Grants

The aim of EUreka3D-XR is to expand 3D and XR scenarios in the European common data space for cultural heritage. EUreka3DXR builds upon the three pillars constructed by EUreka3D to create new experiences in extended reality integrated in the European Data Space for Cultural Heritage. The proposed framework is composed by: - EUreka3D platform of guidelines and recommendations based on the results of the VIGIE Study for the production of 3D high-quality contents - EUreka3D Data Hub made of computing and storage resources that power a range of tools and services for accessing, visualising and manipulating cultural contents, mostly in 3D formats - a programme of capacity building initiatives that extend the seminars, documentations, workshops and demonstrations initiated in EUreka3D with new elements focused on the creation of XR experiences The EUreka3D-XR framework will be operated via an online application in the form of a tool-box that targets a twofold community of users: the providers and the users of contents. The providers - namely Cultural Heritage Institutions, small museums and libraries, digital archives - will use the tools of Eureka3D-XR to improve their skills, to give access to their datasets and to transform their cultural contents (2D, 3D, video, texts, maps, stories) into innovative XR experiences. The users – namely researchers, students and teachers, tourists, creative enterprises, and the citizenry living in the cultural places represented in the digital space - will re-use the high-value datasets published by the providers and interact with XR experiences. Three show-case scenarios will be developed in Eureka3D-XR and made available as new contents and documentation: The virtual visualization of the middle-ages walls of the city of Girona The XR narrative of excavations in process in the Bibracte archaeological site The new life of Saint Neophytos Englystra in Cyprus Impact assessment and users testing will contribute to long-term sustainability.

Partners:

1. INTERNATIONAL CONSORTIUM FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC HERITAGE (PHOTOCONSORTIUM)

2. INTERUNIVERSITAIR MICRO-ELECTRONICA CENTRUM (IMEC)

3. STICHTING EGI (EGI)

4. POLITECHNIKA WROCLAWSKA (WCSS)

5. ETHNICON METSOVION POLYTECHNION (NTUA)

6. TECHNOLOGIKO PANEPISTIMIO KYPROU (CUT)

7.  AYUNTAMIENTO DE GIRONA (CRDI)

8. BIBRACTE (BIBRACTE)

9. STICHTING EUROPEANA (EF)

10. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ITALIA SRL (SE.IT)

11. MEEMOO - VLAAMS INSTITUUT VOOR HET ARCHIEF (meemoo)

SURE-GB: Identifying Gender Bias in Machine Translation

SURE-GB is an innovative project focused on identifying and addressing occupation-related gender biases in machine translation (MT), particularly in translations between English, French, and Greek. Machine translation systems, widely used in our daily interactions, can inadvertently perpetuate societal biases. SURE-GB aims to tackle this issue by developing an automated service that detects three types of gender bias in MT:

• Under-representational bias: When gender assignment in translations reflects the low representation of a specific gender in linguistic corpora, even if it's accurate to reality.
• Stereotypical bias: When gender assignment reinforces harmful stereotypes, for example, translating "professor" as masculine despite the presence of many female professors.
• Algorithmic bias: When bias arises from technical shortcomings in MT systems, unrelated to actual gender representation in data.

Key Features:

• Curated Knowledge Graph: We are building a knowledge graph that encodes standardized data for occupations based on sources like the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS), the International Classification of Occupations (ISCO), and sociolinguistic statistics.
• Machine Learning Toolkit: Our toolkit uses the knowledge graph to automatically detect and categorize gender biases in translations, providing actionable recommendations to improve accuracy and fairness in machine translation systems.
   

Why It Matters:

Gender bias in machine translation doesn’t just reflect societal prejudices—it can reinforce them, contributing to deeper inequalities. By identifying and categorizing these biases, we aim to raise awareness and establish guidelines for more equitable translation practices.

