SECONDO addresses the question “How can decisions about cyber security investments and cyber insurance pricing be optimised?” SECONDO will support professionals who seek cyber security investments, developed to support human decision making, and a complete well-founded security strategy. This is a timely research problem, as the rapid growth of cyber-attacks is expected to continue its upwards trajectory. Such growth presents a prominent threat to normal business operations and the EU society itself. On the other hand, an interesting, well-known, finding is that an organisation's computer systems may be less secure than a competitor's, despite having spent more money in securing them. Budget setting, cyber security investment choices and cyber insurance, in the face of uncertainties, are highly challenging tasks with massive business implications. SECONDO aims to make impact on the operation of EU businesses who often: (i) have a limited cyber security budget; and (ii) ignore the importance of cyber insurance. Cyber insurance can play a critical role to the mitigation of cyber risk. This can be done by imposing a cost on firms' cyber risk through a premium that they have to pay and the potential for paying a smaller premium should they reduce their current cyber security risk. SECONDO has a cross-disciplinary nature, combining mathematical and engineering insights to empower innovative software. Apart from the novel research results, the project will offer a software platform to narrow the gap between theoretical understanding and practice. To achieve this, the four industrial project partners will i) lead the part of the project where industrial needs will be entered as input to the requirements collection phase, and, ii) provide their innovative software for risk assessment. The three academic partners will work together to i) design and thoroughly describe the proposed methodologies, but also ii) contribute to their software development.

The lack of trusted and secure platforms and privacy-aware analytics methods for secure sharing of personal data and proprietary/commercial/industrial data hampers the creation of a data market and data economy by limiting data sharing mostly to open data. This trend will continue if different technical standards, quality levels, and legal aspects are allowed to diverge uncontrollably. TRUSTS will ensure trust in the concept of data markets as a whole via its focus on developing a platform based on the experience of two large national projects, while allowing the integration and adoption of future platforms. The TRUSTS platform will act independently and as a platform federator, while investigating the legal and ethical aspects that apply on the entire data valorification chain, from data providers to consumers, i.e. it will (a) Set up a fully operational and GDPR-compliant European Data Marketplace for personal related data and non-personal related data targeting both personal and industrial use by leveraging existing data marketplaces (International Data Space and Data Market Austria) and enriching them with new functionalities and services. (b) Demonstrate and realise the potential of the TRUSTS Platform in 3 use cases targeting the industry sectors of corporate business data, specifically in the financial and telecom operator industries while ensuring it is supported by a viable, compliant and impactful governance, legal and business model. To create a European Data Market based on secure and trustworthy data exchanges, the TRUSTS consortium brings together technology providers that are already deeply involved in major national data market projects. This integration will be tested in practice by 6 companies, including 2 data providers, addressing 3 different use-cases. The TRUSTS technology and use-cases will be accompanied by business and legal and ethical considerations, which will ensure that the results of the project are sustainable beyond its duration

According to the last official available 2015 data, almost 93% of all enterprises in Europe in the non-financial business sector have less than 10 employees. These micro enterprises (MEnts) are responsible for 30% and 21% of the overall employment and value added in the EU, respectively. However, when it refers to the imminent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)’s application, MEnts are the most vulnerable due to their lack of expertise and resources to invest in their adoption. It is urgent to develop solutions that assist MEnts in smoothly adopting the GDPR, safeguarding the interests of the EU citizens on data privacy and security, avoiding the negative socioeconomic consequences entailed to breaches for MEnts, and, by extension, benefitting the European society. SMOOTH project addresses this challenge from two complementary focuses: 1) Creating awareness on the importance of being compliant with the GDPR, as many MEnts ignore their obligations in this respect, involving as partners Data Protection Authorities and associations representing EU MEnts. For the same purpose, SMOOTH will deliver a practical GDPR interactive handbook (website and mobile app) tailored specifically to MEnts. 2) Assisting MEnts to effectively adopt and comply with the GDPR. The SMOOTH cloud platform will use machine learning, text and data mining, and advance online auditing methods to automatically create a bespoke GDPR compliance report for the most critical aspects to MEnts. Likewise, SMOOTH will provide useful materials for solving those identified aspects of the GDPR that are not properly covered. All this will positively contribute to citizens rights, while avoiding potential fines for the MEnts that may account for as much as 4% of the annual income, according to the GDPR. SMOOTH is born from technology partners and data protection authorities and will be designed and validated by actual MEnts with the aim of becoming the reference tool platform for them to adopt the GDPR.

TANGO will establish a stronger cross-sector data sharing, in a citizen-centric, secure and trustworthy manner, by developing innovative solutions while addressing environmental degradation and climate change challenges. The overall outcome is a novel platform exhibiting the following capabilities: user-friendly, secure, trustworthy, compliant, fair, transparent, accountable and environmentally sustainable data management, having at its core technology components for distributed, privacy preserving and environmentally sustainable data collection, processing, analysis, sharing and storage. This platform will promote trustworthy and digitally enabled interactions across society, for people as well as for businesses. TANGO will leverage the power of emerging digital technologies to strengthen the privacy for citizens and private/public organisations, reduce costs and improve productivity. It will unlock the innovation potential of digital technologies for decentralised, privacy-preserving applications, while making accessible and demonstrating this potential within the GAIA-X and EOSC ecosystem. With 37 key partners from 13 countries, TANGO, is uniquely positioned to provide a high impact solution within the transport, e-commerce, finance, public administration, tourism and industrial domains supporting numerous beneficiaries across Europe. Through the provision of TANGO technologies, a trustworthy environment will be designed acting as a gatekeeper to information and data flows. Citizens and public/private organisations will be empowered to act and interact providing data both online and offline. TANGO will focus its activities on 3 main pillars: (i) the deployment of trustworthy, accountable and privacy-preserving data-sharing technologies and platforms; (ii) the creation of data governance models and frameworks; (iii) the improvement of data availability, quality and interoperability – both in domain-specific settings and across sectors.

UPCAST provides a set of universal, trustworthy, transparent and user-friendly data market plugins for the automation of data sharing and processing agreements between businesses, public administrations and citizens. Our plugins will enable actors in the common European data spaces to design and deploy data exchange and trading operations guaranteeing (i) automatic negotiation of agreement terms, (ii) dynamic fair pricing, (ii) improved data-asset discovery, (iii) privacy, commercial and administrative confidentiality requirements, (iv) low environmental footprint, as well as ensuring compliance with (v) relevant legislation and (vi) ethical and responsibility guidelines. UPCAST will support the deployment of Common European data spaces by consolidating mature research in the areas of data management, privacy, monetisation, exchange and automated negotiation, considering efficiency for the environment as well as compliance with EU and national initiatives, AI regulations and ethical procedures. Four real-world pilots across Europe will operationalise a set of working platform plugins for data sharing, monetisation and trading, deployable across a variety of different data marketplaces and platforms, ensuring digital autonomy of data providers, brokers, users and data subjects, and enabling interoperability within European data spaces. UPCAST aims at engaging SMEs, administrations and citizens by providing a transferability framework, best practices and training to endow users in order to deploy the new technologies and maximise impact of the project.