ATOS IT

OpenContinuum addresses the coordination and support of the Cloud-Edge-IoT domain, with a specific thematic focus on the supply-side of the computing continuum landscape. An integrated, open ecosystem built around Open Source, Open Standards, and the effective blending of the two vibrant European communities of Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) is the key enabler for European prosperity in the Cloud-Edge-IoT domain and more widely in the data economy. Therefore the core ambition of OpenContinuum is fostering European strategic autonomy and interoperability through an open ecosystem for the computing continuum. Such an ecosystem will contain the research and innovation projects in the Cloud-Edge-IoT portfolio to be coordinated, the diverse community evolved from the current Cloud and IoT ones, with the addition of further actors, initiatives, and alliances of significance. The supply-side nature of OpenContinuum's agenda will orient the themes and focus of the project activities, but will not limit the scope of the community building. The active landscaping and engagement work of the project will be key to bring the Cloud and IoT communities together and to express all points of view with a common language and understanding. OpenContinuum will then provide strong guidance and support to European computing continuum actors to contribute to and lead open-source projects and standardisation efforts. Key project contributions to the relevant expected outcomes include: a baseline common open architecture for computing continuum research projects, reinforced collaboration between European public and private initiatives from Cloud to edge to IoT, and increased awareness on the importance of Open Source and standards for EU digital autonomy. These contributions, arising from project results, will evolve further towards larger-scale impacts and strategic objectives for European technological, economic, and societal advancement.

Energy-intensive industries, embedded in many strategic value chains, make up more than half of the energy consumption of the European industry and reducing their CO2 intensity is crucial for meeting the objectives of the Paris agreement. Within EIIs, metallurgy poses a major challenge due to the trade-off that must be found between maintaining economic profitability, while progressively implementing the required transformations for a greener production. While digitalisation is generating a data deluge, Artificial Intelligence cannot be fully adopted due to limitations to share data between several factories and the heterogeneity of systems that hinders the replicability of AI. ALCHIMIA aims to build a platform based on Federated Learning and Continual Learning to help big European metallurgy industries unlock the full potential of AI to support the needed transformations to create high-quality, competitive, efficient and green manufacturing processes. The project will address the challenges of the steel sector, creating an innovative system that automates and optimises the production process dynamically with a holistic approach that includes scrap recycling and steelmaking. ALCHIMIA will find an optimal mix to reduce energy consumption, emissions and waste generation of steelmaking while guaranteeing to obtain high-quality products. The replicability and scalability of ALCHIMIA will be enabled through a complementary use case for the manufacturing of automotive parts. The developed system will be used for prognostic optimisation of the mix of input materials charged in the furnaces to obtain a certain product quality that matches the customers' specifications while reducing the environmental impact and the energy consumption. ALCHIMIA will not only seek the optimal mix for the charge of metallurgy furnace, it will also determine the best combination of learning capacities to enable a smooth green transition for all industries thanks to unprecedented collaboration

The European Network for Cybersecurity (NECS) was formed in response to the increased need of highly qualified experts able to cope with all the aspects of the European cybersecurity strategy that is currently under implementation. There is indeed an evident need and opportunity to grow a new generation of young researchers able to answer this demand for expertize, trained to the changing nature of the challenges to be faced. These challenges include evolvable threats and new technological means to exploit network and information security vulnerabilities of cyber systems that have eventually consequences in the physical world. Starting from these considerations, the European Commission proposed the “DIRECTIVE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL concerning measures to ensure a high common level of network and information security across the Union” . This directive proposal, on the one hand, recognizes the relevance for the European economy of cybersecurity, on the other one, poses the regulatory basis for achieving a common level of cybersecurity preparedness among the main European public/private stakeholders. This 4-year project for a cybersecurity research and training network aims at contributing to answer this increased demand of human expertise in the field. The project; by fosters ing a multi-sectorial/disciplinary approach that is clearly necessary for tackling all cybersecurity aspects - as also recognized by the European Network and Information Security (NIS) platform recently established by the EU to contribute to the strategy that is firmly based on a public/private cooperation. Being cybersecurity inherently multi-sectorial, NECS has participants (beneficiaries and partners) both from the academic sector (7) and non-academic one (5). In the NECS research and training network, multi-disciplinary expertise has been collected and interlinked in order to have as a centre of gravity the cybersecurity security area.

AD4GD’s overall objective is to co-create and shape the European Green Deal Data Space as an open hub for FAIR data and standards-based services that support the key priorities of biodiversity, climate change, and pollution. The focus will be on interoperability concepts that bridge the semantic and technology gaps which currently prevent stakeholders and application domains from multi-disciplinary and multi-scale access to data, and which impede the exploitation of processing services, and processing platforms at different levels including Cloud, HPC and edge computing. This project will enable the combination and integration of data from remote sensing, established Virtual Research Environments and Research Infrastructures, Internet of Things (IoT), socio-economic data, INSPIRE and Citizen Science (CitSci) in an interoperable, scalable and reliable manner. This will facilitate integration by including semantic mappings to different standards and dominant models bridging domain- and data source-specific semantic concepts such as the Essential Variables framework (e.g. the GCOS Essential Climate Variables, the GEOBON Essential Biodiversity Variables), as well as applying machine learning and geospatial user feedback to ensure quality, reliability and trustworthiness of data and transforming spatial scales. The project will make data and services accessible to the EC Knowledge Centres, GEOSS portal, EOSC and other science services as applicable, ensuring the sustainability of the results, and will actively promote data accessibility for community stakeholders and citizen scientists. AD4GD will demonstrate and validate the approach in three pilots whose stakeholders include international organizations, scientists and researchers, citizens, decision makers (e.g. public authorities), and Earth observation (EO) solution developers. The pilots address selected Green Deal priority areas, including cross-domain components: Zero pollution, Biodiversity, and Climate Change.

IoT developers face a very fragmented landscape made of very different devices, from bare metal devices with few KB of RAM and limited or no security protection to devices equipped with powerful support for AI and with built-in hardware (HW) to implement Root of Trust (RoT) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). Such different devices coexist, and it is an open challenge to guarantee an acceptable level of security across the whole system to avoid “easy” entry points for attackers. The complexity is further exacerbated by the existence of many HW platforms, general purpose but also domain specific, each implementing proprietary instances of RoT and TEE that prevent or make it very difficult for applications and security services to interoperate. CROSSCON aims at addressing all these issues by designing a new open, flexible, highly portable and vendor independent IoT security stack that can run across a variety of different edge devices and multiple HW platforms to offer a consistent security baseline across an entire IoT system. A high-level assurance is guaranteed by the formal verification of the stack specifications. CROSSCON stack offers a unified set of trusted APIs to the layers above. It is modular and among all the security features it offers is possible to configure only the ones needed depending on the underlined HW and firmware. It leverages the security features already implemented in the layers below. In case such security features are missing, like in bare metal devices, the stack offers an entire TEE implementation suitable for such devices. As devices are getting more powerful and use cases more complex, there is the need to add new trusted services as building blocks to implement security at the higher levels, such as protection of the models given in input to ML engines embedded in HW or support for biometrics and template protections. CROSSCON provides the open specifications of the stack along with an open-source reference implementation.