Transfer Learning from Imprecise and Abstract Models to Autonomous Technologies (TIAMAT)

AI integration in CCSI work practice: catalysing innovation and competitiveness is sponsored by European Commission — Horizon Europe. Expected Outcome: Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes: Insights, recommendations, strategies, guidelines, methods and tools supporting full AI integration in CCSI practices become available to CCSI, policymakers, and stakeholders. Scenarios for co-created solutions tailored to CCSI needs, utilizing quality data and federated data sources, along with digital infrastructures, and inclusive cooperation processes, become available. Generally made available AI-powered and ethically designed solutions, tools and services in several CCSI areas benefit creators, cultural professionals, and society, including persons with disabilities and other specific needs, fostering innovative creative expressions and improving creative business models while preserving and enhancing cultural diversity, and inclusion. By mastering ethical and inclusive AI, CCSI are empowered drivers of culture, innovation, competitiveness and societal wellbeing. Scope: AI technologies are transformative, providing unprecedented opportunities for human creativity, experimentations and co-creations. AI profoundly impacts cultural and creative sectors and industries, changing practices, facilitating new ways of working and making innovative services and products possible. Artists, industry players, and cultural organisations increasingly use AI, for assistance in content creation, production, and management, to predict trends, personalise market content, engage audiences, enhance cultural heritage preservation and accessibility, and many more purposes. Cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI) [1] need to fully harness AI's potential to maintain relevance, expand their impact and value, increase competitiveness, and keep their vibrant, inclusive nature. Embracing and co-creating ethical AI solutions tailored to CCSI needs will, among other benefits, enable the automation of low-creativity tasks, allowing to increase focus on high-value activities that enhance creativity and productivity, thus unlocking unprecedented possibilities. Production times and costs can be reduced, market reach expanded, preservation, interpretation and inclusive access to cultural heritage enhanced, and new job categories could emerge. Although several initiatives are on the ground, a comprehensive understanding of enabling frameworks and factors and of what is still lacking in terms of data, standards, infrastructures, computing power, tools, knowledge and capacity for the CCSI to fully embrace the opportunities opened by AI is essential for effectively integrating AI technologies into CCSI practices and workflows. Proposals should assess the current level of AI readiness in the CCSI, investigate the specific barriers to AI adoption in the sectors, and highlight areas where AI can offer the most benefits. In continuous engagement with the sectors, based on the analysis of current practices and through concrete use cases, proposals should produce strategic guidance to extensively and seamlessly integrate AI into CCSI operations, enhancing efficiencies, averting risks, and facilitating cross-sector collaboration. Based on this analysis, they should develop a set of tailored tools designed to address the specific gaps and leverage the opportunities uncovered during the assessment. These tools should be strategically aligned with the sector's needs, ensuring they provide targeted solutions to enhance AI adoption and maximize its potential benefits. They should be scalable, affordable for smaller, less-resourced CCSI actors and accompanied by related documentation and training materials and documentation. Proposals should address one of the following two options, and are allowed to address both: Develop scalable pilots for innovative AI-enabled products and services across diverse segments of sectoral value chains, in cooperation with CCSI. These pilots are expected to address identified gaps in CCSI operations and prioritise solutions that catalyse innov Programme areas: Horizon Europe (HORIZON), Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness, Culture, creativity and inclusive society, Cultural Heritage Keywords: Artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, multi agent systems, Business models, Capacity building, Creativity management, Cultural heritage, cultural memory, Data and image processing, Digitalisation/ICT and cultural heritage, Entrepreneurship, Experimentally-driven research and innovation, High performance computing, Intangible cultural heritage, Knowledge transfer, Machine learning, statistical data processing and applications using signal processing (e.g. speech, image, video), Open innovation, Public administration, Social innovation, Tangible cultural heritage, Trustworthy ICT, Visual arts, performing arts, design, AI adoption, AI integration, CCSI, accessibility, audience engagement, automation, business models, capacity building, co-creation, content creation, creative industries, creative innovation, creators’ rights, cross-sector collaboration, cultural and creative sectors, cultural diversity, cultural inclusion., data-driven creativity, digital infrastructures, digital transformation, emerging jobs, ethical AI, federated data, heritage preservation, inclusive AI, innovation ecosystem, knowledge transfer, market reach, multilingual access, personalization, sustainable creative economy, sustainable models, underserved audiences, upskilling

USDA NIFA's SBIR/STTR Phase I program is the principal non-dilutive federal funding channel for small businesses commercializing agricultural technology, and it has become a significant AI funding source without ever being branded as one. The program is organized into ten topic areas rather than a single AI call, which means applicants must locate their AI work inside an agricultural problem area - plant production and protection, animal production and protection, forests and related resources, food science and nutrition, rural and community development, aquaculture, biofuels and biobased products, small and mid-size farms, and agriculturally related manufacturing and alternative and renewable energy. In practice this structure rewards proposals framed around a specific production constraint rather than around a modeling technique. Machine learning for crop and soil monitoring from remote sensing, computer vision for pathogen and pest detection, autonomous harvesting and weeding robotics, decision-support and yield-prediction systems, and sensor fusion for livestock health all fit comfortably, but reviewers are agricultural scientists and commercialization specialists, not ML researchers, and proposals that lead with architecture rather than with the farm-level problem tend to score poorly. Phase I awards run from $125,000 to $181,500 for feasibility work, a range that has drifted upward in recent cycles, with Phase II available to successful Phase I awardees for full R&D. Eligibility is the standard SBIR profile: a for-profit small business concern qualifying for research or R&D purposes, US-based and majority US-owned; the STTR variant requires formal cooperative R&D with a nonprofit research institution, which is the natural route for teams spinning technology out of a land-grant university. Timing is the practical difficulty - NIFA has historically released the Phase I RFA around July with applications due roughly twelve weeks later in early October, but exact dates shift year to year and the FY2026 date was still pending at the time of review. Applicants should register on SAM.gov and Grants.gov well in advance and subscribe to Grants.gov alerts, since the release-to-deadline window is short for a program that expects a commercialization plan alongside the technical narrative.

