The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies since 2018, with the purpose of making significantly easier for citizens to have any data which is stored with one service provider transmitted directly to another provider. DAPSI will foster the advanced research in the Data Portability field through the support to researchers, SMEs and high tech startups from all over Europe. DAPSI proposes a match making process: an intersection between science and business, an opportunity to unite the knowledge and experience of both areas to achieve a common goal around Data Portability. To do so, DAPSI consortium will select the best applications to build complementary teams that will research and apply this advancement to relevant uses cases with market potential in a collaborative way. Up to 58 teams will be selected and only the best ones will progress through three phases of 10 months in an incubation programme where experts in diverse field will provide a successful working methodology, access to top infrastructure, training in business and data related topics, coaching, mentoring, visibility, community building and investment. On top of that, each DAPSI team will receive up to 195k€ equity-free funding, distributing a total amount of 5.6M€ through three open calls. The consortium led by ZABALA and participated by F6S, CAP DIGITAL, IMT, FRAUNHOFER and ENGINEERING will also work to contribute to the progress of the NGI community in the Data Portability domain generating insights and recommendations in the field.

AI4Cities brings together the leading European cities in the intersection of ‘Smart Cities’ and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions reduction, in order to speed up and steer the creation of new breakthrough solutions in how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support cities’ strategic plans to become Carbon Neutral. Right now is the time to direct AI research/innovation towards the societal needs -- to assign detailed, pragmatic, solvable ‘missions’ from the cities’ climate action plans to AI developers. Through these missions, this project will create breakthrough, scalable, European solutions for these specific needs, and thus lead to immediate, concrete and measurable emissions savings, but more importantly, give examples on how to create impact and better future, for the whole of the AI community as well as all the European cities and citizens. On one hand, the opportunity window for European AI leadership is closing fast in the competition between solutions coming from the US and China - what kind of AI solutions govern us in the future is of great policy interest for Europe. On the other hand, urban emission reduction ambitions in most of the cities are set up so high that many of them are not realistically achievable without exploiting best-in-class ICT technologies. While cities are different, the largest opportunities for emission reduction in European cities are very similar. The highest common reduction targets in most cities’ climate action plans are in transport and in buildings’ energy use. As an example, in Helsinki, the production of Electricity and Heating accounts for 71% of GHG emissions; urban transportation and traffic account for 24%. Combined, these two sectors total 95% of Helsinki’s total carbon footprint. The purpose of this PCP is to support Cities’ transition to carbon neutrality, by applying the use of AI and related enabling digital technologies to tackle the challenge of reducing the Cities GHG emissions.

Recent research activities in the ICT area, in particular in digital content and media sectors, has resulted in a number of technological enablers which allow the creation of new products and services. This has established a new converged social media environment in Europe as a playground for a large number of stakeholders, to ultimately enable creation of the related business, new jobs, and revenues benefiting from these developments. However, the main drivers of the new media and content technologies are the big industries, whereas the main users of these technologies are small enterprises / SMEs, which are creating product and services to reach the end customers – European and world-wide citizens. We can still observe a gap in discussions between the large technology providers and the small technology adopters, preventing the establishment of common strategies for the technology take up towards a more efficient creation of the new innovative product and services. Therefore, there is a clear need for the establishment of a common European community in the area of convergence and social media, in order to lay-down common research and innovation strategies, by involving important players from academia and research institutions, policy makers, end users, etc. Accordingly, one of the main goals of the VITAL MEDIA project is to enlarge the community in the social media area at the European level, at level of the national and regional clusters, through collaboration amongst the NEM Initiative and the clusters. The enlarged community will be animated through a number of discussions at workshops to be organised at all mentioned levels and through cooperation within an innovative online collaboration tool, aiming to widely discuss and establish research and innovations roadmaps for the area, by strong cooperation with research and academic institutions active in the area, covering the identified gaps between the technology providers, their users/adopters, and research.

The INNOLABS project is cluster/network driven and grounded in the conviction that cluster organizations guarantee a better understanding of what kind of services and added value can be provide to their “clients”. Its specific focus is on unlocking the cross-sectoral collaborative potential of SMEs in combining ICT with the BIO, Health and Medicine sectors representing an emerging but still under-utilised market, and applying such results to personalized ehealth for elderly populations in both rural and urban areas. mHealth is another area within INNOLABS that will help in leveraging outstanding results. The innovations created by the combination of different value chains get to market fast and need to adapt constantly to changing end-user needs. INNOLABS will study the characteristics in market dynamics and specificities for innovations created by merging ICT and biomedical research. The main outcome of the INNOLABS project will be a catalogue of monetary and non-monetary measures provided by regional innovation clusters to support SMEs to deliver timely and innovative products and services increasing the competitiveness of the SMEs and advances the positioning of European countries in these new emerging markets. Achieving long-term sustainability will be another of INNOLABS targets. All these will be achieved by pursuing the following project objectives: 1) Test and validate optimal support measures sensitive to the specific characteristics of ICT and biomedical markets by comparing measures for traditional value chains with new fast lane measures. 2) Increase the competitiveness of SMEs by using targeted non-monetary support mechanisms that generate added value encompassing expert knowledge, new partnerships and market optimisation of products 3) Secure new funding streams to facilitate sustainable cycles of collaborative IHBM innovation by SMEs on new market platforms.