This is the continuation project of the Ideal-ist network - the network for National Contact Points (NCP) of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The objective of Ideal-ist is to foster trans-national cooperation among National Contact Points (NCP) in the area of Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies (LEIT) Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) under Horizon2020. The project will deliver trans-national services offering tangible benefits to Ideal-ist users; proposers and NCPs, and other projects, by supporting knowledge sharing, networking and proposal development activities. This cooperation will also include collaboration and networking with similar networks in parallel themes (Security, ENV, Transport, Energy, Health, etc.), especially in the context of joint/coordinated or PPP calls. Ideal-ist will be built upon experience gained over more than 20 years from the preceding projects, starting in FP4, and the cooperation of NCPs in the network and those supporting the network.

The “Once-Only” Principle Project (TOOP) explores and demonstrates the “once-only” principle through multiple sustainable pilots, using a federated architecture on a cross-border collaborative pan-European scale in order to identify drivers and barriers and to provide a basis for future implementations and wider use. Three pilots are implemented: (1) Cross-border e-Services for Business Mobility, (2) Updating Connected Company Data and (3) Online Ship and Crew Certificates. TOOP has the ambition to connect 59 information systems from 21 countries. The methodological approach of TOOP is based on an exploratory and agile pilot life-cycle approach to cross-border pilots, the planning and implementation of which is supported by the development of a generic federated architecture and building blocks, the identification and mitigation of barriers, including legal issues, and the evaluation of the results, with pro-active dissemination and sustainable exploitation of the results throughout the project. TOOP’s main technological innovation is a generic federated OOP architecture that supports the interconnection and interoperability of national registries at the EU level. The pilots planned are ambitious as they contain innovations and provide a basis for recommendations for future implementations and the wider use of the OOP. The project is an important learning environment for OOP in particular and European e-Government in general. The pilots are scalable and can be extended to all Member States in subsequent years. TOOP’s consortium of 51 organisations consists of 19 national administrations (or authorized thereby) from 19 different EU Member States and 2 Associated Countries. The public administrations provide effective piloting, research partners make sure that the key preconditions for effective piloting are met, and private entities support exploitation, all complementing each other in the whole range of activities and areas dealt with in TOOP.

This proposal represents the joint initiative of Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), Fundação para a Ciencia e a Tecnología, I.P. (FCT), the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (Tubitak) and National Institute for Research & Development in Informatics (ICI Bucuresti), to develop and operate the BSC AI Factory, a new Artificial Intelligence Factory at the service of the European Union Artificial Intelligence innovation ecosystem. The BSC AI Factory project will deploy a comprehensive set of AI-oriented services, complemented with strong training, networking and hub facilities to boost the uptake and use of AI by industry with a special emphasis in SMEs and start-up companies, all of them based in the four participating countries and at the service of the European innovation community, designed specifically to meet Europe’s evolving AI needs, and running on a powerful upgrade of the EuroHPC JU MareNostrum5 supercomputer exploiting the most recent AI-oriented computing technologies.