Partners
The MARVEL consortium consists of 17 partners based in 12 different countries but being engaged in internationally.
Get to know our partners.
State R&D Centre. FORTH hosts six major Research Institutes. FORTH, besides its pioneering contributions in the sector of Information and Telecommunications Technologies in Greece, cooperates, in the context of European and international collaborative R&D programmes, with universities, research centres and other organisations at national and international level, thus contributing to the exchange of scientific ideas and the creation and transfer of new technologies. The research directions at FORTH take into consideration the State-of-the-Art, international trends, research and technological challenges worldwide, as well as the national needs of the public and private sectors. FORTH represents Greece in the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), an organisation dedicated to the advancement of European research and development in the areas of information technology and applied mathematics.
FORTH will be responsible for coordinating MARVEL, dealing with all aspects of day-to-day project management (including project & financial control and resource monitoring and reporting, risk management and contingency actions), and achieving a common scientific and technical direction within the project, in order to ensure successful achievement of the project objectives on time and within budget. FORTH has significant expertise in mature, operational as well as state of the art cyber-security techniques and good practices, including hardware-enabled security assurance, security monitoring, security assessment and incident response. The strong involvement in both research-and industry-focused projects, as well as the pertinent services provided by FORTH (e.g. Security services at the edge) provide thorough and up-to-date knowledge on current and emerging cyber-security threats. As such, FORTH will lead WP8 and the respective tasks T8.2 and T4.3. Moreover, FORTH will participate in the activities of all WPs by contributing in scientific, research and organisational effort of the project.
Infineon is a world leader in semiconductors. Combining entrepreneurial success with responsible action, at Infineon we make the world easier, safer and greener. Barely visible, semiconductors have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. We are playing a key role in shaping a better future – with microelectronics that link the digital and the real world. Our semiconductors enable smart mobility, efficient energy management and the secure capture and transfer of data.
Infineon designs, develops, manufactures and markets a broad range of semiconductors and system solutions. The focus of its activities is on automotive electronics, industrial electronics, communication and information technologies, and hardware-based security. The product range comprises standard components, customer-specific solutions for devices and systems, as well as specific components for digital, analogue, and mixed-signal applications. Over 60% of Infineon’s revenue is generated by power semiconductors, almost 20% by embedded control products (microcontrollers for automotive, industrial as well as security applications), and the remainder by radio-frequency components and sensors. Infineon generates 32% of its revenue in Europe, 56% in Asia and 12% in the Americas.
Infineon will work on sound analytics within the project, as well as provide technological knowledge with respect to microphones to be used for the needs of the project. It brings to the project its strong expertise in MEMS microphones. MEMS microphones will be deployed and used for data analysis and pattern recognition in MARVEL. As such, IFAG will lead WP4 and task T4.1.
Aarhus University (AU) was founded in 1928. It has four faculties – Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Science and Technology, Faculty of Health Sciences and School of Business & Social Sciences. The four faculties cover the entire research spectrum – basic research, applied research, strategic research and research-based advice to the authorities. AU has 39,000 students; about 1,800 PhD students – of which one in four has a foreign nationality – and close to 900 postdoctoral scholars together with 11,500 employees. As such, internationalisation is a key part of AU’s mission and it continuously works to strengthen the international profile of the University through a series of initiatives, which will increase international research partnerships and the number of international students. AU has been establishing itself as a university for cutting-edge research and has been moving up the most important university ranking lists. In 2018, the university is ranked at number 111 at the Leiden Ranking, number 141 at the QS World University Ranking, and number 123 of 17,000 universities on the Times Higher Education World University Ranking. AU has participated in 295 FP7 and 255 H2020 projects – 21 and 26, respectively, as coordinator – and has hosted/is currently hosting 51 ERC projects. AU has a very successful track record of managing both individual fellowships and large international projects and of hosting visiting researchers of all career stages for both training and knowledge transfer purposes.
