The impact of technology in the world's panorama is at an all-time high. Advanced media applications enabling immersive communication are becoming ubiquitous in our lives, and there is a global trend to adopt virtual solutions to support day-to-day business operations, social events, and general lifestyle. A subset of these innovative media applications includes Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Holography, but they do not come without their share of challenges and requirements. To enable a satisfactory user experience, the requirements for the computing platform and its underlying network can be considered extreme and far from what can be attainable today. Hence, we propose a Cloud for Holography and Cross Reality (CHARITY), which is a complete framework that attempts to overcome the challenges and meet the requirements of such applications. CHARITY leverages an innovative cloud architecture that exploits edge solutions, a computing and network continuum autonomous orchestration, application-driven interfacing, mechanisms for smart, adaptive and efficient resource management, strong community involvement, and overreaching compatibility with all infrastructure vendors. This integrated framework will be put into test in a broad diversity of use cases targeted at advanced media applications, such as holographic events, virtual reality training, and mixed reality entertainment. CHARITY expects to deliver a working prototype, validated by the most demanding applications, capable of being demonstrated at dissemination events and exploited by a large community of users and companies outside the consortium, paving the way to the mass adoption of more advanced media applications in the market.

The project aerOS aims at transparently utilising the resources on the edge-to-cloud computing continuum for enabling applications in an effective manner, incorporating multiple services deployed on such a path. Therefore, aerOS will establish the missing piece: a common meta operating system that follows a collaborative IoT-edge–cloud architecture supporting flexible deployments (e.g., federated or hierarchical), bringing tremendous benefits as it enables the distribution of intelligence and computation – including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and big data analytics – to achieve an optimal solution while satisfying the given constraints. The overarching goal of aerOS is to design and build a virtualized, platform-agnostic meta operating system for the IoT edge-cloud continuum. As a solution, to be executed on any Infrastructure Element within the IoT edge-cloud continuum – hence, independent from underlying hardware and operating system(s) – aerOS will: (i) deliver common virtualized services to enable orchestration, virtual communication (network-related programmable functions), and efficient support for frugal, explainable AI and creation of distributed data-driven applications; (ii) expose an API to be available anywhere and anytime (location-time independent), flexible, resilient and platform-agnostic; and (iii) include a set of infrastructural services and features addressing cybersecurity, trustworthiness and manageability. aerOS will: (a) use context-awareness to distribute software task (application) execution requests; (b) support intelligence as close to the events as possible; (c) support execution of services using “abstract resources” (e.g., virtual machines, containers) connected through a smart network infrastructure; (d) allocate and orchestrate abstract resources, responsible for executing service chain(s) and (e) support for scalable data autonomy.

The path towards 6G is beginning now that 5G matured and is being deployed worldwide both publicly and privately. While 5G brought a step up in many fields, such as, performance and efficiency, more is always expected in terms of efficiency by the overall community and in terms of performance by industry and technology providers who want to further increase their offerings and products. Continuous demands for higher throughput, lower latency and more energy efficient communications needs to be supported by relevant use cases that can claim and demonstrate the needs for these requests. 6G-PATH goal is to help foster the further development and integration of new and improved tools and products from EU companies with 5G/6G, while also measuring relevant KPIs and KVIs. To achieve this, 7 testbeds will be part of the project consortium, which will be used by 10 use cases spread across four key verticals: Health, Education, Smart Cities and Farming. Moreover, a relevant portion of the budget will be used for FSTP, where we envision the integration of 2 new Pilot Sites, extend the testbeds with 10 additional technologies, as well as 30 new Use Cases, through Open Calls, to further involve the community and obtain more metrics and outcomes. 6G-PATH plans to work closely with other ongoing/starting Stream-B and Stream-C projects in a feedback loop, where the innovations that partners are achieving in other projects can be deployed and further tested by our pool of use cases and Open Calls, while sharing our results and outcomes to further cement the innovation being made.

RIGOUROUS project aspires to identify and address the major cybersecurity, trust and privacy risks threatening the network, devices, computing infrastructure, and next generation of services. RIGOUROUS will address these challenges by introducing a new holistic and smart service framework leveraging new machine learning (ML) and AI mechanisms, which can react dynamically to the ever-changing threat surface on all orchestration layers and network functions. RIGOUROUS new smart service framework is capable of ensuring a secure, trusted and privacy-preserving environment for supporting the next generation of trustworthy continuum computing 6G services along the full device-edge-cloud-continuum on heterogenous multi-domain networks. This includes establishing compliance with the design of software (SW), protocols and procedures, as well as AI-governed mechanisms to cope with the security-related requirements in the full DevOps lifecycle, from the service onboarding up to the day-2 operations. Further the DevOps lifecycle spans from the prevention and detection of anomalies and/or intrusions at different levels (physical or cyber) based on violation of policies or rules, up to their mitigation and policy enforcement. It also comprises the incorporation of the human factor starting from the design until the human-in-the-loop concept in the whole orchestration. Additionally extensive research devoted to realizing advanced security enablers is carried out to bring automation and intelligence to the smart, but also secure, orchestration concept. In brief, RIGOUROUS targets the following key objectives: • Holistic Smart Service framework for securing the IoT-Edge-Cloud continuum lifecycle management • Human-Centric DevSecOps • Model-based and AI-driven Automated Security Orchestration, Trust Management and deployment • Advanced AI-driven Anomaly Detection, decision and Mitigation Strategies • Demonstration of a Set of Industrially Relevant Use Cases in Operational Envi

The 6G-SANDBOX project brings a complete and modular facility for the European experimentation ecosystem (in line and under the directions set by SNS JU), which is expected to support for the next decade technology and research validation processes needed in the pathway towards 6G. The target is at technologies and research advances, that span over the entire service provisioning chain, and refer to user/data, control and management planes. In this direction, 6G-SANDBOX introduces the concept of Trial Networks, which refers to fully configurable, manageable and controlled end-to-end networks, composed of both digital and physical nodes. The 6G-SANDBOX Trial Networks incorporate infrastructures distributed in EU (namely in Malaga, Athens, Berlin and Oulu) and offer to third parties (including experimenters from open calls) automated experimentation capabilities through a rich and extensible toolbox. Meant to create tangible and long-term impact, the 6G KPIs and KVIs that will be quantified with the facility, will be released to any interested party; while the set of developments and APIs that will be produced, will feed an open repository as an initial step to move the contributions and the lessons learned beyond the project boarders and define a European 6G library.