ITEA 3 Call 7 projects

A vital Community

In this Call, we see a strong focus on two smart challenges, engineering and health, covering more than 60% of the labelled projects. The engineering domain is very active, with a strong emphasis on Artificial Intelligence. New engineering methods or processes need to be developed for the AI applications and there is the opportunity to apply AI techniques to the engineering field itself. The health sector is also strongly evolving with the integration of new sensors that open up new opportunities. In this field, we also see the influence of AI and emerging technologies like virtual reality.

Besides these two strong sectors, three projects are related to Safety and Security, which is a very important challenge in the development of resilient IT systems. We can see the impact of the customer workshop on cyber security, organised in June 2020, through the emergence of these projects that cover interesting aspects of the Safety and Security domain. The three remaining projects are also very relevant, with activities that will impact how we communicate and collaborate, how we share spaces between humans and autonomous vehicles and how we optimise certain industrial processes.

As already mentioned, AI continues to inform almost all the projects when it comes to the technology dimension. The projects aim for interesting progress in machine learning, natural language processing, semantic representation, image processing, digital twin technology and virtual reality. They also plan to apply these technologies in use cases covering most of the industrial sectors (healthcare, automotive, transportation, energy, electronics, travel and construction), promising a strong business impact.

In summary, ITEA 3 Call 7 has given birth to 16 important projects that have the ability to boost our industry and change society. Software innovation is at the centre of important transformations and will help to accelerate the recovery after the sanitary crisis.

In the end one project was cancelled after labelling due to lack of funding in (one of) the main countries.

ITEA 3 CALL 7 PROJECT OVERVIEW

Hereafter you will find a short project description of each labelled project.

3STARS – 20011

Sustainable Smart Systems, Technologies, and Rating Scale
Project leader: Virtual Vehicle Research GmbH (Germany)
Sustainability is one of the key engineering priorities of our time. The 3STARS project will introduce sustainability as an engineering discipline to software-intensive applications. It will establish a measurable quality model accompanied by a dedicated rating scale. The capability to make accurate predictions based on sensing the world around us will drive the market for sustainable systems. 3STARS therefore focuses on simulation/AI-driven methods. Effective system design and development processes, efficient tools, new computing and communication architectures and increased system interoperability will lead to circular flows of digital artifacts, enabling new business models.

ASSIST – 20044

Automation, Surgery Support and Intuitive 3D visualization to optimize workflow in IGT SysTems
Project leader: Philips Medical Systems Nederland B.V. (Netherlands)
Current software image-guided therapy applications to assist the physician still require significant manual user interaction while all attention should go to the patient instead. The ASSIST project will develop technologies and solutions to get the physician back in control of the clinical procedure by assisting or automating part of the physician’s tasks during image-guided therapy procedures. The aim of the project is to optimise and simplify the workflow in image-guided therapy procedures with the main goal of streamlining physicians’ work, optimising imaging systems, improving patient outcomes, reducing human error and lowering costs.

Comrade – 20008

COMmunicate and collaboRAte in extendeD rEality
Project leader: TNO (Netherlands)
Traditional video conferencing tools come with limitations that prevent efficient and meaningful remote communication and interactive participation. The global pandemic and climate change urgently demand an era of eXtended Reality (XR) communication and collaboration. The aim of the COMRADE project is to specify, develop, integrate and validate end-to-end networked solutions for real-time communication and collaboration in XR. The project goal is to enable XR video conferencing and meetings, virtual travelling, expertise at a distance, virtual studio productions, virtual home improvement and shared media and entertainment.

CONTRAST – 20031

CONtinuous engineering and TRustworthy operation of AI-enabled SysTems
Project leader: Syntell AB (Sweden)
Our vision is future Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) which are enabled by automation, interconnection and AI. However, without trustworthiness, future CPS will not be an economic success and market introduction will be slow or even impossible in cases where safety cannot be guaranteed. To address this important challenge and ensure that trustworthy systems are made in Europe, CONTRAST sets out to develop a runtime assurance approach for ensuring the trustworthiness of complex CPS with AI and ML components. The approach shall enable the continuous optimisation of system performance while guaranteeing key properties of trustworthiness.

ENTA – 20020

Encrypted Network Traffic Analysis for Cyber Security
Project leader: Solana Networks (Canada)
Today, more than 80% of Internet traffic is encrypted and there is a strong need for innovative research and the development of tools able to provide visibility in encrypted traffic and detect cyber-attacks. The ENTA project will explore three solutions based on Encrypted Network Traffic Analysis (ENTA) in order to identify encrypted applications, encrypted data exfiltration and rogue encrypted IoT devices. The ENTA project will deliver an encrypted traffic analysis service platform for cybersecurity that will support several basic building blocks necessary for any machine learning/deep learning-based traffic analysis.

HeKDisco – 20030

Healthcare Knowledge Discovery
Project leader: Mantis (Turkey)
The main purpose of the HeKDisco project is to reduce potential human mistakes in medical care for patients. Following evidence-based medicine (EBM), HeKDisco aims to use the best (reliable) evidence in making decisions on the care of individual patients so that clinician experience, patient values and preferences and the best empirical clinical guidelines are all integrated. HeKDisco aims to transform big health data from volume-based to value-based by generating a relational knowledge base that can lead to innovative treatments, predict therapeutic outcomes and provide early diagnosis.

