Programme Category
Programme Name
Programme Description
The European Defence Fund (EDF) is the Commission’s initiative to support collaborative defence research and development, and to foster an innovative and competitive defence industrial base.
Identifier Code
Call
Summary
This topic has opened under the call ”Artificial intelligence” (EDF-2021-DIGIT-R).
The aim of this topic is to tackle the problem of robustness and frugality in military AI software components to facilitate the development of new systems and their adaptation to the evolution of their environment, including from user supervision, for a reasonable cost, with minimal intervention from expert developers, and without regression. State-of-the-art research on transfer learning, zero- or few-shot learning, active learning, domain adaptation, hybrid AI and other relevant topics should be leveraged to propose new methods to improve AI-based methods, while preserving high performance. The proposals must cover activities that aim to create, underpin and improve knowledge, products and technologies, including disruptive technologies for defence, which can achieve significant effects in the area of defence.
Detailed Call Description
The proposals must address in particular the following objectives:
- Design of relevant military use cases where trustworthy and frugal AI algorithms are needed (i.e. targeting specific tasks for which data-greedy algorithms are currently outperforming other methods), and for which representative data can be collected and performance can be measured in an objective way.
- Development of new methods for reducing the need for data and supervision to train and adapt AI systems (and simultaneous monitoring of the state of the art, which is important in this quickly evolving domain but should take place as a background activity integrated with system development), for example through:
- simulation and generative models,
- transfer, semi-supervised, self-supervised, and active learning,
- hybridisation with user-defined rules.
- Development of new methods for improving robustness guarantees by design, for example through:
- new algorithms increasing the robustness of existing neural networks methods that are intrinsically not robust,
- evaluation and surveillance of both the output space and the environment.
- Implementation of benchmarking experiments on the use cases to demonstrate the advantages and drawbacks of the proposed methods.
Call Total Budget
Financing percentage by EU or other bodies / Level of Subsidy or Loan
100%
Thematic Categories
- Education and training
- Research, Technological Development and Innovation
Eligibility for Participation
- Educational Institutions
- Researchers/Research Centers/Institutions
Eligibility For Participation Notes
The action shall be carried out by legal entities cooperating within a consortium of at least three eligible legal entities which are established in at least three different Member States or associated countries. At least three of those eligible legal entities established in at least two different Member States or associated countries shall not, during the entire period in which the action is carried out, be controlled, directly or indirectly, by the same legal entity and shall not control each other.
The admissibility and eligibility conditions are described under Article 9 and Article 10(4) of the EDF regulation.
Call Opening Date
Call Closing Date
National Contact Point(s)
Ministry of Defense
172-174 Strovolos Avenue, 2048 Strovolos, Nicosia,
website: https://mod.gov.cy/
Telephone: 22 807500
Email: defence@mod.gov.cy
Department of Research and Innovation
Phones: 22 807755, 22 807754
Email: research.innovation@mod.gov.cy
(Publish Date: 29/09/2021-for internal use only)
EU Contact Point
European Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space (DEFIS)
https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/defence-industry-and-space_en