GLASS

GLASS is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Union to create a new paradigm for the sharing and transfer of personal information, with the citizen in control. It will provide a distributed framework for sharing common services of public administrations across the EU for citizens, businesses and governments. It started on January 1st 2021, and will complete its funded phase on December 31st 2023.

On February 17, 2022 an online meeting was held between representatives of the GLASSS and QualiChain projects. During this meeting, potential synergies between the two projects were discussed and agreed, including joint stakeholder activities.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

OU, NTUA

IMPULSE

The IMPULSE project (Identity Management in PUbLic SErvices) focuses on AI and blockchain disruptive technologies and their impacts on eID. The project will perform a user-centric and multidisciplinary analysis on the integration of such technologies in EU public services. IMPULSE will assess benefits, risks, costs and restrictions and consider socioeconomic, legal and ethical impacts. The project will involve Digital Innovation Hubs and implement six innovative case studies to produce an integrated AI and blockchain supporting GDPR-compliant eID and actionable roadmaps for the sustainable adoption of advanced eID technologies.

On October 28, 2021 an online meeting was held between representatives of the QualiChain, IMPULSE, HECAT, and CO3 projects, which are funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-02-2018-2019-2020 – Transformative impact of disruptive technologies in public services. During this meeting, the project representatives presented their respective projects and discussed potential areas of collaboration. Several such areas were identified, especially regarding the sharing of lessons learned and best practices from the pilots conducted in each project, as well as the co-organisation of dissemination events and activities.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

OU

HECAT

The HECAT project (Disruptive Technologies Supporting Labour Market Decision Making) is developing new technology to support labour market decision-making. A new user experience platform will build on existing basic algorithmic techniques used by some European public employment systems administrations to deliver labour market insights directly to unemployed citizens, and so is built on European values of open data, collaboration, transparency and citizen participation. By focusing on job quality and sustainable employment, the project will bring insight to policymakers.

On October 28, 2021 an online meeting was held between representatives of the QualiChain, IMPULSE, HECAT, and CO3 projects, which are funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-02-2018-2019-2020 – Transformative impact of disruptive technologies in public services. During this meeting, the project representatives presented their respective projects and discussed potential areas of collaboration. Several such areas were identified, especially regarding the sharing of lessons learned and best practices from the pilots conducted in each project, as well as the co-organisation of dissemination events and activities.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

OU

CO3

The CO3 project (Digital Disruptive Technologies to Co-create, Co-produce and Co-manage Open Public Services along with Citizens) aims at assessing the benefits and risks of disruptive technologies, namely: blockchain, augmented reality, geolocated social network, interactive democracy tools, and gamification, in the co-creation, co-production and co-management of public services with citizens as PAs partners. Augmented Reality becomes a single shared layer on the urban passage and part of citizen’s public life, AR enables the manipulation of financial objects built on blockchains, information sharing on a map, online deliberations and so constitutes an infrastructure for service co-production by citizens. CO3 pilots the technologies’ ecosystem of in three sites: Paris, Turin and Athens.

On October 28, 2021 an online meeting was held between representatives of the QualiChain, IMPULSE, HECAT, and CO3 projects, which are funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-02-2018-2019-2020 – Transformative impact of disruptive technologies in public services. During this meeting, the project representatives presented their respective projects and discussed potential areas of collaboration. Several such areas were identified, especially regarding the sharing of lessons learned and best practices from the pilots conducted in each project, as well as the co-organisation of dissemination events and activities.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

OU

CHAISE

The core mission of the CHAISE project is to develop a strategic approach on blockchain skills development for Europe, as well as to deliver future-proof training solutions, in order to tackle blockchain skill shortages and to respond to the current and future skill needs of the European Blockchain workforce. Its duration is four years starting now. CHAISE will develop a Blockchain training programme to address technical, non-technical & cross-discipline skill needs. Furthermore, all the developed learning materials will be made available to everyone via a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).

On October 5 2021, ASEP met online with members from the Greek team of the European research project CHAISE in order to present QualiChain. The Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs is one of the project’s partners. Ιn this context, Sandra Tirovola and Eleni Kakna, IT and Computer Science teachers in secondary education, met with Panagiotis Zarafidis, John Dellagramatikas and Nina Trifonopoulou from ASEP, οn the occasion of the drafting of a questionnaire that aims at identifying all Blockchain initiatives taking place in Greece. Very interesting questions were asked during the interview that gave the Greek pilot’s members the opportunity to present QualiChain’s overall scope of work, its partners, as well as its objectives, the expected outcomes, indicative KPIs etc. Βoth sides agreed that cooperation has interesting prospects.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

ASEP

European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI)

Since 2018, the EU Member States (with Norway and Lichtenstein) and the European Commission have joined forces to form the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP). The Partnership is building a European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). The vision is to leverage blockchain to the creation of cross-border services for public administrations and their ecosystems to verify information and make services trustworthy. Since 2020, EBSI is deploying a network of distributed blockchain nodes across Europe, supporting applications focused on selected use-cases. EBSI is the first EU-wide blockchain infrastructure, driven by the public sector, in full respect of European values and regulations.

