GASTEJO project will develop a blockchain-based, decentralized, permissionless inventory distribution platform for travel apartment rentals. It will facilitate entry of new European online travel agency players into the travel apartment rentals market, reduce costs of intermediation between apartment hosts and guests, drive down rental prices and increase revenues to European apartment owners and online travel agencies. The GASTEJO platform will provide independent online travel agencies (OTAs) of any size with access to global travel apartment inventory, allowing them to compete efficiently with global integrated OTAs such as Airbnb and HomeAway. This will result in expansion of the market and creation of a new €2.5 billion market opportunity for new entrants. Lastminute.com, a major European online travel agency with 43 million daily visitors, expressed interest in piloting the GASTEJO platform, and its CEO has joined GASTEJO advisory board. GASTEJO’s disruptive blockchain-based business model will provide unprecedented operational and financial efficiency. It will support payment in both fiat or crypto currencies, provide mutual insurance and loyalty incentives and enable trustworthy bookings and transactions. GASTEJO will disrupt the market by enabling OTAs to offer a super-set of features of Airbnb while cutting out redundant intermediaries and fostering competition. GASTEJO project team and advisory board combine strong blockchain technology and commercialization expertise with deep understanding of travel booking and insurance industries. The proposed Phase 1 feasibility study will perform market assessment, create a plan for disruptive market penetration, assess regulatory and commercial risks, deepen the assessment of technological feasibility and prepare a comprehensive business plan.

The goal of the OPERANDO project is to specify, implement, field-test, validate and exploit an innovative privacy enforcement platform that will enable the Privacy as a Service (PaS) business paradigm and the market for online privacy services. The OPERANDO project will integrate and extend the state of the art to create a platform that will used by independent Privacy Service Providers (PSPs) to provide comprehensive user privacy enforcement in the form of a dedicated online service, called “Privacy Authority”. The OPERANDO platform will support flexible and viable business models, including targeting of individual market segments such as public administration, social networks and Internet of Things. A key aspect addressed by OPERANDO is the need to simplify privacy for end users (data subjects). OPERANDO will support a simple Privacy Dashboard allowing users to specify their preferences. These will be automatically compared with Online Service Provider (OSP) privacy policies and translated into personal data access control decisions by the PSP. OPERANDO will also address OSP requirements for simplified privacy compliance checking and auditing, to verify that they will meet user expectations or to satisfy privacy regulators. The technology will be trialled in the health care and public administration sectors. The OPERANDO consortium thereby aims to contribute to the entire ecosystem of online privacy stakeholders: Users, PSPs, Online Service Providers and Regulators. Federation of Privacy Authorities will be supported to increase value of the services and their uptake. The OPERANDO platform will be positioned for endorsement by European governments and standardization bodies. To increase transparency of the privacy services and dissemination of results, OPERANDO outcomes will be implemented in Open Source, and will be made available to the community for evolution and value-adding beyond the scope of the project.

In recent years, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a revolutionary privacy-enhancing technology and, consequently, has quickly expanded to other applications. However, further research has cast a shadow of doubt on the strength of privacy protection provided by FL. Potential vulnerabilities and threats pointed out by researchers included a curious aggregator threat; susceptibility to man-in-the-middle and insider attacks that disrupt the convergence of global and local models or cause convergence to fake minima; and, most importantly, inference attacks that aim to re-identify data subjects from FL’s AI model parameter updates. The goal of TRUMPET is to research and develop novel privacy enhancement methods for Federated Learning, and to deliver a highly scalable Federated AI service platform for researchers, that will enable AI-powered studies of siloed, multi-site, cross-domain, cross border European datasets with privacy guarantees that exceed the requirements of GDPR. The generic TRUMPET platform will be piloted, demonstrated and validated in the specific use case of European cancer hospitals, allowing researchers and policymakers to extract AI-driven insights from previously inaccessible cross-border, cross-organization cancer data, while ensuring the patients’ privacy. The strong privacy protection accorded by the platform will be verified through the engagement of external experts for independent privacy leakage and re-identification testing. A secondary goal is to research, develop and promote with EU data protection authorities a novel metric and tool for the certification of GDPR compliance of FL implementations. The consortium is composed of 9 interdisciplinary partners: 3 Research Organizations, 1 University, 3 SMEs and 2 Clinical partners with extensive experience and expertise to guarantee the correct performance of the activities and the achievement of the results.

Currently, economies worldwide are pursuing mostly a linear model of production which leads to massive material losses, dependency on geopolitically instable states and volatile markets for primary resources. A circular economy, on the contrary, seeks to counter this approach to ?preserve the value of utilized resources and materials as long as possible, to use them as frequently as possible, and to produce as little waste as possible. European industry needs solutions to mitigate the barriers for industrial data reusability and facilitate the unlocking of value from data. Joint Industrial Data Exchange Platform is a place where industrial data is fused for interconnecting seemingly different sectors into the collaboration pipeline. It builds upon the principles of Industry 4.0, by adopting a coherent approach for the semantic communication between diverse actors aimed towards direct or indirect contribution to the EU?s climate neutrality goals of 2050. JIDEP is a landing place to any organization which has any kind of data obstacle to be addressed, on its paths towards delivering more sustainable material, product, service, or solution. Within JIDEP, built-in tools are made available for unlocking the value of the data, which can lead to the development of more sustainable solutions, technologies, and materials. JIDEP is also an optimizing continuum, covering the entire product lifecycle and steering it towards circular standards implementation at technological and regulatory levels. Finally, JIDEP is a tool equipped with resilience frameworks for growing organizational and industrial capacities to withstand supply chain disruptions in short-, medium- and long-term clauses. As such, JIDEP ingests industrial data and produces sustainability, resilience, and circularity artifacts for its participants.

WeldGalaxy project will deliver, a B2B online Platform that brings together global buyers (end-users/OEM) and EU sellers (manufacturers/suppliers/distributors/service providers) of welding equipment along with auxiliaries/consumables and services, thereby enhancing the visibility of EU’s welding products/prototypes/services to global users (via digital marketing strategies) and providing innovative web-based services (e.g. equipment selection and inventory management, digital design/testing of equipment capabilities) to boost EU market share and competitiveness. The digital platform will incorporate Knowledge base engineering (KBE) tool that streamlines equipment selection process for end-users and allows ‘plug and produce’ digital manufacturing of the right equipment to specified customers’/end-users’ requirements and regulatory compliance. Though the full capability of the WeldGalaxy platform including associated product services (including the services from all third parties) will be demonstrated in welding equipment (along with auxiliaries) and consumables manufacturing domain, yet, the conceptual and functional framework of WeldGalaxy technology concept can be used in any industrial domain related to manufacturing. The Dynamic Knowledge Management based B2B platform will be designed by following the standard 3-tier architecture. Scalability and reliability will be assured by the use of: RESTfull architecture for API layer, cloud-based backend platform hosted on mainstream cloud providers like AWS or Google Cloud Platform who offer clustering, loading balancing, caching to support scalability and redundant data backup to ensure reliability. Use of blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) will make the platform inherently stable, highly scalable and always up. The digital platform, supported by integrated blockchain/DLT for improved reliability/visibility/ transparency/ security of transactions, will enhance the competitiveness of EU manufacturing sec