Artificial Intelligence has become a major innovative force and it is one of the pillars of the fourth industrial revolution. This trend has been acknowledged also by the European Commission that has already pointed out how high-performance, intelligent, and secure networks are fundamental for the development and evolution of the multi-service Next Generation Internet (NGI). While great progress has been done during the last years with respect to the accuracy and performance of AI-enabled platforms, their integration in potentially autonomous decision-making systems or even critical infrastructures requires end-to-end quality assurance. AI@EDGE addresses the challenges harnessing the concept of “reusable, secure, and trustworthy AI for network automation”. In AI@EDGE European industries, academics and innovative SMEs commit to achieve an EU-wide impact on industry-relevant aspects of the AI-for-networks and networks-for-AI paradigms in beyond 5G systems. Cooperative perception for vehicular networks, secure, multi-stakeholder AI for IIoT, aerial infrastructure inspections, and in-flight entertainment are the uses cases targeted by AI@EDGE to maximise the commercial, societal, and environmental impact. To achieve the goal, AI@EDGE targets significant breakthroughs in two fields: (i) general-purpose frameworks for closed-loop network automation capable of supporting flexible and programmable pipelines for the creation, utilization, and adaptation of the secure, reusable, and trustworthy AI/ML models; and (ii) converged connect-compute platform for creating and managing resilient, elastic, and secure end-to-end slices capable of supporting a diverse range of AI-enabled network applications.

Edge computing offers many technical advantages, e.g., reduced latency, secure decentralized processing and storage, scalability at lower complexity, versatility to adapt the changes in resources and applications, and increased reliability. Edge computing can dramatically boost services and applications by supporting artificial intelligence (AI) natively, instead of relying on the cloud. Edge computing supporting AI is the only technology that will enable many of the long-awaited game changers: Industry4.0 and smart manufacturing, 5G, IoT, self-driving vehicles, remote robotics for healthcare, and machine vision among others. The BRAINE project’s overall aim is to boost the development of the Edge framework focusing on energy efficient hardware and AI empowered software, capable of processing Big Data at the Edge, supporting security, data privacy, and sovereignty. The approach is to build a seamless Edge MicroDataCenter interlinked with AI enabled network interface cards. BRAINE employs a visionary utilization method for edge resources management and network-edge workload distribution. Predicting resource availability and workload demand, identifying trends, and taking proactive actions are all aspects of these novel methods. The impact of BRAINE encompasses advances in the European video distribution ecosystem, improving data processing at the network edge, and proving integrated AI for applications. These will lead to unprecedented savings in performance and energy efficiency: 2x performance/Watt and 50% energy savings; 71% latency reduction for an acceleration centric EMDC; 80% space and maintenance reduction, 99.999% fault tolerance with level 5 autonomy (autonomous driving, robotics, mission-critical system); and significantly faster infrastructure installation and deployment. BRAINE boosts EU’s position in the intelligent edge computing field and enables growth across many sectors, e.g., manufacturing, smart healthcare, surveillance, satellite navigation.

Evolving business models are progressively reshaping the scope and structure of ICT services, with massive introduction of virtualization paradigms and tight integration with the physical environment. Several market forces are already driving towards the creation of multi-domain and complex business service chains, which undoubtedly bring more agility in service deployment and operation but introduce additional security and privacy concerns that have not been addressed in a satisfactory way yet. Tackling conflicting trends in the cybersecurity market, like fragmentation or vendor lock-ins, GUARD will develop an open and extensible platform for advanced assurance and protection of trustworthy and reliable business chains spanning multiple administrative domains and heterogeneous infrastructures. The purpose of GUARD is manifold: i) to increase the information base for analysis and detection, while preserving privacy, ii) to improve the detection capability by data correlation between domains and sources, iii) to verify reliability and dependability by formal methods that take into account configuration and trust properties of the whole chain, and iv) to increase awareness by better propagation of knowledge to the humans in the loop. The distinctive approach of GUARD will be the architectural separation between analysis and data sources, mediated by proper abstraction; this paradigm will result in an open, modular, pluggable, extendable, and scalable security framework. This holistic solution will blend security-by-design with enhanced inspection and detection techniques, raising situational awareness at different levels of the companies’ structure by tailored informative contents, so to enable quick and effective reaction to cyber-threats. Demonstration and validation in two challenging scenarios is envisioned to bring the technology to an acceptable level of maturity, as well as direct involvement of relevant stakeholders for concrete business planning.