It is presently acknowledged and scientifically proven than climate related hazards have the potential to substantially affect the lifespan and effectiveness or even destroy of European Critical Infrastructures (CI), particularly the energy, transportation sectors, buildings, marine and water management infrastructure with devastating impacts in EU appraising the social and economic losses. The main strategic objective of EU-CIRCLE is to move towards infrastructure network(s) that is resilient to today’s natural hazards and prepared for the future changing climate. Furthermore, modern infrastructures are inherently interconnected and interdependent systems ; thus extreme events are liable to lead to ‘cascade failures’. EU-CIRCLE’s scope is to derive an innovative framework for supporting the interconnected European Infrastructure’s resilience to climate pressures, supported by an end-to-end modelling environment where new analyses can be added anywhere along the analysis workflow and multiple scientific disciplines can work together to understand interdependencies, validate results, and present findings in a unified manner providing an efficient “Best of Breeds” solution of integrating into a holistic resilience model existing modelling tools and data in a standardised fashion. It, will be open & accessible to all interested parties in the infrastructure resilience business and having a confirmed interest in creating customized and innovative solutions. It will be complemented with a webbased portal.The design principles, offering transparency and greater flexibility, will allow potential users to introduce fully tailored solutions and infrastructure data, by defining and implementing customised impact assessment models, and use climate / weather data on demand.

The project will combine for the first time a multi-role lighter-than-air (LTA) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with an ultra-high resolution multi-sensor surveillance payload supporting border surveillance as well as search & rescue applications, and specifically rough terrain detection. The sensor payload will include synthetic aperture radar (SAR), laser detection and ranging (LADAR), shortwave/longwave infrared (SWIR/LWIR) and acoustic cameras for direct target detection, as well as optical and hyperspectral cameras for indirect detection (via vegetation disturbance). The project will use the ground-based infrastructure of border police units (command & control centres), innovative data models (to identify illegal crossing patterns and preferred routes) and advanced audio/video analytics and storage (to provide additional detection capabilities). The technology concepts will be validated in the field by 6 border police units (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus) covering 3 major illegal migration routes into Europe (Eastern Mediterranean, Western Balkan and Eastern Borders Routes), which represent 58% of all illegal border crossings detected and are also the most used for smuggling of drugs, weapons and stolen vehicles. The combined solution will provide high coverage, resolution and revisit time with a lower cost (4 EUR/kg/hr) than satellites and higher endurance (100 kg payload for 12 hours) than drones. Based on the field trial results, the consortium expects to develop a solution that can be deployed further by European border polices after project completion. The project will also involve the contribution of NGOs working with illegal migration and human right protection issues, as well as regulatory experts dealing with the ethics and privacy requirements of border surveillance solutions

Given the inability of Highly-Distributed-Application-Developers to foresee the changes as well as the heterogeneity on the underlying infrastructure, it is considerable crucial the design and development of novel software paradigms that facilitate application developers to take advantage of the emerging programmability of the underlying infrastructure and therefore develop Reconfigurable-by-Design applications. In parallel, it is crucial to design solutions that are scalable, support high performance, are resilient-to-failure and take into account the conditions of their runtime environment. Towards this direction, the ARCADIA project aims to design and validate a Novel Reconfigurable-By-Design Highly Distributed Applications Development Paradigm over Programmable Infrastructure. The proposed framework will rely on the development of an extensible Context Model which will be used by developers directly at the source-code level. Proper Context-Model will be assisted and validated by IDE-plugins (for many IDEs) in order to re-assure that the generated executable files contain meaningful semantics. According to ARCADIA’s vision, the generated executables should be on-boarded by a Smart Controller which will undertake the tasks of translating annotations to optimal infrastructural configuration. Such a controller will enforce an optimal configuration to the registered programmable resources and will pro-actively adjust the configuration plan based on the Infrastructural State and the Application State. The Context-Model and the aforementioned ARCADIA toolset will be complemented by a Development Methodology that will assure that developed Highly Distributed Applications are Reconfigurable-By-Design. The framework is planned to be validated and evaluated on three use cases that will be deployed over testbeds that host heterogeneous programmable infrastructure.

PrEstoCloud project will make substantial research contributions in the cloud computing and real-time data intensive applications domains, in order to provide a dynamic, distributed, self-adaptive and proactively configurable architecture for processing Big Data streams. In particular, PrEstoCloud aims to combine real-time Big Data, mobile processing and cloud computing research in a unique way that entails proactiveness of cloud resources use and extension of the fog computing paradigm to the extreme edge of the network. The envisioned PrEstoCloud solution is driven by the microservices paradigm and has been structured across five different conceptual layers: i) Meta-management; ii) Control; iii) Cloud infrastructure; iv) Cloud/Edge communication and v) Devices, layers. This innovative solution will address the challenge of cloud-based self-adaptive real-time Big Data processing, including mobile stream processing and will be demonstrated and assessed in several challenging, complementary and commercially-promising pilots. There will be three PrEstoCloud pilots from the logistics, mobile journalism and security surveillance, application domains. The objective is to validate the PrEstoCloud solution, prove that it is domain agnostic and demonstrate its added-value for attracting early adopters, thus initialising the exploitation process early on.

Discovering criminal networks and identifying their members is one of the primary aspects of LEAs' mission. ROXANNE will contribute towards this goal by bridging the strengths of speech and language technologies (SLTs), visual analysis (VA) and network analysis (NA). If funded, ROXANNE will achieve a significant increase in the speed of investigation processes and an improvement in identification of individuals by means of speech, in the scope of criminal cases where large amounts of lawfully intercepted communications (with multilingual attributes) are analysed. The technical development will be centred around the ROXANNE platform, which will enhance criminal network analysis capabilities by providing a framework for extracting evidence and actionable intelligence based on speech, language and video technologies. The intention is not to replace humans but automate time-consuming tasks, and support LEA decision-making. Its early version will offer preliminary SLT, VA and NA capabilities to collect end-user feedback. The final version will provide multilingual, probabilistic tools interfacing SLT and NA technologies, boosted by natural language processing (NLP) and relation analysis in the synoptic criminal activity graph. ROXANNE will achieve full compliance with relevant INTERPOL and EU legal and ethical frameworks, including innovative approaches to data protection management such as privacy by design. Special efforts will be expended to ensure ROXANNE outcomes achieve widespread adoption by law enforcement. The effort will be enhanced through a series of education and awareness campaigns and the direct involvement of LEAs from nine European countries, that will test our solutions on real case data. In addition, ROXANNE partner INTERPOL and EUROPOL (member of the External Advisory Board) will provide advice and guidance. The consortium has 24 partners with complementary skills, including leaders in key technology areas impacting criminal investigations.