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ELEVATE: European League of Advanced Digital Skills Academies DIGITAL-2026-SKILLS-09-LEAGUE-OF-ACADEMIES

The European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) has launched the 9th Digital Europe Call for Advanced Digital Skills (DIGITAL-2026-SKILLS-09) under the Digital Europe Programme to fund projects that strengthen advanced digital skills in line with the EU's Digital Decade and Competitiveness Compass goals. The first topic of the call aims at establishing the European League of Advanced Digital Skills Academies (ELEVATE) — an overarching framework designed to guide governance, enhance coordination, and ensure coherence among various sectoral initiatives. ELEVATE will foster synergies and support the effective implementation of objectives across existing efforts such as the Cybersecurity Skills Academy, the EuroHPC Skills Community, and the newly created advanced digital skills academies in AI, Virtual Worlds, Quantum, and Semiconductors. It will also align with other EU-funded projects focused on advanced digital skills, including DIGITAL-funded specialised education programmes, in order to reduce fragmentation. The consortium is expected to establish an agile governance structure and stakeholder engagement plan, develop quality and certification frameworks for ICT education, create mentoring, fellowship, and alumni networks, conduct market analysis on advanced digital skills supply and labour demand, and implement a communication strategy and repository hosted on the DSJP to share outcomes and best practices EU-wide.

Second call for innovation studies for the development of generative AI models

The FFplus project, funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, aims to strengthen the competitiveness and innovation capacity of European SMEs by enabling them to use high-performance computing (HPC) to advance digital R&D and business processes. This second open call targets SMEs and start-ups skilled in AI and HPC, supporting them in developing large-scale generative AI models to boost technological growth, innovation, and scalability across Europe. Through this call, FFplus will fund innovation studies including projects on generative AI such as large language models (LLMs). The proposed innovation studies are expected to demonstrate full alignment with FFplus objectives, define a clear success vision showing the business impact of HPC use, and provide comprehensive descriptions of training datasets, model characteristics, and expected performance. Applicants must identify and propose mitigation strategies for risks such as bias, hallucination, or model drift, in line with EU trustworthy AI guidelines.