Recent market research has revealed a globally growing interest on documentaries both from the demand and supply side. Documentary genre has now become the 2nd most populated content-wise genre in the movie titles catalog, surpassing traditionally popular genres such as comedy or adventure films. At the same time modern audiences appear willing to immerse into more interactive and personalised viewing experiences, through second-screen content and advanced video formats such as 360° video. Documentaries, even in their linear version, involve high costs in all phases (pre-production, production, post-production) due to certain inefficiencies, partly attributed to the lack of scientifically-proven cost-effective ICT tools. PRODUCER aims at filling this gap, by delivering a set of innovative ICT tools that focus on supporting various stages of the documentary creation process, ranging from the user engagement and audience building, to the final documentary delivery. Apart from the key objective of reducing the overall production cost and time, enabling small documentary production houses (SMEs) to increase their market share and competitiveness, our project would result in: a) providing greater creativity and productivity to documentary creation professionals, stimulated by new production sophisticated tools that enable searching, annotating, editing, personalizing professional and user generated content, b) enhancing viewers’ experience and satisfaction by generating multi-layered documentaries, and delivering to the viewer personalized services, and c) facilitating the promotion of the documentaries to investors. The consortium is composed of three SME partners, one broadcaster, one large ICT industry, and two research institutions, all of them actively involved as key actors in offering adequate competence for the accomplishment of the project objectives

DELTA proposes a DR management platform that distributes parts of the Aggregator’s intelligence into lower layers of a novel architecture, based on VPP principles, in order to establish a more easily manageable & computationally efficient DR solution, ultimately aiming to introduce scalability & adaptiveness into the Aggregator’s DR toolkits; the DELTA engine will be able to adopt & integrate multiple strategies & policies provided from its energy market stakeholders, making it authentically modular & future-proof. DELTA will also deliver a fully autonomous architectural design, enabling end-users to escape the hassle of responding to complex price/incentive-based signals, while facilitating active, aware & engaged prosumers, based on innovative award schemes, a social collaboration platform & enhanced DR visualisation. Provision of full-scale market & grid services will be made possible by delivering explicit & implicit-based DR elasticity services, while pushing current market regulatory limitations so that they can be surpassed, and satisfying potential grid constraints related to flexibility activation through Multi-Factor Forecasting and Deep Reinforcement Learning Profiling. Furthermore, DELTA will propose & implement novel multi-agent based, self-learning energy matchmaking algorithms to enable aggregation, segmentation & coordination of several diverse supply & demand clusters, designed end-to-end using well-known, open protocols (i.e. OpenADR), for increasing interoperability. DELTA will set the milestone for data security in future DR applications by not only implementing novel block-chain methods & authentication mechanisms, but also by making use of Smart Contracts which would further secure & facilitate Aggregators-to-Prosumers transactions. Two pilots in UK & Cyprus will realise the DELTA concept, covering a wide variety of residential/tertiary loads (>11GWh), RES generation (>14GWh) & energy storage systems (>9MWh) (average annual measurements).

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) offers many advantages when compared to traditional MIS, including improved vision, precision and dexterity. While the popularity of RAMIS is steadily increasing, the potential for improving patient outcomes and penetrating into many procedures is not fully realised, largely because of serious limitations in the current instrumentation, control and feedback to the surgeon. Specifically, restricted access, lack of force feedback, and use of rigid tools in confined spaces filled with organs pose challenges to full adoption. We aim to develop novel technology to overcome barriers to expansion of RAMIS to more procedures, focusing on real-world surgical scenarios of urology, vascular surgery, and soft tissue orthopaedic surgery. A team of highly experienced clinical, academic, and industrial partners will collaborate to develop: i) dexterous anthropomorphic instruments with minimal cognitive demand ii) a range of bespoke end-effectors with embedded surgical tools using additive manufacturing methods for rapid prototyping and testing utilizing a user-centred approach, iii) wearable multi-sensory master for tele-operation to optimise perception and action and iv) wearable smart glasses for augmented reality guidance of the surgeon based on real-time 3D reconstruction of the surgical field, utilising dynamic active constraints and restricting the instruments to safe regions. The demonstration platform will be based on commercial robotic manipulators enhanced with the SMARTsurg advanced hardware and software features. Testing will be performed on laboratory phantoms with surgeons to bring the technology closer to exploitation and to validate acceptance by clinicians. The study will benefit patients, surgeons and health providers, by promoting safety and ergonomics as well as reducing costs. Furthermore, there is a potential to improve complex remote handling procedures in other domains beyond RAMIS.

Ageing@Work will develop a novel ICT-based, personalized system to support ageing workers (aged 50+) into designing fit-for-purpose work environments and managing flexibly their evolving needs. Advanced dynamically adapted virtual models of workers will incorporate specificities in respect to skills, physical, cognitive and behavioral factors, being extended from the work context to personal life aspects interacting with workability, health and well-being. Virtual workplace models will encode characteristics of the workplace (factory, outdoor work site, home), at both physical and semantic, resource/process levels. On top of the models, computational intelligence will be responsible to (a) assess user specificities and needs i.r.t. work conditions, both in terms of ergonomics, health and safety issues and task assignments, and (b) perform personalized predictive simulations on workability, health and well-being. Recommendations will then be provided both to the worker and company (under strict privacy restrictions), on how the working conditions must adapt. The worker models will be populated by highly unobtrusive worker sensing, both at work, at home and on the move. To foster workability and productivity, highly personalized, intuitive, age-friendly productivity, co-design enhancement tools will be developed, including ones for AR/VR-based context-awareness and telepresence, lifelong learning and knowledge sharing. On top of these, a novel Ambient Virtual Coach (AVC) will encompass an empathic mirroring avatar for subtle notifications provision, an adaptive Visual Analytics –based personal dashboard, and a reward-based motivation system targeting positive and balanced worker behavior at work and personal life, towards a novel paradigm of ambient support into workability and well-being. The integrated system will be developed by user-centered design and will be evaluated at two pilot sites, related to core Industry 4.0 processes of mining and machines production.

The SCENE project has been majorly designed to offer the means for a modern & globally competitive, European filmmaking industry, by building upon two solid pillars, i.e. semantically cognitive AI technologies and the (in) tangible European Cultural assets, always with respect to the European values & policies regarding the human and its environment. SCENE will develop a wide set of cutting-edge technologies & services that are able to cover the whole pipeline of the film-making industry, “from farm to fork”, i.e. from the very early stages of the film planning until their playback at the audience screen. Specifically, SCENE aims to innovate by enriching the existing data lakes with high-qualitative & editable 3D digital models of European cultural sites, and by enhancing their accessibility with the integration of multi-dimensional knowledge graphs carrying location- & cultural-aware information. SCENE will further facilitate the film-making & film-editing side during the production & the post-production phase with efficient simulation & novel assessment mechanisms. Similarly, it will enable a smart & privacy-preserving interaction channels between industrial stakeholders & the audience, that will allow not only for pro-active sensing of the audience’s preferences in the pre-production phase, but also for the early identification of the most matching advertisement & distribution channels during the distribution phase, as well as the insightful matching & recommendation between films & individuals. The integration of the aforementioned technologies under the unique SCENE platform demonstrates significant capacity to render an excellent proof-of-concept prototype to guide, inspire and mark significant breakthrough in the film making industry during the post COVID era, on scientific, commercial, business & policy level.