e-IRGSP7 will provide the core support services to the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG). The project will support e-IRG in providing advice on policy-making towards inclusive, federated, user-driven and resilient e-Infrastructures and their related services. The main activities include the operation of the e-IRG secretariat, i.e. organisation of e-IRG events and provision of secretarial support to e-IRG, its Chair and Executive Board and the provision of policy support towards the development and publishing of policy papers and recommendations on the e-Infrastructure spectrum, as well as the support to related e-IRG working groups and task forces, which are also vital for e-IRG. The e-IRG analytical capacity for its policy documents will be strengthened with external experts, both from the e-IRG delegates and their countries, and from well-known experts in the filed who are invited as speakers in the e-IRG workshops. The communication and outreach activities, include the dissemination of the outputs of e-IRG throughout the European Research Area (ERA), the external and internal e-IRG web presence and maintenance of the social media outlets. Liaison activities are also planned with targeted stakeholders, such as ESFRI related ones, to jointly underpin the interworking of e-Infrastructures with the thematic infrastructures. Through these supporting activities by e-IRGSP7 and in its capacities, e-IRG will contribute to the implementation of EOSC, including better coordination among national entities (e.g., NRENs, national computing/clouds infrastructures) and to a more inclusive e-Infrastructure ecosystem. The consortium is very experienced and well-connected in the field through long involvement in previous e-IRG support projects and other EOSC key projects and can contribute towards better e-Infrastructure coordination and the digital transformation in the ERA. A new partner (TU-Wien) is also joining bringing experience from the EOSC Secretariat.

e-IRGSP6 will provide the core services to the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG). The project will support e-IRG in its activities producing high-level policy recommendations towards the implementation of EOSC, EDI and the e-Infrastructure Commons overall. The activities include the operation of the secretariat, i.e. organisation of e-IRG and outreach events and provision of secretarial support to e-IRG, its Chair and Executive Board. The provision of editorial support during the preparation of policy documents, as well as the support to e-IRG working groups and task forces are also vital services needed by e-IRG. The communication and lie-IRGSP6 will provide the core services to the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG). The project will support e-IRG in its activities producing high-level policy recommendations towards the implementation of EOSC, EDI and the e-Infrastructure Commons overall. The activities include the operation of the secretariat, i.e. organisation of e-IRG and outreach events and provision of secretarial support to e-IRG, its Chair and Executive Board. The provision of editorial support during the preparation of policy documents, as well as the support to e-IRG working groups and task forces are also vital services needed by e-IRG. The communication and liaison activities include the dissemination of the outputs of e-IRG, liaison with its various stakeholders, in particular ESFRI, the operation of the external and internal e-IRG web presence and maintenance of the social media outlets. e-IRGSP6 will also assist the EC, the Members States and Associated Countries with communication activities around EOSC and EDI/EuroHPC. Through these supporting activities by e-IRGSP6 and in its capacities e-IRG will contribute to the implementation of EOSC and promote the cultural change towards Open Science principles. The consortium is very experienced and well-connected in the field through long-term involvement in previous e-IRG support projects.

As metaverses operate in real-time their wide adoption is expected to create digital public spaces for interaction in which the already possible online interactions are intensified and blended with the physical world as never before. To lead in this field and maximize positive implications, Europe needs to ensure that new multi-dimensional challenges arising, are addressed in accordance with European values. AGORA responds to the lack of doctoral programs which go beyond the technical understanding of Metaverses and consider its business and social value while unpacking and addressing potential unintended consequences. Through a rigorous and robust research and training programme, AGORA aims to develop a critical research and talent base capable of leading by example. AGORA’s approach is to train the researchers not only to understand Metaverse's infrastructure but also to understand and oscillate between the different levels of Metaverse’s business and societal value, paving in this way a more integrated understanding of this disruptive ecosystem. Combining theoretical and hands-on industrial research and transferable skills training will enable researchers to target high-quality publication outlets and to become creative and autonomous so that they can exploit and commercialize research results and become competitive in the global arena. One of AGORA’s unique selling points is its ability to prepare the ESRs to work in any of the three pathways (academia, industry, policy making) as well as their intersections. AGORA's inter-sectoral network brings together leading academic and non-academic co-supervision arrangements of high quality, stimulates the development of new industrial doctoral training procedures between top business schools and industries in the region.

The Pledger project aims at delivering a new architectural paradigm and a toolset that will pave the way for next generation edge computing infrastructures, tackling the modern challenges faced today and coupling the benefits of low latencies on the edge, with the robustness and resilience of cloud infrastructures. The project will deliver a set of tools and processes that will enable a) edge computing providers to enhance the stability and performance effectiveness of their edge infrastructures, through modelling the overheads and optimal groupings of concurrently running services, runtime analysis and adaptation, thus gaining a competitive advantage b) edge computing adopters to understand the computational nature of their applications, investigate abstracted and understandable QoS metrics, facilitate trust and smart contracting over their infrastructures and identify how they can balance their cost and performance to optimise their competitiveness and monitor their SLAs. By providing this toolset, the project will allow also third parties to act as independent validators of QoS features in IoT applications, enabling new decentralised applications and business models, thus filling a large gap in the emerging edge/IoT computing market landscape. The project validates its results through three use cases which are very relevant for the innovative edge/cloud computing concepts it plans to introduce: namely in manufacturing, mixed reality and smart cities application domains.

SERRANO’s overall ambition is to introduce a novel ecosystem of cloud-based technologies, spanning from specialized hardware resources up to software toolsets. This will enable application-specific service instantiation and optimal customizations based on the workloads to be processed, in a holistic manner, thus supporting highly demanding, dynamic and security-critical applications. SERRANO is not only tuned and fully aligned with current trends in the cloud computing sector towards the expansion of cloud infrastructures so as to efficiently integrate edge resources, but it also integrates transparently HPC resources ir to provide an infrastructure that goes beyond the scope of the “normal” cloud and realizes a true computing continuum. SERRANO introduces an abstraction layer that transforms the distributed edge, cloud and HPC resources into a single borderless infrastructure, while it also facilitates their automated and cognitive orchestration. It proposes the introduction and evolution of novel key concepts and approaches that aim to close existing technology gaps, towards the realization of advanced infrastructures, able to meet the stringent requirements of future applications and services. It will develop technologies and mechanisms related to security and privacy in distributed computing and storage infrastructures, hardware and software acceleration on cloud and edge, cognitive resource orchestration, dynamic data movement and task offloading between edge/cloud/HPC, transparent application deployment, energy-efficiency and real-time and zero-touch adaptability. Finally, to highlight the proposed ecosystem’s scientific and technological significance, SERRANO will demonstrate three high impact use cases related to (i) secure cloud and edge storage over a diversity of cloud resources, (ii) fintech by supporting latency-sensitive and safety-critical digital services in the financial sector and (iii) machine anomaly detection in manufacturing for Industry 4.0