Democracy is facing challenges including loss of trust in EU institutions, disillusionment and declining interest among citizens, increasing political polarisation, online disinformation and politically manipulated information, and a growing distance between citizens and elected representatives. We believe this can change if proper deliberative processes and tools are institutionalised that exploit the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and citizens’ post-Covid competences. We envision the next generation of digital deliberations as: grounded on solid democracy theory, multimodal (video, audio, text), usable and accessible, gamified (e.g. using skill points, scoreboards, missions, and avatars), mass, enabled by novel but also legal and ethical AI features (e.g., summarisation, moderation, fact checking, hate speech and toxicity detection) and easily adopted and institutionalized. In this context, the aim of AI4Deliberation project is to provide robust, ethical AI tools and comprehensive guidance to assist governments in institutionalising, using and evaluating multimodal, gamified, mass deliberations. The vision of the project is to equip governments with a theoretically solid and empirically tested set of AI-enabled deliberative processes, a comprehensive framework with practical guidelines, and an AI toolkit that will enable them to design, institutionalise, operate and evaluate transparent, ethical, inclusive, multimodal, gamified, mass citizens deliberations resulting in more active and inclusive citizenship and increased trust to rule-of-law based institutions by citizens. To achieve these ambitious objectives, the consortium brings together a team of world leaders in deliberative democracy, AI and LLMs (incl. vid-LLMs), argumentation mining, law and ethics, deliberation platforms (including video-based) while four large scale pilots will be conducted from city level to international discussing topics that include climate change and long Covid.

The European tourism sector plays a pivotal role in driving economic growth, employment, and social development. However, it faces challenges deriving from its predominant reliance on linear models, causing significant environmental impacts and resource depletion. Recognizing the necessity for a paradigm shift, the VERNE project aspires to accelerate the transition of local and regional tourist destinations toward sustainable and circular models across Europe. VERNE aims to provide an integrated framework for analysing the feasibility and impact of circular interventions in tourism destinations, offering recommendations for authorities, tourism industries, and citizens for the sector's transition into more sustainable business models. In collaboration with public administrations, DMOs, private sector services, industries, citizens and tourists, NGOs, and other stakeholders, VERNE will create and validate a range of systemic, replicable, and scalable solutions, tailored on the real needs and attitudes of these actors. These solutions will encompass diverse approaches and technologies (i.e., digital solutions, improved waste and food waste management, wastewater treatment, use of electric vehicles, etc.) and will cover several sector and services for tourism . The VERNE solutions will be implemented and demonstrated in 5 European representative tourist destinations (VERNE Pilots). The project's outcomes will be incorporated into new business models, providing a quantified demonstration of their effects on the competitiveness and sustainability of existing tourism services. Finally, VERNE will have the ambition to emerge as one-stop-shop for sustainable tourism, serving as a comprehensive hub of expertise, tools, and best practices on sustainable tourism, facilitating the adoption and replication of circular systemic solutions across Europe.

A strong data economy is emerging in Europe, where both large companies and SMEs acknowledge the fundamental value of Big Data to cause disruptive change in markets and business models . Nevertheless, the growth of the data economy is hampered by the lack of trusted, secure and ethical-driven personal data platforms and privacy-aware analytics methods capable of, on the one hand, securing the sharing of personal data and proprietary/commercial/industrial data and, on the other hand, of strictly and fairly defining how value can be captured, produced, released and cashed out for the benefit of all the stakeholders involved. Addressing this kind of concerns on privacy, ethics and IPR ownership over the DataVaults value chain is one of the cornerstones of the project. Its goal to set, sustain and mobilize an ever-growing ecosystem for personal data and insights sharing and for enhanced collaboration between stakeholders (data owners and data seekers) relies exactly on DataVaults personal data platform’s extra functionalities and methods for retaining data ownership, safeguarding security and privacy, notifying individuals of their risk exposure, as well as on securing value flow based on smart contract. DataVaults aims to deliver a framework and a platform that has personal data, coming from diverse sources in its centre and that defines secure, trusted and privacy preserving mechanisms allowing individuals to take ownership and control of their data and share them at will, through flexible data sharing and fair compensation schemes with other entities (companies or not). The overall approach will rejuvenate the personal data value chain, which could from now on be seen as a multi-sided and multi-tier ecosystem governed and regulated by smart contracts which safeguard personal data ownership, privacy and usage and attributes value to the ones who produce it.

The Universal Accessibility Suite represents a groundbreaking initiative that aims to revolutionize the accessibility and inclusivity of smart buildings and smart cities. By leveraging advanced technologies and innovative solutions like AI, BIM and GIS, AccesS aims to create barrier-free environments, facilitate smooth mobility, and enable equal access to essential services and facilities. AccesS aspires to deliver innovations supporting accessible and inclusive design by providing advanced analytics for life-cycle assessments, optimizing energy, environmental, and user comfort aspects, incorporating simulation-based testing and compliance with accessibility guidelines for designing user-friendly and safe products and built environments. The project aims also to explore the relationship between comfort and energy consumption to promote sustainable practices and incorporates virtual user models and simulation environments. Furthermore, AccesS aspires to deliver innovations supporting inclusive, adaptive and sustainable operation of the built environment in order to optimize building operations in an adaptive manner depending on the needs of its users and addresses e-mobility and micro-mobility to facilitate accessible and inclusive transportation options. A particularly important aspect is the development of an Accessibility Assessment Scheme to define clear and measurable criteria, guidelines, and performance indicators for assessing accessibility. The demonstrators have been grouped under 6 case studies, focused on 3 different types of buildings/ uses (cultural heritage buildings, people care facilities, public services buildings) and in 5 different locations in 5 European Smart Cities (Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Netherlands and Switzerland) in order to maximize impact and address numerous real-life situations. 22 partners from 9 European countries will collaborate and provide their expertise and resources within the 36 months of AccesS lifetime.

ORBIS addresses the disconnects between ambitious ideas and collective actions at a large socio-technical scale. It responds to the profound lack of dialogue between citizenship and policy making institutions by providing a theoretically sound and highly pragmatic socio-technical solution to enable the transition to a more inclusive, transparent and trustful Deliberative Democracy in Europe. The project shapes and supports new democratic models that are developed through deliberative democracy processes; it follows a socio-constructive approach in which deliberative democracy is not a theory which prescribes new democratic practices and models, but rather the process through which we can collectively imagine and realize them. ORBIS provides new ways to understand and facilitate the emergence of new participatory democracy models, together with the mechanisms to scale them up and consolidate them at institutional level. It delivers: (i) a sound methodology for deliberative participation and co-creation at scale; (ii) novel AI-enhanced tools for deliberative participation across diverse settings; (iii) a novel socio-technical approach that augments the articulation between deliberative processes and representative institutions in liberal democracies; (iv) new evidence-based democratic models that emerge from the application of citizen deliberation processes; (v) demonstrated measurable impact of such innovations in real-world settings. The project builds on cutting-edge AI tools and technologies to develop a sustainable digital solution, and bridges theories and technological solutions from the fields of political and social science, social innovation, Artificial Intelligence, argumentation and digital democracy. The achievement of the project’s goal is validated through six use cases addressing contemporary issues at different scales and settings, experimenting with different civic participation and deliberation models, and involving diverse types of stakeholders.