FAIRCHAIN addresses the growing need for a significant transformation of current food systems by developing competitive intermediate food chain alternatives adapted to small and mid-sized actors. FAIRCHAIN specifically aims to: -Foster the emergence of innovative intermediate food value chains that support the scaling-up of small and mid-sized actors facing unsustainable conventional dominant agri-food system. This requires to specific technological, organisational and social innovations as well as regulatory and policy adaptations to widely deliver food in a fair and sustainable way. -Inspire and encourage larger actors to down-scale conventional food value chains and better address the growing need of consumers to consume local high quality and safe products. The emergence of intermediate food value chains should put pressure on dominant actors, forcing them to align with best practices in terms of offering opportunities to local suppliers and ensuring an equitable distribution of costs and benefits. The main goal of FAIRCHAIN is to test, pilot and demonstrate recently developed technological, organisational and social innovations, realising a shift up to TRL7 and enabling small and mid-sized actors to scale-up and expand the production of affordable nutritious food in competitive intermediate food value chains. FAIRCHAIN will address the dairy and fruit&vegetable sectors, which hold a strategic economic position in Europe. Both are prone to integrate a large variety of innovations, correspond to an increasing consumer demand for nutritious and healthy food and need to meet the challenge of sustainably delivering perishable commodities to consumers. FAIRCHAIN will consider the entire value chain. More focus is given to postharvest steps rather than the production step in itself because the power imbalances created in market relationships are mainly attributed to the increasing concentration in the processing and retail sectors in conventional food supply chains

Virtualisation and software networks are a major disruptive technology for communications networks, enabling services to be deployed as software functions running directly in the network on commodity hardware. However, deploying the more complex user-facing applications and services envisioned for 5G networks presents significant technological challenges for development and deployment. SONATA addresses both issues. For service development, SONATA provides service patterns and description techniques for composed services. A customised SDK is developed to boost the efficiency of developers of network functions and composed services, by integrating catalogue access, editing, debugging, and monitoring analysis tools with service packaging for shipment to an operator. For deployment, SONATA provides a novel service platform to manage service execution. The platform complements the SDK with functionality to validate service packages. Moreover, it improves on existing platforms by providing a flexible and extensible orchestration framework based on a plugin architecture. Thanks to SONATA’s platform service developers can provide custom algorithms to steer the orchestration of their services: for continuous placement, scaling, life-cycle management and contextualization of services. These algorithms are overseen by executives in the service platform, ensuring trust and resolving any conflict between services. By combining rapid development and deployment in an open and flexible manner, SONATA is realising an extended DevOps model for network stakeholders. SONATA validates its approach through novel use-case-driven pilot implementations and disseminates its results widely by releasing its key SDK and platform components as open source software, through scientific publications and standards contributions, which, together, will have a major impact on incumbent stakeholders including network operators and manufacturers and will open the market to third-party developers.

The GAIA project focuses on the educational community; faculty, staff, students and parents at all levels of education: primary/secondary/high schools and universities. Targeting Energy Efficiency in the context of the educational community is clearly very important due to a number of reasons since raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage is key to achieving sustained energy reductions and it will also indirectly affect their immediate family environment, while achieving energy reduction in the school buildings. GAIA will create an innovative ICT ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both the users (faculty, staff, students, parents) and buildings (schools, universities, homes) that will motivate and support citizens' behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. GAIA will include also a set of pilots in different countries. GAIA will directly educate over 6.900 users, influence and attempt to transform their behaviour through a series of trials conducted in the educational environment and in homes. We expect a larger number of people to be informed about the activities of GAIA and be positively affected towards an energy-efficient behaviour transformation.

ELOQUENCE is focused on the research and development of innovative technologies for collaborative voice/chat bots. Voice assistant-powered dialogue engines have previously been deployed in a number of commercial and governmental technological pipelines, with a diverse level of complexity. In our concept, such a complexity can be understood as a problem of analysing unstructured dialogues. ELOQUENCE’s key objective is to better comprehend those unstructured dialogues and translate them into explainable, safe, knowledge-grounded, trustworthy and bias-controlled language models. We envision to develop a technology capable of learning by its own, by adapting from a very data-limited corpora to efficiently support most of the EU languages; from a sustainable computational framework to efficient and green-power architectures and, in essence, that may serve as a guidance for all European citizens whilst being respectful and showing the best of our European values, specifically supporting safety-critical applications by involving humans-in-the-loop. Overall, ELOQUENCE’s project considers building on top and to improve of prior achievements in the domain of conversational agents, e.g. recently launched and public-domain Large Language Models (LLMs), such as chatGPT (e.g., more recent versions), or LaMDa most of them developed in non-EU countries. While including key industrial enterprises from Europe (i.e., Omilia, Telefonica, Synelixis), ELOQUENCE will validate the developed technology through (i) safety-critical scenarios with human-in-the-loop for security-critical applications (i.e., emergency services in call centres) and (ii) smart home assistants via information retrieval and fact-checking against an online knowledge base for lesser risky autonomous systems (i.e., home-assistants). ELOQUENCE will target the R&D of these novel conversational AI technologies in multilingual and multimodal environments and demonstrated in several pilots.