InnoSale - 20054

Innovating Sales and Planning of Complex Industrial Products Exploiting Artificial Intelligence
Project leader: Software AG (Germany)
InnoSale aims to innovate today’s sales systems and processes for complex and variable industrial equipment, plants and services that require time-consuming back-office support. InnoSale develops methods to increase the expressiveness of validation rules and to suggest relevant purchase options (case-based reasoning). Sales engineers will be supported in finding previous customer requests & orders and other suitable solutions quickly, as well as in identifying similarities between customers (evolutional clustering). User experience will be improved and supported by combining deep learning systems with augmented reality techniques, 3D modelling and 3D printing.

NGAST – 20013

Next Generation Automated Security Testing
Project leader: ARD GROUP (Turkey)
Internet of Things (IoT) device manufacturers and operators face the challenge of defending a vastly larger attack surface with essentially the same resources. Methods and tools for automated security testing are needed to eliminate security weaknesses lurking in software or APIs. NGAST will tackle these challenges by creating (1) methods to automatically identify software bugs that lead to security vulnerabilities and (2) an open, extensible platform where these methods can be easily applied. NGAST’s goal is to develop next-generation continuous integration/continuous delivery-capable automated security testing solutions for source code, binaries and distributed systems in the IoT domain.

OMD – 20003

Optimal Management of Demand
Project leader: Experteam (Turkey)
Increasing demands and time pressures accelerated by the pandemic are causing organisations to ask for new automations to proactively manage their environments. The OMD framework produced in this project will help businesses to assign the correct agent to a specific service demand effectively and remotely. This will shorten the time and reduce the cost of operations by avoiding repetitions. The OMD framework will rapidly and effectively contribute to many sectors, using AI models to improve service as a CSM approach. By improving the overall efficiency of operations on the supply side, the project will also increase customer happiness.

Secur‐e‐Health – 20050

Privacy preserving cross-organizational data analysis in the healthcare sector
Project leader: Kelvin Zero (Canada)
Sensitive health data is often kept in silos in a way that cannot be efficiently leveraged for legitimate medical, research and data analysis purposes. The goal of the Secur‐e‐Health project is to integrate new approaches for digital identification technologies and privacy-preserving analysis techniques in a secure system infrastructure. The Secur-e-Health system will allow medical institutions of all types to collaborate together and leverage data analyses and insights. This is expected to have a significant impact on the quality of the medical predictive models, the efficiency of data-driven treatments, the acceleration of new clinical research and the improvement of healthcare in general.

SIGNET – 20052

Sensing and Image-Guided Neurological therapies, cardiac Electrophysiology and Tumour treatments
Project leaders: Philips (Netherlands)
Image-guided treatment technologies can improve the outcome of many complex medical interventions. Due to safety reasons and a lack of targeting accuracy, many complex medical treatments are currently delivered over several sessions. The overall objective of SIGNET is to develop an ecosystem of companies and institutes to deliver efficient image-guided treatment workflows for efficient and safe single-visit treatments. This will replace current complex procedures in cardiology, oncology and neurology and improve patient comfort, safety, treatment outcomes, staff availability and economic viability.

SmartDelta – 20023

Automated Quality Assurance and Optimization in Incremental Industrial Software Systems Development
Project leader: RISE (Sweden)
Too often, certain quality aspects of a system begin to deteriorate as it is built and incremented with new features. It is therefore important to be able to accurately analyse and determine the quality implications of each change and increment to a system. To address these challenges, SmartDelta will build automated solutions for the quality assessment of product deltas in a continuous engineering environment by providing smart analytics from development artifacts and system execution, offering insights into quality improvements or the degradation of different product versions and providing recommendations for the next builds.

The Mechanical Web – 20019

Smart Digital Supply Chains in Manufacturing Industry
Project leader: Fraunhofer SCAI (Germany)
Today, the optimisation of integrator systems by model prediction is nearly impossible or too costly. The main goal of the Mechanical Web is to provide solutions for the efficient exchange of executable and smart surrogate models between component suppliers and the integrating system designer. The focus of the Mechanical Web project is on AI/ML-based methods to create, evaluate and integrate supplier models into OEMs’ complex system design environments. Suppliers and end-users will benefit from faster integration times and better feedback on part behaviour in the target system at early phases of design.

VRCare – 20048

Virtual Reality Healthcare Simulations
Project leader: Lapland University of Applied Sciences (Finland)
Despite the rapid development of the eXtended Reality (XR) industry, there is a lack of high-quality, certified training and simulation for healthcare professionals. The VRCare project responds to these needs by co-creating the first XR healthcare ecosystem across Europe, which employs a holistic approach to XR healthcare simulation by combining strong technical knowledge, service design, AI & machine learning, hand tracking, natural language processing, pedagogical design, research and certification. VRCare aims to improve overall healthcare performance and make a positive impact on patients’ lives by reducing the number of mistakes professionals make.

V‐Space – 20039

Hybrid workspaces for humans and (semi-)autonomous vehicles
Project leader: Almende BV (Netherlands)
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are being utilised by many industries, such as agriculture, retail, mining and manufacturing. The aim of the V-Space project is to bring a unified solution for hybrid workspaces where humans and AVs collaborate together. The project has two complementary use cases focusing on ports and private spaces. Autonomous transport within ports is a key enabler for more intelligent and sustainable ports, forming the basis for predictable and cost-efficient operations. Similarly, there are large opportunities to be gained in smaller warehouses and other private spaces exploited by companies.