BACKGROUNDRapid technological change means we face a very real digital competence gap in the coming years—a period in which technological capabilities accelerate so swiftly that talent and knowledge can’t keep up. The competence gap will create friction, slowing realization of the benefits of digital transformation. Almost all EU countries are introducing schemes, offers, services aimed at reducing the competence gap but despite the EU goal of creating a common Digital Single Market, most of them are not connected, don’t know each other or have never thought about establishing any kind of cooperation scheme.OBJECTIVEThe DITA project wants to strengthen transnational cooperation among synergic training organizations and increase the mobility opportunities of trainees in the European digital industry scene by a) providing a transparent and useful overview of available training opportunities in the field of Digital Transformation, b) supporting trainees in identifying which available training opportunities may best fit to their needs and expectations, c) establishing permanent cooperation schemes among the identified training, programs and facilities, d) delivering and permanently maintaining an open but supervised tool (The Digital Industry Training Atlas) that will collect, connect and display synergic available training opportunities in Europe on digital transformation.TARGET GROUPSThe project has 2 main target groups: 1) it responds to the needs of todays and tomorrows professionals or graduates working for (or being potential candidates to work for) European small and medium sized enterprises, specifically the project addresses the needs of current or future managers and staff of almost all operational departments of a typical European SME; 2) vocational training organizations that would highly benefit from connecting to complementary organizations in their country as well as in other countries.The project will involve at least 100 end users (learners) during the teat phase and 160 during multiplier events plus 110 training organizations.NEEDS ADDRESSEDUnder this perspective the project allows a) learners to 1) have full and transparent access to available training paths in the field of digital transformation; 2) be facilitated and supported in identifying and choosing the most appropriate training path that would increase their competences and skills in the field of digital transformation;b) training organizations to increase the quality of their training offer by establishing international formal connections with complementary training organizations.EXPECTED RESULTSThe project’s expected results are to increase: 1) the general awareness level of the current and future European workforce about available training opportunities in the field of Digital Transformation; 2) the understanding of potential synergies among the identified training opportunities in the field of Digital Transformation; 3) learners’ mobility throughout Europe to benefit from the different and complementary offer of training programs in the field of Digital Transformation; 4) the internationalization strategies of life-long learning training organizations in the field of Digital Transformation.INTELLECTUAL OUTPUTS7 synergic and complementary project partners from 6 EU countries (IT, AT, DE, BE, PT and ES) representing the most relevant running European Industry 4.0 initiatives will cooperate to achieve these results by delivering 4 synergic IOs, namely 1) Digital Transformation & Competences in Europe: Available Training Facilities & Approaches; 2) Digital Transformation & Competences in Europe: Industry Relevant Training Case Studies and ideal synergies; 3) The Interactive EU Map of Digital Transformation Training Providers; 4) Cooperation Framework for a common Digital Transformation Training Arena.LONG TERM BENEFITAt the end of the project an interactive EU Map of available training options and their potential interconnections will be available for European exploitation via the Training Atlas. A long-term action plan, describing strategy and concrete action lines until the end of 2024, and concrete synergies with EU digitalization-oriented initiatives will guarantee its availability after the end of the project. European Learners and Training Organizations will benefit from it as well as all those programs and action lines foreseen and anchored to the Digital Single Market initiative..