Building capacity to deploy the EEHRxF and digital health services and systems to support the rights of citizens and reuse of health data under EHDS is sponsored by European Commission — Digital Europe Programme. Expected Outcome: Expected outcomes and deliverables are: Work strand 1: Guidance for public authorities and healthcare providers to deploy, upgrade and operate digital health services and systems that support the rights of citizens and fulfil their obligations under the EHDS. Maintenance and expansion of a community of public authorities and healthcare providers based on common guidance for services and systems aligned with the objectives of the EHDS. The community should build upon one or more existing communities. Large-scale deployment of and/or capacity building for digital health services and systems that support the EEHRxF and the rights of citizens included in the EHDS. Work strand 2: A toolbox for data holders to support dataset description, data quality and utility labelling, and secondary use readiness in alignment with the EHDS. Establishment or expansion of existing community of data holders with the objective of supporting peer exchange, reuse of good practices and alignment of approaches for the creation and maintenance of dataset descriptions and data quality and utility labels for secondary use under the EHDS. Creation of dataset descriptions and data quality and utility labelling by data holders, such as public authorities and healthcare providers. Integration of datasets descriptions in the datasets catalogues of health data access bodies. Support to data holders in putting in place the organisational and technical arrangements required to make electronic health data available for secondary use under the EHDS, in line with applicable safeguards. Work strand 3: A training framework and training sessions to prepare service providers to support public authorities, healthcare providers and data holders in the implementation of the EHDS as described above, complementing and aligning with the work of the EEHRxF Support Centre, i2X Capacity Building for Secondary Use [1], and QUANTUM [2] . A business model, including the uptake strategy, for service providers that can support the adoption of the EEHRxF, the uptake of services and systems compatible with the EHDS and the creation and maintenance of dataset descriptions and data quality and utility labels. A community of trained service providers trained to support public authorities, healthcare providers and data holders in fulfilling requirements of the EHDS. 1 - https://hadea.ec.europa.eu/calls-tenders/capacity-building-secondary-uses-health-data-european-health-data-space_en 2 - https://quantumproject.eu/ Objective: Regulation (EU) 2025/327 of the European Parliament and of the Council (‘The European Health Data Space (EHDS) Regulation’) [1] reinforces the rights for citizens to access and control their personal electronic health data and supports their freedom of movement by improving the cross-border exchange of such data to ensure continuity of healthcare. These rights include the right of natural persons or their representatives to access their personal electronic health data through electronic health data access services, the right to insert information in their own electronic health record (EHR), the right to rectification, the right to portability and the right to restrict access to their electronic health data. The rights also contribute to the achievement of the target of 100% of Union citizens having access to their electronic health records by 2030, as set in the Digital Decade policy programme. For primary use, implementing these rights under the EHDS Regulation requires concrete action, capacity-building and training, to support the digital health community, particularly public authorities, healthcare providers, and service providers, particularly Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), in the deployment of digital health services and systems that support these rights (across all the priority data categories) and that adopt the EEHRxF (European Electronic Health Record Exchange Format), taking into account the specific circumstances of different c Programme areas: DIGITAL-1 Keywords: Civil society organisations, Continuing professional training, Creation of processes and new forms of cooperation, Curricular education activities with enterprises, Data Security and Privacy, Data reuse, Digital Services and Platforms, Education, Education and Training, Europe's innovation potential, Health and Ecosystem Services, Health care, Health data, Health information, Health sciences, IT skills and competence, Identification of skills needs, Knowledge transfer, Learning outcomes, Life sciences, Privacy, Public administration, Public administration innovation, Public sector information, Public sector innovation, Quality of education/educational products, Regulation, Stakeholder management, Teaching materials, Training of trainers (multiplication), Transfer of educational results/products to new sectors, eHealth, Capacity building for healthcare providers, Cascading funding mechanism for digital health, Certified digital health service providers, Citizen health data rights, Community of practice for health data holders, Data management best practices, Digital Decade Policy Programme (2030 targets, Digital health service deployment, EEHRxF, EHDS compliance for healthcare providers, EU digital health policy, Electronic health records (EHR) access, European Electronic Health Record Exchange Format, Guidance for EHR system deployment, HDABs, Health Data Access Bodies, Health data governance, Health data holder obligations under EHDS, Health data holders, Health data interoperability, Healthcare providers, Patient-controlled health records, Primary and secondary use of health data, Public authority digital health readiness, Right to access electronic health data, Right to data portability in healthcare, Right to rectification of health data, Right to restrict health data access, Staff training in digital health systems, Toolbox for health data secondary use, Training for SMEs in digital health, Training framework for EHDS compliance