AU will contribute to the MARVEL by proposing and developing new methodologies for efficient and light- weight DL models for visual surveillance tasks, including person/object detection, crowd counting and activity/anomaly detection. We will build on top of our recent experience in efficient DL models for visual data analysis and feedforward neural network architecture optimization for building compact DL models. Moreover, we will build on top of our recent methods for multi-modal data analysis and fusion for combining visual and audio information. Extensions of such methodologies for efficient and light-weight multi-modal DL solutions will be of particular interest. As such, AU will lead T3.3 and participate in other WPs on the fields of its expertise. Find out more here.
Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with approximately 120,000 employees in 73 countries and annual revenue of around € 12 billion. The European number one in Big Data, Cybersecurity, High Performance Computing and Digital Workplace, The Group provides Cloud services, Infrastructure & Data Management, Business & Platform solutions, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payment industry. With its cutting-edge technologies, digital expertise and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across various business sectors: Defense, Financial Services, Health, Manufacturing, Media, Energy & Utilities, Public sector, Retail, Telecommunications and Transportation.
The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting, Atos Worldgrid, Bull, Canopy, Unify and Worldline. Atos SE (Societas Europaea) is listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index.
ATOS will utilise its Data Acquisition Framework to enable MARVEL deal with the massive amounts of data generated in the project pilot fields. Therefore it will contribute to WP3 and WP5 by leading T5.4 on benchmarking, while it will use its big network and affiliations to contribute to WP7 which includes market analysis (T7.1) and sustainability support (T7.5).
CNR is the largest Italian public research organisation carrying out research activities in a broad range of sectors through a network of about 70 Institutes. CNR participates in the project through the researchers of the Ubiquitous Internet group (UI) of the Institute for Informatics and Telematics (IIT). UI-IIT research activities are focused on the Future Internet design and evaluation, data-centric (mobile) networks being one of the key research topics the group is focusing on. In addition, UI-IIT researchers are working on distributed AI models running on heterogeneous edge devices collaborating together. UI-IIT researchers feature broad expertise in the design, modelling, performance evaluation through analysis, simulation and experiments of innovative Internet distributed systems, with special emphasis on various types of pervasive (edge) networks. UI-IIT members are actively participating to relevant expert groups at the national and European levels including the NetWorld 2020 ETP Expert Group. UI-IIT is part of several related EC projects: in H2020 AUTOWARE (2016-19) it looks at fog-computing data management solutions for factories of the future; in H2020 REPLICATE (2016-21), as well as in the national project “Smart Cities” (2014-16), it develops pilots of distributed data-centric Mobile Social Networking services for Smart Cities. Recently, in FP7 MOTO it investigated foundational aspects of D2D opportunistic offloading and related networking protocols; in FP7 EINS, it looks at inter-disciplinary approaches to the design of mobile content-centric networks. UI-IIT is also part of the H2020 SoBigData++ and HumaneAI projects looking at BigData analytics and distributed AI for human social behaviour analysis, and H2020 ESPRIT where it focuses on optimisation of transport systems for Smart Cities environments exploiting BigData analytics over users mobility data. UI-IIT is part of large national competence centres through which it transfers these results to large industries and SMEs, and has recently contributed to transfer these research results towards innovative solutions in several EIT Digital projects in the area of Future Network Solutions, in the topics of mobile opportunistic networks and IoT solutions.
CNR will investigate the implications of moving computation of AI/ML algorithms from a centralized cloud to a distributed set of resources in the edge, with special emphasis on the multimodal perception focus considered in MARVEL. In particular, it will focus on: i) novel orchestration mechanisms that take into account the physical location and constrained resources of edge devices; ii) federated learning and compression mechanisms to take full advantage of edge computation capabilities while keeping under control accuracy and convergence of algorithms, and iii) novel data distribution algorithms for edge networks supporting distributed AI tasks. CNR will lead T2.2 and T3.5 while assisting to work performed under all the rest WPs.
