Eurostat data reveals that the 11% of the total population of the European Union is unable to keep their home adequately warm. Caused by low household income, high energy bills, and low dwelling energy efficiency, energy poverty has traditionally been associated with the inability of households to meet their heating needs during winter. However, up to the 19% of households declared not being comfortably cool in summer. Nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005, with the last five years comprising the five hottest. Not to mention this 2019 June has been the hottest on record. Climate change is increasing both the severity and frequency of extreme hot weather and heat waves and in dense urban areas, these heatwave episodes will be combined with the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, worsening city centres temperatures which will negatively impact human health and wellbeing. Thus, cooling needs and overheating risk need to be incorporated into the energy poverty equation. The project COOLtoRISE aims to reduce summer energy poverty incidence among European households improving their indoor thermal habitability conditions and reducing their energy needs during the hot season, which will decrease their exposure to heat and heat-related health risks. Not all households have an air conditioning system and it is known that energy poor households make a restrictive use of heating and cooling as they cannot afford associated energy bills. However, raising awareness on summer energy poverty and implementing actions to mitigate it will have a double benefit on European households. First, heat exposure of energy poor households will be reduced by increasing indoor thermal conditions, which will decrease in their risk to suffer heat related diseases. Second, raising summer energy culture and preventing air conditioning devices to be installed can have serious benefits on climate change preventing future emissions.

The rapid advances in ICT have raised the need to adapt to this progress for organisations (pushing them towards e-services and increase their efficiency), public authorities (stimulating new services to citizens and reducing complexity) and individuals (enabling them to communicate personal information more efficiently). DEFeND will deliver a platform which empowers organisations in different sectors to assess the compliance status, plan the achievement of the GDPR compliance and increase their maturity in different aspects of GDPR. DEFeND platform enables building and analysing models following a Privacy-by-Design approach spanning over two levels, the Planning Level and the Operational Level, and across three management areas: Data Scope, Data Process and Data Breach. The consortium will leverage existing software, tools and methodologies towards the implementation of the platform software components. The DEFeND platform will be tested in living labs pilots, involving partners from four E.U. countries in four different areas: healthcare, banks, energy and local public administration. It will be tested in an operational environment (TRL 7) in three different scenarios across two different types, focusing on the GDPR compliance process for end-users and on the GDPR implications for external stakeholders. Driven by the lack of appropriate products in the market, the DEFeND exploitation strategy is based on commercialisation of project results at three levels: platform-as-a-whole, fragments of the platform and partners’ individual exploitation. This strategy will enable partners to integrate the results into their existing commercial offerings, exploring and establishing new business opportunities. The exploitation strategy will focus on four areas: Sector Specific Exploitation, Networking, Exploitation Meetings and Community-building around the project. The exploitation strategy will be integrated and supported by dissemination activities throughout the project.

Public services (as all others) are reaching the Digital Single Market (DSM). Secure and respectful electronic identity (eID) management is an important enabler for trust and confidence in the DSM. Emerging technologies can disrupt eID and have strong potential for empowering existing initiatives. In particular, IMPULSE focuses on 2 of the most promising and disruptive technologies nowadays: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain, and their contributions to and impacts on eID. IMPULSE will carry out a user-centric and multidisciplinary impact analysis on the integration of Blockchain and AI on eID in public services, evaluating benefits but also risks, costs and limitations, considering socio-economic, legal, ethical and operational impacts, together with framework conditions (like GDPR and eIDAS regulations, existing eID systems, and standards). IMPULSE will use a demand-driven co-creation process as the guide, including pilot-oriented operational experimentation and involving Digital Innovation Hubs. A set of 6 representative and innovative case studies in Denmark, Spain, Bulgaria, Iceland and Italy, led by public service partner, will provide a variety of cultural, operational, legal, procedural and social contexts for research. Two major outcomes will be produced: 1) Holistic AI and blockchain technology supporting GDPR-compliant eID to complement existing EU identity schemas, ensuring cross-border access and secure and adaptable requirements for actionable integration with other public service providers, and adoption by existing Trust Service Providers (TSP) to ensure marketability. 2) Actionable roadmaps (detailing pathways and good practices) for the adoption, escalation and sustainability of such advanced eID technologies by public services in the EU ecosystem, in different countries and at different levels (local, regional, national and cross-border), as well as recommendations for policy makers supporting political accountability and responsibility.