Video Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAkWg0ciiw8&ab_channel=UTTER-UnifiedTranscriptionandTranslation

Code: https://github.com/ails-lab/Sure-GB

Can artificial intelligence (AI) coexist with artists, and support artistic expression? Our research goal is to look into this question, by investigating potential applications of AI for facilitating the expression of emotions by artists. Specifically, we envision an intelligent system that recognizes the emotional context during musical performance, based on the music being played and on biosignals from the performer, and then targetedly modifies the sound for supporting (or changing) the emotional context. To realize this, we have identified three main tasks that we aim to complete as part of our research. The first task is the creation of a dataset, that will contain audio of musical performances, alongside symbolic representations of the music (e.g. scores), and a variety of biosignals (e.g electroencephalogram). Such a dataset will be the first of its kind and will have significant scientific impact, as it will enable new research into correlating music with emotions. Studying this correlation is the second main task we have identified. Specifically, we will study links between emotions and a) music theory, b) acoustics and c) biological signals that will be extracted and analyzed with state-of-the-art AI methods. Finally, the third task we have identified is the analysis of the aforementioned correlations between emotions and music, and based on this analysis to modify elements of musical expression (for example, by changing audio effects parameters), enhancing the musical result and the experience of both performer and audience. To complete these demanding tasks, we have put
together a balanced team, consisting of internationally acclaimed professional musicians, in addition to experienced music
theory researchers, and AI researchers.

Partners:

1. NATIONAL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS

2. NATIONAL AND KAPODISTRIAN UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS

The agricultural sector has a big challenge: producing more with fewer raw materials and less adverse effects on society, production
animals, climate and biodiversity. Optimal use of resource is even more important now, due to the imminent food crisis. Climate-friendly sustainable agriculture, with care for natural resources, is essential for our food production and quality of life, today and for future generations. Automated Milking Systems (AMS) were developed in the late 20th century under the perspective of reducing manual labour & costs and improving quality of life for the farmers. Not only have these machines improved in harvesting milk efficiently, but they also have the added ability to collect a greater amount of data about production, milk composition, cows health and behaviour. This could allow producers to make more informed management decisions, while in parallel reducing emissions and increasing animal welfare. Nevertheless, currently available AMS have important limitations in terms of optimising their operation. dAIry 4.0 addresses these challenges, integrating and optimising AI, data and robotics solutions to demonstrate how this combination will optimise AMS production aspects and minimise adverse effects on society, climate and biodiversity. The approach will be demonstrated through real world use cases of interest both for the farming sector and the food industry. In terms of AI tools to be used, the project will focus on the following novelties: - Developing multimodal learning techniques to efficiently utilize multiple types of information for animal health & overall animal status monitoring - Developing self-supervised and novel data augmentation techniques to reduce the amount of labelled training data needed - Exploring novel explainable AI techniques to increase transparency of the system and eventually facilitate acceptance by the users - Including the farmer in the loop to build the cognitive abilities for the system.

Partners

1. CY.R.I.C CYPRUS RESEARCH AND INNOVATION CENTER LTD (CyRIC)

2. LELY INDUSTRIES NV (LELY)

3. UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA (UAB)

4. ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS (AUTH)

5. TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET WIEN (TUW)

6. EREVNITIKO PANEPISTIMIAKO INSTITOUTO SYSTIMATON EPIKOINONION KAI YPOLOGISTON (ICCS)

7. ALPES LASERS SA (AP)

The purpose of the proposal is to contribute to the tourism development of the coastal front of the southwestern coastline of Attica (Athens Riviera) by highlighting (a) the natural environment, (b) the tourism potential, (c) the cultural heritage, and (d) the designation of critical tourist hubs (destinations) along the entire western coastline of Attica, from Faliro to Palaia Fokaia. The proposal falls under the framework of Blue Growth and Economy, as it aims at sustainable (economic and social) development, with an emphasis on the tourism industry, through:

• Promoting natural, cultural, and tourism resources while simultaneously supporting the economy by protecting marine tourism and linking it with alternative and specialized forms of tourism.
• Improving the tourism product with appropriate infrastructure projects (sea-linking of tourist areas of interest).
• Providing real-time information to users about tourism possibilities/options.
• Promoting sustainable blue growth of the coastal front of Western Attica.
• Minimizing environmental disruption.
• Attracting investment interest.

