CVC takes part in ELLIOT, a Horizon Europe flagship project for robust general-purpose AI

CVC will be a partner in ELLlOT, a Horizon Europe-funded project aiming to develop next-generation Multimodal Generalist Foundation Models, AI systems capable of learning general knowledge and patterns from massive amounts of data of various types — from videos, images, and text to sensor signals, industrial time series, and satellite feeds —  and efficiently transferring the generic knowledge learned in generalist manner to a wide variety of downstream tasks. ELLIOT’s models will empower new applications in the domains of media, earth modelling, robotic perception, autonomous driving, computer engineering and workflow automation.

With 30 partners from 12 countries and a €25 million budget, ELLIOT will play a key role in reinforcing Europe's position in trustworthy, open, and sovereign AI. The project will officially start in July 2025.

ELLIOT will closely cooperate with European and international open-source and open science communities like LAION and open-sci, benefiting from the strong expertise on open foundation models and datasets necessary for their creation established in those networks. These tight links will ensure staying on the frontiers of fast progressing research and making the whole pipeline for foundation model research and development - dataset composition, training, fine-tuning and evaluation - fully open and reproducible, such that it can be validated and easily adapted for specific industry and public sector needs.

Leveraging Europe’s world-class supercomputing infrastructure — including EuroHPC supercomputers like JUPITER, Leonardo, MareNostrum, and LUMI as well the Alps supercomputing infrastructure of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre — ELLIOT will combine real and synthetic data from public internet and trusted sources, including European Data Spaces, to train and deliver a family of open trustworthy multimodal generalist foundation models along with open datasets and methods. This will enable the AI community in Europe and worldwide to build, study, deploy, extend and evaluate such models and the whole pipeline necessary for their creation in a fully reproducible manner at a level and scale that is currently not possible in open public domain. In that way, ELLIOT will act as a catalyst for open-source and open science in AI, and substantially strengthen Europe’s Sovereign AI vision.

The consortium is coordinated by the Information Technologies Institute of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas and includes powerhouse academic and research institutions, alongside innovative SMEs, public stakeholders and non-profit organisations with diverse expertise.

With ELLIOT, Europe positions itself at the frontier of open, trustworthy, and socially beneficial artificial intelligence — capable of driving innovation in critical areas such as media, Earth observation, autonomous systems, and public services.