It is a fact that the European population growth is slowing down, while the population ageing accelerates. Rapid increases in the elderly population are predicted for the coming decades due to the ageing of post-war baby births. Within Europe’s ageing population, Hearing Loss, Cardio Vascular Diseases, Cognitive Impairments, Mental Health Issues and Balance Disorders, as well as Frailty, are prevalent conditions, with tremendous social and financial impact. Preventing, slowing the development of or dealing effectively with effects of the above impairments can have a significant impact on the quality of life and lead to significant savings in the cost of healthcare services. Digital tools hold the promise for many health benefits that can enhance the independent living and well-being of the elderly. Motivated by the above, the aim of the SMART BEAR platform is to integrate heterogeneous sensors, assistive medical and mobile devices to enable the continuous data collection from the everyday life of the elderly, which will be analysed to obtain the evidence needed in order to offer personalised interventions promoting their healthy and independent living. The platform will also be connected to hospital and other health care service systems to obtain data of the end users (e.g., medical history) that will need to be considered in making decisions for interventions. SMART BEAR will leverage big data analytics and learning capabilities, allowing for large scale analysis of the above mentioned collected data, to generate the evidence required for making decisions about personalised interventions. Privacy-preserving and secure by design data handling capabilities, covering data at rest, in processing, and in transit, will cover comprehensively all the components and connections utilized by the SMART BEAR platform. The SMART BEAR solution will be validated through five large-scale pilots involving 5.000 elderly living at home in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Romania.

TRIĒRĒS is Greece’s first Hydrogen Valley brings together business, knowledge and regional interests. The TRIĒRĒS Valley starts as a small scale Valley but has a tremendous upward perspective over a large part of the Balkans, South-Eastern Europe and the wider area of Eastern Mediterranean. The Valley will be built around the nucleus of MOH’s Corinth Refinery complex. From a business perspective the project has strong transeuropean interest as 80% of the refinery sales are generated outside of Greece, rendering it internationally oriented by default. Creating and building a Valley using the refinery as Hydrogen generator accelerates the transition, with an annual production of 2,410 tons of Green Hydrogen that will be utilised in the production of low and no Carbon footprint energy and industrial products and will be injected in the natural gas grid creating a Hydrogen Backbone of full EU interest. High visibility actions in mobility will include one (1) short-sea ferry ship, three (3) public transport buses, and at least (two) 2 cars. Knowledge and innovations are spurred through the intensive collaboration with knowledge institutes and SME’s. The participation of the local and regional governments assures the component of public acceptance, understanding and advocacy, generating interest to many parties supporting regional economic growth. The learnings from HEAVENN and WIGA P&G Valleys will be replicated with the specific knowledge of the Greek and broader connected geographies. TRIĒRĒS entails an investment of 115 mil EUR (initially by project partners) up to 408 million EUR (potential direct/indirect leverage of investments). Several thousand people will be employed during the realisation of the valley project, which will promote new skills development. The consortium partners are creating a true new perspective in the region, transitioning from a traditional refinery complex to a state-of-the art future oriented energy and hydrogen ecosystem in the region.

GEORGIA (Green dEal cOmpliant iRriGation Increasing Europe’s Agriculture resilience to drought) consortium, consisting of 16 partners from 9 European countries and led by Synelixis SA (the provider of SynField smart agriculture platform), has joined forces to increasing the resilience of agriculture to drought enhancing efficiency in water management. The project assesses drivers and barriers of key innovative irrigation systems, including environmentally responsible recycling of sewage sludge and biowaste streams, biological water-absorbing geocomposites, as well as water abundance and scarcity solutions. In parallel, GEORGIA pursues their optimal application through local condition modeling and employment of Artificial Intelligence. To this end, the partners develop in-situ, drone-based and geospatial monitoring, an eXplainable-AI decision support system as well as Crop Digital Twins. GEORGIA enhances and validates these technologies starting from the farm level and upscaling at large-scale and catchment levels. The socio-techno-economic approach is validated in 7 pilots in 6 countries, connected through a Federated Deep Machine Learning architecture. GEORGIA covers multiple crops, production types (conventional, intensive, agroecology and organic) and geographical regions, namely a) Mediterranean (Greece, Cyprus), b) Southeast Europe-Balkans (Bulgaria, Serbia) c) Central Europe-Midland (Austria), and d) Continental Europe-Baltic Sea (Poland). We will be able to collect and process sensor data from farms that span from the Southern to Northeast Europe, along with organic and non-organic production. We will also have access to large facilities such as Biological Cleaning Plant at BSL 3 covering large private farms, a Greek island (Santorini) and a Greek Region. More than 1,200 farmers will be directly involved in the experimentation phase, providing insights and feedback on AgriDataSpace platform and knowledge provided and more than 89,000 farmers will be dire

Three key global drivers underpin the increased interest in plant protein-based diets: population-growth, important role of proteins in a healthy diet, and the environmental impact of animal-based food chains. While an increasing trend in proportion of plant sources included in diet is obvious, the current generation of commercial plant-based alternatives is suboptimal. Therefore, more research is needed to develop mild processing techniques for plant proteins and to obtain a comprehensive understanding on the impact of plant proteins on technological and nutritional functionality. Addressing current challenges and shortcomings, Excel4Pro aims to support, with underpinning research and knowledge exchange, the capacity of the national Excellence Hubs of Türkiye, Greece, and Ukraine as a regional launch pad for plant-protein-based novel food economies. Excel4Pro will be used as a critical tool to connect and scale up the strategically selected plant-based protein ecosystems in a single, interconnected and cross-border Excellence Hub dedicated to growing and changing the agri-food sector in Türkiye, Greece and Ukraine by developing novel food products based on plant-based proteins. Collaborative R&I strategies, mentoring programmes, action plans to attract dedicated investment, and an array of upskilling activities for researchers and entrepreneurs will help close knowledge gaps between place-based innovation ecosystems and support the development of more sustainable food systems. Excel4Pro's consortium contains 17 partners (4 Academic, 8 Business, 2 Public Authorities, and 3 Societal Actors) that are well balanced and fully completes the quadruple helix. Excel4Pro is a 4 years project with 6 carefully designed Work Packages that efficiently exploit the consortium's diverse knowledge and expertise to develop solutions to Global Challenges in line with EUGreen Deal, the Farm to fork strategy for a fair, healthy and environment-friendly food system.