The SECANT platform will enhance the capabilities of organisations’ stakeholders, implementing (a) collaborative threat intelligence collection, analysis and sharing; (b) innovative risk analysis specifically designed for interconnected nodes of an industrial ecosystem; (c) cutting-edge trust and accountability mechanisms for data protection and (d) security awareness training for more informed security choices. The proposed solution’s effectiveness and versatility will be validated in four realistic pilot use case scenarios applied in the healthcare ecosystem. Ultimately, SECANT will contribute decisively towards improving the readiness and resilience of the organisations against the crippling modern cyber-threats, increasing the privacy, data protection and accountability across the entire interconnected ICT ecosystem, and reducing the costs for security training in the European market.

The turnover of mining and quarrying in Europe reaches up to 224 billion Euros and has generated EUR 64.9 billion of value added, 1% of the non-financial business economy total. The rise of key enabling technologies and the urbanisation and industrialisation of emerging economies in combination with increase in population and living standards will continue to drive growing demand for raw materials. The need to extract raw materials in a profitable, environmentally sound, and safe way for both mining workforce and communities is driving the mining industry towards innovative approaches to transform operations. Even though Industry 4.0 offers a wide spectrum of solutions, and intelligent technologies to address respective challenges, the mining industry hesitates to adopt such innovative approaches when compared to downstream industries. In addition, the need for a human-centred, environmentally oriented and society-driven approach is emerging in developing Industrial Internet of Things technologies for mining. Dig_IT will address the needs of the mining industry to move forward towards a sustainable use of resources while keeping people and environment at the forefront of their priorities. In order to achieve that Dig_IT proposes the development of a smart Industrial Internet of Things platform (IIoTp) that will improve the efficiency and sustainability of mining operations by connecting cyber and physical systems. The platform will collect data from sensors at 3 levels: (i) human, (ii) assets, (iii) environment and will also incorporate both market real time and historical data. The impact of Dig_IT to the European Mining industry, but also the society itself, can be summarised in the following (with a horizon of 4 years after project ends): (i) increase of the mining efficiency by 17%, (ii) increased OEE for machines and loading by 20% and 18% respectively, (iii) 19% reduction of CO2eq, (iv) about 310 new jobs created and (v) over 28M EUR ROI for the consortium.

The EU data economy has grown tremendously, with forecasts predicting to reach 800Billion Euros in 2025. Data are becoming the new currency, being exchanged as products or services in marketplaces. Data markets are predicted to reach a size of 100Billion Euros in 2025. Existing data marketplaces are centralised, store the data on the cloud, provide limited to no guarantees about data quality and they are governed by single entities that make the rules. SEDIMARK merges the expertise of a large team of experts to build a secure, trusted and intelligent decentralised data and services marketplace, based on Distributed Ledger Technology and Artificial Intelligence. SEDIMARK enables distributed heterogeneous data within the EU to be easily and seamlessly linked, shared and exploited for diverse business and research scenarios. SEDIMARK builds upon the concept of FAIR data, ensuring that data are of the highest quality, unbiased, enriched and annotated, so that they can be discovered, accessed, and easily reused. SEDIMARK includes a distributed registry of resources (data/services) stored on edge systems, close to where they are generated and where the data are cleaned, labelled, validated and anonymised. Security is applied with strong access control, privacy techniques for data minimisation and purpose limitation, exploiting blockchain for enforcing trust, decentralised identities, and data verification. Energy efficient AI techniques will be used for automated data quality management, labelling and classification of data as well as for providing (distributed) analytics and advanced services on top of the data. Semantic interoperability based on common ontologies and data models will allow the easy and efficient discovery, sharing and federation of heterogeneous data from multiple sources. The system is built on top of existing platforms of the consortium, starting from TRL5 and will be tested and demonstrated in four real world scenarios, reaching TRL-8.

ENSURESEC is a sociotechnical solution for safeguarding the Digital Single Market’s e-commerce operations against cyber and physical threats. It combines an automatic, rigorous, distributed and open-source toolkit for protecting e-commerce, with monitoring of the impact of threats in physical space and a campaign for training SMEs and citizens aimed at creating awareness and trust. ENSURESEC addresses the whole gamut of modern e-commerce, from standard physical products purchased online and delivered via post, to entirely virtual products or services delivered online. It addresses threats ranging from maliciously modifying web e-commerce applications or rendering them unavailable to legitimate customers, to delivery issues or fraud committed by insiders or customers. It achieves this by focusing on the common software and physical sensor interfaces that sit along the e-commerce, payment and delivery ecosystem. At technical level, it integrates proven state-of-the-art inductive (machine learning) with deductive (formal methods) reasoning tools and techniques so that e-commerce operations are protected by design, as well as through continuous monitoring, response, recovery and mitigation measures at run-time. Importantly, trust of the infrastructure’s operations among its users is established, benefiting from distributed ledger technology ensuring transparency of the operations and that information has not been modified. Although ENSURESEC innovations are applicable to any critical infrastructure that relies and is monitored by networked software systems, its design and integration philosophy make it uniquely prepared to protect distributed and evolving e-commerce infrastructures with its various forms of payment and delivery (virtual, online and physical). ENSURESEC also enhances citizens’ resilience to threats and their trust in e-commerce companies, especially SMEs, thus contributing towards the vision of a reliable and trusted digital single market.

Trondheim, Limerick, Alba Iulia, Pisek, Sestao, Smolyan and Voru and their industry and research partners are joining forces to co-create the future we want to live in. As aspiring Lighthouse and Follower Cities, respectively, they have detailed out their ambitions into the +CityxChange proposal, which describes a structured approach on how to develop and deploy Positive Energy Blocks and Districts and scale these out as part of the Clean Energy Transition. The approach combines: Prototyping the Future through Integrated Planning and Design; Enabling the Future through Creation of a Common Energy Market; and Accelerating the Future through CommunityxChange with all stakeholders of the city. New forms of integrated spatial, social, political, economic, regulatory, legal, and technological innovations will deliver citizen observatories, innovation playgrounds, regulatory sandboxes, and Bold City Visions to engage civil society, local authorities, industry, and RTOs to scale up from PEBs to PEBs to Positive Energy Cities, supported by a distributed and modular energy system architecture that goes beyond nZEB. On top of this, the consortium will create a new energy market design coupled to consumer-driven innovation, developed in close working cooperation with national regulators, DSOs/CSOs, property developers, and local energy communities. Flexibility will be put at the core of the distributed energy system by creating new micro-grid operation, prosumer-driven Community System Operators, and new markets for peak shaving/RES trading to reduce grid investment needs and curtailment. Their aim is to realize Europe-wide deployment of Positive Energy Districts by 2050 and prepare the way for fully Positive Energy Cities.