and smart integration over a holistic, resilient and real-time situational awareness infrastructure that includes innovative UAV-UGV cooperation pathways (laser-based charging, UAV supporting UGV regarding route planning) and multi-technology communication infrastructure (5G, RF, optical wireless). Data-driven optimization models will provide recommendations through a user-friendly API to support FR’s tactics. Three complementary pilots will be implemented to demonstrate the benefits brought by HURRICANE solutions, in several challenging environments: peri-urban areas (Corsica), mountains (Alps) and wildfires (Andalusia). Last, but not least, EU-wide advanced training modules will be implemented to raise awareness among FR about these innovative technologies, integrating new operational procedures. At the end of the project, HURRICANE will show improved hazard management efficiency (60% operation time reduction, 95% false positive readout reduction), with reduced FR exposure to harmful situations, strengthened EU robotics industry leadership (5M€ of revenues and 50 jobs). In 2028, training will be provided for 100 FRs across 15 EU countries, aiming to achieve a total of 10,000 trained FRs by the year 2035.

High quality public services constitute the backbone of citizens’ social welfare and are also essential to a region’s competitiveness and business entrepreneurship. Delivery of high quality public services is instrumental so that society and its economy can function. Despite this, the future provision of public services faces significant social challenges, as stated in H2020 “Understanding Europe - Promoting The European Public And Cultural Space”. Key challenges include those due to demographic change and others, related to the EU´s continued search for a model of advanced economic and social development compatible with demands for competition in a globalized economy. All of these longer-term challenges mean that public service provision must be reinforced on the basis of more and better innovation, and greater efficiency and productivity. CITADEL will create an ecosystem of best practices, tools and recommendations to transform Public Administrations (PAs) via an inclusive approach in order to provide stakeholders with more efficient, inclusive and citizen-centric services. The CITADEL ecosystem will allow PAs to use what they already know and new data to implement what really matters to citizens in order to shape and co-create more efficient and inclusive public services. CITADEL innovates by using ICTs to find out why citizens stop using public services, and use this information to readjust provision to bring them back in. Also, it identifies why citizens are not using a given public service (due to affordability, accessibility, lack of knowledge, embarrassment, lack of interest, etc.) and, where appropriate, use this information to make public services more attractive, so they start using the services. CITADEL will be implemented and validated in four use cases in Latvia, Italy, The Netherlands and Belgium.