As an interdisciplinary endeavour, the GREET network brings together leading institutions and companies in Cyber-Physical System (CPS), AI, software engineering and cognitive interaction research across Europe with the aim of training a new generation of scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs that will move Europe into a leading role in the scientific and technological innovation in Generative AI-driven CPS, its proactivity and explainability. Linking the leading academic and industrial partners in the above areas, GREET will form an effective and unique training network powerfully combining the best research training with a range of academic and industrial placements, specialist research and knowledge transfer workshops. It will develop and train a new generation of young researchers through a set of key research projects, developing breakthrough CPS systems and services that feature generative cognition, explainee-aware generative explainability, and transparent proactivity in highly secured CPS eco-environments. It will shape the delivery of training in the novel generative AI-driven CPS across Europe: delivering key insights into the science and models of the proposed CPS, setting up its scientific foundation, and equipping the DN’s recruited Doctoral Candidates with skills to drive the next innovative steps in this key area of generative AI-driven CPS. These steps include building a sustainable innovation ecosphere and community, disseminating and exploiting this new CPS’s learning and understanding of the eco-internals, eco-surroundings and eco-dynamics in many vital societal and economic services, including Industry 5.0, smart city, healthcare, energy, emergency handling, social robotics and elderly care. The innovation perspective of these new CPS is substantial, which will be particularly important for handling services that involve humans and in critical situations, e.g., in emergency and hazardous environments.

"EPIC has contributed to the modernisation of European Higher Education by developing a flexible framework for international student projects, carried out across universities and in collaboration with industrial partners and research environments. It has been developed, tested and refined based on the experiences of three years, and it has been made available along with supporting materials published as Open Educational Resources. The materials also document our experiences through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, examples and success stories. The framework provides different models of setting up international and interdisciplinary student projects, reflecting different needs and regulations - making the framework useful for most institutions who want to work with international, interdisciplinary and/or problem based projects. The approach developed is scalable and cost-efficient due to the use of virtual collaboration and blended learning. The framework has also demonstrated its value through good evaluations, and by being used by partner institutions and beyond. For example, many ideas of EPIC are continued in a new initiative on collaborative student projects, bringing students from different disciplines and countries together to work on problems related to the sustainable development goals, and including universities from Europe, South America and Africa.Each year was conducted as a cycle, consisting of:-Planning of projects and collaborations-Preparation of training materials, guidelines and seminar-5-day project planning seminar for students and supervisors-Project work, virtually but with the option for one additional blended mobility-Evaluation and reflection-Dissemination activitiesStudents, teachers and companies were involved throughout each cycle.Due to Covid-19, the additional mobility in the last year was cancelled, and part of the dissemination went virtual. Yet, the project prepared us to work within all the restrictions also in our other teaching tasks.After the evaluation of each yearly cycle, the framework and materials were revised. Year 2 focused especially on improving the support for students by streamlining the whole process of carrying out the projects (e.g. by integrating the preparation phase better with the project planning seminar, by facilitating a more structured workflow during the project seminar, and by linking the outcome of the seminar better to the virtual collaboration). Year 3 focused especially on creating a joint scope for the various projects to enhance collaboration and understanding between the projects - using the Sustainable Development Goals for this turned out to be a very good approach.The framework developed is flexible, and allows students from different backgrounds and countries to work together - even if learning objectives and workloads are different - and allows for both tight and loosely coupled collaborations. It has been tested with teams of 2-10 students, and it was demonstrated that the approach makes it possible to integrate and recognise the work within existing programmes, which is important for a more widespread take-up.The project work is supported by ICT-based educational resources that are made available for the students and supervisors, focusing on e.g. project planning/management, team work, entrepreneurship and innovation, supervision, and other documents that supports the take-up of the approach for companies and universities. Also, an open source IT tool was customised to support the collaboration process. All the materials developed are publicly available for use and exploitation, and are presented in a user friendly online course format.The partnership has contributed to increase the quality and relevance of higher education within and beyond the participating institutions particularly by focusing on increased employability, closer collaboration between students and industry, internationalisation, increased labour market relevance of education, increased learning outcome by promoting active learning methods based on real-world problem solving, promotion of the take-up of ICT tools and Open Education Resources, and by giving the students transversal competences. The evaluations show that the project had a significant impact on the participants, and we also see a systemic impact on the participating organisations. As planned, more than 2.000 teachers were reached face2face, and 6 conference papers were published targeting practitioners and the didactical society (including a student paper that won the ""Best Student Paper Award""). 25 companies (including three Centres of Applied Research) were involved in student projects, along with 102 students and 50 supervisors (incl. repetitions). In summary, EPIC has developed and tested a paradigmatic formula for carrying out industry/academia collaboration, and for implementing the project based learning with groups of students of blended expertise and background."

The DiamonDT (Development of Innovative AcadeMy ON the basis of DT teaching) aimed at fostering independent, open-minded and innovation-oriented thinking of future higher education graduates based on Design Thinking (DT) methodology. The project was coordinated by Lodz University of Technology (TUL), together with its partners in the field of the higher education from Spain (UV - University of Vigo), Norway (UiT - University of Tromsø) and Poland (UTP - University of Science and Technology in Bydgoszcz). This project is a dedicated response to the current and anticipated future requirements of the European labour market. The institutions with different but harmonizing and strong backgrounds and educational experience formed the project’s consortium, as it helped to achieve a broad complementarity of educational and research practice. DiamonDT project offered a development of an educational path based on Design Thinking methodology addressed to three target groups: students, academic teachers and implicitly business environment as well. An educational path based on Design Thinking will lead to an improvement of the human resources potential on the labour market and it will definitely influence the development of the economy innovativeness both at the local, global and the European level. Nowadays Europe needs higher education not only to pass relevant knowledge and help students to prepare for professional life and work, but also to equip them with a set of transversal skills and team work experience. In order to meet these requirements DiamonDT offered ways to upgrade the educational systems improving the way of teaching in the field of enhancing the creativity and focusing students attention on development of innovative solutions tailored to the real needs of local communities as well as global society.The main goal of the DiamonDT project was to provide an innovative tool into the methods of teaching and learning. It was realized by creating an education path implementing the Design Thinking methodology as well as conducting interdisciplinary projects based on that method from the different disciplines of science and various areas of everyday life. The strength of the project consortium lied both in the infrastructure as well as in the strong background for proficient education of DT methodology. The project results, which were achieved, include: the development of teaching materials for study courses: course programme for first-cycle studies including proper course sheet, the development of materials used for training of tutors in DT methodology, multilingual course materials and DT handouts. The most important result are: TEXTBOOK, TOOLBOX and a handbook of good DT practices, which includes practical guidelines on the DT educational process for both teachers and students. Apart from these, also the sample documents and as well as description of case studies, projects, examples used during the project realization and remarks collected from students and DT mentors working with the national and international groups were worked out. The handbook is a universal tool for European HEIs that will help them use DT in the classroom. Tens of tutors were trained during professional courses held locally and in foreign partner country. A number of departments of each HEI participating in the project implemented the DT course that was developed within the project into their curricula. Dozens of students took part in national and international Good Practice Academies. The numerous business contacts with industry were established thanks to the common project. In addition, the project also involved the implementation of the soft type results: equalization or increase of knowledge among students as well as tutors, development of competence of both.

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.