Dandelion will promote the work done by inclusive, innovative and reflective societies’ projects on a local, regional and European level by developing and implementing a series of innovative and exciting communications activities aiming to inform, educate and entertain a wide cross section of the European population, policy makers, academics and media. By placing European economic and financial reform, the problems young people face in Europe, cultural heritage, European values and diversities, the EU's role as a global actor and the new forms of public sector innovation at the heart of these activities, by involving established science educators, by creating clear lines of communication between projects and named mass media and by utilising novel communications, Dandelion will ensure that inclusive, innovative and reflective societies’ ambitious philosophy is given the highest profile. By giving tools and guidelines to the dissemination managers towards general public, policy makers, academia and media Dandelion will guarantee an improved access to research projects’ data in the future.

Climate change will require concerted innovative ideas and actions at the local/regional level. A sustainable European bioeconomy will not only ensure the protection of the environment and biodiversity, but will also drive the renewal of European industries, the modernisation of primary production systems and lead to the creation of jobs, particularly in rural areas, through the active participation of all regional stakeholders in their local bioeconomies. RuralBioUp project will strengthen the cooperation among regional key actors and knowledge holders, empowering them to establish an inclusive and long-lasting ecosystem (the RuralBioUp Regional Hubs) to support the mainstreaming of bio-based business models in rural areas. In particular, RuralBioUp will establish 9 Regional Hubs (30 stakeholders per Hub) in 6 EU countries, that will co-design and implement 9 Action Plans on 18 value chains. Regional Hubs will be empowered by RuralBioUp's partners with mentoring, coaching and training activities in the implementation of their Action Plans. Thanks to this, at least (a.l.) 1.000 innovators will be supported (through networking events and study visits) and a.l. 50 new collaborations fostered (e.g. partnership agreements between companies and/or farmers, solutions funded, etc.) to adopt small-scale bio-based solutions in rural areas. The project will leverage synergies between existing EU networks (EuBioNet, BioEast, etc.), clusters, and regional organisations and will build upon previous research results (Power4Bio, BE-RURAL, Enabling, Transition2Bio, Biovoices, etc.) by integrating and extending the existing knowledge and data in order to propose different rural business models and new bio-based value chains in the targeted regions, through the realisation of a digital tool (the RuralBioUp One-Stop-Shop) supporting regional actors to take science-based and informed decisions.

Petty crime has a significant negative impact on European citizens’ quality of life, community cohesion and the safety and security of the urban environment. The aim of the Cutting Crime Impact (CCI) project is to enable Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) and security policymakers to adopt a preventative, evidence-based and sustainable approach to tackling high-impact petty crime. Tailored to the needs of end-users, CCI will design, develop and demonstrate four Toolkits covering: (i) predictive policing; (ii) community policing; (iii) crime prevention through urban design and planning; and (iv) measuring and mitigating citizens’ feelings of insecurity. Using social science methods and innovation tools from the design industry, CCI will support LEAs in researching and innovating practical, evidence-based tools that meet end-users needs and operational contexts. In delivering CCI, LEAs will gain valuable experience in requirements capture, problem framing, ideation, concept generation, solution design and prototyping that is transferable to other areas. Practical consideration of ethical, legal and social issues throughout the project's research and innovation activities will ensure developed Toolkits help promote safe and secure towns and cities, without compromising fundamental human rights. All toolkits will be demonstrated in an operational setting to assess performance, and materials developed to support integration into LEA operations and foster wider implementation. CCI aims to encourage wider EU adoption of effective approaches to safety and security, and will develop an extended European Security Model that includes high-impact petty crime and citizens’ feelings of insecurity. CCI will result in greater openness to innovation and design approaches amongst LEAs and security policymakers across Europe, as well as demonstrate the value of practitioner-led approaches to EU-funded research and innovation projects.

Motivated by the challenges, risks and opportunities that the wide use of AI brings to media, society and politics, AI4Media aspires to become a centre of excellence and a wide network of researchers across Europe and beyond, with a focus on delivering the next generation of core AI advances to serve the key sector of Media, to make sure that the European values of ethical and trustworthy AI are embedded in future AI deployments, and to reimagine AI as a crucial beneficial enabling technology in the service of Society and Media. The AI4Media consortium, comprising 30 leading partners in the areas of AI and media (9 universities, 9 research centres, 12 industrial partners) and 35 associate members, will establish the networking infrastructure to bring together the currently fragmented European AI landscape in the field of media, and foster deeper and long-running interactions between academia and industry, including Digital Innovation Hubs. It will also shape a research agenda for media AI research, and implement research and innovation both with respect to cutting-edge technologies at the core of AI research, and within specific fields of media-related AI. AI4Media will provide a targeted funding framework through open calls, to speed up the uptake of innovations developed within the network. A PhD programme will further enhance links to the industry and the fostering and exchange of talent, while providing motivation to prevent brain drain, and a set of use cases will be developed by the network to demonstrate the impact of the achieved advances in the media sector. The Excellence Centre that is established during the AI4Media project, and the ecosystem that will grow around it, will provide a long-term basis for the support of AI excellence in Europe, long after the project end, with the aim of ensuring that Ethical AI guided by European values assumes a global leading role in the field of Media.

AI-based decision support systems are increasingly deployed in industry, in the public and private sectors, and in policy-making. As our society is facing a dramatic increase in inequalities and intersectional discrimination, we need to prevent AI systems to amplify this phenomenon but rather mitigate it. To trust these systems, domain experts and stakeholders need to trust the decisions. Fairness stands as one of the main principles of Trustworthy AI promoted at EU level. How these principles, in particular fairness, translate into technical, functional social, and lawful requirements in the AI system design is still an open question. Similarly we don’t know how to test if a system is compliant with these principles and repair it in case it is not. AEQUITAS proposes the design of a controlled experimentation environment for developers and users to create controlled experiments for - assessing the bias in AI systems, e.g., identifying potential causes of bias in data, algorithms, and interpretation of results, - providing, when possible, effective methods and engineering guidelines to repair, remove, and mitigate bias, - provide fairness-by-design guidelines, methodologies, and software engineering techniques to design new bias-free systems The experimentation environment generates synthetic data sets with different features influencing fairness for a test in laboratories. Real use cases in health care, human resources and social disadvantaged group challenges further test the experimentation platform showcasing the effectiveness of the solution proposed. The experimentation playground will be integrated on the AI-on-demand platform to boost its uptake, but a stand-alone release will enable on-premise privacy-preserving test of AI-systems fairness. AEQUITAS relies on a strong consortium featuring AI experts, domain experts in the use case sectors as well as social scientists and associations defending rights of minorities and discriminated groups.