Partners

1. ILIDA CONSULTING ENGINEERS SA

2. NATIONAL AND KAPODISTRIAN UNIVERISTY OF ATHENS

3. INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTER SYSTEMS 

AI4Europeana proposes the development of the AI4Culture platform: an online capacity building hub for the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in the Cultural Heritage (CH) sector. The platform offers access to a pool of AI-related resources: (i) a set of deployable and reusable AI tools; (ii) open labelled datasets amenable for training and testing AI models; and (iii) capacity building materials. The AI4Culture platform will be populated with an initial suite of AI tools, offered as deployable software packages as well as services. To this end, a number of existing digital components will be customised, interfaced, and packaged, so that they can be readily used by CH institutions in the context of representative and real-life application scenarios: multilingual text recognition in scanned documents; multilingual subtitles generation and validation; enrichment with information extracted from images and semantic linking; and machine translation for CH metadata. Furthermore, said components will be interoperable with the Europeana Core Service platform. The project also processes and makes available under open licences a range of datasets with human-produced or -validated annotations to various CH-related resources, including handwritten documents, images, and CH metadata. This way, AI4Culture boosts the availability of relevant materials from (and for) Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) to be used for training, validating and evaluating AI tools. Finally, the project will produce a multifarious range of materials for upskilling, including Wikis, tutorials, step-by-step guides and best practices, as well as a series of capacity building events with hand-on sessions and a hackathon. With this comprehensive offering, the project has a clear and strong value proposition for the CH sector, helping it to overcome the barriers that have prevented a broad adoption of AI technologies so far and thereby innovating the Data Space for CH.

Partners

1. STICHTING EUROPEANA 

2. DATOPTRON I.K.E. 

3. FONDAZIONE BRUNO KESSLER 

4. TRANSLATED SRL 

5. CROSSLANG NV

6. DATABLE BV

7. PANGEANIC-B. I. EUROPA SLU

8. KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN

9. EUROPEAN FASHION HERITAGE ASSOCIATION

10. STICHTING NEDERLANDS INSTITUUT VOORBEELD EN GELUID

11. AIT AUSTRIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY GMBH

CRAFTED brings together a diverse consortium composed of experienced Europeana aggregators - European Fashion Heritage Association7, EUscreen8, MUSEU-HUB9, and the Greek national aggregator SearchCulture.gr10, 15 museums and archives from 8 European countries, eight of them involved directly in the consortium, and seven involved through the Greek national aggregator (ten of these institutions are providing content to Europeana for the first time), the Europeana Foundation, and experienced technology partners with the aim to aggregate new high-quality datasets on Europeana, provide novel technologies to enrich collections and carry out public engagement and dissemination activities to promote crafts heritage. The project sets out to achieve six specific objectives:

- Increase the amount of high-quality, multimodal content on Europeana.

- Define and deploy an innovative human-in-the-loop methodology and accompanying toolset for the optimized automatic enrichment of large amounts of CH metadata

- Enhance interest in European crafts and rejuvenation of craft practices.

- Support the takeup of AI and crowdsourcing technologies in the Cultural Heritage sector.

Partners:

1. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)-established in Greece

2. Michael Culture Association (MCA) - established in Belgium

3. Stichting Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (NISV) - established in Netherlands

4. European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) - established in Italy

5. Stichting Europeana (EF) - established in Netherlands

6. AG Culturele Instellingen Antwerpen/Erfgoed (AG CIA) - established in Belgium

7. DATABLE BV (DATABLE) - established in Belgium

8. Université du Luxembourg (UdL) - established in Luxembourg

9. MINISTERE DE LA CULTURE ET DE LA COMMUNICATION - Mobilier national et manufactures nationales des Gobelins, de Beauvais et de la Savonnerie (MCC) - established in France

10. Museum of Arts and Crafts (MUO) - established in Croatia

11. STOWARZYSZENIE MIEDZYNARODOWE CENTRUM ZARZADZANIA INFORMACJA (ICIMSS) - established in Poland

12. Fondazione Museo del Tessuto di Prato (FMTP) - established in Italy

13. Etablissement public Paris Musées (PARIS MUSEES) - established in France

14. NATIONAL DOCUMENTATION CENTER – EKT (ETHNIKO KENTRO TEKMIRIOSIS KAI ILEKTRONIKOU PERIECHOMENOU) (EKT) - established in Greece

This Action aims to build connections between the Europeana and the Automated Translation Digital Service Infrastructures (DSI) for the benefit of both:

i to improve usability of heritage resources by enriching datasets on Europeana as well as datasets provided by cultural institutions with multilingual metadata; and

ii to significantly enrich the language resources available through the ELRC-SHARE repository by adding millions of records describing cultural heritage items.

The Action will deliver to ELRC-SHARE at least 10 million metadata records to be sourced from the Europeana API, processed and tagged. The resources will include records with data in parallel languages and, where not possible, monolingual records, covering the 24 EU official languages. All provided resources will have a free reuse license (CC0).

