RITHMS project intends to boost the operational capacity of Police and Customs/Border Authorities in addressing the increasingly organised and poly-criminal nature of trafficking in cultural goods through research, technological innovation, outreach and training. Illicit trade in cultural heritage has progressed from a local phenomenon limited to the initiative of a few individuals to a highly remunerative source of income for criminal organisations and terrorist groups that have taken advantage of the opportunities offered by the web and social media to further expand an already flourishing market. Against this background, RITHMS proposes an interdisciplinary approach made necessary by the transnational character of this crime and its links to other criminal networks. The project will define a replicable strategy to counter the challenges in addressing the illicit trafficking of stolen/looted cultural goods and to investigate the mechanisms underpinning it, including its connection with organised crime. RITHMS will foster cross-cutting research bringing together all the domains relevant to expand the understanding of this type of crime (art market, criminology, law studies, forensic science, etc.). Inputs from these disciplines will inform the theoretical framework underlying an interoperable AI-based Platform able to identify criminal organised networks and to provide investigators with valuable intelligence on the activities and evolution of such networks. The Platform will be leveraging the methods of Social Network Analysis (SNA), a methodology that gives a way to better understand human behaviour through people's relations and interactions. Including four Police authorities, two Border Agencies, one Police School, SMEs, and researchers from SSH and ICT, RITHMS Consortium is well positioned to offer solutions to counteract more effectively organisations involved in illicit activities against cultural heritage.

NESTLER is a joint project between the EU and African member states designed to promote One-Health sustainable partnership. The project aims to bring together interdisciplinary technological advances to effectively monitor the well-being of animals, plants, and humans in a holistic approach. The complementarity between the stakeholders will extend upon the ongoing initiatives from FARM2FORK strategies that have resulted in integrated software systems and solutions. The novelty of the NESTLER project lies in the development and integration of advanced remote sensing technologies. The project platform will develop software interfaces for ingesting satellite data sources along with video streams captured from unmanned aerial vehicles and other IoT devices installed for monitoring the environmental and animal well-being. The large-volume of data ingested into the platform will be subjected to additional processing for the extraction of intuitive insights with the assistance of machine learning algorithms and deep-learning network architectures. The extracted insights will be translated into predictive models affecting One-Health sustainability programme using the machine automation. Additionally, the NESTLER project will also undertake research activities to investigate the impact of insect protein on the circular economy for the well-being of animals. The project will develop methodologies for edible insect farming which will be in animal farming. The project will also conduct research studies on the impact of animal waste in crop-based farming. In complementary to the analysis of health benefits, the project will also undertake efforts to evaluate the economic sustainability of such farming practices which will lead to the setup to joint EU-Africa joint task force on One-Health Sustainability. The outcome of the project will result in a transition from a linear economy to a circular economy delivering sustained growth and development.

SILVANUS envisages to deliver an environmentally sustainable and climate resilient forest management platform through innovative capabilities to prevent and combat against the ignition and spread of forest fires. The platform will cater to the demands of efficient resource utilisation and provide protection against threats of wildfires encountered globally. The project will establish synergies between (i) environmental; (ii) technology and (iii) social science experts for enhancing the ability of regional and national authorities to monitor forest resources, evaluate biodiversity, generate more accurate fire risk indicators and promote safety regulations among citizens through awareness campaigns. The novelty of SILVANUS lies in the development and integration of advanced semantic technologies to systematically formalise the knowledge of forest administration and resource utilisation. Additionally, the platform will integrate a big-data processing framework capable of analysing heterogeneous data sources including earth observation resources, climate models and weather data, continuous on-board computation of multi-spectral video streams. Also, the project integrates a series of sensor and actuator technologies using innovative wireless communication infrastructure through the coordination of aerial vehicles and ground robots. The technological platform will be complemented with the integration of resilience models, and the results of environmental and ecological studies carried out for the assessment of fire risk indicators based on continuous surveys of forest regions. The surveys are designed to take into consideration the expertise and experience of frontline fire fighter organisations who collectively provide support for 47,504x104 sq. meters of forest area within Europe and across international communities. The project innovation will be validated through 11 pilot demonstrations across Europe and internationally using a two sprint cycle.

PRAETORIAN strategic goal is to increase the security and resilience of European CIs, facilitating the coordinated protection of interrelated CI against combined physical and cyber threats. To that end, the project will provide a multidimensional (economical, technological, policy, societal) yet installation-specific toolset comprising: (i) a Physical Situation Awareness system, (ii) a Cyber Situation Awareness system; (iii) a Hybrid Situation Awareness system, which will include digital twins of the infrastructure under protection; and (iv) a Coordinated Response system. The PRAETORIAN toolset will support the security managers of Critical Infrastructures (CI) in their decision making to anticipate and withstand potential cyber, physical or combined security threats to their own infrastructures and other interrelated CIs that could have a severe impact on their performance and/or the security of the population in their vicinity. The project will specifically tackle (i.e. prevent, detect, response and, in case of a declared attack, mitigate) human-made cyber and physical attacks or natural disasters affecting CIs. It will also address how an attack or incident in a specific CI can jeopardise the normal operation of other neighbouring/interrelated CIs, and how to make all of them more resilient, by predicting cascading effects and proposing a unified response among CIs and assisting First Responder teams. PRAETORIAN is a CI-led, user-driven project, which will demonstrate its results in three international pilot clusters –some of them cross border– involving 9 outstanding critical infrastructures: 2 international airports, 2 ports, 3 hospitals and 2 power plants.

The ADMA TranS4MErs will accelerate factories to become Factories of the Future embracing the ecological, digital, and societal challenges. This will be done via a smart combination of an all-connecting community platform in combination with toolboxes, virtual and physical training activities, assistance programs, tailor-made training content in all relevant technology areas and set of applications. All those services, tools, assistance, and service components pick up the SMEs at the right stage to start their own Trans4mation journey. The consortium is equipped with all necessary experience and professionalism and has a wide geographical reach, that we can almost guarantee to deliver the services at their doorstep or on their screen.