ALFIE project encompasses the EthiTech Dialogue Hub (ETD-Hub) and AutoML platform. ETD-Hub is as a multi-disciplinary discussion forum where citizens, policymakers, AI professionals, and legal entities come together to engage in robust conversations surrounding the legal and ethical dimensions of AI and related technologies. The ETD-Hub serves as a collaborative space, shaping policy recommendations that influence the European Legal framework on AI, ensuring its adaptability to evolving societal and technological landscapes. Complementing the ETD-Hub is AutoML, an advanced implementation platform that seamlessly translates these deliberative outcomes into actionable AI tools and solutions. There is a bi-directional feedback loop between ETD-Hub and the AutoML platform helping to refine the policy recommendations. The AutoML platform combines two layers: Interaction layer relying on generative AI and an AutoML engine. The interaction layer contributes to the democratisation of AI by enabling the creation of advanced AI tools through interaction in natural language and speech with focus on multilinguality, while the AutoML platform finds the solutions based on the input of the user given through the first layer. The AutoML not only generates AI models and solutions that respect the EU legal framework, but also serves as a data broker providing access to a wide range of datasets contained in different platforms, with special focus on promoting unbiased and balanced AI datasets. With integrated features such as natural language processing, speech recognition, multilingual capabilities, and explainable AI, AutoML represents a widely accessible AI platform that seamlessly connects with AI-ethics through ALFIE ecosystem, and is ready to bridge legal discourse with technological implementation fostering responsible and transparent AI practices.

The need for levels of availability and scalability beyond those supported by relational databases has led to the emergence of a new generation of purpose-specific databases grouped under the term NoSQL. In general, NoSQL databases are designed with horizontal scalability as a primary concern and deliver increased availability and fault-tolerance at a cost of temporary inconsistency and reduced durability of data. To balance the requirements for data consistency and availability, organisations increasingly migrate towards hybrid data persistence architectures comprising both relational and NoSQL databases. The consensus is that this trend will only become stronger in the future; critical data will continue to be stored in ACID (predominately relational) databases while non-critical data will be progressively migrated to high-availability NoSQL databases. Moreover, as the volume and the value of natural language content constantly grows, built-in support for sophisticated text processing in data persistence architectures is increasingly becoming essential. The aim of TYPHON is to provide a methodology and an integrated technical offering for designing, developing, querying and evolving scalable architectures for persistence, analytics and monitoring of large volumes of hybrid (relational, graph-based, document-based, natural language etc.) data. TYPHON brings together research partners with a long track record of conducting internationally-leading research on software modelling, domain-specific languages, text mining and data migration, and of delivering research results in the form of robust and widely-used open-source software, industrial partners active in the automotive, earth observation, banking, and motorway operation domains, an industrial advisory board of world-class experts in the fields of databases, business intelligence and analytics, and large-scale data management, and a global consortium including more than 400 organisations from all sectors of IT.

Recent reports state that the adoption of open-source software (OSS) helps, resulting in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers. However, the use of OSS also comes at enormous cost: choosing among OSS projects and maintaining dependence on continuously changing software requires a large investment. Deciding if an OSS project meets the required standards for adoption is hard, and keeping up-to-date with an evolving project is even harder. It involves analysing code, documentation, online discussions, and issue trackers. There is too much information to process manually and it is common that uninformed decisions have to be made with detrimental effects. CROSSMINER remedies this by automatically extracting the required knowledge and injecting it into the IDE of the developers, at the time they need it to make their design decisions. This allows them to reduce their effort in knowledge acquisition and to increase the quality of their code. CROSSMINER uniquely combines advanced software project analyses with online monitoring in the IDE. The developer will be monitored to infer which information is timely, based on readily available knowledge stored earlier by a set of advanced offline deep analyses of related OSS projects. To achieve this timely and ambitious goal, CROSSMINER combines six end-user partners (in the domains of IoT, multi-sector IT services, API co-evolution, software analytics, software quality assurance, and OSS forges), along with R&D partners that have a long track-record in conducting cutting-edge research on large-scale software analytics, natural language processing, reverse engineering of software components, model-driven engineering, and delivering results in the form of widely-used, sustainable and industrial-strength OSS. The development of the CROSSMINER platform is guided by an advisory board of world-class experts and the dissemination of the project will be led by The Open Group.

