KONNEKT ABLE TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED

ITHACA project aims to better understand the complexities and controversies for applying AI into the field of civic participation and stimulate new and responsible practices of research and innovation that anchor AI technologies design in human rights, values and principles, and moral and ethical reflection.The project vision is to contribute to the maximisation of the possible positive impact of AI on the functioning of democratic institutions and processes by developing and testing of a human centric Artificially Intelligent and Ethics by Design online discussion platform for civic participation in local governance, which incorporates human and social interpretations into the design process to ensure that AI decision-making processes are explainable, transparent and fair. ITHACA will pay particular attention to the needs and voices of citizens from vulnerable groups, with a view to ensuring that human rights impacts stemming from the design, development and ongoing deployment of algorithmic systems are comprehensively monitored, debated and addressed. Through its pilot activities in two different EU countries, ITHACA plans to assess the ability of AI to enhance citizens participation in the local governance while preventing or minimizing possible adverse effects stemming from unregulated use of AI and empowering citizens with knowledge about the AI model involved. ITHACA will also provide scalable tools for the identification of security risks and threats and for conformity with the Fairness principle and Privacy principle in AI-based systems and big data for civic engagement applications. Based on its implementation experiences, the project will define a data governance framework with relevant ethical principles and practices to be implemented in the design, development, deployment process for AI civic engagement platforms as well as policy recommendations on philosophical, legal and ethical values that should be embedded in the development of such platforms.

EC contribution:

EUR 426k

Start:

2023-01-01

End:

2025-12-31

Status:

SIGNED

Scheme:

HORIZON-RIA

Call:

HORIZON-CL2-2022-DEMOCRACY-01

View on CORDIS (DOI 10.3030/101094364)

The integration of edge computing, advanced 5G connectivity, and decentralized processing drives the widespread deployment of private edge ecosystems capable to reshape numerous industry sectors. However, unlocking the full potentials of edge-level intelligent management requires concerted efforts in platform development and cross-sector collaboration. COP-PILOT, develops a Collaborative Open Platform framework geared towards orchestrating end-to-end services across diverse industry domains. In crafting an open platform, COP-PILOT provides a flexible solution designed to effectively manage various industry sectors while ensuring robust security, automation, and intelligence features. Regarding interoperability, the framework seamlessly integrates with underlying technologies, ranging from IoT platforms to core infrastructure, facilitating collaboration across the compute continuum. Furthermore, COP-PILOT empowers the development of advanced cross-sector applications by offering support for cutting-edge network services, thereby enabling heightened security, resource management, and automation capabilities. The implementation strategy revolves around two primary directions: enabling platform implementation and real environment integration. For the former, COP-PILOT adopts a modular orchestration approach, simplifying the onboarding of complex applications through a user-friendly generative AI interface. This approach includes integration with multi-tiered data processing, policy-driven optimization, and dynamic reasoning capabilities, ensuring alignment with prevailing industry standards. In terms of real environment integration, the platform is deployed across four large piloting clusters, addressing a diverse array of edge paradigms. These use cases span across energy, smart city, agriculture, and industrial manufacturing sectors, fostering the development of cross-sector applications in mobility, logistics, and resource management.

EC contribution:

EUR 330k

Start:

2025-01-01

End:

2027-12-31

Status:

SIGNED

Scheme:

HORIZON-IA

Call:

HORIZON-CL4-2024-DATA-01

View on CORDIS (DOI 10.3030/101189819)

cPAID envisions researching, designing, and developing a cloud-based platform-agnostic defense framework for the holistic protection of AI applications and the overall AI operations of organizations against malicious actions and adversarial attacks. cPAID aims at tackling both poisoning and evasion adversarial attacks by combining AI-based defense methods (e.g., life-long semi-supervised reinforcement learning, transfer learning, feature reduction, adversarial training), security- and privacy-by-design, privacy-preserving, explainable AI (XAI), Generative AI, context-awareness as well as risk and vulnerability assessment and threat intelligence of AI systems. cPAID will identify guidelines to a) guarantee security- and privacy-by-design in the design and development of AI applications, b) thoroughly assess the robustness and resiliency of ML and DL algorithms against adversarial attacks, c) ensure that EU principles for AI ethics have been considered, and d) validate the performance of AI systems in real-life use case scenarios. The identified guidelines aspire to promote research toward developing certification schemes that will certify the robustness, security, privacy, and ethical excellence of AI applications and systems.

EC contribution:

EUR 266k

Start:

2024-10-01

End:

2027-09-30

Status:

SIGNED

Scheme:

HORIZON-RIA

Call:

HORIZON-CL3-2023-CS-01

View on CORDIS (DOI 10.3030/101168407)