Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (BDLTs) cover a revolutionary potential but their uptake and deployment to value chains other than financial ones remains slow. Among other causes, fragmentation and a series of obstacles to their market deployment hamper the diffusion and pace of adoption of BDLTs by SMEs. Blockpool.eu (https://blockpool.eu/) aims to enhance SME innovation capacity by providing better innovation support. We will use the power of intermediary organisations (clusters, federations...) and cross-regional industrial networks to Pilot the acceleration of SME uptake and deployment of BDLTs. Our consortium thus aims to accelerate the cross-border uptake and deployment of BDLTs by/to European SMEs. Blockpool.eu aims to grow beyond the Pilot Project to become a sustainable Portal for BDLT deployment. We will build and strengthen SMEs’ and intermediaries’ BDLT capacity in a cross-value chain fashion, and strengthening both supply and demand sides through 1) a Blockchain “deployment pool” and 2) generic support activities. Besides enabling actions toward framework conditions and the capacity increase of SMEs, intermediaries and to another extent policy makers and regulators, Blockpool.eu will develop a Deployment Pool: 25 SME projects will be selected through an Open Call allocating at least 50% of the total project budget to test and validate new BDLT solutions (TRL7+) in most prominent sectors (e.g. supply chain, energy, healthcare, Fintech, Insurance, Legal, Shipping & Social Good). SMEs will also benefit from the support of our Mentors Network, training (MOOC/Webinars), as well as other innovative tools. That way, Blockpool.eu will contribute to the demonstration of BDLTs to SMEs across EU value chains but also generate impacts at a broader level than the one of its Deployment Pool: we will generate impacts at the level of the framework conditions (economic, social, legal and regulatory) conditioning the uptake and deployment of BDLTs.

HUBiquitous is an Innovation Action aiming at creating a joint Africa-Europe Startup & Innovation Ecosystem for long-term collaborations and partnerships. The project has the ambition to increase the technology level and capacity building of 30 local DIHs/TechHubs in 5 African countries. The project proposes highly innovative concepts called Innovation Enablers (i.e. Solution Lab, Application Business Box, and MeetHub online platform). The purpose of these enablers is to provide technical (e.g. IoT, AI, and BigData disruptive technologies) as well as entrepreneurial development skills to DIHs and startups/entrepreneurs. Thanks to these Innovation Enablers, the project will further demonstrate and build the local innovation and ecosystem capacity through 3 programs: (i) Talent program, building digital skills for local talents, (ii) Accelerator program, creating innovative applications and products and (iii) Community program, developing the Africa-Europe start-up and innovation communities. HUBiquitous Innovation Enablers and Programs will, therefore, support and empower the startup and entrepreneurship ecosystems from both continents with the development of a rich and sustainable collaboration between African and European DIHs. HUBiquitous consortium is composed of a partnership of Ten (10) entities, five European and five African, coming from nine different countries. It builds on the existing cooperation and partnership stemming from two previous H2020 ICT International Collaborations with Africa projects (WAZIUP and WAZIHUB). The ultimate target of HUBiquitous is to pave the way for long-term and sustainable innovation for the African DIHs.

KijaniBox is a highly innovative project that will accelerate the African green transition and provide energy access for small businesses along the food supply chain. The target is to leverage the organic waste and transform them into green energy for cooling and refrigeration applications in order to prevent food losses and sanitary risks. The project aims to demonstrate the concept in 3 pilot sites in partnership with local waste management companies, food value chain actors and cold supply chain industries. In order to implement the concept, the project proposes highly innovative approaches called “Green Transition Enablers”. These are i) KijaniBox System itself, a small-scale, off-grid, industrial-grade waste to cooling system ii) Application Solution Boxes (ASB), application specific KijaniBox solution for three use cases iii) Co-creation Factory, enabling the local manufacturing capabilities for cost-effective solution, and finally iv) Business-in-a-Box, a comprehensive toolkit for entrepreneurs and stakeholders business support in order to ensure successful take-up and commercialization of the solution. KijaniBox is a highly innovative driven consortium composed of fourteen (14) entities, 7 European and 7 African partners, coming from 6 different countries. The ultimate target of KijaniBox is to pave the way for long-term sustainable economic growth and job creation opportunities in Africa and Europe.

Smart Health is EU Strategic Value Chain that contributes to growth, jobs and competitiveness. Health Data is the main enabler for the value chain, but it also depends on cutting edge technologies - AI, cloud computing, IoT, to integrate the dispersed knowledge and support innovative healthcare solutions and services. EC sets the creation of a European Health Data Space as a main priority, to promote better exchange and access to health data. On a regional level, the RIS3 strategies of the involved widening countries - Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Cyprus emphasize the need for based on Big Data, AI and IoT digitalized healthcare, to enable personalized medicine, informed decisions, and improved disease prediction. RIS3 strategies also outline the need for more funding for R&I, policy coherence and development of territorially join innovation strategies. A cross country coordinated approach is needed to align the separate endeavours towards an Excellent South-East Europe Smart Health Innovation Ecosystem enabled by a Regional Smart Health Data Space. VELES raises the level of innovation excellence in the South-East EU through creating a sustainable place-based innovation ecosystem, enabled by Regional Smart Health Data Space, including novel transformational framework, R&I and investment strategy and action plan for research, development and adoption of innovative and secure digital solutions that underpin the delivery of sustainable healthcare services. The Regional Smart Health Data Space will be demonstrated through the design of 4 interrelated pilots on Cancer treatment (Greece); Personalised/precision medicine of Alzheimer (Bulgaria); Cerebral tumours (Romania) and Dementia (Cyprus). The aim of VELES is to foster health data sharing regional and national strategies, to secure improved clinical practice, to preserve patient’s privacy and to empower citizens’ smart healthcare through access to innovative, cyber secure and data driven digital health services.

HumAIne will research, develop, validate and promote a novel operating system for Human-AI collaboration, which will enable the development of advanced decision making applications in dynamic, unstructured environments in different industrial sectors. The HumAIne OS will empower AI solution integrators to implement Human-AI collaboration systems that outperform AI systems and humans when working in isolation. HumAIne’s developments will be integrated into a single OS platform, which will coordinate four interwind components offering Active Learning (AL), Neuro-Symbolic Learning, Swarm Learning (SL) as well eXplainable AI (XAI) capabilities. These advanced AI paradigms are ideal for exploiting true Human-AI collaboration since, in each of them, the worker is the key actor with complete control and understanding of the performed operations. AL enables the development of effective Human-in-the-Loop systems that involve humans when AI faces increased uncertainty. Neuro-Symbolic Learning combines DL with semantics and rules to complete highly complex tasks with high accuracy while requiring considerably less training data than current AI models. Advanced XAI models will be made available, providing explanations of models’ predictions while considering the global context instead of just analysing the feature importance of a single AI model. HumAIne’s XAI will provide guidance to humans to enable the timely optimisation of AL and SL models where human participants provide feedback dynamically as well as fine-tuning of Neuro-Symbolic models. The platform will handle various types of structured and unstructured data, including inputs from humans that will be semantically correlated through ontologies, knowledge graphs, and semantic interoperability. HumAIne will complement its platform with complementary resources (e.g., training) and will be build a vibrant community of interested parties around it, to drive exploitation and wider use of the project's results.