Industry needs alternatives to textual passwords for access control. While tokens can still be stolen or transferred to other persons, biometrics technology can provide reliable, cost-effective and user-friendly solutions. The proliferation of smart services calls for unsupervised authentication at a distance. Being natural, non-intrusive and readily compatible with smart and mobile devices, automatic speaker verification (ASV) is an appealing solution. Even so, today’s state-of-the-art ASV systems lack robustness to environmental variability and are vulnerable to spoofing. Concerns regarding interoperability, scalability and privacy also form barriers to exploitation. While embracing standards, in addition to a privacy and interoperability-by-design ethos, OCTAVE will integrate commercial-grade and new, hybrid ASV systems with the latest environmental robustness and anti-spoofing technologies to deliver a scalable, trusted biometric authentication service (TBAS). While simultaneously relieving end-users from the inconvenience of dealing with textual passwords, the OCTAVE platform will reduce the economic and practical burdens related to password loss and recovery. The TBAS will support single (text-dependent, text-prompted and text-independent) in addition to hybrid operating modes. The delegation of authentication to a single, yet distributed TBAS, will increase trust and privacy, avoid single points of failure and allow for rapid breach notification and remediation. Solutions will be installed in data-sensitive and mission-critical services and validated in two real commercial trials: banking services and physical access within a critical airport infrastructure. Flexibility will support wider exploitation in future applications in, for example, customer care, telephone banking, e-commerce, logical and physical access control. OCTAVE will thus fuel new opportunities for commercial services making use of electronic identification and authentication.

TH2ICINO (Towards H2ydrogen Integrated eConomies In NOrthern Italy) supports the deployment of micro hydrogen economies for the EU by developing and demonstrating a full ecosystem integrated by 6 replicable use cases linked to the steps of the hydrogen value chain. The results will validate a Master Planning Tool (MPT), which replicability will be then tested. The demonstration of the hydrogen valley will work on the four pillars of the hydrogen value chain: (i) hydrogen production, (ii) hydrogen storage, (iii) hydrogen distribution, and (iv) hydrogen consumption and will send the initial status of TH2ICINO in order to enable replication and expansion. A first stage will include modelling, simulation and scenarization, from electrolysis plant to end-user in order to evaluate different scenarios and optimize them taking into consideration the technological constraints. Once the optimal cases are defined, an implementation phase will bring to real-life the innovative concept of the ecosystem tangible results to feed the MPT.

Our world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges. Keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5°C implies a mandatory drop in CO2 emissions. Against this backdrop, the EC has issued the European Green Deal: an ambitious plan towards a fully sustainable economy, including aviation. With one million species endangered, biodiversity restoration is another key issue. Once aviation has recovered from the COVID pandemic effects, global air traffic as a major enabler of connectivity and economic growth will resume and keep increasing. This emphasizes the challenge of reducing the environmental impact of the air transportation sector as a whole. OLGA partners (airports, airline, handler, industry, research, SMEs) unite a wealth of expertise to contribute to solving this complex challenge: efficient and carbon neutral airport and airline operations, sustainable logistics, smart energy & mobility, intermodality for passengers and freight, emission/air quality assessments, green construction and circular end-of-life solutions. Sustainable Aviation Fuels supply chains will be integrated in conventional jet fuel infrastructure. Complementary types of low-emission mobilities, electric ground support equipment, hydrogen infrastructure and reduced carbon airside operations will be demonstrated. OLGA will achieve significant quantified advances already within the first three years, ready for exploitation by partners. This will lead to proven CO2 reduction, air quality improvement and biodiversity preservation with involvement of the entire sector's value chain. Sustainable impacts will be realised on societal, environmental and economic levels at local, national and EU scale. OLGA will have a duration of 60 months, requesting a 25 MEuros grant. OLGA's airports are uniquely positioned to showcase the environmental innovations, while the airports of Zagreb and Cluj will prove scalability and EU-wide applicability.