The EDF “NEMO” proposal has been funded by the European Commission!
Zanasi & Partners will be the Scientific and Technical Coordinator of the recently awarded NEMO (laNguagE Modules develOpment) proposal, funded under the European Defence Fund (EDF) program.
“With NEMO, the sixth project in Defence matters for Z&P, we are strengthening our position as a key leader in SME European defence research. This is a natural extension of the company’s desire to support the defence and security of Italy and of our allies!” says Z&P’s President, Ing. Alessandro Zanasi.
In 2023 the European Commission called for “agile and robust Human Language Technologies (HTLs) for Defence” with the request to build a “demonstrator” of these technologies, namely a set of tools immediately usable by the military end-users, without any intervention by the developer. To this end, the call EDF-2023-LS-RA-CHALLENGE-DIGIT-HLTP was published last year.
The project proposal will leverage sophisticated AI methods based on Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLMs). To meet the requirements, a multinational consortium has been established including many academic and industry institutions, military academies, and think-tanks. NEMO has the objective of developing a software demonstrator offering a complete range of different HLT functionalities, with an interactive and user-friendly interface for user-driven adaptation and with special attention to AI explainability and performance evaluation.
An innovative approach based on three main pillars will be implemented to answer the needs in the field of HTLs.
- First, the most advanced algorithms and expertise developed by industrial and academic institutions at the forefront of HLTs will be used as starting points for NEMO.
- Second, the developed tools will be adapted to the Defence domain, characterised by its own vocabulary and semantics. Hence, the partners in the defence sector will play a crucial role in the project proposal.
- Lastly, the proposal must enable users to perform data annotation, correction and validation in accordance with the requirements defined in the call. To this end, an approach based on Transformer Models and Large Language Models will be developed.
The 5 years project will rely on 15 partners from 9 countries, whose roles in the proposal are the following:
- Coordinator: SINTEF (Norway)
- Scientific and Technological coordinator: Zanasi & Partners-Z&P (Italy)
- Defence Partners:
- Bulgarian Defence Institute “Professor T. Lazarov” (Bulgaria)
- National Defence University “Carol I” (Romania)
- ICSA Foundation (Italy)
- Defence Research Institute-DRI (France)
- Technological Partners:
- Etra (Spain)
- Lingsoft (Finland)
- Lingsoft Language Services (Finland)
- Technical Research Centre VTT (Finland)
- Kraintech (France)
- Read Coop (Austria)
- University of Innsbruck (Austria)
- Transfortec (Netherlands)
- Tecoms (Italy)