"The COVID 19 pandemic poses a threat to ensuring and maintaining the quality of higher education caused by insufficient readiness of universities for digital learning in the 21st century. On the other hand, the current situation represents a unique opportunity for the rebirth and transformation of education through unified digital education and the expansion of the possibility of international networking between strategic partners. The content of the submitted project is based on the baseline study of the European Commission ""Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on Food Security and Nutrition"", according to which EU citizens during the first and second waves of the coronavirus reduced the overall demand for meeting less important needs and included food security and its sustainability among the most important priorities of the functioning of the society. Therefore, the aim of the proposed project is to reinforce the ability of education at the strategic partners´ institutions in the field of agri-environmental and food law through the feasible and effective implementation set of tools to ensure high quality, inclusive digital education. Specific objectives of the project are:- to develop and/or use high-quality digital content in the form of newly developed innovative teaching application;- develop digital pedagogical competences of teachers/trainers/researchers and learners;- to deliver high quality inclusive digital learning opportunities for learners;- to promote networking of strategic partners in the area of sharing of resources and expertise in the field of agri-environmental legislation, using digital technology providers and experts in educational technologies and relevant pedagogical practice.Master students, teachers, trainers, researchers of strategic partners, and institutions of formal and non-formal education, as well as relevant stakeholders from the area of agri-environmental law, were identified as the target groups.The partnership involves the strategic partners from the following countries in terms of maintaining the political-geographical balance: Slovakia, Poland, Portugal, and Italy. In order to create the most comprehensive education possible in this area, scientific and educational institutions (HEIs) and institutions operating directly in application practice are proposed as strategic partners representing each country.To fulfill the main goal and specific objectives, the project proposes the project activities as follows:- Development of an innovative smart application InCreDi, the aim of which will be to create a digital learning platform tailored to the educational process of legal branches and the requirements of strategic partners. InCreDi will be freely downloadable, available online/offline, and designed for a variety of smart devices (computers, tablets, and smartphones).- Elaboration of Guidelines for users of InCreDi to guide and make it easier the use all the proposed InCreDi tools.- Organisation of the seminar ""Effective digital approaches to modern education"" will aim to acquaint target groups with the latest trends in digital technologies as well as to clarify changes in learning in the cognitive process in the digital education system.- Elaboration of didactic materials for the course ""EU Agri-Environmental law"" as common teaching materials. Didactic materials are supplemented by practical cases, videos, vlogs, and tests. - Pilot testing of e-learning course ""EU agri-environmental law"" as a joint European course where the MSc. students from all strategic HEIs will meet together for education. - Storytelling will provide the target groups with the most up-to-date information in the field of agri-environmental law.- Elaboration of comparative analysis of agri-environmental law in the EU in individual countries of the strategic partnership will bring comparative knowledge from countries of the strategic partnership.- Organising the problem-solving webinars conducted in each Strategic Partnership country will provide four thematic areas that will enable the target groups to actively discuss the current challenges of EU agri-environmental law. - Organising of the dissemination activities – development and updating of the project webpage, seminars as multiplier events, preparation of online and printed materials and events.Strategic partners expect the desired impacts:-improved digitization of education, modernisation and internationalisation at home;-improved skills and competencies of target groups (professional, language, intercultural, organisational);-increased employability of students on the national and EU labor market;-improved harmonised educational approach to the teaching of legal branches;-improved recognizability and credibility of the strategic partners at the national and EU level;-amended agrarian and agri-environmental legislation;-increased interest and awareness of the issues related to agri-environmental law."

The AI4EOSC (Artificial Intelligence for the European Open Science Cloud) delivers an enhanced set of advanced services for the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models and applications in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). These services are bundled together into a comprehensive platform providing advanced features such as distributed, federated and split learning; novel provenance metadata for AI/ML/DL models; event-driven data processing services or provisioning of AI/ML/DL services based on serverless computing. The project builds on top of the DEEP-Hybrid-DataCloud outcomes and the EOSC compute platform and services in order to provide this specialized compute platform. Moreover, AI4EOSC offers customization components in order to provide tailor made deployments of the platform, adapting to the evolving user needs. The main outcomes of the AI4EOSC project will be a measurable increase of the number of advanced, high level, customizable services available through the EOSC portal, serving as a catalyst for researchers, facilitating the collaboration, easing access to high-end pan-European resources and reducing the time to results; paired with concrete contributions to the EOSC exploitation perspective, creating a new channel to support the build-up of the EOSC Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning community of practice.

