Immersive telepresence technologies will have game-changing impacts on interactions amongst individuals or with non-human objects (e.g. machines), in cyberspace with blurred boundaries between the virtual and physical world. The impacts of this technology are expected to range in a variety of vertical sectors, including education and training, entertainment, healthcare, manufacturing industry, etc. The key challenges include limitations of both the application platform and the underlying network support to achieve seamless presentation, processing and delivery of immersive telepresence content at a large scale. Innovative design, rigorous validation and testing exercises aim to fulfil the key technical requirements identified such as low-latency communication, high bandwidth demand, and complex content encoding/rendering tasks in real-time. The industry-leading SPIRIT consortium will build on the existing TRL4 application platforms and network infrastructures developed by the project partners, aiming to address key technical challenges and further develop all major aspects of telepresence technologies to achieve targeted TRL7. The SPIRIT Project will focus its innovations in network-layer, transport-layer, application/content-layer techniques, as well as security and privacy mechanisms to facilitate the large-scale operation of telepresence applications. The project team will develop a fully distributed, interconnected testing infrastructure across two geographical sites in Germany and UK, allowing large-scale testing of heterogeneous telepresence applications in real-life Internet environments. The network infrastructure will host two mainstream application environments based on WebRTC and low-latency DASH. In addition to the project-designated use case scenarios, the project team will test a variety of additional use cases covering heterogeneous vertical sectors through FSTP participation.

The realization of the paradigm of Internet anywhere, anytime and any-device and the diffusion of end-user multimedia devices with powerful and user-friendly capabilities such as smartphones, tablets PCs, mobile gaming terminals and e-books, are leading to the proliferation of a significant amount of emerging multimedia services: immersive environments, mobile online gaming, 3D virtual world, book/newspaper consumption, social networking, IPTV applications, just to cite a few. Some of these services have already reached a major market success, such as the case of newspaper/magazine mobile readers and smartphone multimedia apps. Their success has been achieved especially because a user-centered approach has been followed to design the whole process of content production, service activation, content consumption, service management and updating. From these considerations it arises that management of the Quality of Experience (QoE) is undoubtedly a crucial concept in the deployment of future successful services and it is straightforward to be understood but complex to be implemented in real systems, since there are many variables which will affect QoE, and these variables are changeable and span multidisciplinary areas including multimedia signal processing, communications, computer networking, psychology and sociology. This Network focuses on the analysis, design, optimization and management of the QoE in advanced multimedia services, creating a fully-integrated and multi-disciplinary network of 12 ESRs working in and seconded by 7 academic institutions, 3 private companies and 1 standardization institute distributed in 6 European countries and in Korea. This Network will offer to a group of newly recruited Fellows in a cross-sectoral environment to shape their long-term research view and get fundamental methodological tools on various research fields, namely: multimedia networking, signal processing, communications, business, psychology and sociology.

SISSDEN is a project aimed at improving the cybersecurity posture of EU entities and end users through development of situational awareness and sharing of actionable information. It builds on the experience of Shadowserver, a non-profit organization well known in the security community for its efforts in mitigation of botnet and malware propagation, free of charge victim notification services, and close collaboration with Law Enforcement Agencies, national CERTs, and network providers. The core of SISSDEN is a worldwide sensor network, which will be deployed and operated by the project consortium. This passive threat data collection mechanism will be complemented by behavioral analysis of malware and multiple external data sources. Actionable information produced by SISSDEN will be used for the purposes of no‐cost victim notification and remediation via organizations such as National CERTs, ISPs, hosting providers and Law Enforcement Agencies such as EC3. It will especially benefit SMEs and citizens, which do not have the capability to resist threats alone, allowing them to participate in this global effort, and profit from the improved information processing, analysis and exchange of security intelligence, to effectively prevent and counter security breaches. The main goal of the project is creation of multiple high-quality feeds of actionable security information that will be used for remediation purposes and for proactive tightening of computer defences. This will be achieved through development and deployment of a distributed sensor network based on state-of-the-art honeypot/darknet technologies and creation of a high-throughput data processing center. SISSDEN will provide in-depth analytics on the collected data and develop metrics that will be used to establish the scale of most important security issues in the EU, and impact of the project itself. Finally, a curated reference data set will be created and published to provide a high-value resource.