Recent events have demonstrated the need for readiness for medical supply and equipment rapid manufacturing repurposing. Eur3ka will deliver a trusted and unique capability to plug and collectively respond to a sudden demand increased in a coordinated and effective manner at unprecedented scale. Eur3ka mission is to bring together most recent R&I results in (1) Industry 4.0 standards, open automation modular manufacturing production line enablers; (2) industrial international common data space enablers and digital infrastructures; (3) global on-demand and manufacturing as a service platforms; (4) connected and smarter supply networks, and global medical supplies and equipment repositories; (5) the vibrant European and Global network of manufacturing DIH network innovation services and open experimental facilities. The main ambition of Eur3ka is to enable and facilitate global and fair access to (1) a Plug & Respond (P&R) repurposing resource coordination framework for pandemic crisis response, (2) a common open standardized modular manufacturing reference architecture and solutions, and (3) top digitally sovereign cross-sectorial manufacturing networks and capacities that should allow to connect global manufacturing and supply chain capabilities and medical knowledge on-demand and as-a-Service across the globe in an IP-responsive manner to ensure rapid manufacturing repurposing for an increased and sudden demand of medical supplies and equipment. Eur3ka builds and extends the existing Global Network of Advanced Manufacturing Hubs (AMHUBs) to leverage a comprehensive COVID response based on solid socio-tecno-economic pillars that bring together advanced manufacturing and digital enablers that will raise robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, response, and recovery against current and future pandemics. Eur3ka vision builds on and accelerate current digital transformation industry 4.0 efforts, as well as flexible regulations and tailored workforce re-/up- skilling

BACKGROUND.Global competition has generated the need among all the enterprises, especially SMEs, to adjust their strategies for survival.As a result of T4 actions, the interviewed stakeholders complained of lack of skills and knowledge to allow companies have a dedicated person to facilitate the transfer of modern technologies, products and services so as to accelerate the development for survival on the market in the fight with big companies.It has so emerged that the proposed occupation, the Transnational Technology Transfer Manager, is mandatory for the development strategy. TTTM must possess, apart form the professional technical abilities, competences which should enable European harmonization (leadership, economic and legislative knowledge, ability to mediate between social groups with different cultures etc). OBJECTIVES.The general objective of T4 was to increase and upgrade skills and competences of European SMEs in the field of transnational technology transfer and accelerate public and private stakeholder organizations in increasing their responsiveness to SMEs skills needs. T4 aimed at 1)minding the gap between SMEs and transnational technology innovation processes;2)establishing a permanent, transparent, recognition oriented, evolving&multi-actor training mechanism which will allow to respond to the needs of SME's;3)increasing institutional capacity and awareness of responsible actors of industrial, technological and training policies about the role of transnational technology transfer for SMEs and extend cooperation between SMEs, Research, Service Providers and VET&Training System actors.TARGET GROUPS included:SMEs:managers,technical and administrative staff,consultants;Cluster Organizations:technical staff,consultants;R&D Centre / Universities:researchers,technical staff;Technology Parks and Business Development Centres: technical staff,consultants;Economic Development Bodies:policy officers,management,technical staff;VET and Higher Education:trainers, researchers, technical staff, administrative staff, learners.The directly involved target groups members was 650 units, but due to multiple information in various media channels, we consider that the number can be 1000.ACTIVITIES.In order to achieve the planned objectives, T4 has been structured so as to obtain the four IOs which were implemented by 7 complementary partners combining training, technology, outreach to SMEs and policy anchoring capacities.The 8 Work-packages were:WP1-Project Management;WP2-Quality Management;WP3-Evaluation and Risk Management;WP4-Dissemination and Exploitation;WP5-inding the GAP: SMEs& TTT (M2-M6) created a knowledge base about current successful practices which combined technology transfer&training methods to support these processes and further strengthen them; WP6-Mapping skills needs&Develop Competence Profile(M6-M11) which focused on mapping the competences of the TTTM; WP7(M11-M24) focused on producing the curriculum and in the development and testing of the TTTM Training Program;WP8(M20-M26) delivered 2 sets of final guidelines, one for policy levels and the second one for VET system & Innovation system actors and a template of Memorandum of Understanding in order to set up of a TTT Training Cooperation Network.RESULTS. Main project results can be summarized as follows:1)SMEs increased awareness level about technology transfer processes at transnational level;2)Training&Service Providers increased knowledge about how to simplify technology transfer processes;3)available training (including competence profile, training course structure, content and self-enrollment E-learning platform);4)increased capacity of the educational/training/service side to respond to educational/training needs with a more close to market and understandable language;5)participation of the governance level&VET System actors to the information and awareness raising initiatives;6)increased knowledge about how developed training can be transformed & readapted according to technological trends and SMEs needs(and how formal VET training course can be anchored to more situational learning settings based on SMEs daily operations);7)achieving of a good collaboration between partners;8)harmonization of know-how transfer between them and familiarity with cultural specifics of involved countries.The impact of our short-term activities was to raise awareness of the need to develop such a business within companies, creating a win-win collaboration. In a long terms perspective the project aims at creating a winning cooperation mechanism between training&educational system and European SMEs which will contribute to adopt transnational technology transfer as a means to accelerate growth and development.A major benefit consisted in observing the enthusiasm and satisfaction of the contacted stakeholders in finding the solution to solve the problem they had been struggling with for a long time, namely surviving on a market dominated by the big companies.

