Adaptation to climate change has become a central focus for researchers across various fields, including climate science, environmental science, urban planning, information science and social science, to support policymakers in making informed decisions to build a climate-prepared and resilient society. The major challenges in achieving this goal are (i) lack of seamless interaction between platforms, data spaces, and users, (ii) poor data interoperability as well as service interoperability, (iii) lack of infrastructural support for generating FAIR data, and (iv) legal barriers hindering access to data. CLIMATE-ADAPT4EOSC aims to overcome these challenges by providing an EOSC-centred collaborative research environment equipped with existing EOSC data and services and extended with new data and services, such as Interoperability, FAIRification, Research Results Publishing as Open Data, Data Adaptation, Data Format Compliancy, Mapping and Entity Matching, enabling interoperability and seamless interaction of data that allow the creation of extended services, e.g., Big Data Analytics for climate risk assessments. The project develops a climate change adaption ontology and an EOSC Climate-Adapt Knowledge Graph based on the ontology, supporting findability, accessibility, tracking and life cycle management of research outputs of various kinds, including data, scientific papers, methods, code, software packages and tools. CLIMATE-ADAPT4EOSC also develops three innovative services that provides support to EU Mission climate change adaptation and the European Green Deal. These services have been planned to be demonstrated in Five EU countries.

TENSOR will provide LEAs a platform that facilitates the biometric evidence extraction, sharing and storage in cross border environments allowing them to share best practices in an automated, robust, secure, privacy-preserving and scalable manner. In addition, the full potential of biometrics technologies will be exploited and their fusion in case of partial evidence gathered in the crime scenes by forensic institutes strengthening their acceptance in the court of justice. More particularly, TENSOR will equip security practitioners with novel tools focusing on (a) Extraction of biometrics and other more or less distinctive features validated in forensic conditions that assist LEAs in identification, identity verification, intelligence and investigation processes and can be leveraged to unlock criminals’ mobile devices; (b) Sharing of biometrics through secure, automated, scalable exchange of biometric intelligence and court-proof evidence among LEAs in a cross-border manner, enhancing interoperability among legacy systems owned by security practitioners and Forensic Institutes; and (c) Storage of biometrics in a privacy-preserving way through a biometric data protection mechanism enabling revocability of biometric templates. TENSOR will also introduce the one-of-its-kind European Biometric Data Space creating a common ground among LEAs, Forensic Institutes and Security Researchers assisting in the faster adoption of modern biometric solutions.

LAGO will deliver the foundation for a trusted EU FTC Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) to address the so-called “Data Issue” in the FCT research landscape, i.e., the lack of domain-specific data in sufficient quality and quantity to enable appropriate training and testing of the developed methods, platforms and tools. LAGO will be instrumental in identifying common barriers and subsequently providing the structural, governance and technical foundations to foster and innovate data-oriented research collaboration among LEAs, security practitioners, relevant EU agencies, academic and industry researchers, policy makers and regulators. For this purpose, LAGO will develop an evidence-based and validated multi-actor Reference Architecture for the FCT RDE for these actors to deposit, share and co-create data and tools for FCT research purposes based on common rules, protocols, standards and instruments in a trusted and secured environment. The envisaged Reference Architecture and accompanying governance framework will be based on the design principles of decentralisation, data sovereignty, data quality, openness, transparency and trust and comply with EU values and principles on data protection, privacy and ethics. The Reference Architecture will be accompanied by a TRL-7 Reference Implementation of added-value technological tools to ensure practical realisation of the Reference Architecture as multiple data spaces and across the full range of concrete usage scenarios. A Roadmap will finally provide the consolidated rules, conditions and considerations for the actual deployment of the EU FCT RDE. The ultimate ambition of LAGO is to go beyond the creation of a common repository in order to innovate the FCT data-oriented research sphere by creation the crucial foundations for the sustainable, safe and trusted creation, co-creation, sharing and maintenance of training and testing datasets for the FCT research domain.

The European Commission’s latest strategy for fighting child sexual abuse highlights a harsh reality that, globally, we are ‘losing the battle’ against online child sexual abuse and exploitation (OCSEA). Various projects funded through the EU are working diligently to identify the source of CSAM on both the Clearnet and Darknet and are establishing stronger awareness of the needs and requirements of LEAs to fight the overloading volume of images, text, media files, etc. However, the IOCTA 2021 report also brings a chilling honesty that the prevalence of materials shows no sign of slowing or stabilising. The adage that prevention is better than the cure never seemed more fitting. The 2PS project condemns all forms of sexual abuse and exploitation – and there are no excuses that justify behaviours and actions that harm or victimise children. However, to reduce the number of abused children and those at risk of exploitation, we need to address various challenges. Several of those relate to people with a sexual interest in children and their needs to divert them from abusing. 2PS, which stands for Prevent & Protect Through Support is a highly innovative action offering a paradigm shift in the approach to tackling child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) across Europe. The highly qualified and diverse consortium – together with leading global actors – are committed to laying the foundations for new coherent modus operandi that complement the reactive approaches currently favoured. This is achieved by addressing the support needs of people with a sexual interest in children and people who feel they might offend. We will share the best practices for guidance, therapy and treatment methods – combined with new training and awareness for frontline support workers and LEAs. We aim to move preventive actions to the forefront, offering alternative courses of action to existing offenders and people who fear they might offend– including people with a sexual interest in children.

Identity theft is rapidly expanding, causing substantial financial loss to millions of people all around the world. This invisible crime is also widespread across EU countries, where a growing number of citizens is targeted by sophisticated fraudulent attacks each year, both offline and online. 56% of Europeans have experienced at least one type of fraud in the last two years. European security officials speak of an “epidemic” created by a spike in demand from asylum-seekers and from terrorists carrying counterfeit documents to enter the EU. Security documents are increasingly being counterfeited or tampered with by criminals to facilitate transnational crime. The continued vulnerability of different types of identity and travel documents makes it extremely difficult to combat this problem. SafeTravellers value proposition aims at a) strengthening the security at the borders, b) improving the productivity of the Border Authorities and LEAs by providing them with the appropriate tools to combat identity fraud at the hardware, identity and travel document, and biometrics level, while c) offering a frictionless border crossing experience for EU/TCN citizens as they will not have to stop at the border checkpoints. SafeTravellers is both proposing a new way of citizen identification based on multiple biometrics instead of the problematic identity document, as well as an enhancement of the current way of identity verification at the borders through a set of tools that will detect attacks at the biometric hardware, identity and travel document fraud and attempts to falsify biometrics. The proposed solution is GDPR compliant and introduces various privacy-preserving mechanisms to safeguard the citizens' rights. Through the distributed European Multi-Biometric Data Space offered by SafeTravellers, each Member State will keep in its jurisdiction the personal data of its country nationals while allowing cross-border identity checks without transferring or revealing any biometric data.