INTRASOFT International (Luxembourg) is a leading European IT Solutions and Services Group with strong international presence, offering innovative and added-value solutions of the highest quality to a wide range of international and national public and private organisations. The company employs more than 1,600 highly-skilled professionals, representing over 20 different nationalities and mastering more than 18 languages. With headquarters in Luxembourg, INTRASOFT International (Luxembourg) operates through its operational branches, subsidiaries and offices in 17 countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Cyprus, Greece, Jordan, Moldova, Morocco, Romania, Palestine, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, UK, UAE, USA and Yemen. More than 500 organizations in over 70 countries worldwide (Institutions and Agencies of the European Union, National Government Organizations, Public Agencies, Financial Institutions, Telecommunication Organizations, and Private Enterprises) have chosen the company’s services and solutions to fulfil their business needs.
INTRA will contribute to the design and development of the architecture and the implementation of the MARVEL framework by providing its Streamhandler platform. As such, INTRA will lead WP5 and T5.5 as well as contributing to the MARVEL data management (T2.2) and plans for commercialisation (T7.5).
Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), in Trento (Italy), is a private no-profit research institution subsidized by the Province of Trento. With more than 450 people, FBK’s mission is to develop both knowledge, expertise, and innovation in the fields of Information Technology, Microsystems/Microelectronics and Social Sciences, conduct technology transfer at the local, national and international industrial level. FBK is a founding member of the EIT Digital Italian node.
FBK will offer its current solutions and research on novel techniques on the field of Smart Cities. It will lead the experiment design in T1.3 and also apply its privacy preservation techniques for data at the edge by leading T3.1. It will also strongly contribute to WP5 and WP6 by participating at the integration and experimentation activities respectively.
audEERING GmbH is involved in developing and licensing software for intelligent audio analysis, in particular speech and sound-scapes. A core software product is the world-class audio analysis toolkit openSMILE, which is capable of extracting over 6k audio features relevant for speech, music, and sound analysis and has been used as a basis for numerous international benchmarks. Combined with machine learning expertise, audEERING delivers highly accurate sound and speech analysis products.
Within MARVEL, AUD will provide its expertise in the field of voice and emotion recognition, especially developing and tuning the necessary algorithms to be applied for the specific needs of the project as well as acoustic scene analysis. As such, AUD will lead T4.2 and will also be in charge of the innovation management by leading T8.3. Find out more here.
Tampere University (TAU, Tampereen korkeakoulusaatio sr) was created on 1 January 2019 as a merger of Tampere University of Technology (TUT) and University of Tampere (UTA). The multidisciplinary, foundation-based Tampere University is Finland’s second-largest university with 20.000 students and 330 professors. TAU conducts scientific research in technology, health and society and provides the highest education within these fields. Audio Research Group of TAU lead by professor Tuomas Virtanen focuses on development of algorithms for audio signal processing and content analysis of audio. The group has done pioneering work on one-channel sound source separation and detection and classification of sound events in everyday environments.
TAU in MARVEL will be responsible for the development of novel methods and algorithms for effective acquisition and analysis of big audio data, the extraction of information from audio signals, and the localization of audio sources. It will mainly participate in WP3 activities and lead WP1 by defining the project scene. TAU will also lead standardisation efforts by leading T7.4.
Privanova is the leading provider of Privacy Compliance and Risk Management Solutions, with a particular focus on the GDPR. We operate at the interface between privacy, technology and policy. Our R&D activities focus on the analysis of legal, ethical and technological issues, often from the law enforcement perspective. Our team includes former INTERPOL professionals experienced in managing the whole EU project life-cycle. Together, our consultants have initiated, managed or successfully participated in more than 25 FP7 and H2020 consortia. In addition, we have hands-on-business knowledge of the proposal evaluation, project review and the EU ethics checks scheme.
PN leads consortium efforts on privacy, data protection and ethics compliance. In particular, we are responsible for gathering and analyzing the ethics and legal requirements including the GDPR compliance. We participate in implementing the Privacy by Design efforts of the project and contribute to all other work packages to ensure legal and ethical compliance of the project. PN will lead T2.5 and will also mainly assist in WP7 activities. Find out more here.