AI-DAPT brings forward a data-centric mentality in AI, that is effectively fused with a model-centric, science-guided approach, across the complete lifecycle of AI-Ops, by introducing end-to-end automation and AI-based systematic methods to support the design, the execution, the observability and the lifecycle management of robust, intelligent and scalable data-AI pipelines that continuously learn and adapt based on their context. AI-DAPT will design a novel AI-Ops / intelligent pipeline lifecycle framework cross-cutting the different business, legal/ethics, data, AI logic/models, and system requirements while always ensuring a human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach across five axis: “Data Design for AI”, “Data Nurturning for AI”, “Data Generation for AI”, “Model Delivery for AI”, “Data-Model Optimization for AI”. AI-DAPT will contribute to the current research and advance the state-of-the-art techniques and technologies across a number of research paths, including sophisticated Explainable AI (XAI)-driven data operations from purposing, harvesting/mining, exploration, documentation and valuation to interoperability, annotation, cleaning, augmentation and bias detection; collaborative feature engineering minimizing the data where appropriate; adaptive AI for model retraining purposes. Overall, AI-DAPT aims at reinstating the pure data-related work in its rightful place in AI and at reinforcing the generalizability, reliability, trustworthiness and fairness of Al solutions. In order to demonstrate the actual innovation and added value that can be derived through the AI-DAPT scientific advancements, the AI-DAPT results will be validated in two, interlinked axes: I. Through their actual application to address real-life problems in four (4) representative industries: Health, Robotics, Energy, and Manufacturing; II. Through their integration in different AI solutions, either open source or commercial, that are currently available in the market.

Manufacturing industry faces the challenges of driving competitiveness, resilience, sustainability and circularity in the context of a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous environment. A VUCA world calls for new capabilities on the manufacturing systems demanding HUMANufacturing systems to evolve from industrial automation towards industrial autonomy. MaaS technologies still lack a solid foundation for more active resilience mechanisms that can respond with increased agility to more volatile and uncertainty scenarios. M4ESTRO envisions to create an end-to-end trustworthy and transparent platform for Manufacturing as a Service offering active and predictive resilience and timely preparedness to disruptive events. M4ESTRO will foster an interactive, collaborative, and dynamic ecosystem where these stakeholders will operate in a hyper-distributed way to manufacture products by providing and receiving services in a secure and trusted manner. It will offer response actions to foreseen risk based on the intrinsic network’s flexibility while offer preparedness to unforeseen risks based on the documented resilience to switch action plans To do so, M4ESTRO will focus on four (4) pillars, offering HW and SW components: Pillar 1: Resilient, transparent and flexible manufacturing processes in value chains. Pillar 2: Resilient equipment, AI and trusted data for adaptive manufacturing. Pillar 3: Resilient Simulations to the Industrial Metaverse for responsive manufacturing. Pillar 4: Human centred Manufacturing Resilience and Sustainability. The impact of M4ESTRO for the European Manufacturing industry, but also the society itself, can be summarised in the following (with a horizon of 4 years after project ends): (i) Process ramp-up time (>26%); (ii) OEE (>14%); (iii) Yield & CpK (>11% & >24%); (iv) Product cost reduction (>9%); (v) Cost per piece (>38%); (vi) Energy consumption (>26%); (vii) about 305 new jobs created and (viii) over 42.89 MEUR ROI for the consortium.