Democracy is facing challenges including loss of trust in EU institutions, disillusionment and declining interest among citizens, increasing political polarisation, online disinformation and politically manipulated information, and a growing distance between citizens and elected representatives. We believe this can change if proper deliberative processes and tools are institutionalised that exploit the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and citizens’ post-Covid competences. We envision the next generation of digital deliberations as: grounded on solid democracy theory, multimodal (video, audio, text), usable and accessible, gamified (e.g. using skill points, scoreboards, missions, and avatars), mass, enabled by novel but also legal and ethical AI features (e.g., summarisation, moderation, fact checking, hate speech and toxicity detection) and easily adopted and institutionalized. In this context, the aim of AI4Deliberation project is to provide robust, ethical AI tools and comprehensive guidance to assist governments in institutionalising, using and evaluating multimodal, gamified, mass deliberations. The vision of the project is to equip governments with a theoretically solid and empirically tested set of AI-enabled deliberative processes, a comprehensive framework with practical guidelines, and an AI toolkit that will enable them to design, institutionalise, operate and evaluate transparent, ethical, inclusive, multimodal, gamified, mass citizens deliberations resulting in more active and inclusive citizenship and increased trust to rule-of-law based institutions by citizens. To achieve these ambitious objectives, the consortium brings together a team of world leaders in deliberative democracy, AI and LLMs (incl. vid-LLMs), argumentation mining, law and ethics, deliberation platforms (including video-based) while four large scale pilots will be conducted from city level to international discussing topics that include climate change and long Covid.

The rapid growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its ubiquitous presence in our everyday life has significantly affected the way government services are delivered today. This poses constant challenges to safeguard the data confidentiality and integrity of e-government services, while increasing its adoption and usage by citizens and businesses. GLASS caters for a 'European Common Services Web', bringing closer together citizens, businesses and European governments. The project introduces a citizen-centric e-governance model that enables beneficiaries to participate in a network for big data exchange and service delivery, which is by design digital, efficient, cost-effective, interoperable, cross-border, secure and promotes the once-only priority. The GLASS solution comprises (i) a distributed file storage system, capable of addressing the complexity of the processes and their high demand on resources; (ii) a distributed ledger, which records every transaction among users to increase the overall transparency and trustworthiness; (iii) a distributed application (dapp) ecosystem for delivering mobile services tailored to the needs of its users; (iv) a single sign-on Wallet as a Service (WaaS) platform responsible for managing multiple services provided by each dapp; and (v) a Middleware Gateway Framework, responsible for the establishment of secure communication pathways among operational stakeholders and the integration of already existing e-governance systems with newly developed ones. GLASS brings together twelve (12) interdisciplinary partners from eight (8) countries to deliver a novel e-governance model and address the challenges that governance structures in the EU are currently facing - from divergent and legal groundwork to physical and technological limitations - towards the democratization and openness of the public administration services.

ORBIS addresses the disconnects between ambitious ideas and collective actions at a large socio-technical scale. It responds to the profound lack of dialogue between citizenship and policy making institutions by providing a theoretically sound and highly pragmatic socio-technical solution to enable the transition to a more inclusive, transparent and trustful Deliberative Democracy in Europe. The project shapes and supports new democratic models that are developed through deliberative democracy processes; it follows a socio-constructive approach in which deliberative democracy is not a theory which prescribes new democratic practices and models, but rather the process through which we can collectively imagine and realize them. ORBIS provides new ways to understand and facilitate the emergence of new participatory democracy models, together with the mechanisms to scale them up and consolidate them at institutional level. It delivers: (i) a sound methodology for deliberative participation and co-creation at scale; (ii) novel AI-enhanced tools for deliberative participation across diverse settings; (iii) a novel socio-technical approach that augments the articulation between deliberative processes and representative institutions in liberal democracies; (iv) new evidence-based democratic models that emerge from the application of citizen deliberation processes; (v) demonstrated measurable impact of such innovations in real-world settings. The project builds on cutting-edge AI tools and technologies to develop a sustainable digital solution, and bridges theories and technological solutions from the fields of political and social science, social innovation, Artificial Intelligence, argumentation and digital democracy. The achievement of the project’s goal is validated through six use cases addressing contemporary issues at different scales and settings, experimenting with different civic participation and deliberation models, and involving diverse types of stakeholders.

REWIRE envisions a holistic framework for continuous security assessment of open-source and open-specification hardware and software for IoT devices and the development of cybersecurity certification in accordance with the requirements and guidelines of recent EU regulation Cyber security Act3. The proposed scalable and multifunctional cybersecurity platform will ensure the security throughout the life of the IoT devices with continuous security auditing, trust computing and theorem proofs for defining an hw-based microarchitecture for enhanced protection targeting to open-hardware/software vulnerabilities. A certification procedure of the audited software and hardware components will propose new software security metrics and establish a layer of trust between stakeholders, utilizing Blockchain and smart contracts. REWIRE will expand traditional cyber insurance models to account for both open-source hardware and software assets, by ingesting security auditing results for estimating premium costs. REWIRE will exploit a Knowledge Plane of metadata generated from application behavioral patterns and operations to determine appropriate security policies and properties to enforce on open-source hw/sw to block potentially harmful instructions. REWIRE has invested in three carefully selected pilots (Automotive, Smart Cities, Smart Satellites), which can address the ambitious objectives of the project. - customizable TEE based on RISC-V - micro benchmarking for quick and automated assessment of h/w vulnerability Based on the above description, REWIRE aims to safeguard the entire workflow of secure processing; from the Deployment and Operation of SW-based SoSes to their patch management when new exploits have been identified during run-time, by providing new trust management mechanisms towards the auditability and certification of SW/HW open-source specifications.

Today public authorities need to provide better services with fewer resources. Citizens require accessible, user-friendly, personalised, and integrated public services that match their needs and circumstances. At the same time, trust in the public sector deteriorates. We argue the solution rests in enhancing existing relevant EU work (on policies, models, frameworks, roadmaps etc) by adopting best research and practice (e.g. in public service co-creation) and by exploiting relevant technologies particularly mobile apps, virtual assistants (chatbots), knowledge graphs, and linked data. We acknowledge that for many years, the EU is providing useful practical advice including frameworks (e.g. EIF), models (e.g. CPSV), architectures (e.g. EIRA), roadmaps, etc. These however are not directly applicable anymore as they do not incorporate the latest research and practice, e.g. in public service co-creation. Similarly, research is not related to EU work and practice is not related to research. The vision of the inGov project is to provide innovative ICT-supported governance models as well as mobile apps including chatbots, which will enable stakeholders' collaboration in co-producing inclusive and accessible Integrated Public Services (IPS) thus increasing trust and satisfaction. For that purpose, multidisciplinary scientific methods will be used including design science, multiple case study and variants of the technology acceptance model. The project results will be piloted in Malta to modernise the digital family household public service (affecting 200,000 households), in Austria to deploy IPS for collecting tourism tax (affecting 3,200 accommodation providers), in Greece to digitise the disabled card renewal service (benefiting 11,500 disabled, low-income citizens) and in Croatia to create AI-driven virtual assistants and services (affecting 32,000 citizens). We aim to feed our results back to EU policies hence achieving alignment between policies, research and practice.