Sphynx Technology Solutions AG is based at Zug, Switzerland and has also offices in Cyprus and London. The company offers products and solutions, and consulting services, in the areas of cyber intelligence, analytics, incident response, assurance and certification. The technologies offered by Sphynx include sophisticated event processing and analytics, security monitoring and testing, intrusion detection, fraud management, and incident response. Sphynx deploys off-the-shelf hardware components along with its custom software to provide tools such as its analytics engine, a threat-monitoring platform and a security audit and certification platform. Via its consulting services, Sphynx has expertise in providing customized solutions depending on client needs as well as more general training on analytics, security assessment and certification and cyber intelligence.
STS will be responsible for the compilation, augmentation and sharing of the MARVEL Data Corpus to the community. It will lead WP2 and the relevant tasks T2.3 and T2.4.
Trento is the third largest city in the Alps (120,000 inhabitants) and the capital of the Autonomous Province of Trento in Northern Italy. The Municipality of Trento employs about 1,500 collaborators and it is organised in three main areas: Citizen services; Cultural services; Technical area of the territory. The Smart City Office implements the objectives of the Smart City Project and manages EU projects to test new smart services or improve the existing ones.
The Municipality of Trento will be the leader of the Trento use case focusing on monitoring public urban areas. It will lead pilot activities by leading WP6 and T6.2.
Faculty of Technical Sciences (FTN), as part of the University of Novi Sad (UNS), comprises 11 departments and is the largest individual faculty in Serbia with over 1000 employees and 10,000 students. The project will be carried out by the Department of Power Electronics and Communication Engineering (DPECE). DPECE is the leading FTN department regarding the number of staff members, EU-funded projects and innovation-oriented spin-off companies emerging out of DPECE research activities.
Centre for intelligent Communications, Networking and Information Processing (ICONIC) merged several DPECE teams into a strong centre engaging 15 academic staff members and more than 20 PhD students. ICONIC targets internationally visible research in massive cellular machine-type communications and large-scale distributed information processing and machine learning, supported by reconfigurable hardware design. iCONIC staff have established links towards local and regional ICT ecosystem and ongoing collaboration with companies in the domain of cellular IoT, cloud-based systems and hardware acceleration. The centre staff regularly publish in top-tier IEEE journals such as IEEE Trans. Communications, IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, or IEEE Trans. Information Theory, and at flagship IEEE conferences (IEEE ICC, IEEE WCNC, IEEE GlobalSIP, etc).
UNS will focus on machine learning and AI-related aspects, mostly on personalized federated learning realization for extreme-scale analytics in MARVEL, and it will also support processing and analytics for audio-visual intelligence. UNS will also contribute to the MARVEL data corpus through generating drone data in a lab environment. It will lead WP3 and T3.2 will participating to research tasks of all other WPs.
Founded in 2011, Information Technology for Market Leadership IKE (ITML) is a global ICT enterprise headquartered in Athens, Greece. ITML provides novel, tailor-made software solutions based on a variety of technologies, such as big data analytics, advanced data mining and machine learning. ITML’s vision is to deliver products and services close to the real customers and market needs, ultimately improving the user experience and the access to technology. ITML solutions cover a very wide range of applications, including e-shops, e-learning, Business Process Management (BPM), or any other customized application.
ITML particularly delivers solutions through (a) bilateral projects with private industry, (b) Public-Private Partnerships (PPP), (c) EU and beyond-EU funded projects, and nationally-funded projects. It has active participation in numerous H2020 projects as technology provider and system integrator in the fields of:
- Tailor-made cybersecurity services
- Internet of Things
- Machine Learning-based Big Data Analytics
- Smart Transportation
- Smart Production Digitisation
- Energy efficient smart city applications
ITML will mainly participate in data management activities of MARVEL in WP2 and will lead T5.3 which involves the integration of the MARVEL framework. It will also lead exploitation activities in T7.3.
We dream of an environmentally responsible and proactive society that can enjoy clean air and peaceful streets. Greenroads Malta Ltd has been incorporated in early 2019, following an incubation programme of EIT Climate-KIC Accelerator in 2018. Currently, the company is working with researchers to develop products and services for better traffic management and reduction of pollution from our streets.
