FINDHR is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to prevent, detect, and mitigate discrimination in AI. Our research will be contextualized within the technical, legal, and ethical problems of algorithmic hiring and the domain of human resources, but will also show how to manage discrimination risks in a broad class of applications involving human recommendation. Through a context-sensitive, interdisciplinary approach, we will develop new technologies to measure discrimination risks, to create fairness-aware rankings and interventions, and to provide multi-stakeholder actionable interpretability. We will produce new technical guidance to perform impact assessment and algorithmic auditing, a protocol for equality monitoring, and a guide for fairness-aware AI software development. We will also design and deliver specialized skills training for developers and auditors of AI systems. We ground our project in EU regulation and policy. As tackling discrimination risks in AI requires processing sensitive data, we will perform a targeted legal analysis of tensions between data protection regulation (including the GDPR) and anti-discrimination regulation in Europe. We will engage with underrepresented groups through multiple mechanisms including consultation with experts and participatory action research. In our research, technology, law, and ethics are interwoven. The consortium includes leaders in algorithmic fairness and explainability research (UPF, UVA, UNIPI, MPI-SP), pioneers in the auditing of digital services (AW, ETICAS), and two industry partners that are leaders in their respective markets (ADE, RAND), complemented by experts in technology regulation (RU) and cross-cultural digital ethics (EUR), as well as worker representatives (ETUC) and two NGOs dedicated to fighting discrimination against women (WIDE+) and vulnerable populations (PRAK). All outputs will be released as open access publications, open source software, open datasets, and open courseware.

The objective of WELCOME is to research and develop intelligent technologies for support of the reception and integration of migrants in Europe. Unlike the majority of the projects that address the problem of migrant integration by frontends with “one-for-all” interfaces for information acquisition and services, WELCOME will offer a personalized and psychologically and socially competent solution for both migrants and public administrations. It will develop immersive and intelligent services, in which embodied intelligent multilingual agents will act as dedicated personalized assistants of migrants in contexts of registration, orientation, language teaching, civic education, and social and societal inclusion. The agents will be personalized in the sense that they will dynamically adapt their interaction behavior to the topic, given context and the profile of the interlocutor. To provide “real-life” experience and thus deeper and swifter integration, immersive virtual and augmented reality technologies will be used. For public administrations, decision support technologies that will draw upon visual analytics and semantic reasoning techniques will be developed. To achieve its objective, WELCOME will innovate in the areas of human – multiple service-oriented agent interaction, multilingual spoken language technologies, knowledge processing, immersive personalized education and social inclusion technologies, and decision support strategies. WELCOME’s solution will be validated and its portability to different European contexts demonstrated in three pilot use cases. Both WELCOME as a whole and its individual technologies are expected to have a very significant societal and economic impact. WELCOME counts with a highly competent Consortium of 15 partners: 6 research institutions, 3 ICT companies, and 6 entities related to migrant reception and integration. To increase its impact and dissemination, WELCOME involves the International Migrant Organization as subcontractor.

Cancer is one the leading causes of death in Europe in the general population with reports noting the cancer-related mortality twice as high in the homeless population. Reasons for this excess are linked to risky health behaviours as well as significant barriers experienced by homeless people when trying to access the often highly fragmented health care systems. Timely and evidence-based preventive strategies including optimizing health care pathways provide a solution to the high cancer mortality and could improve overall health outcomes in this underserved population. The aim of the CANCERLESS project is to deliver an innovative solution as an aggregate intervention based on the combination of the tested Patient Navigator Model and Patient Empowerment Model to create the Health Navigator Model for Europe. The Health Navigator Model is an evidence-based patient-centred intervention which develops patient empowerment through health education and social support and promotes timely access to primary and secondary prevention services. CANCERLESS includes partner organizations with long-standing experience in working in the field of health and social care for the homeless in the south, east, northwest and central Europe, as well as academic institutions and local governments. Using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation as well as the Research and the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance frameworks based on implementation science know-how, the CANCERLESS project aims to reduce the gap in health inequalities for the homeless population by reducing cancer burden, which will, in turn, reduce associated costs across health and social care systems in Europe. Moreover, the CANCERLESS project aims to harness the transformative potential of the integrated care pathways in cancer as well as provide health and social care policy recommendations for the adoption and implementation of the Health Navigator Model across Europe.