INESC-ID is strongly involved in EBSI as Miguel Correia is national representative at the EBP since 2018 and currently one of its co-chairs. INESC-ID, NTUA and OU are following the EBSI's Diplomas Use Case that aims to support the verification of electronic university diplomas at European level. Therefore, in QualiChain we are monitoring the evolution of EBSI. We are especially interested in EBSI as university diploma verification is one of the functions of the QualiChain platform (among many other functions).

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

INESC-ID, NTUA, OU

WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management: Investment on Blockchain Certificates

Research on finding a solution for blockchain certificates for WHU.

WHU has had a series of meetings/workshops with QualiChain representatives, with the objective to investigate and identify potential synergies, such as engagement of WHU in the QualiChain testing/piloting activities, commercial exploitation of the QualiChain solution in the post-project era, as well as potential collaboration in future educational or research initiatives.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

NTUA, ATOS

intelcomp

A Competitive Intelligence Cloud/High Performance Computing Platform for Artificial Intelligence-based Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Making.

Participation in the IntelComp consultation workshop on Science, Technology and Innovation policies for Artificial Intelligence technologies.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

NTUA

Hellenic Blockchain Hub

The Hellenic Blockchain Hub is a non-profit network of executives from the public and private sector aimed at the dissemination of knowledge on the blockchain – DLT technology. The main objective of the Hellenic Blockchain Hub as an organization and network is to contribute to the promotion of blockchain/DLT technologies (Distributed Ledger Technologies & Distributed Technologies) and the development of standards and applications in sectors of the economy and society and be a center for knowledge acquisition as well as a platform for dialogue.

The Supreme Council for Personnel Selection (ASEP) and the Hellenic Blockchain Hub agreed to build cooperation by signing an MoU which defines the frame for future collaboration between the two entities with regards to the promotion of blockchain technology in Greece. The areas of cooperation may include participation in joint working groups and organization of scientific seminars, conferences and workshops, publications in scientific journals and conferences, participation in policy and strategy papers, successful case studies, participation in research programs, investigation and promotion of good practices as well as utilization of field research data.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

ASEP

DE4A (Digital Europe for All)

DE4A is validating a comprehensive, holistic, flexible, EU-scalable approach to develop and demonstrate the potential and benefits of securely sharing relevant-only data once-only across digital-by-default, common shared services in line with users’ expectations of giving them access to public services online and making online public services more trustworthy and secure (EU citizenship consultation of 2015). DE4A takes the reality as its starting ground – the needs and the capacities of the Member States, ensures compliance with all relevant regulations (SDGR, GDPR, eIDAS, Services Directive, among others) as well as EU and MS strategic eGovernment and Single Market goals and aims to transform governance towards open collaboration and innovation, adaptable to depart from the variety of current environments.

On November 27 2020, ATOS as partner of QualiChain and coordinator of DE4A and Kraken projects, organised a workshop to present all three projects and relevant pilots, with the objective to enable cross-fertilisation of ideas, share lessons-learnt and identify potential synergies that may arise. The workshop initiated discussions between the 3 projects on potential synergies and collaborative work moving forward. The following outcomes were derived from the workshop:
• We need to keep monitoring GDPR developments and how these affect blockchain-related issues.
• How do we ensure that the issuer of the academic titles is indeed credible.
• Keep paying attention to the relevant European initiatives and how these evolve, such as Europass, DEAC, etc.
• QualiChain shared the list of chosen technologies along with the purpose and advantages of each one.
All 3 projects will provide, amongst others, decentralised solutions with the ability to share and verify individual qualifications while respecting the individual’s privacy. The 3 projects will continue to be in close communication and will be sharing their technological and piloting outcomes.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

ATOS, NTUA, INESC-ID, AMA, TIB, ASEP

KRAKEN (BroKeRage and MArKet platform for pErsoNal data)

KRAKEN is developing a trusted and secure personal data platform with state-of-the-art privacy aware analytics methods (with guarantees on metadata privacy, including query privacy). KRAKEN aims to enable the sharing, brokerage, and trading of potentially sensitive personal data, by returning the control of this data to citizens (data providers) throughout the entire data lifecycle. KRAKEN aims to standardise different IT solutions thanks to featuring the (privacy-preserving) integration of independently obtained data sources from subjects consenting to different analyses. The project combines, interoperates, and extends the best results from two existing mature computing platforms developed within two H2020 actions: CREDENTIAL and MyHealthMyData.

