FAME is a joint effort of world-class experts in data management, data technologies, the data economy, and digital finance to develop, deploy and launch to the global market a unique, trustworthy, energy-efficient, and secure federated data marketplace for Embedded Finance (EmFi). The FAME marketplace will alleviate the proclaimed limitations of centralized cloud marketplaces towards demonstrating the full potential of the data economy. In this direction, the project will enhance a state of the art data marketplace infrastructure (i.e., H2020 i3-Market marketplace) with novel functionalities in three complementary directions namely: • Secure, interoperable, and regulatory compliant data exchange across multiple federated cloud-based data providers in-line with emerging European initiatives like GAIA-X. • Decentralized, programmable, data assets trading and pricing leveraging blockchain tokenization techniques (including support for accruing data assets value in NFTs). • Integration of trusted and Energy Efficient (EE) analytics based on novel technologies such as Quantitative Explainable AI, Situation Aware Explainability (SAX), incremental EE analytics, and edge analytics. FAME will become operational in a federated cloud environment with multiple providers of EmFi data assets, including datasets, AI/ML models, and more. It will become interconnected with more than 12 data marketplaces that are operated by the project partners, as well as with other data infrastructures that will support the implementation of 7 pilots. Through this process, the catalog of the FAME marketplace will be populated with a critical mass of 1000+ data assets. Furthermore, FAME will establish a Learning Center (LC) for tech and non-tech users, as this is a key prerequisite for unlocking the potential of the data economy. FAME will build a vibrant community of EmFi stakeholders around the FAME platform, which will serve as a catalyst for the sustainability of the project’s results.

The project aerOS aims at transparently utilising the resources on the edge-to-cloud computing continuum for enabling applications in an effective manner, incorporating multiple services deployed on such a path. Therefore, aerOS will establish the missing piece: a common meta operating system that follows a collaborative IoT-edge–cloud architecture supporting flexible deployments (e.g., federated or hierarchical), bringing tremendous benefits as it enables the distribution of intelligence and computation – including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and big data analytics – to achieve an optimal solution while satisfying the given constraints. The overarching goal of aerOS is to design and build a virtualized, platform-agnostic meta operating system for the IoT edge-cloud continuum. As a solution, to be executed on any Infrastructure Element within the IoT edge-cloud continuum – hence, independent from underlying hardware and operating system(s) – aerOS will: (i) deliver common virtualized services to enable orchestration, virtual communication (network-related programmable functions), and efficient support for frugal, explainable AI and creation of distributed data-driven applications; (ii) expose an API to be available anywhere and anytime (location-time independent), flexible, resilient and platform-agnostic; and (iii) include a set of infrastructural services and features addressing cybersecurity, trustworthiness and manageability. aerOS will: (a) use context-awareness to distribute software task (application) execution requests; (b) support intelligence as close to the events as possible; (c) support execution of services using “abstract resources” (e.g., virtual machines, containers) connected through a smart network infrastructure; (d) allocate and orchestrate abstract resources, responsible for executing service chain(s) and (e) support for scalable data autonomy.

The 6G vision for an open, distributed and user-centric evolution of the current SBA core network creates many security challenges and risks. The disaggregated heterogeneous cloud continuum (i.e. distributed cloud system with many stakeholders located in different regions, while private, public, or hybrid clouds are considered for the formation of the continuum), in conjunction with softwarization and IT-based infrastructure operations, set the stage for risks and challenges to trustworthiness in the 6G era. On top of the open and distributed 6G core over the edge-cloud continuum, SAFE-6G proposes a holistic research approach aimed to design, develop and validate a 6G-ready native trustworthiness framework by enabling user-centric safety, security, privacy, resilience, reliability functions. By utilizing (X)AI/ML techniques to cognitively coordinate and balance these functions, in order to optimize the Level of Trust (LoT), which realises the trust requirements and data governance policy that each user/tenant/human-role specifies, a feature that is considered an essential KVI for user-centric 6G. The proposed SAFE-6G framework covers the whole trustworthiness 6G lifecycle by applying trustworthiness analysis, realisation and post-evaluation during the whole user-centric service provision, from onboarding and deployment to operation and decomposition. Verification and validation of the proposed SAFE-6G framework will be performed at the Stream C SNS 6G-SANDBOX Athens platform using two Metaverse-based pilots. The immersive-applications will be tested considering different 6G system setups, different service flavors and deployments, under various threats and attacks.

Even if significant progress has been made towards the Twin Transition, the recent energy crisis revealed the EU energy system’s vulnerability and dependence on external energy sources and highlighted the need for intensifying the integration of RES in electricity, transport and building (heating) sectors. To achieve on this, the energy system shall transform from a centralised/fossil-fuel-based to an energy efficient, RES-based and interdependent system, operating with a high degree of flexibility offered by distributed assets. ODEON is conceived under the principle that this can only be realized through the creation of an inclusive ecosystem of stakeholders characterized a mesh of Data, Intelligence, Service and Market flows, jointly enabling the resilient operation of the energy system under increased RES integration and distributed flexibility. ODEON introduces a sound, reliable, scalable and openly accessible federated technological framework (i.e. ODEON Cloud-Edge Data and Intelligence Service Platform and corresponding Federated Energy Data Spaces. AI Containers, Smart Data/AIOps orchestrators) for the delivery of a wealth of services addressing the complete life-cycle of Data/AIOps and their smart spawn in federated environments and infrastructures across the continuum. It will integrate highly reliable and secure federated data management, processing, sharing and intelligence services, enabling the energy value chain actors and 3rd parties to engage in data/intelligence sharing, towards the delivery of innovative data-driven and intelligence-powered energy services in accordance to the objectives set by the DoEAP. ODEON results will be extensively validated in 5 large-scale demonstration sites in Greece, Spain, France, Denmark and Ireland involving all required value chain actors, diverse assets, heterogeneous grid and market contexts, and multi-variate climatic and socio-economic characteristics to support its successful replication and market uptake.

COBALT proposes the introduction of a Common Certification Model (CCM) for European industries, leveraging existing standards and composing a unified cybersecurity namespace for ICT processes. The proposal will uphold the paradigm of Digital Twinning (DT) via the creation of Digital Threads and extend it in a vertical agnostic approach across different industries, including Quantum computing (involving FHG’s Quantum Computer) and I4.0. The COBALT DT will explore technology disruption mainly focusing on AI and High-Performance Computing (HPC) via the analysis and certification of Quantum Processing Oracles (a Quantum Computer exposure operation that is used as input to another algorithm), and how different enablers of these paradigms can be certified in a vertical agnostic manner. Quantum is destined to play a pivotal role in Europe’s AI and Computing sovereignty, thus protecting such infrastructure and its relevant processes (Quantum Oracles), should be of top priority. Along with common information models, COBALT acknowledges the importance of trusted information exchange a critical feature for an effective certification process across different industries, especially regarding cybersecurity. Therefore, COBALT will focus on the integration of International Data Spaces (IDS) primitives as a basis for the data sharing platform across different stakeholders. IDS currently proposes different models and procedures to share information and data across different spaces in a trusted manner between two parties, this can facilitate the process to build a trusted end-to-end certification framework across different industry stakeholders. Finally, COBALT aims to build a decentralized solution to further accelerate technology adoption and harmonization for the different use cases to be adopted. For the proposed CCM to function as a long term and sustainable European solution for certification, it needs to adapt and flex according to different environment conditions.