As privacy and trust remain key in the data sharing debate, Privacy enhancing technologies (PET) will play a prominent role by 2025. Safe-DEED takes a highly interdisciplinary approach, bringing together partners from cryptography, data science, business innovation, and legal domain to focus on improving Security technologies, improving trust as well as on the diffusion of Privacy enhancing technologies to keep up pace with global macrotrends and the data economy, to enable the fastest possible growth. Furthermore, as it has been recently shown that even among large companies, many have no data valuation process in place, Safe-DEED provides a set of tools to facilitate the assessment of data value, thus incentivising data owners to make use of the scalable cryptographic protocols developed in Safe-DEED to create value for their companies and their clients.

SECONDO addresses the question “How can decisions about cyber security investments and cyber insurance pricing be optimised?” SECONDO will support professionals who seek cyber security investments, developed to support human decision making, and a complete well-founded security strategy. This is a timely research problem, as the rapid growth of cyber-attacks is expected to continue its upwards trajectory. Such growth presents a prominent threat to normal business operations and the EU society itself. On the other hand, an interesting, well-known, finding is that an organisation's computer systems may be less secure than a competitor's, despite having spent more money in securing them. Budget setting, cyber security investment choices and cyber insurance, in the face of uncertainties, are highly challenging tasks with massive business implications. SECONDO aims to make impact on the operation of EU businesses who often: (i) have a limited cyber security budget; and (ii) ignore the importance of cyber insurance. Cyber insurance can play a critical role to the mitigation of cyber risk. This can be done by imposing a cost on firms' cyber risk through a premium that they have to pay and the potential for paying a smaller premium should they reduce their current cyber security risk. SECONDO has a cross-disciplinary nature, combining mathematical and engineering insights to empower innovative software. Apart from the novel research results, the project will offer a software platform to narrow the gap between theoretical understanding and practice. To achieve this, the four industrial project partners will i) lead the part of the project where industrial needs will be entered as input to the requirements collection phase, and, ii) provide their innovative software for risk assessment. The three academic partners will work together to i) design and thoroughly describe the proposed methodologies, but also ii) contribute to their software development.

The overarching goal of INCOGNITO is to combine state-of-the-art technologies in a platform that will allow users to easily understand what is needed to access online services with respect to their privacy and be able to prove specific attributes of their identity or their whole identity. We build on top of the framework that is being developed under the ReCRED project where we use advanced mobile software in order to convert online and physical identity proofs into validated and cryptographically strong proofs of identities that can be used for getting access to Online Services. INCOGNITO has the following objectives: 1.Design and implement an infrastructure that supports qualified anonymity (QA) by leveraging state of the art cryptographic credentials schemes as well as Federated Login solutions. 2.Design and implement an Identity Acquisition and Management platform that will allow the user to quickly and securely acquire identity attributes from Physical ID documents and Online Identities. 3.Design and implement an advanced UI/UX AI-based assistant that will guide and inform the user about aspects of his identity management as well as possible actions to take. 4.Evaluate the results of the project through two pilot activities. To achieve these objectives an inter-sectorial and interdisciplinary secondment program for Experienced and Early Stage Researchers that fosters knowledge exchange is proposed. Academic partners will offer their expertise on online identity acquisition and management, machine-learning algorithms and user experience assessment. Industry partners will offer their expertise on state-of-the-art IT security technologies, production-grade development processes, exposure to industrial research environment and relevant business issues and data.

According to the last official available 2015 data, almost 93% of all enterprises in Europe in the non-financial business sector have less than 10 employees. These micro enterprises (MEnts) are responsible for 30% and 21% of the overall employment and value added in the EU, respectively. However, when it refers to the imminent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)’s application, MEnts are the most vulnerable due to their lack of expertise and resources to invest in their adoption. It is urgent to develop solutions that assist MEnts in smoothly adopting the GDPR, safeguarding the interests of the EU citizens on data privacy and security, avoiding the negative socioeconomic consequences entailed to breaches for MEnts, and, by extension, benefitting the European society. SMOOTH project addresses this challenge from two complementary focuses: 1) Creating awareness on the importance of being compliant with the GDPR, as many MEnts ignore their obligations in this respect, involving as partners Data Protection Authorities and associations representing EU MEnts. For the same purpose, SMOOTH will deliver a practical GDPR interactive handbook (website and mobile app) tailored specifically to MEnts. 2) Assisting MEnts to effectively adopt and comply with the GDPR. The SMOOTH cloud platform will use machine learning, text and data mining, and advance online auditing methods to automatically create a bespoke GDPR compliance report for the most critical aspects to MEnts. Likewise, SMOOTH will provide useful materials for solving those identified aspects of the GDPR that are not properly covered. All this will positively contribute to citizens rights, while avoiding potential fines for the MEnts that may account for as much as 4% of the annual income, according to the GDPR. SMOOTH is born from technology partners and data protection authorities and will be designed and validated by actual MEnts with the aim of becoming the reference tool platform for them to adopt the GDPR.

The emergent European Data Economy relies on the availability of data as a basis for further innovation and exponential development of technologies, especially the development of trustworthy ‘made in Europe’ AI that reflects European values. Data Spaces, platforms and marketplaces are enablers, key to unleash the potential of such data. However, data sharing and data interoperability are still at their infancy. Through DataBri-X, European Data Spaces, platforms and marketplaces and their wide range of business, governmental and public, research and civil society stakeholders will be equipped with a holistic and flexible data governance process and a seamless integrated standards based toolbox for data- and metadata management which can be assembled along relevant requirements, provides open source as well as commercial tools (the bricks / bri-X), and mechanisms to load 3rd party resources like language resources or AI models, and can be easily deployed into Data Spaces and thereby will contribute to make Europe the most successful area in the world in terms of data sharing and data re-use, to gain the full benefit from the value of data, while respecting the legal framework relating to security and privacy. The project's objective is to provide a holistic, energy-efficient and user-friendly toolbox of practical, robust and scalable bricks/Bri-X (processes, technologies and tools) that improve the interoperability, usability, discoverability, quality, and integrity of data and metadata, with the aim of making data sets ready for expanded digital value creation in the context of European Data Spaces. The DataBri-X toolbox will be offered in compliance with accountability, fairness, privacy, and confidentiality regulations as well as FAIR principles and will build on existing and emerging initiatives. The DataBri-X consortium comprises 14 partners from 6 EU members and 1 associated country (UK), that together form a complete value chain of actors.