On November 27 2020, ATOS as partner of QualiChain and coordinator of DE4A and Kraken projects, organised a workshop to present all three projects and relevant pilots, with the objective to enable cross-fertilisation of ideas, share lessons-learnt and identify potential synergies that may arise. The workshop initiated discussions between the 3 projects on potential synergies and collaborative work moving forward. The following outcomes were derived from the workshop:
• We need to keep monitoring GDPR developments and how these affect blockchain-related issues.
• How do we ensure that the issuer of the academic titles is indeed credible.
• Keep paying attention to the relevant European initiatives and how these evolve, such as Europass, DEAC, etc.
• QualiChain shared the list of chosen technologies along with the purpose and advantages of each one.
All 3 projects will provide, amongst others, decentralised solutions with the ability to share and verify individual qualifications while respecting the individual’s privacy. The 3 projects will continue to be in close communication and will be sharing their technological and piloting outcomes.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

ATOS, NTUA, INESC-ID, AMA, TIB, ASEP

SEAL

SEAL aims to combine the benefits of Member-State backed citizen (natural person identification and authentication through eIDAS) and student and researchers identities (eduGAIN from GÉANT and European Student Identifier from European Student Card) to enable a cross-sector interoperability between eIDAS and Higher Education/Research domains. This will be achieved through the deployment of the SEAL linking service platform, which will establish inter-linking mechanisms between different identities in order to support authentication mechanisms for multiple identities. SEAL identity linking service will centralise the checks of the identities on a trusted third party and provide common query interfaces so the burden of having to compare/validate the match between two identities is taken out of the services to a dedicated platform.

Collaboration between QualiChain and SEAL was established since the beginning of the QualiChain project, as SEAL is a project coordinated by ATOS. Upon a series of discussions between representatives of the QualiChain and SEAL projects, it has been concluded that the SEAL project covers an open issue of QualiChain, namely the identity validation, and can be leveraged in order to offer an embedded unique experience to the users of the QualiChain platform.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

ATOS, INESC-ID, NTUA

BlockAdemic

The BlockAdemic project aims to create a digital distributed cybersecurity system for the certification and verification of educational activities, qualifications and skills in the field of higher education and lifelong learning, creating an inviolable educational passport. BlockAdemic uses sophisticated tools of blockchain technology to ensure the required degree of cybersecurity and trust at both user and institutional level. It reinforces the logic of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) and the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), which is adapted and implemented in educational scenarios for pilot runs. The recording of educational activities will cover both specific and general skills, an innovation that has not ever been implemented on any other educational application.

On January 29 2021, Dr. Katerina Zourou (representing BlockAdemic and Web2Learn) met Dr. Panagiotis Kokkinakos (representing QualiChain and DSSLab NTUA), with the objective to enable cross-fertilisation of ideas, share lessons-learnt and identify potential synergies that may arise. This meeting acted as the first out of a potential series of discussions between the initiatives, as potential synergies and collaborative work moving forward is envisioned. Dr. Zourou and Dr. Kokkinakos will continue being in close communication and will be sharing their initiatives’ outcomes.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

NTUA

IMPILO

IMPILO aims to provide an innovative solution to the chronic problems of the health system by facilitating the management of sensitive health data, the communication between doctors and patients, and the existence of personalised therapies. IMPILO’s objective is the implementation of: 1. The Global Medical Blockchain (GMB), an open and decentralized network of medical data, which will leverage the blockchain technology in order to act as a repository of transactions related to health data, and hence enable the creation and usage of Electronic Health Folders. 2. The Impilo application, which will manage the interactions of doctors and patients not only with each other, but also with the platform. The Impilo application will also offer innovative services. For example, it will enable the maintenance of Electronic Health Folders, direct communication and follow-up of patients, visit planning, tele-counseling, and sharing of critical health data.

Both IMPILO and QualiChain leverage blockchain in order to provide solutions to the chronic problems of the health and education/human resources management systems respectively. Taking that into consideration, QualiChain and IMPILO shared their knowledge and experience regarding Hyperledger Iroha and blockchain’s best practices. The 2 projects will continue being in close communication and will be sharing their technological outcomes.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

NTUA

W3C Credentials Community Group

The mission of the W3C Credentials Community Group is to explore the creation, storage, presentation, verification and user control of credentials. The group focuses on a verifiable credential created by an issuer about a subject (a person, group, or thing) and seeks solutions inclusive of approaches, such as self-sovereign identity, presentation of proofs by the bearer, data minimisation, as well as centralised, federated and decentralised registry and identity systems. The group is drafting and incubating Internet specifications for further standardisation and prototyping and testing reference implementations.

Members of the OU team have joined the W3C Credentials Community Group and contribute to its activities. The work of the group on Verifiable Credentials is informing the OU technological and piloting work in QualiChain. On July 13th 2020, representatives from the OU team presented QualiChain and their latest work on Verifiable Credentials and Blockchains in a conference call between all members of the W3C group. In particular, Alexander Mikroyannidis presented an overview of the QualiChain project, its scope and objectives, as well as the pilot conducted by the OU on lifelong learning. The slides from this presentation are available here.

Partners Involved in this Collaboration:

OU