Ensuring a sustainable food system requires, above all other factors, re-entrusting our primary production to the guardians of our territory, the owners of small- and medium-sized farms and farm structures in rural areas. GUARDIANS focuses on understanding their challenges and empowering them with a set of digital innovative solutions that will help them to bridge the current technological gap between small and large farms. GUARDIANS will put in place a set of cost-effective and human-centric digital solutions, which aim to support and empower the penetration, sustainability and resilience of more agroecological farming models, like regenerative agriculture, natural grazing, alternative managed grazing strategies, and the promotion of pollinators in different farm structures. To do this, a multi-actor co-creation methodology, a set of adoption pathways and 9 different technologies, combining software and hardware (i.e. drones, sensors), will be customized to cover the farmers' needs. These digital solutions will be tested through a total of 24 small- and medium-sized farms and farm structures with a wide range of production types (arable crops, woody crops, grassland and livestock production) in 6 pilots represented by farming cooperatives (acting as one stop shops) from 5 different countries with diverse environmental, climatic and socio-economic conditions. As a result, GUARDIANS will increase the uptake of innovative digital technologies by farmers, guaranteed by the use of a multi-actor approach, integrating farmers and agricultural stakeholders at all stages of the project, as well as scientists, technicians and SMEs. Cascade funding and connections to specific stakeholders (agricultural cooperatives, agrifood hubs, DIHs, OGs) will be used as multipliers to allow GUARDIANS to roll up its impact throughout Europe. It is expected to roll-out and replicate GUARDIANS results up to 92 farms around Europe during the project duration.

OPERA project aims at supporting these ambitious challenges with technological innovation on three main aspects: • Design next generation Low Power (LP) and Ultra-Low Power (ULP) systems, • improve energy efficiency in computing by means of heterogeneous architectures, • and provide smart and energy efficient solution for the interaction between embedded smart systems and remote small form-factor data centers OPERA project fits into the mission and scope of the H2020 ICT workplan for 2014 and 2015 aspiring to the European leadership in industrial technologies for the Ultra-Low Power computing devices and sensors enabling an ecosystem of heterogeneous devices and small form factor data centers In this context, OPERA’s vision is to deliver innovation on highly parallel, heterogeneous, reliable, low power, and secure systems leveraging both low power server-class processors and reconfigurable devices. While the former provide energy efficient processing power for the majority of the workloads, the latter offer the possibility of customizing and adapting hardware solutions over time to specific needs. The targets of innovation in OPERA are next generation LP servers and highly parallel embedded computer systems based on ULP architectures. Adopting a mechanism for selecting the best processing element for a specific task is fundamental for achieving good levels in energy efficiency. OPERA aims at exploiting such kind of mechanisms to orchestrate both general-purpose and reconfigurable devices. The OPERA vision is to integrate ULP smart devices into a platform that uses next-generation LP servers to remotely process the data and offering cloud-based services. OPERA's added value to the project is the validation of the technological solutions on three different real-life workloads use-cases. By integrating and optimizing computing systems for energy efficiency at different levels of the computing continuum, OPERA envisages the creation of big opportunities for Europe

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for 80% of the disease burden as well as for the majority of premature deaths in the EU; diminishing the citizens’ quality of life, life expectancy and increasing the financial burden (from those affected to the health system). During the last 3 decade environmental stressors have been addressed through numerous studies, which have raised concerns about the detrimental effects of the environment on human health. Most evaluated environmental stressors are air temperature, particulate and gaseous air pollutants, urban noise, food pollutants and radiation. By end of 2022, air pollution was reported to be responsible of an excess mortality of 311.000 people per year in the UE-27 , driving not only premature deaths but also an increased risk of vascular diseases such as ischemic heart disease, stroke, and other non-communicable non-vascular diseases like chronic respiratory diseases or depression. Some newly considered stressors such as electromagnetic field, and light exposure are also susceptible to affect human health (e.g ocular and dermatological NCD diseases). ENACT aims at building a pathway to generate clinical, technological and economic short & long-term impact targeting local and regional stakeholders and create impact by: Developing a state-of-the-art environmental risk score and analyser driven framework and platform to predict, monitor and prevent the exposomic risk of acute and chronic health conditions of chronic vascular and non-vascular NCDs. This new exposomic risk score and analyser will support (a) patients, (b) health professionals/hospitals, and (c) policy makers; aiming at reducing the human and financial burden of NCD, considering potential individual vulnerability factors, and reinforcing both a clinical and a policy implementation that enables prevention and disease management for higher quality of life.

The IoF2020 project is dedicated to accelerate adoption of IoT for securing sufficient, safe and healthy food and to strengthen competitiveness of farming and food chains in Europe. It will consolidate Europe’s leading position in the global IoT industry by fostering a symbiotic ecosystem of farmers, food industry, technology providers and research institutes. The IoF2020 consortium of 73 partners, led by Wageningen UR and other core partners of previous key projects such as FIWARE and IoT-A, will leverage the ecosystem and architecture that was established in those projects. The heart of the project is formed by 19 use cases grouped in 5 trials with end users from the Arable, Dairy, Fruits, Vegetables and Meat verticals and IoT integrators that will demonstrate the business case of innovative IoT solutions for a large number of application areas. A lean multi-actor approach focusing on user acceptability, stakeholder engagement and sustainable business models will boost technology and market readiness levels and bring end user adoption to the next stage. This development will be enhanced by an open IoT architecture and infrastructure of reusable components based on existing standards and a security and privacy framework. Anticipating vast technological developments and emerging challenges for farming and food, the 4-year project stays agile through dynamic budgeting and adaptive decision-making by an implementation board of representatives from key user organizations. A 6 M€ mid-term open call will allow for testing intermediate results and extending the project with technical solutions and test sites. A coherent dissemination strategy for use case products and project learnings supported by leading user organizations will ensure a high market visibility and an increased learning curve. Thus IoF2020 will pave the way for data-driven farming, autonomous operations, virtual food chains and personalized nutrition for European citizens.

Prompted by the need to comply with environmental and societal concerns, Electrical Power and Energy Systems are undergoing an unprecedented transformation, demanding urgent upgrades to make them more reliable, resilient and secure. Modernization of current grids will greatly reduce the frequency and duration of power blackouts, diminish the impact of disruptive events and restore service faster when outages occur, creating broad benefits to society and economy. eFORT approach will enable the further upgrading of the energy grid without affecting the security of supply and increasing their reliability and resiliency against extreme weather events, man-made hazards and equipment failures. eFORT addresses this complex challenge by gathering a consortium of 24 partners, from 10 EU countries, that provides the needed expertise. The project will put in place a set of solutions at the cyber and physical layers for detecting, preventing and mitigating vulnerabilities and threats. Among them, an interoperable Intelligent Platform will set a common foundation for grid characterization and vulnerability overseeing, as well as gather information from smart grid components and apply heavy-duty algorithms, whereas Asset Management developments will strengthen grid infrastructure robustness, which will be empowered by the addressed Digital Technologies. All these elements will be validated in relevant environments coming from 4 demo cases covering the whole grid value chain: (i) a transmission network (The Netherlands); (ii) a remote distribution grid (Italy); (iii) a digital substation in Ukraine; and (iv) a micro-grid in Spain. Moreover, eFORT relies on several horizontal actions aiming at empowering EPES players by establishing a common regulatory and standardisation framework, performing technical and cost-benefit analysis, and evaluating new related business models and replication potential, in the pathway towards a more sustainable energy system.