The energy and building sector are vital to Europe’s environment and energy policies. In the current energy transition, the building sector is recognized as a cornerstone due to the possibility to easily adopt advanced control strategies and smart management systems. Thereby cost-effectively increasing buildings’ energy efficiency and flexibility, while improving building users’ comfort, productivity, and health. This cost-effective energy use reduction will render faster implementation of on-site and nearby renewable energy sources, facilitate demand electrification, hence reducing Europe’s energy dependencies. Achieving the building sector energy transition demands an improvement of the interoperability of European buildings with energy carriers and non-energy services. Buildings must play an active role in ensuring the reliability, resilience, and sustainability of the energy system, particularly in the face of evolving challenges such as climate change, resource constraints, and other threats (e.g., cybersecurity, geopolitical, etc.). Therefore, the aim of ENTRANCE is to enable smart-grid-ready and decarbonized buildings through the integration of energy efficiency, flexibility, on-site renewables, mobility, empowerment of end-users, and interoperability between buildings and district heating and electricity grids. The ambition of ENTRANCE is to develop and demonstrate solutions that promote building integration and active participation in the energy system and market through guaranteeing end-users’ comfort and empowerment while creating value for the economic actors of the energy landscape. Through four core principles based on integrated technology, digitalization, user engagement, and performance-driven economics, ENTRANCE solutions will be demonstrated in relevant environments. To generalize the solutions for different geographical regions, ENTRANCE includes demonstration sites from six different countries around Europe.

The perception of Europe and individual European countries has a high impact on expectations and decisions of citizens from outside Europe (considering) coming to Europe, especially from countries of origin (COO) for migration. Misperceptions and targeted misinformation campaigns can lead to security threats. It is therefore crucial for border control and other relevant security agencies and policy makers to better understand how Europe is perceived abroad, detect discrepancies between image and reality, spot instances of media manipulation, and develop their abilities for counteracting such misconceptions and the security threats resulting from them. The goal of the MIRROR project is to develop an integrated platform, a set of tools on top of this platform, as well as a systematic methodology for the comprehensive intermedia analysis of the perception of Europe, the detection of discrepancies between perception of and reality in Europe, and the creation of awareness for the impact of such misconceptions and the resulting threats, including hybrid threats. In a process driven by perception-specific threat analysis, the MIRROR project will combine methods of automated text, multimedia and social network analysis for various types of media (including social media) with empirical studies for creating a substantiated picture of the perception of Europe and for combining evidences from different sources. Solutions developed in the project, including technology and actionable insights, will be thoroughly validated with border agencies and policy makers, e.g. via pilots. For achieving its goals, MIRROR brings together a strong multidisciplinary consortium combining research excellence experts in text and multimedia analysis, social network analysis, security research, social science, in particular communication science, law and ethics, gender research with commercial partners and border agencies as well as civil society organizations.