Developing and managing distributed systems is a complex task requiring expertise across multiple domains. This complexity considerably increases in swarm systems, which are highly dynamic and heterogeneous and require decentralised solutions that adapt to highly dynamic system conditions. The project TaRDIS focuses on supporting the correct and efficient development of applications for swarms and decentralised distributed systems, by combining a novel programming paradigm with a toolbox for supporting the development and executing of applications. TaRDIS proposes a language-independent event-driven programming paradigm that exposes, through an event-based interface, distribution abstractions and powerful decentralised machine learning primitives. The programming environment will assist in building correct systems by taking advantage of behavioural types to automatically analyse the component's interactions to ensure correctness-by-design of their applications, taking into account application invariants and the properties of the target execution environment. TaRDIS underlying distributed middleware will provide essential services, including data management and decentralised machine learning components. The middleware will hide the heterogeneity and address the dynamicity of the distributed execution environment by orchestrating and adapting the execution of different application components across devices in an autonomic and intelligent way. TaRDIS results will be integrated in a development environment, and also as standalone tools, both of which can be used for developing applications for swarm systems. The project results will be validated in the context of four different use cases provided by high impact industrial partners that range from swarms of satellites, decentralised dynamic marketplaces, decentralised machine learning solutions for personal-assistant applications, and the distributed control process of a smart factory.

The proposed project aims at (a) identifying skills shortages and gaps in the labor market for different regions, sectors,time periods (b) supporting all kinds of enterprises in developing their human resource strategy, including both training of current employees, and skill shaping of future employees, (c) supporting recruiting enterprises looking for specific skills, (d) supporting EU citizens in developing their skills in an informed way and eventually finding a suitable job and e) aiming to find good candidates for emerging roles, but also to equip existing employees with the necessary skills to retain their jobs, thus improving job retainability and reducing employee churn.The project will meet its goals by designing and implementing an intelligent platform for managing labor market skills and skill gaps. The system will monitor and mine internet resources and EU initiatives to acquire and process meaningful raw data about existing and sought skills, and entities offering and seeking jobs. State-of-the-art IT technologies will be used to empower the platform and achieve its goals, including advanced statistical and network and data analysis, machine learning and competency mining. On the basis of such analyses, recommendation tools for HRM, educational profile upskilling and digital policies will be made available to users. The system will offer its findings in an easy, human-centric with SSH principles, ready to use, and ethically correct form to both enterprises and individuals. Such objectives are highly relevant to the objectives of the call. In particular, it is expected that the project will contribute to the multi-faceted assessment of the labor market status through its data acquiring and analysis tools. Continuous monitoring will allow for detecting current and future trends and gaps in requested and processed skills. The platform will offer a knowledge base for recommendation tools to develop skill strategies both for enterprises and individuals.

In the last three decades, public key cryptography has become an indispensable component of global communication digital infrastructure. These networks support a plethora of applications that are important to our economy, our security, and our way of life, such as mobile phones, internet commerce, social networks, and cloud computing. In such a connected world, the ability of individuals, businesses and governments to communicate securely is of the utmost importance. At the moment, the quantum threat is theoretical as quantum computers that fulfill the requirements of Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms for long keys are not available, but it is evident that widely used RSA, ECDSA, ECDH, and DSA cryptosystems will need to be replaced by post-quantum cryptography (PQC). The need for addressing this problem early enough has been recognized by various relevant organizations and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has started an effort to identify cryptographic algorithms able to withstand quantum computer attacks by 2022 — and make them available by 2024. The main objective of PQ-REACT project is to design, develop and validate a framework for a faster and smoother transition from classical to post-quantum cryptography for a wide variety of contexts and usage domains, while leveraging Europe's most powerful Quantum infrastructure (IBM Quantum Computer from Fraunhofer FOKUS). This framework will include PQC migration paths and cryptographic agility methods and will develop a portfolio of tools for validation of post quantum cryptographic systems, that will allow users to switch to post-quantum cryptography, taking under consideration their individualities and various contexts and a wide variety of real world pilots, i.e., Smart Grids, 5G and Ledgers. The project will also foster a series of open calls for SMEs and other stakeholders to bring and test their PQC algorithms and external pilots on the PQ-REACT, Quantum Computing Infrastructure.

Over the past decades the mobile communications has evolved over the different generations to the current 5G, and transformed into a fundamental infrastructure that supports digital demands from all industry sectors. However, 5G systems are expected to fall short on meeting the anticipated stringent performance requirements for the new generation of real time mission-critical applications. In view of that, DESIRE6G will design and develop novel zero-touch control, management, and orchestration platform, with native integration of AI, to support eXtreme URLLC application requirements. DESIRE6G will re-architect mobile networks through a) its intent-based control and end-to-end orchestration that targets to achieve near real time autonomic networking; and b) a cloud-native unified programmable data plane layer supporting multi-tenancy. The latter will be supported by a generic hardware abstraction layer designed for heterogeneous systems. Flexible composition of modular micro-services for slice specific implementations and flexible function placement depending on HW requirements will enable granular use case instantiation and service level assurance with minimum resource consumption and maximum energy efficiency. The DESIRE6G data, control, management, and orchestration plane is supported by a pervasive monitoring system, extending from the network to the user equipment or IoT terminal. DESIRE6G will employ distributed ledger technology to support a) dynamic federation for services across of multiple administrative domains and b) infrastructure-agnostic software security. Finally, DESIRE6G will enable communication-, and energy- efficient distributed AI, at the network edge, while considering application-level requirements and resource constraints. The proposed innovations will be validated employing a VR/AR/MR and a Digital Twin application at two distinct experimental sites.