Announcement of the SECURED Project Open Call

We are excited to announce the Open Call for the SECURED project. The SECURED project is committed to the advancement of multiparty computation, homomorphic encryption, data anonymization, and synthetic data generation, particularly emphasizing secure and unbiased artificial intelligence and data analytics within the healthcare sector.

About the SECURED Project

The SECURED project aims to overcome current limitations in secure multiparty computation and data anonymization, enhancing their practical capabilities and performance. By addressing these challenges, SECURED will scale up privacy technologies, improve algorithmic efficiency, and support health technology providers, particularly SMEs, in implementing privacy-enhancing technologies. The project will focus on real-world applications, showcased in four health-related use cases: real-time tumor classification, telemonitoring for children, synthetic data generation for education, and access to genomic data.

Objectives of the SECURED Project

1. Secure Multiparty Computation (SMPC) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE): Develop scalable SMPC and HE schemes for AI-based health data analytics tools suitable for realistic health domain scenarios.
2. Advanced Anonymization: Provide advanced anonymization methods for health datasets and AI models and assess anonymity using de-anonymization/re-identification techniques.
3. Synthetic Data Generation: Create adaptable and versatile tools and services for generating synthetic health/medical data, including synthetic images.
4. Federated Learning Infrastructure: Establish the SECURED Privacy-Preserving and Robust Federated-Learning Infrastructure to support scalable health-data-related services and tools, ensuring unbiased AI training.
5. Integration and Innovation Hub: Integrate SECURED components into a framework offering tools, services, training, and knowledge for researchers, EU data hubs, innovators, and end-users.
6. Legal and Ethical Evaluation: Assess the legal and ethical aspects of cross-country usage of anonymized and synthetic datasets and AI models.
7. Validation and Demonstration: Validate and demonstrate SECURED solutions with cross-border EU health data hubs, offering anonymized data and privacy-preserving data analysis for training and education.
8. Dissemination and Business Model: Develop a viable dissemination, exploitation, and business model to support the continuation of a privacy-preserving collaborative health data ecosystem beyond the project’s end.

About the Open Call

The Open Call is designed to involve external third parties employing AI solutions in line with SECURED’s objectives. The Open Call has three main goals:

1. Validation: Validate SECURED solutions with healthcare and AI stakeholders external to the consortium, using continuous feedback to refine and enhance the solutions, thus increasing the variety and volume of processed data.
2. Collaboration: Foster ongoing collaboration with external AI/ML stakeholders, data providers, research teams, and SMEs to share and advance knowledge, enabling iterative development of solutions.
3. Awareness and Participation: Raise awareness of SECURED’s activities through extensive outreach efforts, encouraging widespread participation by a broad community to maintain the project’s momentum beyond its completion.

Key Activities and Support

The Open Call tasks will involve:

• Executing the evaluation of Open Call applications.
• Providing guidelines, recommendations, and technical details for the Open Call.
• Designing the legal and contractual aspects.
• Realizing the Open Call and reporting based on consortium templates/guidelines.
• Holding at least two meetings between the consortium and external parties to set up requirements and present findings.

Funding and Meetings

A dedicated budget of €150,000 has been reserved to fund the selected external parties, compensate external evaluators to ensure a thorough and collaborative evaluation process, and organize one final showcase meeting in an outreach event of the project. Following the Horizon Europe requirements for financial support to third parties, the selected external parties will be funded up to €26,000 each for the project with an additional €1,500 for travel costs. This will assist in the wider evaluation and acceptance of SECURED solutions in the EU data-driven health research and innovation ecosystem. If selected for funding, the project is required to be presented in person at the HIPAC 2025 Workshop.

Funding

Details of the SECURED Open Call for proposals are as follows:

Total allocated budget: 150,000 euros

Maximum funding per project: 26,000 euros + 1,500 euros for travel costs to the final event

 Timeline

Call for proposals launch: 1/8/2024

Proposal submission deadline: 31/10/2024, 17:00 CET

Notification of selected projects: 30/11/2024

Project implementation period: 1/12/2024-1/5/2025

Completion of works: 1/5/2025

We welcome proposals from individuals, organizations, and groups who are passionate about making a positive impact in reliable and unbiased AI and data analytics in the healthcare industry. Proposals will be evaluated based on their creativity, feasibility, impact, and alignment with our organization’s mission.

Stay tuned for more details on the SECURED Open Call and join us in advancing secure and private healthcare data analytics: you can subscribe to the news mailing list by entering your name and e-mail in this link: https://list.uva.nl/mailman/listinfo/news-secured-open-call. Together, we can make significant strides in privacy-preserving technologies for the well-being, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up care in healthcare.

For further information, please contact us via our Open Call email: secured-open-call@list.uva.nl.