The I4MS program in H2020 has been and is a great success for the Digital Transformation of European Manufacturing SMEs. Phase IV of the program was focussing on DIHs and on highly innovative technologies like Digital Twins and AI. In particular, the AI REGIO Innovation Action developed a virtuous alliance between Regions, DIHs, AI solution providers and Manufacturing SMEs, which is materialised by a new methodology for DIHs service portfolio and customer journey analysis, an AI4EU -oriented toolkit of Data and AI resources, a network of Didactic Factories and their TEchnology and REgulatory SAndboxes (TERESA) and an ecosystem of SME-driven experiments and their Digital Transformation pathways. It is time now to align such important outcomes to the evolution of Manufacturing towards Industry 5.0, the evolution of cloud AI Technologies to AI-at-the-Edge, the evolution of H2020 to Horizon and Digital Europe programmes e.g. to EDIH, Data Spaces and AI TEFs (Testing and Experimentation Facilities) for Manufacturing. Some of the AI REGIO I4MS Phase IV motivations are now evolved: it is time for AI REDGIO 5.0 for keeping momentum of AI technologies adoption in Manufacturing SMEs. AI REDGIO 5.0 aims at renovating and extending the H2020 I4MS AI REGIO alliance between Vanguard EU regions and DIHs for a competitive AI-at-the-Edge Digital Transformation of Industry 5.0 Manufacturing SMEs. AI REGIO outcomes (methods and tools for DIHs governance and cross-DIH collaboration; Data Space and AI for Manufacturing toolkit; Didactic Factories network and TERESA facilities; SME-driven experimentations in 14 Vanguard regions) will be i) extended to the I5.0 principles; ii) enabled by the newest trusted technologies along the edge-to-cloud continuum; iii) supported by European open source hw/sw reference implementations, preserving EU values and ethical principles; iv) interconnected with the EDIH network in DEP as well as with the AI TEF nodes and the Data Spaces deployment program.

ACTIVAGE is a European Multi Centric Large Scale Pilot on Smart Living Environments. The main objective is to build the first European IoT ecosystem across 9 Deployment Sites (DS) in seven European countries, reusing and scaling up underlying open and proprietary IoT platforms, technologies and standards, and integrating new interfaces needed to provide interoperability across these heterogeneous platforms, that will enable the deployment and operation at large scale of Active & Healthy Ageing IoT based solutions and services, supporting and extending the independent living of older adults in their living environments, and responding to real needs of caregivers, service providers and public authorities. The project will deliver the ACTIVAGE IoT Ecosystem Suite (AIOTES), a set of Techniques, Tools and Methodologies for interoperability at different layers between heterogeneous IoT Platforms and an Open Framework for providing Semantic Interoperability of IoT Platforms for AHA, addressing trustworthiness, privacy, data protection and security. User-demand driven interoperable IoT-enabled Active & Healthy Ageing solutions will be deployed on top of the AIOTES in every DS, enhancing and scaling up existing services, for the promotion of independent living, the mitigation of frailty, and preservation of quality of life and autonomy. ACTIVAGE will assess the socio-economic impact, the benefits of IoT-based smart living environments in the quality of life and autonomy, and in the sustainability of the health and social care systems, demonstrating the seamless capacity of integration and interoperability of the IoT ecosystem, and validating new business, financial and organizational models for care delivery, ensuring the sustainability after the project end, and disseminating these results to a worldwide audience. The consortium comprises industries, research centres, SMEs, service providers, public authorities encompassing the whole value chain in every Deployment Site.

GREENGAGE’s vision is to promote innovative governance and help public authorities in shaping their climate mitigation and adaptation policies by engaging with citizens to co-create green initiatives and to develop Citizen Observatories (CO), focusing on mobility, air quality and healthy living supporting the delivery of carbon neutral neighbourhoods. The pan-European research innovation action will develop innovative governance process deploying digital solutions to transform citizen’s engagement and cities’ effectiveness in delivering European Green Deal objectives for carbon neutral cities. Green and digital transformation to carbon neutral cities will be promoted via two interrelated project dimensions. First the enhancement of intelligence applied to city decision making process and governance by engaging with citizen observations integrated with Copernicus, GEOSS, in-situ and socio-economic intelligence, and delivered by innovative governance models based on novel toolboxes of decision-making methodologies and technologies. Second by harnessing the social and cultural opportunities to promote the active engagement of citizens via COs in the collection and use of urban decision-making intelligence supportThe project will achieve the above vision by facilitating citizens to observe and co-create their cities by sensing their urban environments that will complement, validate and enrich information held by the public administrations and/or environment agencies derived from remote sensing data and obtained via other authoritative observations. This enhanced and evidence-based information will be used for smart urban governance including policy evaluation, policy making and decision making. GREENGAGE increases societal awareness by showcasing the environmental challenges (climate change, poor air quality, healthy living) through ‘as-is’ state of the urban environment, highlighting the information and other gaps in the authoritative data held by the public administ

SmartSDK aims at creating a sustainable FIWARE ecosystem between Europe and Mexico by leveraging on existing FIWARE outcomes and building reference standards for common challenges. To fulfil this goal, SmartSDK will analyse successful FIWARE applications deployed in Europe and derive from these applications a set of FIWARE-based reference service architectures and reference data models to support the agile development of smart solutions for sustainability challenges of today world. In this perspective, SmartSDK will adopt existing Open Standards and Open Source solutions leveraging on results of European and Mexican initiatives based on FIWARE. By “standardizing” these efforts in a reference Software Development Kit (SDK) for smart applications, SmartSDK will foster a long-term collaboration between Europe and Mexico on FIWARE building on shared societal and economical challenges in Europe and Mexico. The collaboration will promote increased FIWARE adoption in Mexico as ecosystem for developing smart solutions, through the involvement of cities, innovative SMEs and startups. This will insure a wide impact in Mexico and Europe and will support the growth of new FIWARE-based businesses through the direct involvement of a network of around ICT 30 incubators and accelerators with access to more than 1000 ICT Innovative companies and startups and the support of Wayra Mexico (owned by Telefonica), the local branch of the worldwide largest accelerator. The participation of key FIWARE partners in Europe (TID, CREATE-NET) and Mexico (INFOTEC, ITESM), the support of European startups building on FIWARE technology (HOPU, UBI), and Future Internet researchers from Mexico (CECISE, CENIDET, INAOE) under the experienced guide of R&D consultancy specialist and key promoter of FIWARE internationalization (MARTEL) are a unique asset for ensuring SmartSDK success.

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.