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest and investment in the use of Agricultural Digital Technologies (ADSs). The use of ADSs is seen by many as an opportunity to increase the economic and environmental performance of the agricultural sector. Despite great efforts and resources spent, uptake of ADSs by EU farmers has been limited for reasons like a) the frequently excessive cost of ADSs, b) the low trust that farmers have on ADSs and data sharing, for a variety reasons, and c) the weak network connectivity problems experienced by farms in remote areas, which affect the performance of the ADS. The overall aim of the OpenAgri project is to democratise digital farming by enabling the development and deployment of innovative cost-effective energy-efficient OS software and open hardware-based ADSs that can operate at a high performance even in remote areas with weak connectivity. This will be achieved by a) ensuring the co-creation of ADSs by engaging farmers and farm advisors in participatory prototyping activities inspired by the makerspaces approach; and b) providing access to a number of reusable OS software services designed to support the edge and mixed computing mode, and a “sociotechnical infrastructure”. Using a multi-actor approach, OpenAgri will involve farmers, ADSs providers, farm advisors and scientists in 14 Sustainable Innovation Pilots (SIPs) in ≥10 countries across Europe, and guide them in co-creating and piloting edge, cloud and mixed-model ADSs addressing important challenges of agricultural production. 5 SIPs have been pre-selected and 9 more will be awarded through an Open Call, enabling a dynamic response to a changing policy and technology landscape. Finally, building on a thorough analysis of EU agriculture and the results from the SIPs, OpenAgri will create a Decision Support Tool that will allow Policy Makers, Farmers and Farm Advisors to select the best possible cloud, edge or mixed ADSs for any given set of conditions.

DATAMITE empowers European companies by delivering a modular, open-source and multi-domain Framework to improve DATA Monetizing, Interoperability, Trading and Exchange, in the form of software modules, training, and business materials. DATAMITE unleashes the monetization potential at two levels. At internal level, users will have tools to improve quality management of their data, the adherence to FAIR principles, and will be able to upskill on technical and business aspects thanks to the multiple open-source training materials the project will generate. Therefore, data will become trustable and more reliable also in other paradigms like AI. At external level, keeping users in control of their data will provide new sources of revenue and interaction with other stakeholders. The architecture envisioned for DATAMITE enables DIHs sandboxing, becoming a potential instructor on their onboarding of SMEs and low-tech SMEs into the data economy. Together, DATAMITE’s solutions will function as a catalyst to boost data monetization in the European productive fabric. DATAMITE will validate the results in 3 different use cases with a total of 6 pilots, demonstrating that the Framework is interoperable and usable in different domains and user needs, as: 1) Intra-corporate, multi-domain data exchange; 2) Data trading among Data Spaces; 3) Integration with other initiatives as Data Markets, EU AI-on-demand platform, or DIHs. Sectors covered by the pilots are: agriculture, energy, industrial and manufacturing, and climate. To achieve this, the project relies on a consortium of 27 partners from 13 countries, bringing together key actors of the Data Value Chain: Data Spaces technical and business stakeholders, multiple key communities (IDSA, Gaia-X, EUHUBS4DATA, AI4EUROPE, EOSC), key experts in Legal and SSH aspects to guarantee legal and societal compliance, and facilitators on open-source community building and standardisation activities to accelerate the transfer to the market.

Clear targets have been defined by the EU for a more competitive and sustainable agriculture (Green Deal). This requires data-driven decision making for farmers, governments and other policy makers, yet there is a severe reference-data gap when observations are needed at the local level. An underexploited source of data is generated by sensors used in agriculture, as they capture crucial information on the crops and the surrounding agri-environmental conditions. Tapping into this source and upscaling them the integration with other data (e.g. satellite) could result in enhanced capacities for regional agri-environmental monitoring. This would require a paradigm shift on how the monitoring systems work, and on the issues of data ownership and governance. The vision of ScaleAgData is thus to gain insight in (i) how these data streams should be governed to the benefit of all stakeholders, especially the farmers, and (ii) how these data can be integrated in the regional agri-environmental monitoring datasets. Through this upscaling, this wealth of information can be shared with a larger farmer community, thus shrinking the technological inequality in the sector. Specific attention will be paid to innovations in sensor technology, edge computing, data analytics, and novel EO-based products. These innovations will be co-designed and showcased in 6 Research and Innovation Labs, each with their specific thematic focus and spread across Europe. This will enable the assessment of the proposed innovations and data governance frameworks, and demonstrating added values of the improved monitoring capabilities for a range of users, including small-scale and agro-ecological farmers, the financial sector, and policy makers. With these outcomes, ScaleAgData aims at contributing to the overall competitiveness and sustainability performance of the European agricultural sector, and to the work of the HE candidate partnership “Agriculture of Data” and the Soil Mission.