The European Commission (EC) wants to support the development of digital services for European infrastructure. To this end, the Connecting European Facility – Telecom (CEF – Telecom) program has a fund of 31.4 million euros to encourage digital transformation in member states, in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. This first contest call ends on May 12th.
In all, the fund is divided into six sectors: automatic translation, blockchain, eDelivery, eIdentification & eSignature, IA, Internet and Europe's virtual library, Europeana. The highest amount goes to projects that aim to make the Internet safer for children and young people, reaching 11 million euros.
The program also makes available 6.5 million euros for the implementation of master's programs specialized in AI. Four million euros will go towards solutions that make European services more diverse with regard to spoken languages.
Three million euros each are reserved for the areas of the Europeana platform and eIdentification & eSignature. The lowest amount, of 900 thousand euros, will be given to projects that allow public and private administrations to share electronic data with other institutions.
According to the EC, the winners will be announced in October 2020, in a call managed by the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency. The application period has been open since February 28 and, until the end of this year, CEF – Telecom will provide a total of 67 million euros to promote the digital transformation in Europe.
In order to support projects for the implementation of digital services infrastructures across Europe, CEF – Telecom aims to create European networks that will make the single digital market work in practice. So it supports, for example, initiatives related to AI and blockchain.
