Three place-based innovation ecosystems in Cyprus, Greece and Bulgaria partner together to create an Excellence Hub for Future Cities and Regions in Southeast Europe (SEE). The METACITIES Excellence Hub is a sustainable network that offers a common platform for collaboration, cross-fertilization, and best practices sharing across borders, sectors and disciplines on knowledge production, circulation and use. Founded upon a joint R&I strategy, a nexus of collaborative links across sectors, joint research, innovation and outreach activities as well as business modelling and sustainability plans, the collaboration aims to benefit citizens, stakeholders, regional ecosystems and the whole SEE region. The thematic focus on future and metaverse cities necessitates the definition of ambitious R&I agendas and the uptake of advanced digital technologies. Digital Twins (DT) of future cities/regions provide accurate and reliable reference representation seamlessly unifying the physical, digital and human worlds and enabling stakeholders to assess the effects of any changes before investments and implementations actually occur. The proposed Open Digital Twin Framework facilitates co-development of complementary future city domains along with their equivalent DTs. The applied Quadruple Helix Model forges synergies among actors and alignment of public and private sector priorities for regional development. PoC studies, small-scale pilots and feasibility assessments validate project outcomes. Green Business and Operation Models will be developed for future and metaverse cities, as well as for the METACITIES Excellence Hub. Investment and Sustainability Plans will mobilize the communities of the three innovation ecosystems to progress faster in joined efforts. Common investment plans for R&I, infrastructures and support for real-life experimentation, aim to leverage national, regional and European funds as well as crowd funds and private capital in a synergetic manner.

ISAC-NEWTON addresses critical challenges within various 6G wireless application scenarios, necessitating precise environmental information. Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) emerges as a promising paradigm to harness the synergy between sensing and communication, where perceptive mobile networks (PMNs) have been proposed to enhance existing wireless networks by incorporating accurate sensing capabilities. Established cellular networks offer opportunities for sensing with extensive coverage, robust computation, communication power, and networking sensing from multiple nodes for the same target. However, PMNs encounter significant hurdles, including inherent interference, complex sensing environments, and high-speed target tracking by cellular networks. ISAC-NEWTON aims to overcome these challenges through an exceptional research and training program. The vision is a fully integrated system where sensing and communication coexist, sharing resources across time, frequency, space and power domains, alongside key elements like signal processing, machine learning and hardware. The project adopts a multidimensional information perception: (1) of the physical layer by employing innovative metasurfaces to effectively address challenges in both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight scenarios; (2) for robust and reliable sensing by novel prediction and situational algorithms, and optimised monostatic, bistatic or multistatic design for adaptive location-time aware scheduling and improved coverage; (3) for intelligent wireless radio resource management by novel machine learning enabled radio access network mechanisms for real-time decision making and zero-trust security. ISAC-NEWTON will provide a unique, advanced, multi-disciplinary training programme covering all aspects of intelligent communication and sensing science field: modelling, design, development, data analysis, validation, and translation to the application, in an harmonious synergy that enconpasses future wireless networks.

In the context of modern technologies, the transition to 6G networks faces numerous challenges; therefore, novel solutions must be discovered, combined, and tested in order to achieve distributed smart connectivity, imperceptible latency, virtually infinite capacity, improved security/privacy, smart/adaptive networking, and energy efficiency. The 6G-ICARUS project will investigate, combine, and improve on current technologies in order to address numerous obstacles that 6G networks will face in order to define the future wireless networks (FWNs). 6G-ICARUS is focused on FWNs capable of meeting a variety of targets, resulting in better geographic coverage, particularly in urban areas, higher transmission rates, lower latency, provision of diverse services, processing of information generated from a massive volume of heterogeneous sources, inherent resilience to counter potential security threats, and making intelligent decisions. 6G-ICARUS is founded on three pillars: (i) Effective utilisation of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces suitably controlled by artificial intelligence software; (ii) Channel modelling for mmWave/subTHz communications; (iii) Multi-connectivity solutions for 6G mobile communications. The project will generate novel research results as well as novel original hardware supported by innovative software (techniques, algorithms) based mostly on machine learning and deep learning. Hardware and software will be combined and examined in real-world settings to fulfill certain situations, all of which are matched with real-world applications. There will be separate Proof of Concept studies to validate the technologies and methodologies under consideration.