In a global context characterised by geostrategic confrontation and competing narratives, information manipulation can be used to influence perceptions on the ground or fuel a conflict by creating confusion. The transition towards a multipolar world, accelerated by recent shocks such as… Read more the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022 war Russia has been waging in Ukraine, has created an “informational battleground”, in which malign actors resort to hybrid tools, including Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), to gain influence or undermine the capacities and credibility of other powers. Such a “global battle of narratives” was already described by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission (EU HR/VP) Josep Borrell in his 2020’s article3, highlighting the impact the framing of narratives has on citizens’ perceptions and behaviour, governments’ responses and health, economic, political, democratic and security consequences where time is a crucial factor. The 2022 March Strategic Compass (p. 14) warns that the EU now faces “a competition of governance systems accompanied by a real battle of narratives”. In addition, several other key EU communication and policy efforts have already recognised the threat of disinformation and foreign interference, such as the EU Action Plan on disinformation (5 December 2018), the European Democracy Action Plan (3 December 2020), the Digital Services Act (5 July 2022), the Code of Practice on Disinformation (also this year’s (2022) new updated and expanded version), Council Conclusion on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (18 July 2022), among others. Therefore, this Action also aims to further the implementation of existing frameworks and promote the related knowledge and tools externally. This action aims to enable the EU to address short and medium-term foreign policy needs and opportunities in and with non-EU territories by supporting innovative policies/initiatives and by deepening EU relations and dialogues, forging alliances and partnerships, in the fields of information manipulation and other types of foreign interference. It will contribute to enhancing the resilience and responses against FIMI, strengthening the EU’s role as a global security provider and defender of democratic values. It will lead to establishing a community of practice, bringing the EU, Member States and partners closer together on the understanding of FIMI-related challenges and how to address them. While the EU has developed over the past few years many new instruments and approaches, gaps in the EU’s ability to address these growing and evolving challenges remain. Therefore, promotion of widespread understanding and visibility of the Union’s work in this domain and its role on the world scene, by means of strategic communication, public diplomacy, people-to-people contacts, cultural diplomacy, cooperation in educational and academic matters, and outreach activities to promote the Union's values and interests will be further enhanced by this Action.

enRichMyData provides a novel paradigm for building rich, high-quality and valuable datasets to feed Big Data Aalytics and AI applications. The paradigm consists in facilitating the specification and scalable execution of data enrichment pipelines, with a focus on supporting various data enrichment… Read more operations such as discovery, understanding, selection, cleaning, transformation, integration of Big Data from a variety of sources. enRichMyData makes this paradigm easily accessible to a wide set of large and small organizations that encounter difficulties in the process of delivering suitable data to feed their data analytics solutions due to the lack of suitable tools and expertise to support cost-effective and energy-efficient management of data enrichment pipelines. enRichMyData delivers a software toolbox consisting of tools and infrastructure services for setting-up, deploying, executing and managing data enrichment pipelines. The main exploitation targets the operation and monetization of the toolbox primarily in European markets. enRichMyData validates its plan through a strong selection of complementary business cases offered by commercially-focused organizations targeting development of novel products in a wide range of domains, including digital marketing, Industry 4.0, medical devices maintenance, public procurement, innovation ecosystems, and mineral processing. The balanced consortium consists of 14 partners from 12 countries. With a mixture of R&D/technology providers and business case providers, enRichMyData gathers five large companies, three SMEs, an international organization, two research institutes, and three universities

Machine learning methods operate on formal representations of the data at hand and the models or patterns induced from the data. They also assume a suitable formalization of the learning task itself (e.g., as a classification problem), including a specification of… Read more the objective in terms of a suitable performance metric, and sometimes other criteria the induced model is supposed to meet. Different representations or problem formalizations may be more or less appropriate to address a particular task and to deal with the type of training information available. The goal of LEMUR is to create a novel branch of machine learning we call Learning with Multiple Representations. We aim to develop the theoretical foundations and a first set of algorithms for this new paradigma. Moreover, corresponding applications are to demonstrate the usefulness of the new family of approaches. We regard LEMUR as very timely, as LMR algorithms will allow to flexible representations (e.g., suitable for explainability, fairness) with diverse target functions (e.g., incorporating environmental or even social impact) so as to make the induced models abide by the Green Charter and trustworthy AI criteria by design. We will focus on learning with weak supervision because it addresses one of the major flaws of modern ML approaches, i.e., their data hunger, by means of weaker sources of labelling for training data. The outcome of the DN will be a set of 10 experts trained to implement the third and subsequent waves of AI in Europe. The highly interdisciplinary and intersectoral context in which they will be trained will provide them with research-related and transferable competences relevant to successful careers in central AI areas.

The vision of UNICA4EU is to pave the foundation of the ecosystem that will facilitate the upscaling and wide-scale application of Artificial Intelligence to Paediatric Cancer in the next ten years, positioning Europe as the worldwide benchmark in the field.… Read more The initiative will bring together the multi-disciplinary networks of stakeholders required to strengthen the reference knowledge base for the Paediatric Cancer investigation and promotion. This ambition resonates with the European Beating Cancer Plan Flagship ‘Helping Children with Cancer Initiative’, focussed on ensuring that children have access to rapid and optimal detection, diagnosis, treatment and care and build cancer centre networks that extend and complement the European Reference Network for Paediatric Cancer (ERN Paed-Can). The advantage rooted in UNICA4EU comes from the collaboration between the key actors in this consortium required to accomplish such ambition, including the members from the pilot project PPPA-AIPC-2020 (EU4CHILD), reinforced with the leadership of SIOPE. The collaboration with the patient, parent and survivor advocacy network CCI-Europe, with the survivorship care and research network PanCare and the central role of the ERN Paed-Can. The mission will be oriented to bridge today’s dichotomy: 1) Endorse the technical research and innovation in trustworthy and reliable AI, addressing the inherent challenges related to handle multiple data models, homogenisation, interoperability, processing and federated models; 2) Advocate best practices and road-mapping strategic policy to boost the adoption among the healthcare sector, caregivers, children and adolescents living with cancer and survivors. This will require a complete identification of the end-users needs, built upon the existing standards and policy guidelines.

MEETmeTONIGHT (MEET) – “Face to face with the research” is the proposal for the European Researchers’ Night in 2020, happening in the major Italian cities of Milan, Naples, Caserta and Padua, complemented by Brescia, Castellanza, Cremona, Edolo, Lecco, Lodi, Mantova,… Read more Monza, Sondrio (Lombardy region), Avellino, Portici, Procida (Campania region), Cassino, Frosinone, Gaeta, Ventotene (Lazio region) and Asiago (Veneto region). The goal is to realize a special occasion of meeting and interaction between the public at large and the world of research, where researchers – at the forefront of all the proposed activities – can show themselves and what they do, in a simple, spontaneous, informal and entertaining way, actively involving the public. People, by doing, find themselves learning, getting amused, and becoming aware of how much research is for everyone and all around us. All MEET activities aim at promoting research and its outcomes, researchers and their profession, with a special attention to the youngest generations on one side, and to the recognition of the role of Europe on the other. With one common macro-theme, detailed in five thematic areas and five slogans, MEET proposes interactive stands, hands-on experiments and live demos that reconstruct the research environment; conferences, video projections, interactive games; guided visits to scientific museums; meeting occasions with researchers; European Corners; live broadcast moments. A special attention is given to schools’ pupils, for which a number of dedicated activities are foreseen, at the goal of encouraging them to consider research career as a concrete option for their life, and to sustainability, one of the most important topics to be considered to achieve a better future.