Software Technologies a) Research and Innovation Actions (RIA)Proposals will address at least one of the following two areas: Development tools & methods for interoperable, adaptive, secure and trustworthy software. Introduce effective processes and tools for building trustworthy software that adopt to rapidly changing requirements while maintaining key qualities (reliability, availability, performance, security, privacy etc.). They will consist of: New programming models and software engineering tools with increased validation, verification and testing capabilities for ensuring trustworthiness while incorporating inherent semantic reasoning, self-learning and self-healing mechanisms. Focus should also be given to transparent and unbiased algorithmic decision making for the end-users (including transparency for regulatory control purposes) and the integration of evaluation and control functions in the algorithms by design.Advanced development environments addressing the increasing complexity of modern software based systems, facilitating faster software development and increased integration between continued development and operations, while maintaining reliability, and clearly indicating and confronting with cyber-threats and weak points in terms of cybersecurity. Advanced Software systems and architectures: Self-managed software facilitating the semantic adaptation of entities to dynamically changing contexts and coping with different situations, cyberattacks and hardware and software failures.Software systems that effectively deal with resources complexity and volatility. Proposed solutions should address the operation in highly heterogeneous environments with wide geographic distribution, loose, weak or unreliable connectivity between key service components, unpredictable affinity to data sources and cyber-dangerous environments. The focus should be in optimizing and pooling resources across disparate infrastructures to deliver prescribed levels of quality of service and security. The proposals should demonstrate the applicability and viability of the proposed solution across multiple application domains. The use and development of open source software will be encouraged where appropriate to further promote openness, facilitate the sharing of project results and accelerate innovation in Europe through the introduction of novel products and services.The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 3 and 5 million would allow this area to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.b) Coordination and Support Actions (CSA)Coordinate stakeholders in the area of software technologies, digital infrastructures and cybersecurity. Act as support to R&D programmes/activities by disseminating project results and organising scientific and policy events, developing research and innovation roadmaps.The Commission considers that a proposal requesting a contribution from the EU of EUR 1 million would allow this area to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts. The increased complexity of present and emerging ICT systems poses several challenges at software and hardware level including new requirements in terms of integration and cybersecurity. Users require seamless connectivity, abundant computing power and unlimited access to data independently of the underlying infrastructure. Increased levels of adaptability is becoming more and more essential in modern ICT systems in order to manage the needs of highly complex and dynamic environments pushing for continued development and operation (DevOps). Increasing trust, security, reliability while keeping system performance and reducing energy consumption has become non trivial, in a world where billions of devices processing zetabytes of data have to be managed and increased transparency in algorithmic decision making is required. It is therefore required to find new ways of managing this unprecedented complexity in software systems throughout shortened lifecycle: from requirements analysis and design, to development and testing and up to deployment and operations across highly heterogeneous and dynamically self-reconfiguring systems. a) Research and Innovation Actions (RIA)Increased capacity of the European software industry to exploit the capabilities of software-defined infrastructures at middleware and application layer.Improved reliability and cybersecurity of software developed with those tools, which will result in the reduction of loses for software failures or attacks. Investing in the best tools to fight the aforementioned challenges is multiplied has a wide effectExpand research and innovation potential in software technologies & infrastructures while overcoming fragmentation in the European supply base, optimizing investments and use of resources to yield multi-domain software-based products and related software services.Contribute to EU's technology independence in Software. b) Coordination and Support Actions (CSA)Creation of a sustainable European forum of stakeholders representing the Software research, industry and end users.
