In a world of increasing preoccupation with artefacts, interacting with our fellow human beings remains one of our most enjoyable, but also one of our practically most critical activities. We derive inspiration from each other, solve problems and chart our future together. Yet our interaction with fellow humans is far from seamless or frictionless: despite much greater world-wide reach, we suffer (perhaps more than ever) from isolation, barriers and separation due to language, culture, physical distances, time-zones, scheduling conflicts, and distractions to our attention. With greater freedom, reach and flexibility, our isolation and complexities also appear to increase. In our proposed project “Meetween”, we aim to find solutions to these problems. Rather than artificial intelligence (AI) getting in the way of the human experience, we harness its power to make human-human interaction more seamless and natural, eliminate language barriers, replace the techno-clutter with support. The project aims to 1) build the science-based technology solutions needed to power the next generation of videoconferencing platforms for Europe, to support smooth, engaging, barrier-free collaboration across languages; 2) exploit the all-round, integrated algorithmic capabilities offered by foundation models and self-supervised training on large datasets to nimbly adapt to participant context, cultural and regional specificities, including linguistic ones; 3) foster and facilitate business collaboration throughout the European Union by providing real-time machine-learning-powered speech-to-speech translation, summarization and virtual assistant services for online meetings; 4) defend a European vision for AI with regard to safety, privacy, social and ethical approaches, anchored in our regulations, data standards and shared initiatives and resources.

Smart Manufacturing is believed to play a critical role in maintaining the competitiveness of organisations, by supporting them at different levels such as process optimisation, resource efficiency, predictive maintenance and quality control. Nevertheless, AI technologies which are currently and rapidly penetrating industrial sectors at those levels remain essentially narrow AI systems. This is due to the lack of self-adaptiveness in the AIs capability to assimilate and interpret new information outside of its predefined programmed parameters. This mean that AI systems are tailored for solving specific tasks on a specific predefined setting and changes in the underlying setting usually requires system adaption ranging from fine-grained parameter adaptations to fully-fledged re-design and re-development of AI systems. TEAMING_AI project aims at a human AI teaming framework that integrates the strengths of both, the flexibility of human intelligence and scale-up capability of machine intelligence. Human AI teaming is equally motivated to meet the increased need for flexibility in the maintenance and further evolution of AI systems, driven by the increasing personalization of products and service, as well as tackling the barriers of user acceptance and ethical challenges involved in the collaborative environments where artificial intelligence will be used, in order AI can be considered as “teammate” rather than as a threat. The TEAMING.AI project will be run over 36 months with a work plan divided into 9 Work Packages. Work Packages from 1 to 5 are devoted to the development of new technology to enhance the interaction between human and machine. Furthermore, Work Packages 6 and 7 wrap the development of 3 use case scenarios. Finally, two final Work Packages (8 and 9) will work respectively on the dissemination, exploitation of results and coordination of the project in a transversally way to the above mentioned WPs.

The main objective of the SMARTWASTE MSCA SE project is to form a world class international and inter-sectoral network of organizations, working on a joint research programme in the field of novel Sustainable Smart Textile Materials, by replacing conventional and high costs textile materials with sustainable, environmentally friendly, cheaper and novel materials such as cellulose fibres from tomato stems waste and creating nonwovens from unconventional poplar seed fibers. This can only be achieved by bringing together world-class experts in materials, polymers, environmentalists, chemists, software engineers, and designers with state-of-the-art innovations and processes in their respective fields of expertise. The participants will exchange skills and knowledge to create sustainable textile materials, strengthening collaborative research between different countries and sectors. SMARTWASTE will also refine and produce potential commercial market opportunities for non-academic participants in the project (WP7). Our goal is to train next generation of researchers and innovators in sustainable textiles through cross-sectoral and training modules. The staff members will develop new skills, be exposed to new research and innovation environments, international networks, new industrial processes and techniques whilst widening and enriching career development through cross-sectoral knowledge transfer and international mobility.

The main objective of the RETEX MSCA SE project is to form a world class international and inter-sectoral network of organizations, working on a joint research programme in the field of novel Sustainable Electronic Textile Materials, by replacing conventional textile materials with sustainable, environmentally friendly, and advanced materials such as; regenerated fibres from cotton fabrics. This can only be achieved by bringing together world-class experts in materials, polmers, environmentalists, chemists, software engineers, and designers with state-of-the-art innovations and processes in their respective fields of expertise. The participants will exchange skills and knowledge to create sustainable textile materials, strengthening collaborative research between different countries and sectors. RETEX will also refine and produce potential commercial market opportunities for non-academic participants in the project .Our goal is to train next generation of researchers and innovators in sustainable textiles through cross-sectoral and training modules. The staff members will develop new skills, be exposed tonew research and innovation environments, international networks, new industrial processes and techniques whilst widening and enriching career development through cross-sectoral knowledge transfer and international mobility.