Moreover, the Action will train and deploy automated translation engines customised to serve the needs of the Cultural Heritage domain. The engines will be delivered to the European Language Grid (ELG) and will become part of an end-to-end pipeline and a fully-fledged supporting set of tools that connects the two DSIs. The pipeline will be used to source metadata records from Europeana and cultural heritage content providers, to process and translate them to English, evaluate the results, insert the translations as enrichments to cultural heritage metadata records, manage and deliver them to the Europeana platform or to individual Cultural Heritage Institutions’ platforms.

As a result, the provided tools and platforms will be made openly available in order to enable cultural heritage institutions, service providers and other interested parties to reuse the individual tools under different use cases.

The Europeana Translate workflow will be applied to translate at least 25 million Europeana metadata records to be published back to the Europeana Core service platform.

Partners:

1. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)

2. European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) - established in Italy

3. Stichting Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (NISV) - established in Netherlands

4. Pangeanic SL (Pangeanic) - established in Spain

5. Stichting Europeana (EF) - established in Netherlands

6. Michael Culture Association (MCA) - established in Belgium

OLA is a 2-year Erasmus+ European project (2021-2023) coordinated by CNR-IRPPS that, following the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemics, aims at giving an impetus to “open educational resources” and “open educational practices”, as an opportunity to reduce the digital divide in the European educational context, building a more inclusive society.

Open educational resources – intended as free digital educational resources, collaboratively developed by teacher networks with other social actors – already exist, but are still a fragmented reality, not enough widespread and valued at institutional level. OLA project aims at promoting their development and diffusion by means of: MOOC courses for teachers; creation of guidelines about open educational resources for teachers and editors; participative building of an open access online platform usable by teachers to develop and spread multimedia educational scenarios.

By the end of the project, 80 interdisciplinary scenarios related to STEAM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) will be developed, 50 of which will be tested in the 5 partner countries: Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain.

A central issue transversal to the project is paying attention to recognizing stereotypes – starting from, but not limited to gender – and values implicitly conveyed by school textbooks and multimedia online resources, so as to promote a wider concept of “digital competences”, including not only strictly technological competences, but also the capability of using online platforms and information sources critically and responsibly, as a premise for exercising a conscious and informed citizenship.

Partners: 

• Greece: National Technical University of Athens
                1° Peiramatiko Gymnasio Athinas of Athens
• Italy: CNR-IRPPS (international coordinator of the project)
            Istituto Comprensivo Carducci-King of Casoria
• Cyprus: University of Cyprus
• Romania: Scoala Gimnaziala Mircea Eliade of Craiova
• Spain: Centro de Formación Somorrostro of Muskiz

STIRData Action proposes the use of Linked Data and semantic technologies as the means to overcome the technical barriers that hamper the reuse of open data, namely, poor quality and limited availability of Open Data. In particular, the Action seeks to assist data providers through a set of data specifications, guidelines, and an accompanying harmonisation toolset for streamlining and facilitating the process of enriching and publishing company data as Linked Data.

An online platform for searching, navigating, synthetically analysing, and visualising company-related open data content coming from different sources in a homogeneous way will also be developed, supporting a number of cross-border and cross-domain reuse scenarios. These sources will include company registries, sources discoverable via the European Data Portal (EDP) and other open data platforms. The offered functionalities will be exposed via an open Application Programming Interface (API), so that they can be reused by other digital public services or applications developed by data and ICT companies.

In particular, during the project lifetime, data referring to at least 1.5 million companies from at least five different countries will be published as Linked Data and become searchable and navigable via the STIRData platform. The enhanced datasets will be also published to the national open data portals of Greece (data.gov.gr), Norway (data.norge.no), and Czechia (data.gov.cz) so that they can be harvested by the EDP.

The overall STIRData approach, technical tools, and online services will be of a general purpose and can be uptaken to facilitate harmonisation and reusability of open data in other domains.

Partners

1. National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)

2. UNIVERZITA KARLOVA (CU) - established in Czech Republic

3. Masaryk University (MUNI) - established in Czech Republic

4. Registerenheten i Brønnøysund (BRREG) - established in Norway

5. DIGITALISERINGSDIREKTORATET (Digdir) - established in Norway

6. General Secretariat of Digital Governance and Simplification of Procedures of Ministry of Digital Governance (MINDIGITAL) - established in Greece

7. Athens chamber of commerce and industry (ACCI) - established in Greece

8. THINKCODE LTD (ThinkCode) - established in Cyprus