RURACTIVE aims to foster a just and sustainable transition of rural areas by developing smart, community-led, tailor-made, place-based and inclusive solutions within local Multi-Actor Rural Innovation Ecosystems (RIEs) in 12 pilot area (Dynamos - Ds) in 7 EU, 2 Associated Countries and Switzerland. RURACTIVE will unlock the innovation potential of rural communities by addressing six integrated Rural Development Drivers (RDDs) – namely multimodal mobility, energy transition, agri-food and agroecology, culture and cultural innovation, health and wellbeing, nature-based and cultural tourism – and transversally integrating climate change mitigation and adaption, biodiversity and social justice and inclusion. RURACTIVE will empower rural communities to act for societal change, by making available existing knowledge around smart solutions that integrate various forms of innovation (digital and technological, technical, organizational and social, business models and financial) and enhancing rural communities' capacities and skills, by providing training, capacity building, and knowledge transfer. Implementing a methodology for RIEs establishment in 12 Ds, RURACTIVE will work towards inclusive decision-making processes for all, including vulnerable groups and people at risk of exclusion, providing RIEs with instruments and capacities to collaboratively co-develop, co-implement and co-monitor smart and community-led solutions. Also, by offering an open set of data-driven tools (Decision Support Tool, Adaptive Monitoring tool), a digital infrastructure (RURACTIVE Digital Hub), and defining a programme for external Innovators, RURACTIVE will provide a fertile ground for change in rural areas. Results will be out-scaled through knowledge exchanges and networking at EU level (open contest for Additional Ds and RURACTIVE Forum), the deployment of training and capacity building activities for further rural communities and the creation of open e-learning courses and MOOC.

EdgeAI is as a key initiative for the European digital transition towards intelligent processing solutions at the edge. EdgeAI will develop new electronic components and systems, processing architectures, connectivity, software, algorithms, and middleware through the combination of microelectronics, AI, embedded systems, and edge computing. EdgeAI will ensure that Europe has the necessary tools, skills, and technologies to enable edge AI as a viable alternative deployment option to legacy centralised solutions, unlocking the potential of ubiquitous AI deployment, with the long-term objective of Europe taking the lead of Intelligent Edge. EdgeAI will contribute to the Green Deal twin transition with a systemic, cross-sectoral approach, and will deliver enhanced AI-based electronic components and systems, edge processing platforms, AI frameworks and middleware. It will develop methodologies to ease, advance and tailor the design of edge AI technologies by co-ordinating efforts across 48 of the brightest and best R&D organizations across Europe. It will demonstrate the applicability of the developed approaches across a variety of vertical solutions, considering security, trust, and energy efficiency demands inherent in each of these use cases. EdgeAI will significantly contribute to the grand societal challenge to increase the intelligent processing capabilities at the edge.

RESILIAGE’s mission is to provide novel knowledge and impactful solutions for exploiting Europe´s hidden and unused resource: community resilience. RESILIAGE will enable a step-change in Disaster Risk Management and in the way research and practice deal with variation in aspects of society like culture, risk awareness, inclusion, socio-economic and geographical conditions by co-creating resilient communities through digital tools and soft solutions consolidated in a holistic and systemic approach. RESILIAGE aims to improve understanding of the behaviour and psychological reactions of diverse society groups affected by a natural and man-made disaster and enhance community resilience. Indeed, with the proactive and participatory involvement of all the relevant stakeholders and end users, RESILIAGE will co-shape and develop a set of digital tools and soft solutions to support first responders and public authorities, empower citizens, share more accurate and accessible information prior, during and after a natural and man-made disaster or crisis situation. These will be integrated in a digital platform, the Resource Ecosystem for Community Resilience, and validated through a holistic systemic Disaster Risk Management and multi-hazards approach in five Community Resilience labs and their networks. Results and lessons learned will provide guidelines and policy recommendations to enhance preparedness plans, SENDAI framework and strategies for Climate Change Adaptation.

REBECCA, a heavily SME-driven project, will democratize the development of novel edge AI systems. Towards this aim, REBECCA will develop a purely European complete Hardware(HW) and Software(SW) stack around a RISC-V CPU, which will provide significantly higher levels of a) performance (e.g., inferences per second), b) energy/power efficiency (e.g., inferences per joule/watt), c) safety and d) security than the existing ones. This will be achieved by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies and by making significant scientific and technological advances in several key relevant domains, including a) processing units, b) hardware accelerators, c) reconfigurable hardware, d) tightly coupled interconnected chiplets e) HW/SW co-design and co-development tools, f) system software, g) middleware, and h) AI libraries and frameworks. REBECCA will significantly contribute to realizing business and societal opportunities by validating and demonstrating its approach on 4 real-world use cases and 2 benchmarks based on real-world applications from the Smart appliances, Energy Generation, Infrastructure Inspection, Avionics Automotive and Health domains. In terms of HW, REBECCA will develop a novel chip consisting of two tightly coupled chiplets which will incorporate: a) RISC-V multicore, b) Neuromorphic AI Accelerator, c) Programmable array AI Accelerator, d) AI Accelerator utilizing a hierarchical processing architecture, e) DNN Accelerator, f) Reconfigurable hardware, g) Near-Memory-Processing, h) Memory Encryption. In terms of SW, REBECCA will implement optimized system SW, middleware, and AI libraries that will take full advantage of the underlying novel HW. The REBECCA platform will be complemented by a novel HW/SW Design Space Exploration tool which will allow the development of highly efficient REBECCA-based systems. REBECCA will additionally provide the means for safety and security modeling and verification for the developed HW and SW from the very early design stages.

In Europe, migration is tradition – and not only since the European legislation changed towards free migration of European citizens. This is not free of challenges. Especially in the case of care, migrants, often face a double challenge: (i) not to speak the language and not to be acquainted with the culture of the resident country, and (ii) be unfamiliar with the care and health administrations of the country. As a consequence, e.g., elderly migrants in care homes suffer from social exclusion, with their relatives also struggling with getting the right information and interacting with the administration, migrants at home are often reluctant to go to see the doctor in case of health issues, a tendency that is often further aggravated by cultural matters. Migrant temporary care workers, who in addition often do not have an adequate professional training, face the problem of isolation, lack of professional background information and deficient communication with both the cared and the supervision personnel. KRISTINA’s overall objective is to research and develop technologies for a human-like socially competent and communicative agent that is run on mobile communication devices and that serves for migrants with language and cultural barriers in the host country as a trusted information provision party and mediator in questions related to basic care and healthcare. To develop such an agent, KRISTINA will advance the state of the art in dialogue management, multimodal (vocal, facial and gestural) communication analysis and multimodal communication. The technologies will be validated in two use cases, in which prolonged trials will be carried out for each prototype that marks the termination of a SW development cycle, with a representative number of migrants recruited as users from the migration circles identified as especially in need: elderly Turkish migrants and their relatives and short term Polish care giving personnel in Germany and North African migrants in Spain.