The term first responders usually refers to law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical personnel. These responders, however, are not the only assets that may be required in the aftermath of a strike on the homeland. In contrast, the more appropriate term, emergency responders, comprises all personnel within a community that might be needed in the event of a natural or technological (man-made) disaster or terrorist incident. These responders might include hazardous materials response teams, urban search and rescue assets, community emergency response teams, anti-terrorism units, special weapons and tactics teams, bomb squads, emergency management officials, municipal agencies, and private organizations responsible for transportation, communications, medical services, public health, disaster assistance, public works, and construction. In addition, professional responders and volunteers, private nonprofit, nongovernmental groups (NGOs), such as the Red Cross, can also play an important role in emergency response. As a result, the tasks that a national emergency response system would be required to perform are more complex than simply aiding victims at the scene of a disaster, carried out by several kinds of professional users with different roles and expertise. Moreover, emergency preparedness and response lifecycle is a complex process that consists of the preparation, response, and recovery from a disaster, including planning, logistical support, maintenance and diagnostics, training, and management as well as supporting the actual activities at a disaster site and post-recovery after the incident.

Covert evidence gathering has not seen major changes in decades. Law enforcement Agencies (LEAs) are still using conventional, manpower based techniques to gather forensic evidence. Concealed surveillance devices can provide irrefutable evidences, but current video surveillance systems are usually bulky and complicated, are often used as simple video recorders, and require complex, expensive infrastructure to supply power, bandwidth, storage and illumination. Recent years have seen significant advances in the surveillance industry, but these were rarely targeted to forensic applications. The imaging community is fixated on cameras for mobile phones, where the figures of merit are resolution, image quality, and low profile. A mobile phone with its camera on would consume its battery in under two hours. Industrial surveillance cameras are even more power hungry, while intelligent algorithms such as face detection often require extremely high processing power, such as backend server farms, and are not available in conventional surveillance systems. Here we propose to develop and validate a novel, ultra-low-power, intelligent, miniaturised, low-cost, wireless, autonomous sensor (“FORENSOR”) for evidence gathering. Its ultra-sensitive camera and built-in intelligence will allow it to operate at remote locations, automatically identify pre-defined criminal events, and alert LEAs in real time while providing and storing the relevant video, location and timing evidence. FORENSOR will be able to operate for up to two months with no additional infrastructure. It will be manageable remotely, preserve the availability and the integrity of the collected evidence, and comply with all legal and ethical standards, in particular those related to privacy and personal data protection. The combination of built-in intelligence with ultra-low power consumption could help LEAs take the next step in fighting severe crimes.

Telecommunication networks have become a critical infrastructure for economic growth and social prosperity. Current networks will be unable to face the future demands and their increasingly diverse set of services, users, applications and requirements what is forcing network operators to transform them. At the centre of this network transformation is the broad-scale deployment of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). 5GTANGO puts forth the flexible programmability of 5G networks with i) a NFV-enabled Service Development Kit (SDK), ii) a Store with advanced validation and verification mechanisms for VNFs/Network Services qualification (including 3rd party contributions) and iii) a modular Service Platform in order to bridge the gap between business needs and network operational management systems. We propose an integrated vendor-independent platform where the outcome of the development kit, that is a packaged NFV forwarding graph, is automatically tested and validated in the Store for their posterior deployment with a customizable orchestrator compatible with common existing Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIM) and SDN controllers in the market. This end-to-end ecosystem for the agile development and deployment of services realises an extended NFV DevOps model between service developers, telecom operators and vertical industries, increasing operational efficiency, facilitating the implementation and validation of new services and accelerating the adoption of NFV technologies. 5GTANGO system will be demonstrated in two vertical pilots: advanced Manufacturing and immersive Media. 5GTANGO will actively promote collaboration and try to influence the SDOs most relevant for the project such as ETSI NFV or IETF, as well as the key open source initiatives such as OSM and Open-O. It is also 5GTANGO’s ambition to make key contributions to the 5G-PPP Programme, the targeted KPIs and commits to work with its peer 5G-PPP projects.

A growing trend in the field are NFTs or non-fungible tokens. “Non-fungible” is a relevant feature in the creative industries as it is unique and can’t be replaced by anything else. Transactions using NFTs over blockchains allow audiences to easily acquire unique content from the artists, users and creators take part in a cultural and artistic distributed community or gamify the experience with creative content. DAFNE+ will use this technologies to focus on the definition of novel revenue and business models to the cultural and creative industries, improving their global reach and open up new distributions channels without the imposed rules by intermediaries - even controlling the artists revenues- which is many cases are not based on EU (e.g YouTube). Therefore, DAFNE+ aims to create new distributed autonomous organizations / communities (DAO) around digital tokens and NFT, with a decentralized governance where cultural and creative industries (CCI), as be a driver of innovation and competitiveness, can play a role in the community governance and deciding on the rules of the community. DAFNE+ will provide novel services and tools for intuitive and simple content creation by developing new applications (in case of absence or closed approach) that will enable users to produce and ingest new content which can be directly valued and distributed. DAFNE+ will also aim at increasing the legal transparency around the creation, online distribution, and sharing of existing and novel forms of artistic content via blockchain technologies and involving smart contracts NFTs and other digital tokens. Towards this objective, DAFNE+ will map and analyse the relevant IP legal framework in the EU, and in particular the copyright regulatory framework, in order to identify and assess specific legal requirements, opportunities as well as barriers stemming from the identified IP framework which may impact the use of blockchain technologies in online content creation and sharing.

CyberSEAS (Cyber Securing Energy dAta Services) ambition is to improve the resilience of energy supply chains, protecting them from disruptions that exploit the enhanced interactions and extended involvement models of stakeholders and consumers in complex attack scenarios, characterised by the presence of legacy systems and the increasing connectivity of data feeds. It has 3 strategic objectives: 1) countering the cyber risks related to highest impact attacks against EPES; 2) protecting consumers against personal data breaches and attacks; and 3) increasing the security of the Energy Common Data Space. All three objectives are equally important, since cyber-criminals are shifting tactics to favour multi-stage attacks in which stealing sensitive data is a precondition for the real attack, and enables them to maximise damage and profits (while traditionally infrastructure cyber-attacks used to be direct attacks to the machinery and typically targeted control systems, not data). Threat actors, especially large ones such as nation states, also carry out complex attacks that leverage supply chain dependencies, and this trend continues to grow, as highlighted in the July 2020 analysis by the Atlantic Council. Likewise, with the transition to scenarios where users are proactively involved, prosumer data is becoming more and more sensitive. To achieve these objectives, CyberSEAS delivers an open and extendable ecosystem of 30 customisable security solutions providing effective support for key activities, and in particular: risk assessment; interaction with end devices; secure development and deployment; real-time security monitoring; skills improvement and awareness; certification, governance and cooperation. CyberSEAS solutions are validated through experimental campaigns consisting of 100+ attack scenarios, tested in 3 labs before moving out to one of 6 piloting infrastructures across 6 European countries. Out of the 30 solutions, 20 will reach TRL8+ and 10 TRL7.