Nexus Forum 2025 – meet HaDEA-managed Horizon Europe projects

Nexus Forum 2025 took place in Brussels from 5 to 6 November. It focused on the European Commission’s technological priorities related to cloud, AI & sustainability. The forum explored technological synergies that shape our society and drive the economic and political future of the EU and its Member States.

Three Horizon Europe projects managed by HaDEA presented how they are addressing the technological challenges in these domains: SovreignEDGE.cognit, ENACT, and COGNIFOG.

• COGNIT is establishing a new distributed function-as-a-service (FaaS) paradigm for edge application management and smart orchestration. This AI-powered adaptive serverless framework will provide secure and portable access to a continuous data processing environment that abstracts the large-scale, geo-distributed, and low-latency capabilities provided by the cloud-edge continuum.
• ENACT is developing a Cognitive Computing Continuum that can address the needs for optimal resource management and dynamic scaling. By harnessing the power of AI-powered Graph Neural Networks and Deep Reinforcement Learning agents, the project will suggest optimal deployment configurations for hyper-distributed applications. The outcomes of these research and development activities will enhance European businesses competencies and upgrade IT services.
• COGNIFOG will provide a software solution as a Cognitive Fog Framework (Cognitive-Fog) for monitoring and analysing data flows along the IoT-edge-cloud continuum, enabling the processing of data closer to its source and providing real-time responses for many smart IoT applications. This will ultimately improve privacy, security, reliability, resilience, and safety, increasing trust in the technology.

Background

Horizon Europe is the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation with a budget of €95.5 billion. The programme facilitates collaboration and strengthens the impact of research and innovation in developing, supporting and implementing EU policies while tackling global challenges. It supports creating and better dispersing of excellent knowledge and technologies.

NexusForum.EU is a Coordination & Support Action co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement 101135632 and by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation (SERI). The event aims to offer concrete partnership opportunities, actionable insights, and a shared innovation roadmap for advancing Europe’s values-driven technological leadership in Artificial Intelligence along the whole HPC-Cloud-Edge-IoT Continuum.