Greenroads will develop a use-case based on readily available camera feeds on Maltese roads. A key challenge facing all modern societies is transportation. Increased population densities, the rise of megacities, and continued economic growth have contributed to a situation where in the world’s largest cities the average citizen wastes hundreds of hours every year stuck in traffic. Improved road networks, used intelligently and responsively to real time changes, would bring a significant improvement in any city’s livability, help reduce emissions, improve road safety, and assist policy makers as well as transport solution providers.
Greenroads Limited will be working with Infrastructure Malta to help use machine-learning algorithms applied to real-time traffic camera video feeds for dynamic redistribution of traffic. We will utilise hardware, software, and data analytics required to read and process the camera data, create mathematical models, and optimally solve routing problems. We aim to apply computer vision, machine learning and optimisation techniques to automatically monitor and optimise traffic flow in Malta.
The initial phase of the project will involve setting up a technological infrastructure in terms of a reliable data acquisition and processing system which will then act as fuel for work to follow in later stages. It is here where this project can make strides in research. From a local standpoint by providing analyses and optimisation of traffic flow which has never been carried out using algorithms developed and trained specifically on Maltese data.
From this project’s standpoint, the method for rich and detailed nature of the data set we can accumulate will put us in a great position to carry out research in combinatorial optimisation techniques as well as deep learning techniques using this data set. Through this pilot project we will come up with relevant modelling scaling and data analytics that can be converted into a decision-making tool.
GRN will lead T2.1 and T6.1 by assisting in data collection and experiment setup and validation respectively.
Established in 2019 ZELUS IKE is a start-up that is based in Greece. ZELUS is a forward-looking SME focused on developing and managing secure and innovative solutions for business of every size, from micro SMEs to large industries. ZELUS research and innovation activities are based on strong dedication and zeal to successfully deliver top-class, robust and user validated products within time and budget restrictions.
Mission: Empowered by an experienced, strong and skilful team, ZELUS focuses on Digital Forensic Investigations and Analysis (both cyber and physical), Threat Hunting and security-related Situational Awareness. ZELUS services are targeting decision makers and span from collection and analysis systems (e.g. analysis of digital evidence in Critical Infrastructures) to network security services and privacy preserving systems. Moreover, ZELUS supports complete management and implementation services for IT projects supporting the complete software lifecycle, i.e. design, development, deployment, optimisation and maintenance.
ZELUS will be responsible for the development of the Decision-Making Toolkit that will provide the means of delivering MARVEL’s outcomes to end users. As such, it will lead T4.4. ZELUS will also lead T1.1 and WP7 including T7.2 which analyse MARVEL’s challenges and dissemination strategy.
Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, affiliated to the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, was established in 1993 by the State Committee for Scientific Research. PSNC, is a certified (ISO9001, ISO27001) HPC center and network operator. The main part of e-infrastructure (is currently under major upgrade) consist of 1,7 PFlops of computing power, 43 PB storage and data management systems (fast data caches and archivisation). PSNC is partner of PRACE (Partnership of Advanced Computing in Europe) the European HPC initiative and a leading partner of geographical distributed HPC in Poland (PRACE-LAB). The PRACE-LAB project defined a distributed data infrastructure of 100+ PFlops and HPCaaS in cloud for business, especially SMEs.
The backbone network in Poland (operated by PSNC) is based on 100 Gbps connections between the major HPC sites, 100 Gbps to bigger academic communities and 400 Gbps between a few academic cities. We play a role of NREN in Poland and partner of the international consortium GÉANT. PSNC is also a Systems and Network Security Center (CERT-PIONIER). PSNC provide direct support for the scientific communities in Poland as well as in Europe. PSNC has built a co-working space and is coordinating living lab communities. Via its co-working space, PSNC supports 15+ user communities, gathered around ICT technologies and application areas. PSNC’s Poznan Living Lab, as effective member of ENoLL, runs city challenge workshops, hackathons and design thinking interdisciplinary courses. PSNC coordinates the leading Polish ICT research driven Wielkopolska ICT Cluster with 100+ members.
PSNC will be providing and managing the HPC infrastructure to MARVEL. It will lead T5.1 and T5.2 and will also contribute to the experiments setup in WP6.
Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under grant agreement No 957337. The website reflects only the view of the author(s) and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
