The STORIES project aims to contribute to a dynamic future of children’s ebooks evolution by a) developing user-friendly interfaces for young students (10-12 years old) to create their own multi-path stories expressing their imagination and creativity and b) by integrating the latest AR, VR and 3D printing technologies to visualize their stories in numerous innovative ways. In the heart of this intervention lies the vision for integrated curricula and deeper learning outcomes. The project will offer these innovations through a single environment, the STORIES Storytelling Platform which will be the place for students’ artistic expression and scientific inquiry at the same time. The creations of the students (paintings, models, dioramas and constructions, 3D objects and landscapes, animations, science videos and science theatre plays) will be captured and integrated in the form of interactive ebooks. The STORIES technical team will design advanced interfaces in which students will be able to augment characters, buildings, greenhouses and different 3D geometrical structures on a tablet or their computer and inspect their work using a mobile device. The outcome of their work will be detected and tracked, and the video stream is augmented with an animated 3D version of the character or the artefact. The platform will be tested in real settings in Germany, Greece, Portugal, France, Finland and Japan, involving 60 teachers and 3000 students (5th and 6th grade). To achieve this, the proposed project is developing a novel cooperation between creative industries and electronic publishing, educational research institutions in the field of STEM, schools and informal learning centres. The consortium includes 15 partners from Europe, USA, Japan and Australia. But STORIES is going beyond that: The consortium will cooperate in the design of the platform and in the development of the storyline mechanism with Eugene (Eugenios) Trivizas, well known writer of children's books.

Digital evidence is currently an integral part of criminal investigations, and not confined to pure cybercrime cases. Criminal behaviours like financial frauds, intellectual property theft, industrial espionage, and terrorist networks leverage the Internet and cyberspace. The very ubiquity of digital devices, e.g. smartphones, in modern society makes digital evidence extremely relevant for investigations about all kinds of criminal behaviour like murder, contraband activities, and people smuggling, to name a few. Due to its nature, the use of digital evidence in a court of law has always been challenging. It is critical that it should be accompanied by a proper chain of custody, guaranteeing its source and integrity. LOCARD aims to provide a holistic platform for chain of custody assurance along the forensic workflow, a trusted distributed platform allowing the storage of digital evidence metadata in a blockchain. Each node of LOCARD will be able to independently set its own permission policies and to selectively share access to digital evidence with other nodes when deemed necessary and upon proper authorization through fine-grained policies. LOCARD's modularity will also allow diverse actors to tailor the platform to their specific needs and role in the digital forensic workflow, from preparation and readiness, to collection, to analysis and reporting. LOCARD will have a crowdsource module to collect citizen reports of selected violations, a crawler to detect and correlate online deviant behaviour, and a toolkit for investigators that will assist them in collecting online and offline evidence. This will be powered by an immutable storage and an identity management system that will protect privacy and handle access to evidence data using a Trusted Execution Environment. Blockchain technology will not only guarantee that information about the evidence cannot be tampered with, but allow interoperability without the need for a trusted third party.

FORTIKA aims to (1) minimise the exposure of small and medium sized businesses to cyber security risks and threats, and (2) help them successfully respond to cyber security incidents, while relieving them from all unnecessary and costly efforts of identifying, acquiring and using the appropriate cyber security solutions. To fulfil its vision the project adopts a security by design hybrid approach that adequately integrates hardware and software with business needs and behavioural patterns at individual and organisational level to: introduce a hardware-enabled middleware security layer as add-on to existing network gateways; orientate small business users to trusted cyber security services (through FORTIKA’s marketplace) packaged to tailored solutions for each enterprise and further extended to accommodate security intelligence and to encourage security-friendly behavioural and organisational changes. Ultimately, FORTIKA proposes a resilient overall cyber security solution that can be easily tailored and adjusted to the versatile and dynamically changing needs of small businesses. To this end, the project ambitiously aims to make systematic and extensive use of the existing service and product portfolio of security solution providers across Europe. Finally the introduction of a software-defined smart ecosystem in “FORTIKA Marketplace”, will provide the feature of a light mode solution, which will offer virtualized security services (with minimum downloading requirements). From their perspective, users (i.e. SMEs) may utilize a variety of services and share profiling information with the service providers in return for tailored security services aligned with their actual needs. The FORTIKA marketplace will also function as a single point of access for the profiling information for each SME. FORTIKA Cyber-security framework will be evaluated through five major types of SMEs and will be supported from 2 local SME/ICT clusters and 1 EU alliance.

LAZARUS is a three-year research and innovation project that aims to heal many of the security issues that befall modern software during its development lifecycle. The recently introduced area of DevSecOps - in medium to large companies - unfortunately lacks automated security tools, while most existing solutions are targeting only one narrow step of the SDLC process but miss a much needed holistic overview of the global security solution. LAZARUS innovates by intervening in multiple steps of the SDLC, performing targeted security checks and collecting valuable information and intelligence from each step, and exploiting advanced ML and AI methods to convert this intelligence into actionable insights and recommendations. The main innovations of LAZARUS are illustrated in the figure below. Moreover, we provide advanced features for developers, that employing our tools would be able to deploy more intelligent and distributed solutions through dedicated APIs. LAZARUS follows an open-source approach for the core functionality, which is supported by a realistic and viable business model for the sustainability and further exploitation of the project after it reaches the end of this financing phase. To validate the efficacy of the project outcomes we have secured two exciting real-world, diverse, pilots in two very different and demanding sectors.

YAKSHA aims at reinforcing EU-ASEAN cooperation & building partnerships in the cybersecurity domain by developing a solution tailored to specific user and national needs, leveraging EU Know-How and local expertise. YAKSHA will develop and introduce the innovative concept of honeypots-as-a-service which will greatly enhance the process of gathering threat intelligence. It will enhance cybersecurity readiness levels for end users, help prevent cyber-attacks, mitigate cyber risks and better govern the whole cybersecurity process. YAKSHA is ideally positioned to secure global manufacturing supply chains, given its planned focus on IoT Security. YAKSHA will develop innovative methods for malware detection, collection and analysis, as well as design a specialised ontology to be used for long-term storage and analysis of the information, and deploy standard information formats and interfaces to facilitate interoperability. The YAKSHA software solution will be validated in real-world pilot projects in both regions, focusing on Vietnam & Greece, but with plans to expand the deployments to other countries. The test cases will be represented by complex end-users with articulated cybersecurity risks and will allow the consortium to gather feedback to be used later to bring the solution to the market. YAKSHA will develop a comprehensive business plan for the transition of the solution and complementary services to TRL9, leveraging the very strong ASEAN partners that are members of the consortium - including governmental organisations and leading end-users communities and associations with regional scope. As part of this effort, YAKSHA will build a whole ecosystem of partners around its solutions. This will contribute to enhancing cybersecurity skills in Europe and creating new positions for cybersecurity specialists in ASEAN. Moreover, the direct access to the all-important ASEAN market provided to partners will positively impact the competitiveness of European security industry