GREEN TALENT addresses gaps in knowledge, skills and competences in research and innovation (R&I) in 4 Widening Countries, supporting the green transition by contributing to halting biodiversity loss and advancing climate mitigation and adaptation through capacity-building, networking and knowledge exchange in four demonstration hubs. Academic and SME partners in each Widening Country provide expertise, support secondments, establish demonstration hubs, and connect to international R&I. Non-Widening partners catalyse GREEN TALENT by enhancing capacity-building, international cooperation, and joint R&I outcomes. GREEN TALENT develops 5 open-access (OA) training modules on R&I support, covering themes such as grant management, communication, entrepreneurship, and intellectual property rights. Additionally, 5 interdisciplinary OA modules focus on nature-based and integrative solutions that address the biodiversity-climate nexus. A programme of 45 secondments is established, providing R&I talents with hands-on learning through job shadowing, peer mentoring, workshops, and networking events. Personalised career plans and comprehensive reintegration strategies ensure secondees’ professional development, enabling them to apply their newly acquired skills within their home organisations. Ongoing follow-up and assessment guarantee the continued use and refinement of these competencies. The 4 Demonstration Pilots in Widening Countries deliver practical, scalable solutions to climate and biodiversity challenges, acting as collaboration hubs between academic and non-academic sectors. These hubs provide secondees with real-world experience and foster partnerships across sectors. All training materials are openly accessible via the GREEN TALENT Capacity-Building Platform, which also shares case-studies of best practices of cross-sectoral R&I, facilitates knowledge exchange and development, and includes an Exchange Forum furthering interdisciplinary dialogue and peer learning.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the main driver of growth in information technology, touching all sectors in the industry, ranging from healthcare, to finance, and transport. The goal of TRUMAN is to design and develop generic technologies and methodologies for improving AI systems’ resilience against security, privacy, and fairness attacks, as well as to increase the trust that their users have in these systems, while accounting for different phases of the AI life cycle, starting from data collection through training and deployment. TRUMAN will encompass three major AI architectures: knowledge graph (KG) representation and learning, continual learning, and large language models (LLMs). These three approaches will be investigated with the goal of designing solutions aimed for scenarios involving dynamic data collection, distributed model training, and scenarios that involve human-in-the-loop (HITL) design principles. TRUMAN will develop customized robustness solutions for both existing and newly developed privacy, adversarial, and fairness attacks. The project will also consider the impact of these solutions on humans, how to explain to them the underlying technologies and the risks, and employ their help in the improvement of these models. These technologies will be evaluated against four use cases illustrating scenarios from different sectors, i.e., marketing, IT, finance, and healthcare. Moreover, the TRUMAN project will strive to generate generic/holistic guidelines and recommendations for building trustworthy and robust AI systems.

The FORESIGHT project aims to develop a federated cyber-range solution to enhance the preparedness of cyber-security professionals at all levels and advance their skills towards preventing, detecting, reacting and mitigating sophisticated cyber-attacks. This is achieved by delivering an ecosystem of networked realistic training and simulation platforms that collaboratively bring unique cyber-security aspects from the aviation, smart grid and naval domains. The proposed platform will extend the capabilities of existing cyber-ranges and will allow the creation of complex cross-domain/hybrid scenarios to be built jointly with the IoT domain. Emphasis is given on the design and implementation of realistic and dynamic scenarios that are based on identified and forecasted trends of cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities extracted from cyber-threat intelligence gathered from the dark web; this will enable cyber-security professionals to rapidly adapt to an evolving threat landscape. The development of advanced risk analysis and econometric models will prove to be valuable in estimating the impact of cyber-risks, selecting the most appropriate and affordable security measures, and minimising the cost and time to recover from cyber-attacks. Innovative training curricula, guiding cyber-security professionals to implement and combine security measures using new technologies and established learning methodologies, will be created and employed for training needs; they will be linked to professional certification programs and be supported by learning platforms. Aside from the development of skills, the project aims at a holistic approach to cyber-threat management with the ultimate goal of cultivating a strong security culture. As such, the project puts considerable emphasis on research and development (i.e. research on cyber-threats, development of novel ideas, etc) as the key to increasing training dynamics and awareness methods for exceeding the rate of evolution of cyber-attackers

Despite strong indications that Cyprus is now in stable economic recovery, and that the island boasts one of the highest rates of tertiary educational attainment in Europe, the picture painted regarding the level of digital skills among citizens is a dismal one. In the 2017 Digital Economy and Society Index, Cyprus ranked 22nd within the EU, and belongs to the cluster of low performing countries. These findings are particularly worrying in light of the rapid changes taking place in the information landscape, such as the global consolidation of networked information services, and the rise of proprietary algorithmic processes that mediate citizens’ access to information and opportunities. The project will establish a network of researchers with key expertise in the areas of informatics and algorithmic biases, enhancing the Cyprus Center for Algorithmic Transparency, a research center at the Open University of Cyprus (OUC). CyCAT will become the regional expert in issues of information access in light of algorithmic gatekeeping, working with local authorities, librarians and educators to promote algorithmic transparency and enhanced digital literacy skills. Expected outcomes are 1) raising the international profile of the OUC researchers as evidenced by invitations to serve on committees, editorial boards, invited talks; 2) increased output in terms of number and quality of publications of OUC researchers; 3) attraction of additional external research funds to sustain CyCAT. Expected broader impacts include: 1) creation of digital artifacts through showcase projects that are relevant to Cypriots’ information needs and that can help raise awareness of algorithmic bias in the systems they routinely use; 2) educational materials based on CyCAT scientific outputs, that can be used by librarians and teachers; 3) increased opportunities for young researchers engaged with CyCAT; 4) increased dialogue on the importance of digital skills.