The term first responders usually refers to law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical personnel. These responders, however, are not the only assets that may be required in the aftermath of a strike on the homeland. In contrast, the more appropriate term, emergency responders, comprises all personnel within a community that might be needed in the event of a natural or technological (man-made) disaster or terrorist incident. These responders might include hazardous materials response teams, urban search and rescue assets, community emergency response teams, anti-terrorism units, special weapons and tactics teams, bomb squads, emergency management officials, municipal agencies, and private organizations responsible for transportation, communications, medical services, public health, disaster assistance, public works, and construction. In addition, professional responders and volunteers, private nonprofit, nongovernmental groups (NGOs), such as the Red Cross, can also play an important role in emergency response. As a result, the tasks that a national emergency response system would be required to perform are more complex than simply aiding victims at the scene of a disaster, carried out by several kinds of professional users with different roles and expertise. Moreover, emergency preparedness and response lifecycle is a complex process that consists of the preparation, response, and recovery from a disaster, including planning, logistical support, maintenance and diagnostics, training, and management as well as supporting the actual activities at a disaster site and post-recovery after the incident.

The Social and hUman ceNtered XR (SUN) project aims at investigating and developing extended reality (XR) solutions that integrate the physical and the virtual world in a convincing way, from a human and social perspective. The virtual world will be a means to augment the physical world with new opportunities for social and human interaction. We will address the following limitations: ● Lack of solutions to develop scalable and cost-effective new XR applications; ● Lack of convincing solutions for mixing of the virtual and physical environment; ● Lack of plausible and convincing human interaction interfaces in XR; ● Barriers due to resource limitations of end-user devices; We will develop solutions to surpass current limitations, including: ● Development of scalable solutions to obtain plausible and convincing virtual copies of physical objects and environments; ● Development of solutions for a seamless and convincing interaction between the physical and the virtual world; ● Development of wearable sensors and haptic interfaces for convincing and natural interaction with the virtual environment; ● Development of artificial intelligence-based solutions to address current computing, memory, and network limitations of wearable devices; The developed solution will be demonstrated in three real-life scenarios: 1 XR for rehabilitation after accidents or diseases. 2 XR in the industry to increase safety and improve social interaction among workers. 3 XR to remove interaction barriers for persons with disabilities.

DECIDO enables PAs to take full advantage of shared data, analytical tools and methodologies, computational power and cloud services and co-created data, for the development of better targeted and more effective evidence-based policies, leveraging on the capabilities and services offered by the European Cloud Infrastructure. The main mission of DECIDO is to demonstrate the ground-breaking impact of the adoption of cloud infrastructure to gain access to shared data in the field of Evidence Based Policy Making. DECIDO will provide PAs with an integrated interface for the definition of policy making workflows (from evidence gathering to policy definition and evaluation) enabling the orchestration and integration among tools and services made available by EOSC, with customized tools provided by DECIDO partners and relevant (big) data coming from public, academic and private data providers. DECIDO will develop solid and realistic business plans to ensure the long-term sustainability of the results considering legal, ethical and security aspects. DECIDO will also facilitate the introduction of co-creation in evidence based policy making allowing the active involvement of citizens and communities in the process. Hence DECIDO will also contribute in enhancing trust and boosting the perceived legitimacy of authorities. DECIDO methodological and technological approach will be assessed in different exploitation scenarios - demonstrating the value of collaboration, technology transfer and cross-pollination in 4 flagship pilot activities in 3 disaster risk management domains: floods (IT), fires (ES, FI) and power outage (EL). Data and service interoperability and portability will be granted through the use of ISA² core vocabularies, in describing dataset produced and used by PAs. Considering the complexity of the challenge DECIDO aims to address, a multi-sectorial and multi-disciplinary partnership has been set up to perform all the envisaged activities.