The most challenging applications in heterogeneous cloud ecosystems are those that are able to maximise the benefits of the combination of the cloud resources in use: multi-cloud applications. They have to deal with the security of the individual components as well as with the overall application security including the communications and the data flow between the components. The main objective of MUSA is to support the security-intelligent lifecycle management of distributed applications over heterogeneous cloud resources, through a security framework that includes: security-by-design mechanisms to allow application self-protection at runtime, and methods and tools for the integrated security assurance in both the engineering and operation of multi-cloud applications. The MUSA framework leverages security-by-design, agile and DevOps approaches in multi-cloud applications, and enables the security-aware development and operation of multi-cloud applications. The framework will be composed of a) an IDE for creating the multi-cloud application taking into account its security requirements together with functional and business requirements, b) a set of security mechanisms embedded in the multi-cloud application components for self-protection, c) an automated deployment environment that, based on an intelligent decision support system, will allow for the dynamic distribution of the components according to security needs, and d) a security assurance platform in form of a SaaS that will support multi-cloud application runtime security control and transparency to increase user trust. The project will demonstrate and evaluate the economic viability and practical usability of the MUSA framework in highly relevant industrial applications representative of multi-cloud application development potential in Europe. The project duration will be 36 months, with an overall budget of 3,574,190 euros.

The PROCESS demonstrators will pave the way towards exascale data services that will accelerate innovation and maximise the benefits of these emerging data solutions. The main tangible outputs of PROCESS are five very large data service prototypes, implemented using a mature, modular, generalizable open source solution for user friendly exascale data. The services will be thoroughly validated in real-world settings, both in scientific research and in industry pilot deployments. To achieve these ambitious objectives, the project consortium brings together the key players in the new data-driven ecosystem: top-level HPC and big data centres, communities – such as Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project – with unique data challenges that the current solutions are unable to meet and experienced e-Infrastructure solution providers with an extensive track record of rapid application development. In addition to providing the service prototypes that can cope with very large data, PROCESS addresses the work programme goals by using the tools and services with heterogeneous use cases, including medical informatics, airline revenue management and open data for global disaster risk reduction. This diversity of user communities ensures that in addition to supporting communities that push the envelope, the solutions will also ease the learning curve for broadest possible range of user communities. In addition, the chosen open source strategy maximises the potential for uptake and reuse, together with mature software engineering practices that minimise the efforts needed to set up and maintain services based on the PROCESS software releases.

Cloud federation enables cloud providers to collaborate and share their resources to create a large virtual pool of resources at multiple network locations. Different types of federation architectures for clouds and datacenters have been proposed and implemented (e.g. cloud bursting, cloud brokering or cloud aggregation) with different level of resource coupling and interoperation among the cloud resources, from loosely coupled, typically involving different administrative and legal domains, to tightly coupled federation, usually spanning multiple datacenters within an organization. In both situations, an effective, agile and secure federation of cloud networking resources is key to impact the deployment of federated applications. The main goal of this project is two-fold: research and develop techniques to federate cloud network resources, and to derive the integrated management cloud layer that enables an efficient and secure deployment of federated cloud applications. Our proposal will deliver a homogeneous virtualization layer, on top of heterogeneous underlying physical networks, computing and storage infrastructures, providing enablement for automated federation of applications across different clouds and datacenters. The project is fully committed to open source software. Cloud networking aspects will be based on OpenDaylight, a collaborative project under The Linux Foundation, and specifically we will leverage and extend the OpenDOVE project with new rich inter-cloud APIs to provision cross-site virtual networks overlays. The new inter-cloud network capabilities will be leveraged by existing open source cloud platforms, OpenNebula and OpenStack, to deploy multi-cloud applications. In particular, different aspects of the platforms will be extended to accommodate the federated cloud networking features like multi-tenancy, federated orchestration of networking, compute and storage management or the placement and elasticity of the multi-cloud applications.

The project builds on an existing community linked to ISPIM Society focused on innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) – a theme of central interest in EU as a source of employment and growth. The consortium consists of industrial partners (Nokia Networks, Lufthansa, Torbay Hospital, AachenMuenchener, BMW, Lego) and academics who share a concern with the question:How do we improve on current I&E teaching, coaching and training?While many organizations offer courses that focus on I&E we know these often fail to stimulate a step change in student abilities. Learners know they should act, but training does not enable this and whilst they gain considerable ‘explicit’ knowledge, they fail with ‘TACIT’ element that helps them to apply it. We suggest this is partly due to the mode of delivery and there is a need for new and innovative approaches that embrace learning as a generative iteration of knowledge and knowing through doing, making and relating:• recognise different modes of learning; for many practitioners classroom style approaches do not work effectively• promote experiential learning offering different ways of closing the learning cycle between theory and practice• create skills-based learning placing emphasis on what individuals in organizations can actually do rather than focusing only on structures and processes to enable innovation• assure practice-based learning: allowing capability development through experimentation and prototyping• build on core I&E principles around which individuals configure solutions to work in their own corporate contextThe objective of this project is to combine the efforts of business and university educators to create new learner-centred teaching methods, open up new learning opportunities and develop the practical application of entrepreneurial skills. This will be framed as an innovative teaching module to be embedded in the existing curricula of higher education institutions and in the corporate training programs.

<< Background >>GAMIFY enhanced capabilities through experience-based development of 21st century skills such as managing non-routine interpersonal tasks. Gamification allows to provide non-formal education and activation and to engage diverse stakeholders and appropriate participation in the future development of products, services, business models, work processes and new firms.<< Objectives >>Within these objectives the project combines the efforts and knowledge of academia as well as industry in order to advance gamification for innovation and entrepreneurship (InnEn). Against this background the GAMIFY project builds on a community focused on InnEn – a theme of central interest across the EU as a source of employment and growth.<< Implementation >>The implementation on the GAMIFY objectives took place in line with the original proposal. Due to Covid some small changes needed to be done accordingly (e.g. online meetings instead of onsite meetings). Besides, 4 amendments were tabled and officially confirmed.<< Results >>The project reached all milestones: the publications (7 conference papers/ 2 journal papers) , several patterns for the design of gamification formats, several reports as well as internal and external meetings, quality criteria for games format and repository of gamified formats/techniques for InEn through the development of 6 games & implementation of pilot, test and validation workshops, pedagogical materials, 9 webinars, 3 curricula and guidelines and book of games.