Over the last years, the importance and need for broadband and high-speed connectivity has constantly increased. The Covid-19 pandemic has even accelerated this process towards a more connected society. But this holds mainly true for urban communities. In Europe a 13% lack access still persists, and mainly concerns the most rural and remote areas. Those are the most challenging to address since they are the least commercially attractive. COMMECT aims at bridging the digital divide, by providing quality, reliable, and secure access for all in rural and remote areas. The goal of extending broadband connectivity in rural and remote areas will be achieved by integrating Non-Terrestrial Networks with terrestrial cellular XG networks, and low-cost Internet of Things (IoT). Artificial Intelligence, Edge and Network Automation will reduce energy consumption both at connectivity and computing level. Participatory approach with end-users and ICT experts working together on development challenges will be the key for the digitalization of the sector. To ensure the rich exchange of best-practice and technical knowledge among the actors of the agro-forest value chain, COMMECT will set up five Living Labs across and outside Europe, where end-users “pain” and (connectivity) “gains” will be largely discussed, from different perspectives. COMMECT aims at contributing to a balanced territorial development of the EU’s rural areas and their communities by making smart agriculture and forest services accessible to all. COMMECT will facilitate that, by developing a decision-making support tool able to advise on the best connectivity solution, according to technical, socio-economic, and environmental considerations. This tool, incorporating collaborative business models, will be a key enabler for jobs, business, and investment in rural areas, as well as for improving the quality of life in areas such as healthcare, education, e-government, among others.

End-user and societal acceptance is critical to the success of the IoT large scale pilots. U4IoT combines complementary RRI-SSH expertise encompassing social and economic sciences, communication, crowdsourcing, living labs, co-creative workshops, meetups, and personal data protection to actively engage end-users and citizens in the large scale pilots. It will: • Develop toolkit for LSPs end-user engagement and adoption, including online resources, privacy-compliant crowdsourcing tools, guidelines and an innovative privacy game for personal data protection risk assessment and awareness, online training modules. • Direct Support to mobilize end-user engagement with co-creative workshops and meetups, trainings, Living Labs support, and an online pool of experts to address LSPs specific questions. • Analyse societal, ethical and ecological issues and adoption barriers related to the pilots with end-users and make recommendations for tackling IoT adoption barriers, including educational needs and sustainability models for LSPs and future IoT pilots’ deployment in Europe. • Support communication, knowledge sharing and dissemination with an online portal and interactive knowledge base gathering the lessons learned, FAQ, tools, solutions and end-user feedbacks. The U4IoT platform will support IoT take-up in Europe by better aligning it with end-user and societal expectations, mutualizing information and learning experiences, and improving communication with the public,- enabling Europe to take the lead in IoT user (and market) adoption. U4IoT will work in close cooperation with the other CSA, AIOTI and the IoT Forum who will maintain the platform after the end of the project to continue serving the European IoT community.

TagItSmart sets out to redefine the way we think of everyday mass-market objects not normally considered as part of an IoT ecosystem. These new smarter objects will dynamically change their status in response to a variety of factors and be seamlessly tracked during their lifecycle. This will change the way users-to-things interactions are viewed. Combining the power of functional inks with the pervasiveness of digital (e.g. QR-codes) and electronic (e.g. NFC tags) markers, zillions of objects will embed cheap sensing capabilities thus being able to capture new contextual information. Beside this, the ubiquitous presence of smartphones with their cameras and NFC readers will create the perfect bridge between everyday users and their objects. This will create a completely new flow of crowdsourced information, which extracted from the objects and enriched with user data, can be exploited by new services. TagItSmart will create an open, interoperable cloud-based platform with all the tools and enabling technologies, which will address the challenges related to the lifecycle management of new innovative services capitalizing on objects “sensorization”. TagItSmart will empower all steps involved from creating smart markers, Functional Codes (FCs), to supporting secure and reliable acquisition and consumption of such contextual data, while preserving user privacy, to the provision of generic functionalities and a service composition platform which will allow even inexperienced users to create and deploy their FCs based services while maintaining system efficiency. To boost the platform adoption, a set of industrial use cases will be used as a baseline for development, while additional stakeholders will be engaged through a co-creation Open Call approach. A carefully planned engagement activity will ensure the establishment and sustainable expansion of the TagItSmart ecosystem fostering long term innovation and exploitation capabilities well beyond the project duration.