Following European Parliament's Report on Language equality in the digital age, Language-centric artificial intelligence offers new opportunities for digital and technology-enabled communication and products in all European languages (and beyond), and thus both economically and cultural, are a central cornerstone for the European Digital Single Market and inclusion of citizens. However, although smaller or minority languages like Maltese are the ones to gain most from language technologies (LT), tools and resources for them are often scarce — in some cases non-existent which leads to a widening technology gap between large, well-resourced languages and smaller languages like Maltese. The overall goal of the "LT-BRIDGE" project hence is to integrate University of Malta's AI Department and Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology into the European research community in the area of AI-based language technologies by significantly strengthening its the research and networking capacities and reputation aiming to create a European-level Centre of Excellence in the this field in Malta (Widening Country) and thus closing the technology gap. Two leading European research organizations, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Dublin City University's ADAPT Centre (DCU) will work in order to help UM to attain this objective. The Science Strategy and corresponding research and innovation programme proposed by the LT-BRIDGE consortium will address the carefully selected and mutually-relevant research topics jointly shaping important new applied research areas. As a result the project will foster new young European level research teams in UM capable of carrying out competitive research in the priority scientific areas. The Innovation and Research Management capacity building programmes will allow UM to extend and improve its portfolio of services oriented towards the needs of national, regional and European public authorities, businesses and NGOs, as well.

The REXASI-PRO project aims to release a novel engineering framework. The REXASI-PRO project aims to release a novel engineering framework to develop greener and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence solutions. In the methodology, safety, security, and explainability are entangled. In addition, throughout the entire lifecycle of the framework, ethics aspects will be continuously monitored. To this end, the REXASI-PRO project introduces several novelties. The project will develop in parallel the design of novel trustworthy-by-construction solutions for social navigations and a methodology to certify the robustness of AI-based autonomous vehicles for people with reduced mobility. The trustworthy-by-construction social navigation algorithms will exploit mathematical models of social robots. The robots will be trained by using both implicit and explicit communication. REXASI-PRO methodology augments existing system-level and item-level engineering frameworks by leveraging novel eXplainability methods to improve the entire system's robustness. REXASIPRO will release additional verification and validation approaches for safety and security with the AI in the loop. Among the other developments, a novel learning paradigm embeds safety requirements in Deep Neural Network for planning algorithms, runtime monitoring based on conformal prediction regions, trustable sensing, and secure communication. The methodology will be used to certify the robustness of both autonomous wheelchairs and flying robots. The flying robots will be equipped with unbiased machine learning solutions for people detection that will be reliable also in an emergency. Thus, REXASI-PRO will make the AI solutions greener. To this end, both an AI-based orchestrator to augment the intelligence of the robots and topological methods will be developed. The REXASI-PRO framework will be demonstrated by enabling the collaboration among autonomous wheelchairs and flying robots to help people with reduced mobility.

NAUTILOS will fill in existing marine observation and modelling gaps through the development of a new generation of cost-effective sensors and samplers for physical (salinity, temperature), chemical (inorganic carbon, nutrients, oxygen), and biological (phytoplankton, zooplankton, marine mammals) essential ocean variables, in addition to micro-/nano-plastics, to improve our understanding of environmental change and anthropogenic impacts related to aquaculture, fisheries, and marine litter. Newly developed marine technologies will be integrated with different observing platforms and deployed through the use of novel approaches in a broad range of key environmental settings (e.g. from shore to deep-sea deployments) and EU policy-relevant applications: - Fisheries & Aquaculture Observing Systems, - Platforms of Opportunity demonstrations, - Augmented Observing Systems demonstration, - Demonstrations on ARGO Platform, - Animal-borne Instruments. The fundamental aim of the project will be to complement and expand current European observation tools and services, to obtain a collection of data at a much higher spatial resolution and temporal regularity and length than currently available at the European scale, and to further enable and democratise the monitoring of the marine environment to both traditional and non-traditional data users. The principles that underlie the NAUTILOS project will be those of the development, integration, validation and demonstration of new cutting-edge technologies with regards to sensors, interoperability and embedding skills. The development will always be guided by the objectives of scalability, modularity, cost-effectiveness and open-source availability of software and data products produced. NAUTILOS will also provide full and open data feed towards well-established portals and data integrators (EMODnet, CMEMS, JERICO).