Bulgarian entities named in selection of defence industrial projects to benefit from European Defence Fund
The European Commission (EC) announced on May 16 the results of the 2023 calls for proposals under the European Defence Fund (EDF) amounting to more than a billion euro of EU funding to support 54 outstanding joint European defence research and development projects.
The Bulgarian Defence Institute is among the bodies in a project named Nemo, which is to develop a system to perform a variety of Human Language Technologies (HLTs) to all official EU languages.
According to the project description “ Nemo will develop a system to perform a variety of HLTs including speech recognition, handwritten and printed documents recognition, keywords spotting, information retrieval, semantic analysis, named entity recognition, summarisation, and translation to all official EU languages.
“The system will have the form of a demonstrator and will be tailored on the needs of the defence sector. These functionalities will be adapted to the defence domain enabling them to deal with military-specific vocabulary and related semantics.”
The estimated cost of the Nemo project is more than 5.9 million euro.
Bulgarian firm KZY is involved in the Triton project, which “aims to overcome defence-specific obstacles associated to the automation of penetration tests, and fully automate the pre-and post-pentestingprocess”.
The EC said that the 54 selected projects will support technological excellence across a wide range of defence capabilities in critical areas, including cyber defence, ground, air and naval combat, protection of space-based assets or Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) defence.
“They will contribute to the EU’s capability priorities, like better situational awareness to ensure access to space, and to technologies for a future main battle tank,” the EC said.
A total of 581 legal entities from 26 EU member states and Norway participate in the selected proposals.
The EC said that it would now enter into grant agreement preparation with the consortia behind the selected proposals.
“Following the successful conclusion of this process and the adoption of the Commission’s award decision, the grant agreements will be signed before the end of the year and the projects will kick off the cooperation,” the EC said.
“Over the coming years, these cooperative projects will be instrumental in shaping the future landscape of European defence technology, fostering collaboration across borders, and boosting the innovation capacity of the European defence technological and industrial base,” it said.
(Photo: G Schouten de jel)
