ECHO delivers an organized and coordinated approach to improve proactive cyber defence of the European Union, through effective and efficient multi-sector collaboration. The Partners will execute on a 48-month work plan to develop, model and demonstrate a network of cyber research and competence centres, with a central competence at the hub. The Central Competence Hub serves as the focal point for the ECHO Multi-sector Assessment Framework enabling multi-sector dependencies management, provision of an ECHO Early Warning System, an ECHO Federation of Cyber Ranges and management of an expanding collection of Partner Engagements. The ECHO Multi-sector Assessment Framework refers to the analysis of challenges and opportunities derived from sector specific use cases, transversal cybersecurity needs analysis and development of inter-sector Technology Roadmaps involving horizontal cybersecurity disciplines. The Early Warning System, Federation of Cyber Ranges and Inter-sector Technology Roadmaps will then be subject of Demonstration Cases incorporating relevant involvement of inter-dependent industrial sectors. The ECHO Cyber-skills Framework provides the foundation for development of cybersecurity education and training programmes including a common definition of transversal and inter-sector skills and qualifications needed by cybersecurity practitioners. The ECHO Cybersecurity Certification Scheme provides a sector specific and inter-sector process for cybersecurity certification testing of new technologies and products resulting from the proposed technology roadmaps. The project will develop and operate under an ECHO Governance Model, by which the efforts across the EU Network of Cybersecurity Competence Centres can be coordinated and optimized to provide lasting and sustainable excellence in cybersecurity skills development; research and experimentation; technology roadmaps delivery; and certified security products for improved cybersecurity resilience.

The ehcoBUTLER Idea: Nowadays, it is a fact that Europe is ageing. A common characteristic of elders is the frequent occurrence of either physical or mild cognitive impairments. This situation brings new challenges in how to improve the independence and quality of life of elderly people and promote their good health in different ways. The ehcoBUTLER project addresses this challenge by developing an ICT technological platform with both leisure and care apps. The main objective of ehcoBUTLER is to demonstrate the socio-economic benefits from the deployment of several innovative and user led ICT pilot projects based on different business models in order to be able to translate promising results into scalable practice across Europe. How the objectives will be achieved: The ehcoBUTLER Consortium is composed by a multidisciplinary combination of specialist partners on their areas and responsibilities, in order to satisfy the requirements emerging from the EU Call and the particular PHC-20 topic. With this consortium we expect to contribute to break the technological barrier that exists nowadays between the elderly and the ICTs, encouraging the e-Inclusion, to facilitate psychological and cognitive techniques and support procedures, both for the elderly people and for the informal and formal caregivers, to develop an interoperable and open ICT platform particularly designed and adapted to elderly people, to demonstrate the ROI from several four business models based on the deployment of this ICT platform and to generate an ecosystem for apps provider that will allow end users to integrate all the leisure and care related activities in just one platform. To ensure that the platform can be scaled to an operational deployment in the European Market we will deploy ehcoBUTLER in 5 countries and 7 pilot sites to reach the higher number of users and to test the suitability of ehcoBUTLER in different but related business cases.

In the LIV:IN project, major industry leaders from the ICT sector join forces to co-create more responsible approaches to innovation for the first time. LIV:IN builds on the premise that recognition of the value of RRI among industry is necessary for achieving the aim of the call “to progress further in integrating RRI in industrial contexts”. The project follows an opportunity oriented approach in order to (1) activate industry leaders, experts and citizens to experiment with responsible ways of co-creating innovations; (2) build capacity for RRI implementation and develop tools that are applicable across industry sectors; and (3) transform attitudes towards RRI from risk to opportunity. LIV:IN will demonstrate the added value of RRI in the area of smart future living. We carefully selected this application area because it directly impacts the lives of citizens (societal relevance) but also constitutes a major emerging market (business opportunity). The project includes four key features that will significantly enhance the quality of the proposed coordination and support activities. First, six LIV:IN Labs and a virtual community of practice will constitute the central spaces for experimentation with integrating RRI in industry, and, consequently, the development of new approaches to innovation. Second, the application and continuous improvement of RRI tools in these spaces will contribute to capacity-building among industry and citizens alike. Third, embedded audio-visual story-telling will be the main vehicle for disseminating results and for shifting attitudes towards RRI from risk to opportunity. Finally, continuous dialogue with earlier and present initiatives in the areas of RRI, CSR and open innovation will ensure the transferability of project results across industry sectors. Ultimately, LIV:IN is guided by its vision to become a flagship initiative for effective integration of RRI in industry.

Contact centers (CC) are an important business for Europe: 35,000 contact centers generate 3.2 Million jobs (~1% of Europe’s active population). A typical CC produces a wealth of multilingual spoken data that is nowadays mined by humans (CC agents and supervisors) or by rudimentary technical means. BISON consortium plans to bring significant innovations in three areas: (1) basic speech data mining technologies (systems quickly adaptable to new languages, domains and CC campaigns), (2) business outcome mining from speech (translated into improvement of CCs’ Key Performance Indicators) and (3) CC support systems integrating both speech and business outcome mining in user-friendly way. The project will produce two prototypes: smallBison (end of the 1st year) will be a functioning system for real, though limited, deployment and user feedback collection. bigBison (end of the project) will include full range of capabilities and be fully integrated with CC hardware and software infrastructure. Generation of business outputs will be demonstrated on real data. Business indicators and values for the market were instrumental for the definition of the project and will be crucial for project execution. BISON consortium is composed of eight players with complementary skills. Two end users running large CC operations (EBOS, Atento) are generating user requirements and are ready to deploy the prototypes immediately in real scenarios. Phonexia (the coordinator), Brno University of Technology and Telefónica I+D are experts in speech data mining - from R&D, data processing to developing products placed on the market. Telefónica Móviles is an expert in business outcome mining and MyForce is a skilled Contact Center hardware and software integrator. CC data involve a number of legal issues, therefore, the University of Bologna (with significant experience in regulatory and legal aspects) complements the consortium.