Grants

Through an in-depth investigation of AI applications in the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), the HUMAIN project seeks to
provide a clear understanding of both the opportunities and challenges facing the sector and strengthen a responsible use of technology.
Building on comprehensive legal, ethical economic, and social analyses, as well as practical use cases from film, fashion, and music, the
project identifies concrete patterns of AI adoption and their implications for cultural production, access, and reuse. A central outcome
will be the HUMAIN Toolkit, designed to equip CCI stakeholders with practical guidance, frameworks and tools for integrating ethical,
trustworthy and lawful AI into their workflows. To increase the distribution of knowledge and to steer policy discussion around AI with
a strong voice of the CCIs, the project will also offer a diverse capacity building opportunities and will create policy recommendations.
By grounding both the Toolkit and the policy recommendations in real-world cases and sector-specific needs, HUMAIN aims to support
CCIs in making smart, human-centred choices around AI adoption—enhancing preparedness, resilience, and competitiveness in the face
of future technological developments.

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)

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