Objectives of the Assistive Living Technology and Skills (ALTAS) project: The ALTAS project addresses the shortfall of assistive living technology (ALT) training courses for health and social care staff that will ultimately enable their clients and patients to benefit from smart solutions to live independently, self-care and improve their health and well-being. Key objectives are to: (1) develop a recognised standard, curriculum, course and qualification that will give professionals an incentive to add to their knowledge and skills; (2) stimulate demand for and increase the uptake of innovation through stakeholder engagement and co-creation of course development ; (3) provide the opportunity to continuously update the curricula and standards by linking the professionals to a strong knowledge cluster. Strategic relevance: Across Europe, quadruple helix partnerships are striving to scale up smart solutions to address the demographic challenge of an ageing population. But, successful scaling of innovative solutions especially for the elderly with long-term conditions remain patchy. The difficulty in securing health and social care professionals’ engagement to utilize, help people to use and accept the adoption of assistive living technologies is a key obstacle to supporting people to live independently for longer. Partly, this is due to the shortfall of training opportunities for practitioners in assistive living technologies along with the lack of a recognised qualification for competence in their suitability and use. As a result, awareness of what assistive living technologies are available, what they can do, when they are suitable, who could benefit from them and in what way remains low amongst front line health and care workers and their managers. Moreover, at European level, it has been recognized that there is no standard nor consensus as to what should be taught. Methods and actions: The ALTAS project intends to plug this important gap. It will develop, test and evaluate ALTAS standards, curriculum and VET course that can provide health and social care professionals with the knowledge, skills and confidence to utilise, deploy and recommend appropriate ALT devices, technologies and related services. It will also create an accreditation scheme that will be a key step on the road to a national and European- recognised accredited qualification. ALTAS will be delivered in 3 phases: Design, Delivery and Evaluation. The design phase will define the standards, develop a curriculum and generate initial content for course delivery. Needs analysis and stakeholder engagement will support the development of the curriculum and alignment with specific cross-cultural and health and social care characteristics within each partner country and region will be a key principle. Using an iterative learning methodology, the delivery phase will develop an assessment framework, build the training course with the trainers and pilot an eCourse in one region. This phase will also develop and deploy a toolkit to support training course implementation. The assessment framework will form the basis for an accredited qualification, planned to lead to European wide accreditation. In parallel the course and e-course, developed by ALTAS training organisations, will be launched to VET trainers during a 5-day coaching session incorporating different modes of delivery. The course, once developed, will be deployed to 45 trainees each in UK, Spain, Norway and Denmark over 4 days during a 7 month period. In parallel, the eCourse will be deployed in one region to test the right balance for blended learning and assess the most suitable platforms for its deployment. The toolkit will be built on the project website. The third phase will focus on evaluating the course and assessing its impact on the target group and external stakeholders. During this phase, the curriculum and course will also be tested in a Central and an Eastern European country with differing cultural and health and care system characteristics. A sustainability plan laying the foundations for the future of the project and its intellectual outputs will be delivered towards the end of the project. Outcomes and impact: The ALTAS project will deliver a fit-for-purpose standards and curriculum, assessment framework and course materials for health and social care professionals. These deliverables will be supported by an eCourse, a course deployment toolkit and a comprehensive evaluation report. The ALTAS project is expected to (1) raise awareness and increase knowledge of ALT for front-line health and social care staff and their managers, (2) increase motivation in staff to take ALT courses, (3) increase staff willingness and confidence to promote ALT, (4) increase interest in the ALT workforce to exchange and share good practice across Europe and (5) increase collaboration and cooperation between training organisations and ALT suppliers.

In 986 AD a small group of Vikings settled on Greenland. About 500 years later the settlements vanished. It is still not fully known what happened to the settlements and what caused their disappearance, but it can be assumed that the changing climate, a shift in trade relations and the consequences of these factors for social structures were influential factors. In the Middle Ages, Greenland was at the edge of the known world and at the periphery of the large Norse trading network. Therefore it provides an interesting, and somewhat complex, case study of sustainability at the margins. The historical case is easier to understand in an holistic way than contemporary challenges but can trigger an engagement with sustainability at the margins today.The interdisciplinary project team consists of scientists and educationalists from Science Shop Bonn (Germany), The Centre for Design, Innovation and Sustainable Transition (Denmark), BAOBAB (Austria), The Faculty of Education of Edge Hill University (UK) and Project Agency Andreas Joppich (Germany) supported by the Danish National Museum, the researcher Kare Hendriksen and the Danish History Teachers Association. They developed workshop material based on the research about the Viking settlements in Greenland and about the challenges in contemporary Greenland and other parts of the world. Children can explore the artefacts found by researchers in the ancient settlements and apply scientific methods of analysis to interpret what has led to their end. Further material allows the students to compare their findings to modern issues of sustainability and draw conclusions for lifestyles and policy making. All materials developed have been tested in individual lessons and project days. Nearly 1000 secondary-age pupils were directly reached. Thereby methods of learning through inquiry were the focus of the teaching approach. Many of the students confirmed that they could gain new insights into sustainability. More than 200 teachers and students were reached through multiplier events.The resource materials, which can be used by the partner organizations but also lent to schools for lessons of history, geography and political education, include reconstructed artefacts, maps, guidebooks on research methods, newspaper articles, maps and data sets on contemporary issues, along with guidelines for comparing the findings to modern times. Some outdoor games are used to create an adventurous atmosphere and stimulate the cooperation of the children.The workshop provides an example of how competence-centred education can be put into practice and therefore supports the efforts of the European Union and national governments to replace knowledge-centred practices in schools. To support this goal, the project partners also formulated a survey based recommendation on learning through inquiry and its benefits for the development of competences, especially learning to learn and scientific approaches but also social and civic competences, language and mathematics. Based on the experience, guidelines for learning through inquiry have been produced, integrated into the manual, and transferred to a concept for train-the-trainer seminars. Guidance for self-assessment in the manual will make teachers aware of the learning impact on students and allows a promotion of learning through inquiry even after the project has ended. In addition, the method supports interdisciplinary teaching and thereby more cooperation in schools. A recommendation for the integration of the workshop in the curricula of history and geography is prepared for each country. Articles documenting the teaching approach and the linkage of the Viking age and contemporary challenges add further to the resources.During the project all partners have met with key stakeholders to discuss the aims and materials of the project and to expand their networks supporting the dissemination methods and materials.