Parkinson's disease (PD) is a movement disorder characterized by muscle rigidity, tremor, physical movement slowing and in extreme cases, loss of physical movement. Primary symptoms result of decreased motor cortex stimulation caused by insufficient dopamine formation in the brain’s dopaminergic neurons. Secondary symptoms include high level cognitive dysfunctions and subtle language problems. PD is chronic and progressive. Currently there is no cure for PD and associated costs, in terms of quality of life and health and social care expenditures, are expected to rise as the population ages. As none of the existing PD interventions has been really effective the field shows potential for the development of systems to monitor individuals and facilitate symptoms’ management. The design of efficient ICT management system integrating remote monitoring of multi-parametric factors, decision support for medical staff, personalized and adaptable care, and patient and family education is a viable solution. PROPHETIC will exploit modern smart miniaturized systems and advanced information systems towards an infrastructure for remote, continuous, noninvasive acquisition and advanced processing of multi-parametric data and friendly telecare provision based on serious gaming. It will use embedded electronics (suite and cap) capable of measuring neural, psychological, physiological, and biomechanical parameters, and securely communicating them to a Medical Business Intelligence System where pre-processed data will be further analysed hence overcoming real time activity monitoring limitations. Continuous monitoring while aware of the patient’s levodopa medication will help determine health and motor status and avoid levodopa side effects e.g. dyskinesia, freezing, low blood pressure, and falls. It will support caregivers’ decisions and allow early interventions. Appropriate information could be shared between the actors through e.g. smart phones with access according to their role.

PRESENT is a proposal for a three-year Research and Innovation project to create virtual digital companions––embodied agents––that look entirely naturalistic, demonstrate emotional sensitivity, can establish meaningful dialogue, add sense to the experience, and act as trustworthy guardians and guides in the interfaces for AR, VR and more traditional forms of media. There is no higher quality interaction than the human experience when we use all our senses together with language and cognition to understand our surroundings and––above all—to interact with other people. We interact with today’s ‘Intelligent Personal Assistants’ primarily by voice; communication is episodic, based on a request-response model. The user does not see the assistant, which does not take advantage of visual and emotional clues or evolve over time. However, advances in the real-time creation of photorealistic computer generated characters, coupled with emotion recognition and behaviour, and natural language technologies, allow us to envisage virtual agents that are realistic in both looks and behaviour; that can interact with users through vision, sound, touch and movement as they navigate rich and complex environments; converse in a natural manner; respond to moods and emotional states; and evolve in response to user behaviour. PRESENT will create and demonstrate a set of practical tools, a pipeline and APIs for creating realistic embodied agents and incorporating them in interfaces for a wide range of applications in entertainment, media and advertising. The international partnership includes the Oscar-winning VFX company Framestore; technology developers Brainstorm, Cubic Motion and IKinema; Europe’s largest certification authority InfoCert; research groups from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Universität Augsburg and Inria; and the pioneers of immersive virtual reality performance CREW.

EMERALD is a 30-month IA to develop and demonstrate exemplary tools for the digital entertainment and media industries using AI Machine Learning and Big Data technologies, to automate and speed processing, increase production efficiency, use less energy and increase the quality of content. There is a massive increase in the volume of video-based and extended reality content, with an unsustainable demand for skilled human resources, data processing and energy. EMERALD aims to meet the challenge by developing process automation for sustainable media creation; creating a testbed for measuring the energy used in media computation; developing more efficient data use for AI/ML in entertainment and media applications; reducing the power demands for large-scale media data processing; and creating acceptance and demand for AI and sustainable production technologies in the entertainment and media industries. The interdisciplinary Consortium of seven partners includes leading companies from the movie, broadcast, streaming and live entertainment technology sectors, supported by two major European universities.

The main goal of AdMiRe is to develop, validate and demonstrate innovation solutions, based on Mixed Reality (MR) technology, which will allow for TV audiences a step change in interactivity, and bring for content creators a radical improvement in talent immersion and interaction with computer generated elements. AdMiRe is focused on sectors where the lead industry partners in the consortium are key players, thus guaranteeing the impact of the innovation and the take up of the technology. At present, TV audiences can interact with the shows they are watching only through social media or HBBTV. Comments, video and audio from the audience may be incorporated into TV program formats, but this is done in such a way that viewer engagement is quite limited and there is not much potential for innovation. AdMiRe will radically change this by producing solutions that will allow viewers at home to be incorporated into the live TV program they are watching and to interact with people in the TV studio. The key innovation here is to use a regular mobile phone to capture the viewer, extract him/her from the background and finally composite the viewer into the studio footage as an MR object. As for content creators, be it in film, TV or live productions, there is an ever growing trend to combine actors and performers with computer generated objects and have them interact. But the number and difficulty of the technical challenges involved have resulted in methods and technologies of reduced scope, resulting in less engaging content. AdMiRe takes the exact opposite approach, producing authoring tools that remove the main technological obstacles and that will allow actors to be immersed in virtual environments, performers to feel at home within the space, and directors to have the opportunity to better capture emotion, all in all resulting in the possibility to create more compelling visuals and more engaging programming.

FLECON-6G gathers key participants from Phase-1 and Phase-2 SNS JU projects, aiming to make the “Intelligent 6G Network of Networks” vision a reality, with Trustworthiness and Generalisability of Native AI and Network Digital Twins (NDT) assisted approaches. It aims to deliver key technological assets in the form of collaborative and distributed frameworks offering scalability and support for multi-domain, multi-stakeholder infrastructures, jointly with network infrastructure programmability that supports the offloading of network application logic. FLECON-6G provides groundbreaking research to drive the next phase of 6G Native AI research, addressing Trustworthiness and Generalizability via novel intent-driven frameworks and robust Foundation Models, that not only deliver zero-touch orchestration but also performance guarantees and robustness in multi-stakeholder infrastructures. A multi-layer, multi-vendor NDT framework will also assist online decisions and resolve conflicts among multiple closed control loops operating in reactive, proactive or predictive mode for zero-touch self-optimisation. At the business layer, a Smart Marketplace will facilitate the creation of a wide, sustainable ecosystem of highly diversified stakeholders, through which, MNOs, digital service providers, verticals and software developers of AI or DT software applications will jointly collaborate to build more integrated and intent-driven service offers, composing a plethora of modular assets for their effective monetisation. In line with EU’s policies, FLECON-6G will design, develop and validate through relevant PoCs, several secure, trustworthy, resilient and reliable solutions across 4 heterogeneous verticals that require 6G performance capabilities. FLECON-6G will strongly impact standardisation, with significant contributions to 3GPP, ITU, ETSI, GSMA and O-RAN and open-source communities.