Research Security: Trustworthy & Sovereign Science & Technologies for Open Societies
Framed under the overarching theme Research Security: Trustworthy and Sovereign Science and Technologies for Open Societies, the event aims to bring together interdisciplinary research teams across the 10 EUTOPIA alliance universities and 6 global partners.
The umbrella comfortably integrates life sciences, biomedicine and pharmacology research alongside computer science, engineering, law, social sciences and humanities. The operational core of the event focuses on call-anchored co-creation, leaving also space to explore other potential collaborations beyond the specific identified European calls. Supported directly by embedded research officers during the sessions, participants will have the opportunity to analyze call requirements, map complementary expertise across EUTOPIA partner institutions, and define clear leadership, timelines, and proposal roadmaps.
Participants will collaborate to share, group, and refine ideas while moving freely between discussions to discover common goals in a two-day event.
We will open the Research Days with Giulia Consonni (Policy Officer at The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities)on how universities can protect open science and academic freedom while taking security concerns seriously, and what that means for the democratic role of European universities.
Participation and programme structure
The activities will take place in Barcelona on 25–26 November 2026, starting early in the morning on 25 November and finishing around 15.30 on 26 November. As attendance during both days is crucial to the work process, we kindly ask the partner universities to select only those participants able to attend both days.
Each EUTOPIA partner university is invited to select up to four researchers, with a maximum of two researchers per topic and ideally one research-support officer, who will support the working tables alongside with the UPF research support officers. EUTOPIA Global partners will each have two guaranteed places including an optional research support officer and may nominate additional researchers to a reserve list.
The Research Days will take place at Ciutadella Campus, 24 Mercè Rodoreda Building, Polivalent room (ground floor).
Each sub-topic is anchored to specific Horizon Europe 2027 topics. When registering, nominees are asked to indicate the sub-topic they would like to work on and, where applicable, their interest in a specific call, together with a brief description of their proposed contribution. Their professional profiles will then be compiled and shared with registered Research Days participants to support event preparation and facilitate potential collaborations. Participants are expected to briefly introduce their expertise and interests before the discussions begin.
Sub-Topic Description
Situated within the overarching theme of Research Security: Trustworthy and Sovereign Science and Technologies for Open Societies, this sub-topic addresses the technological foundations of Europe’s digital sovereignty: secure, sustainable and autonomous computational infrastructures, and the capacity to protect them. It brings together two complementary strands. The first focuses on decentralised and federated AI processing, energy-efficient computing and the end-to-end quality and security of data across the model lifecycle, together with the development of safe and computationally efficient frontier AI models. The second focuses on how technological sovereignty translates into concrete defensive capabilities: post-quantum cryptography and digital trust, and artificial intelligence applied to cybersecurity. The aim is not to close European research but the opposite: to build the infrastructures and safeguards that allow it to remain open and collaborative precisely because it is trustworthy and not dependent on third parties.
Designed around concrete Horizon Europe topics, the table invites researchers in distributed systems, machine learning, language and multimodal models, cryptography, network and information security, and data governance to form competitive multi-partner consortia. Since HORIZON-CL4-2027-04-DATA-03 requires at least two complementary use cases in different domains, researchers who can bring a domain (for example, health data, language technologies or mobility) are equally welcomet this table.
The sub-topic targets four topics: two under Horizon Europe Cluster 4 (2027), on decentralised and federated AI data processing (HORIZON-CL4-2027-04-DATA-03) and on safe and efficient frontier AI (HORIZON-CL4-2027-04-DIGITAL-EMERGING-11); and two under Cluster 3 (2027), on secure post-quantum cryptography implementations and digital trust (HORIZON-CL3-2027-02-CS-ECCC-03) and on AI for cybersecurity applications (HORIZON-CL3-2027-02-CS-ECCC-01). Participants interested in the energy efficiency of AI processing in data centres (HORIZON-CL4-2027-04-DATA-09) or in the protection of critical infrastructures (HORIZON-CL3-2027-01-INFRA-01 and -02) may also use the table to explore these topics.
Target Horizon Europe Calls (Cluster 4 -Digital, Industry & Space; Cluster 3 –Civil Security for Society)
Sub-Topic Description
This sub-topic explores the legal, institutional, and digital pillars required to protect open democratic societies and democratic legitimacy. It addresses the systemic impact of AI, cyberviolence, and deepfakes on equality and social cohesion, alongside user-centred solutions to safeguard news media freedom and counter foreign information manipulation and polarization. Offering a focused social and political breadth, it invites researchers across constitutional law, AI ethics, media studies, political economy, gender studies, and sociology.
The sub-topic targets calls within Horizon Europe Cluster 2, including open proposals for revitalizing European democracy (HORIZON-CL2-2027-02-DEMOCRACY-09-two-stage), user-focused media freedom tools (HORIZON-CL2-2027-01-DEMOCRACY-06), and mitigating AI and deepfake impacts on inclusive societies (HORIZON-CL2-2027-01-DEMOCRACY-04)—which explicitly integrates gender studies and victim support capabilities. All calls under this table feature unrestricted eligibility, enabling full participation for global partners.
Target Horizon Europe Calls (Cluster 2 – Culture, Creativity & Inclusive Society)
Sub-Topic Description
This sub-topic explores the cultural, artistic, and technological pillars required to strengthen social cohesion, security, and the creative economy. It addresses the transformative potential of cultural heritage against disinformation and social fragmentation, alongside fair AI integration and impact-driven research across the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). With its distinct interdisciplinary breadth, it invites researchers from digital humanities, fine arts, cultural policy, AI ethics, media studies, and economic sociology.
The sub-topic targets calls within Horizon Europe Cluster 2, including the societal impact of cultural heritage for security and cohesion (HORIZON-CL2-2027-01-HERITAGE-07), fair AI support platforms for creatives (HORIZON-CL2-2027-01-HERITAGE-02), and realizing the full potential of CCIs and the arts through impact-driven research (HORIZON-CL2-2027-02-HERITAGE-09-two-stage). All calls under this table feature unrestricted eligibility, enabling full participation for global partners.
Target Horizon Europe Calls (Cluster 2 – Culture, Creativity & Inclusive Society)
Sub-Topic Description
This sub-topic addresses how the convergence of AI, advanced computational simulation, and predictive biomarker discovery is transforming the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of chronic diseases. By bridging biomedical modeling and engineering with life sciences research, the sub-topic establishes an interdisciplinary space to advance AI-driven biomedical data analysis, Virtual Human Twins, and clinical decision-support tools, maintaining a strong connection to European scientific sovereignty and trustworthy healthcare technologies.
Co-chaired across engineering/modeling and biomedicine, the sub-topic enables researchers to integrate computational physics, systems biology, multi-omics data, and clinical AI methodologies.
It targets key calls within Horizon Europe Cluster 1 Health (2027), including Virtual Human Twins to support prevention, diagnosis and clinical decision-making (HORIZON-HLTH-2027-03-TOOL-04), clinical trials testing innovative approaches for neurodegenerative diseases (HORIZON-HLTH-2027-02-DISEASE-14-two-stage), and AI-based predictive biomarkers to anticipate disease progression and treatment response in chronic non-communicable diseases (HORIZON-HLTH-2027-02-TOOL-01-two-stage). Participation is open in accordance with the general Horizon Europe rules for Cluster 1. Entities from associated countries may participate under the usual conditions. Entities from the United States are also eligible.
Target Horizon Europe Calls (Cluster 1 – Health)
If you have questions regarding the inscription, please, contact to eutopia@upf.edu