Motivated by the challenges, risks and opportunities that the wide use of AI brings to media, society and politics, AI4Media aspires to become a centre of excellence and a wide network of researchers across Europe and beyond, with a focus on delivering the next generation of core AI advances to serve the key sector of Media, to make sure that the European values of ethical and trustworthy AI are embedded in future AI deployments, and to reimagine AI as a crucial beneficial enabling technology in the service of Society and Media. The AI4Media consortium, comprising 30 leading partners in the areas of AI and media (9 universities, 9 research centres, 12 industrial partners) and 35 associate members, will establish the networking infrastructure to bring together the currently fragmented European AI landscape in the field of media, and foster deeper and long-running interactions between academia and industry, including Digital Innovation Hubs. It will also shape a research agenda for media AI research, and implement research and innovation both with respect to cutting-edge technologies at the core of AI research, and within specific fields of media-related AI. AI4Media will provide a targeted funding framework through open calls, to speed up the uptake of innovations developed within the network. A PhD programme will further enhance links to the industry and the fostering and exchange of talent, while providing motivation to prevent brain drain, and a set of use cases will be developed by the network to demonstrate the impact of the achieved advances in the media sector. The Excellence Centre that is established during the AI4Media project, and the ecosystem that will grow around it, will provide a long-term basis for the support of AI excellence in Europe, long after the project end, with the aim of ensuring that Ethical AI guided by European values assumes a global leading role in the field of Media.

The HELIOS project will design, implement and validate a state-of-the-art, peer-to-peer federated social media network that addresses the dynamic nature of human communications in three dimensions- contextual, spatial and temporal- while providing all necessary means to ensure the highest level of trust and privacy. HELIOS implements a user-friendly solution for creating and managing social networks. Its core scope is to facilitate democratization of content production, promotion and monetization. HELIOS will also reduce development cost and deployment complexity of any social media application built on top of it. Implemented technologies and tools are following a modular strategy which ensures continuous development beyond the scope of the project, yet maintaining basic features of security and robustness. As a unique value proposition, the project will overcome the closed ecosystem stigma and will re-define the term “social media platform” by creating a foundation for co-operating social networking services. The novel distributed context-layered model in which different types of services (private and public) can form symbiotic existence.

The uniqueness of the CAROUSEL+ value proposition resides in its capacity to empower meaningful visceral group social interaction to tangibly share imagination and physical movement in virtual and hybrid reality settings beyond the existing digital communication technology such as massive online game environments, peer-to-peer connections and social media networks. CAROUSEL+ technology will allow people, in small or larger groups, to feel good and have fun together. CAROUSEL+ will pave the way for the emergence of social- physical behaviour of digital characters by better understanding human body-language and being capable to interact autonomously with a group of people. The project will lay the new technical, and scientific, foundation for social and physical real-world AI by inventing, examining, simulating, developing, testing and validating human-digital interaction scenarios. The dream of the project is to create a sustainable innovation ecosystem of young talents around a new research path to design AI enabled digital characters which understand the social body language and can interact in a social and physical way with humans. CAROUSEL+ wants to lay the technical foundation for “social enabled” digital characters. The innovation perspective of this new branch “Real-World Social and Physical AI” is tremendous as it can be applied to many applications in many areas, for physically interacting in a meaningful social way. In particular digital characters in the future could act as physical trainers, dancers, entertainers, actors, co-workers, health assistants, guides, educators, spectators, physical therapists and companions. Beyond social, entertainment, health and educational applications, CAROUSEL+ learning and understanding of body language and group dynamics could be deployed in many other areas, including security, peace-making, emergency handling and autonomous driving.

Artificial Intelligence is a disruptive technology of our times with expected impacts rivalling those of electricity or printing. Resources for innovation are currently dominated by giant tech companies in North America and China. To ensure European independence and leadership, we must invest wisely by bundling, connecting and opening our AI resources. AI4EU will efficiently build a comprehensive European AI-on-demand platform to lower barriers to innovation, to boost technology transfer and catalyse the growth of start-ups and SMEs in all sectors through Open calls and other actions. The platform will act as a broker, developer and one-stop shop providing and showcasing services, expertise, algorithms, software frameworks, development tools, components, modules, data, computing resources, prototyping functions and access to funding. Training will enable different user communities (engineers, civic leaders, etc.) to obtain skills and certifications. The AI4EU Platform will establish a world reference, built upon and interoperable with existing AI and data components (e.g. the Acumos open-source framework, QWT search engine..) and platforms. It will mobilize the whole European AI ecosystem and already unites 80 partners in 21 countries including researchers, innovators and related talents. Eight industry-driven AI pilots will demonstrate the value of the platform as an innovation tool. In order to enhance the platform, research on five key interconnected AI scientific areas will be carried out using platform technologies and results will be implemented. The pilots and research will showcase how AI4EU can stimulate scientific discovery and technological innovation. The AI4EU Ethical Observatory will be established to ensure the respect of human centred AI values and European regulations. Sustainability will be ensured via the creation of the AI4EU Foundation. The results will feed a new and comprehensive Strategic Research Innovation Agenda for Europe.