In European society, video games are important both as a cultural and commercial industry and as an important aspect of people's daily lives. When compared to other economic sectors, the EU's video game market exhibits a rapid growth rate and makes up one-third of the total market value. The overall aim of the i-Game project is to create an accessible open-source game development platform that will facilitate the co-creation of games by diverse actors within different ecosystems of cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI), to enhance innovation and to bring positive impact on social cohesion and sustainability. More specifically, i-Game aspires: 1) To engage video game stakeholders of different abilities, expertise, and disciplines, to contribute, learn, share and tap into new innovative and economic opportunities; 2) To provide a collaborative platform with the tools to co-create mobile and virtual reality games by engaging different users, from different backgrounds and sectors; 3) To develop an ethical-design culture in the video game industry; 4) To monitor, assess and manage the impact that the video games have on different sectors, especially targeting culture/museums, creative industries and fashion/textile; 5) To help understand why and how are online games positively impacting people, culture and society and help extract the ingredients necessary for developing a new generation of games targeted to improve people’s well-being. The i-Game partnership, composed by organisations with diversified backgrounds and expertise, reassures the interdisciplinary approach required to address the complex topic of the games’ impact on innovation, sustainability, social cohesion and economic growth. This multi-sectorial and inclusive cooperation shall stimulate an innovative and productive work and inspire cross-fertilisation across perspectives, disciplines and countries, under common European values.

ELEGANT aims to solve the ever-increasing problem of software fragmentation in the IoT/Big Data interoperability domain. Software fragmentation prohibits the unification of these two ecosystems severely limiting the ability to regard them as a single system and tune the whole infrastructure towards defining its a) Performance, b) Energy Efficiency, c) Security, d) Reliability, and d) Dependability (PESRD) requirements. ELEGANT proposes a novel software programming paradigm, along with an associated set of methodologies and toolchains, to program IoT and Big Data frameworks using a unified programming framework. Its key proposed innovations in the areas of: a) Light-weight application virtualization, b) Automatic code extraction compatible with both IoT and Big Data frameworks, c) AI-assisted Intelligent Orchestration, d) dynamic code motion, and e) advanced code verification and cybersecurity mechanisms, will enable the seamless operation of end-to-end IoT/Big Data complex systems. This way, users employing the ELEGANT software stack and methodologies will be able to seamlessly define the pareto-optimal point in the PESRD optimization space while the entire system will be able to dynamically adjust itself during execution. To achieve its ambitious goals, ELEGANT assembles a consortium of experts across all domains ranging from low-level system software, IoT, Big Data, AI-assisted scheduling, and DevOps. Finally, the proposed solutions will be evaluated against pre-defined KPIs across a wide range of operational use cases from four distinct domains: health, automotive, smart metering, and video surveillance.

AUGMENTOR aims to develop a novel pedagogical framework that promotes both basic skills and 21st century competencies by integrating emerging technologies. This framework will be supported by an open access AI-boosted toolkit that builds on the strengths of big data and learning analytics to provide different types of stakeholders with explainable recommendations for smart search and identification of educational resources, as well as for designing personalized learning profiles that take into account individual actors’ characteristics, needs, and preferences. The overall approach foreseen is innovative, based on appropriately structured data that capture the stakeholders’ learning paths, promote informed and well-justified interaction, and advance critical thinking. AUGMENTOR will leverage advancements in the fields of Pedagogical Design, Creative Pedagogy, Explainable Artificial Intelligence, and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for instructional purposes. We will meaningfully integrate pedagogical approaches with AI-based software solutions to enable a rich collaboration among all chain’s actors from students to teachers and policy makers. Our goal is to provide guidelines to stakeholders on how to address potential underlying educational difficulties and disabilities, shape individual learning paths, or identify cases of gifted and talented students, to enable them to reach their full potential. AUGMENTOR will enhance trust and transparency, and trigger constructive reflection in both tutoring and pedagogical policy making. The project keeps a strategic balance between the pedagogical and technological dimensions of teaching and learning. At the same time, it contributes equally to the concepts of individual and organizational learning, considering them as interdependent processes. The foreseen solution will be thoroughly deployed and validated in a series of real pilots representing diverse educational and training settings to define best practices.

The rapid growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its ubiquitous presence in our everyday life has significantly affected the way government services are delivered today. This poses constant challenges to safeguard the data confidentiality and integrity of e-government services, while increasing its adoption and usage by citizens and businesses. GLASS caters for a 'European Common Services Web', bringing closer together citizens, businesses and European governments. The project introduces a citizen-centric e-governance model that enables beneficiaries to participate in a network for big data exchange and service delivery, which is by design digital, efficient, cost-effective, interoperable, cross-border, secure and promotes the once-only priority. The GLASS solution comprises (i) a distributed file storage system, capable of addressing the complexity of the processes and their high demand on resources; (ii) a distributed ledger, which records every transaction among users to increase the overall transparency and trustworthiness; (iii) a distributed application (dapp) ecosystem for delivering mobile services tailored to the needs of its users; (iv) a single sign-on Wallet as a Service (WaaS) platform responsible for managing multiple services provided by each dapp; and (v) a Middleware Gateway Framework, responsible for the establishment of secure communication pathways among operational stakeholders and the integration of already existing e-governance systems with newly developed ones. GLASS brings together twelve (12) interdisciplinary partners from eight (8) countries to deliver a novel e-governance model and address the challenges that governance structures in the EU are currently facing - from divergent and legal groundwork to physical and technological limitations - towards the democratization and openness of the public administration services.

Today public authorities need to provide better services with fewer resources. Citizens require accessible, user-friendly, personalised, and integrated public services that match their needs and circumstances. At the same time, trust in the public sector deteriorates. We argue the solution rests in enhancing existing relevant EU work (on policies, models, frameworks, roadmaps etc) by adopting best research and practice (e.g. in public service co-creation) and by exploiting relevant technologies particularly mobile apps, virtual assistants (chatbots), knowledge graphs, and linked data. We acknowledge that for many years, the EU is providing useful practical advice including frameworks (e.g. EIF), models (e.g. CPSV), architectures (e.g. EIRA), roadmaps, etc. These however are not directly applicable anymore as they do not incorporate the latest research and practice, e.g. in public service co-creation. Similarly, research is not related to EU work and practice is not related to research. The vision of the inGov project is to provide innovative ICT-supported governance models as well as mobile apps including chatbots, which will enable stakeholders' collaboration in co-producing inclusive and accessible Integrated Public Services (IPS) thus increasing trust and satisfaction. For that purpose, multidisciplinary scientific methods will be used including design science, multiple case study and variants of the technology acceptance model. The project results will be piloted in Malta to modernise the digital family household public service (affecting 200,000 households), in Austria to deploy IPS for collecting tourism tax (affecting 3,200 accommodation providers), in Greece to digitise the disabled card renewal service (benefiting 11,500 disabled, low-income citizens) and in Croatia to create AI-driven virtual assistants and services (affecting 32,000 citizens). We aim to feed our results back to EU policies hence achieving alignment between policies, research and practice.