The growing demand for skilled employees within the European Software Sector cannot be met by current education and training programmes. Europe needs an innovative new Software Skills Strategy that can fast-track the upskilling and reskilling of Europe’s workforce to address this ever-increasing skills gap. Technology innovation has changed the paradigm of the way software and IT infrastructure are being designed, delivered and managed (vide: automation, instant availability of services, growing software support functions), allowing for shorter and more efficient education cycles. Vocational education is considered as an applicable format, which enables better alignment with industry and employers real time needs and more flexible learning pathways.The European Software Skills Alliance led by DIGITALEUROPE brings together key Industry and Education stakeholders from across the domain to design and implement a highly innovative, effective and sustainable Software Skills Strategy for Europe that will ensure the skills needs of the rapidly expanding and evolving Software Sector can be met in the short, medium and long term. The Alliance will work together to develop, implement and disseminate a new Software Skills Strategy that will tackle the current and future skills shortages in the European Software Sector, enabling continuous development, innovation and competitiveness within the industry.The project includes:- the establishment of a long-term partnership between The European Software Skills Alliance members; - the design of an innovative and sustainable Software Skills Strategy;- development, testing and roll-out of VET training curricula for VET and higher VET;- VET training programmes and qualifications in line with latest market needs and consistently linked with EU instruments and tools enabling professional skills and career development in general and empowering ICT Professionalism and digital competences in particular.

AI-based decision support systems are increasingly deployed in industry, in the public and private sectors, and in policy-making. As our society is facing a dramatic increase in inequalities and intersectional discrimination, we need to prevent AI systems to amplify this phenomenon but rather mitigate it. To trust these systems, domain experts and stakeholders need to trust the decisions. Fairness stands as one of the main principles of Trustworthy AI promoted at EU level. How these principles, in particular fairness, translate into technical, functional social, and lawful requirements in the AI system design is still an open question. Similarly we don’t know how to test if a system is compliant with these principles and repair it in case it is not. AEQUITAS proposes the design of a controlled experimentation environment for developers and users to create controlled experiments for - assessing the bias in AI systems, e.g., identifying potential causes of bias in data, algorithms, and interpretation of results, - providing, when possible, effective methods and engineering guidelines to repair, remove, and mitigate bias, - provide fairness-by-design guidelines, methodologies, and software engineering techniques to design new bias-free systems The experimentation environment generates synthetic data sets with different features influencing fairness for a test in laboratories. Real use cases in health care, human resources and social disadvantaged group challenges further test the experimentation platform showcasing the effectiveness of the solution proposed. The experimentation playground will be integrated on the AI-on-demand platform to boost its uptake, but a stand-alone release will enable on-premise privacy-preserving test of AI-systems fairness. AEQUITAS relies on a strong consortium featuring AI experts, domain experts in the use case sectors as well as social scientists and associations defending rights of minorities and discriminated groups.

The objective of this research activity is to create a reliable computing node that will create a Cognitive Edge under industry standards. This computing node will be the building block of scalable Internet of Things (from Low Computing to High Computing Edge Nodes). The cognitive skill will be given by an internal and external architecture that allows to forecast its internal performance and the state of the surrounding world. Hence, this node will have the capability of learning how to improve its performance against the uncertainty of the environment. As a result of the integration of these cognitive systems into a fractal network, there will be another intrinsic crucial advantage, emergency and adaptability, new functions will flourish through the created space of possibilities of our cognitive Systems. This complex network will transfer all those cognitive advantages to the Edge, a computing paradigm that lay down between the physical world and the cloud.

Drones can perform air operations that manned aircrafts struggle with, and their use brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits whilst reducing the risk to human life. Drone-based service and product innovation, as driven by increased levels of connectivity and automation, is limited by the growing dependence on poorly interoperable proprietary technologies and the risks posed to people, to other vehicles and to property. SESAR JU identified that issue has a high impact on European innovation, which demands R&D investments and incentives for the convergence of shared technologies and markets as a remedy. Actions creating globally harmonized, commercially exploitable yet widely accessible R&D ecosystems should be publicly performed. The COMP4DRONES project complements SESAR JU efforts with a particular focus on safe software and hardware drone architectures. COMP4DRONES will bear a holistically designed ecosystem ranging from application to electronic components, realized as a tightly integrated multi-vendor and compositional drone embedded architecture solution and a tool chain complementing the compositional architecture principles. The ecosystem aims at supporting (1) efficient customization and incremental assurance of drone embedded platforms, (2) safe autonomous decision making concerning individual or cooperative missions, (3) trustworthy drone-to-drone and drone-to-ground communications even in presence of malicious attackers and under the intrinsic platform constraints, and (4) agile and cost-effective compositional design and assurance of drone modules and systems. COMP4DRONES will also build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and goal-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new drone functionalities for multiple application domains. Lead applications driving ecosystem development and benchmarking on the fields of transport, inspection, logistic, precision agriculture, parcel delivery.