EU-IoT will act as an accelerator for the whole European IoT ecosystem towards transforming the current IoT community of researchers and innovators in Europe into an increasingly cohesive, dynamic, participatory and sustainable ecosystem, as an essential part of the Next Generation Internet initiative. It will intervene to assist stakeholders to engage and create value, as well as set up a self-sustaining European IoT community. This requires tackling a number of challenges related to the complex interplay among stakeholders and the many relevant initiatives. The overarching need is the consolidation of fragmented IoT verticals and the still disconnected research and technology domains. To this purpose, EU-IoT set up a strong consortium and plan of action for the establishment of an open and inclusive ecosystem facilitating interactions of all players, know-how exchange, creation of strategic partnerships and durable liaisons. Agility of planning and action is paramount to meet the demand and needs of an ecosystem that is in continuous transformation. EU-IoT will a) help to create a common strategy aligned with the NGI vision to achieve the H2020 goals, while supporting the transition to Horizon Europe; b) foster synergies, liaisons and exchange among all key players in the European landscape; c) support and coordinate outreach and impact creation activities of upcoming ICT-56 projects and Large Scale Pilots; d) pave the way for the development of business models, innovation activities and skills building that lower adoption and deployment barriers for IoT solutions; e) provide a collaborative framework, including content, tools and processes, to engage all EU researchers, developers, integrators and users, thus overcoming fragmentation and assisting further development of a strong European IoT-empowered economy as core building block of the Digital Single Market and Digital Europe altogether.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are a core enabling technology for securing economic leadership in embedded systems and ICT, having an enormous social and economic importance, and making decisive contributions to societal challenges. The EU and the US face common challenges to push forward the limits of the science for engineering CPS, creating a favorable environment for strategic and pre-competitive collaboration. The Transatlantic CPS Summit is an ambitious 18-month support action with the goal of facilitating and creating an enduring and sustainable collaboration campaign on CPS research and development between Europe and the US. The support action achieves its overall aim by means of: 1. Identifying and evaluating possible R&D cooperations between Europe and the US; 2. Investigating and promoting implementation of opportunities for cooperation; 3. Preparing a roadmap for R&D cooperation on CPS engineering between the EU and US together with recommendations for action; 4. Presenting final results to interested stakeholders (e.g. public bodies, industry, academic researchers) on both sides of the Atlantic. To achieve the above, the project mobilises an outstanding multidisciplinary consortium of 7 EU partners and 5 US partners and brings together recognized CPS researchers across the EU and the US in a series of CPS Summit Workshops.

Railway infrastructures are moving towards more intelligent, connected, user-centric and collaborative systems. While it brings many advantages for the industry and users, it also poses new opportunities for cyber-criminals and terrorists. CYRail aims to deliver tailored specifications and recommendations for secure modern rail systems design and operation. The challenges are multiple: wide and distributed geographical display of rail systems limit the traditional cyber-protection and cyber-defence tools & practices; the heterogeneous nature of rail systems make them vulnerable to blended attacks; the collaboration with other transportation infrastructures increase the number of points for attack; new passenger-centric services may expose rail systems to threats known in the IoT; last but not least, ICT supporting these trends are not necessarily trusted for critical applications. CYRail will address those challenges through a methodical diagnosis and specification process, enforced at each step of the cyber-security chain: operational context and scenarios will be defined, followed by a security assessments of railway systems. An analysis of threats targeting those infrastructures will be developed as well as innovative, attack detection and alerting techniques. Adapted mitigation plans and countermeasures will be defined, taking into account their potential impact on operations. Protection Profiles for railway control and signalling applications will be delivered to ensure security by design of new rail infrastructures. The CYRail consortium intends to take advantage of developments in other industries (aeronautics, automotive and energy) and bring them into the railway sector, taking similarities and specificities into account. The Consortium is comprised of a well-balanced group of 6 partners from 5 European countries with complementary skills. An Advisory Board is foreseen, to bring on board the expertise from stakeholders within the railway value chain.