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DUCA (Data Usage Control for empowering digital sovereignty for All citizens)

The DUCA project gives individuals, states, or the EU control over the encryption, privacy, access to data, and how and why this data is processed and used; DUCA will enable international, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration through staff exchanges and knowledge sharing.

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    DUCA (Data Usage Control for empowering digital sovereignty for All citizens) banner

    Funding

    HORIZON-MSCA-2021-SE-01-01 - MSCA Staff Exchanges 2021 GA number: 101086308

    Duration

    4 years

    Vertical alignment / Department

    Cybersecurity / Strategic Partnership Office

    Project Website

    Overview

    DUCA is a project within the Horizon Europe’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges (MSCA SE) programme. The main objective of MSCA SE is to help build Europe’s capacity for research and innovation and equip researchers at all stages of their career with new knowledge and skills, through mobility across borders and exposure to different sectors and disciplines.

    Coordinated by Walton Institute at SETU, the DUCA project – Data Usage Control for empowering digital sovereignty for All citizens – aims to promote innovative international, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration in research and innovation through exchanging staff and sharing knowledge and ideas. The focus of the project is data sovereignty: transparency and control over the protection, residence, and use of user data. It gives individuals, states, or the EU control over the encryption, privacy, access to data, and how and why this data is processed and used (including monetized) by actors in a value chain.

    Data sovereignty is a fundamental pillar to establish digital sovereignty. However, with the digital sovereignty ecosystem rapidly evolving, it is challenging to design interoperable, trustworthy data sharing technologies without forming interdisciplinary collaborations such as the one being developed in DUCA.

    Implementation

    Through the secondments organized and implemented by DUCA, the project plans to foster industry-academia cooperation and sustain new cooperation among partners in the area of data sovereignty, while also promoting staff professional development by broadening and improving their knowledge and skills through appropriate knowledge-sharing-generation activities, equipment, facilities, and real-life experimentation platforms, while reinforcing and complimenting their own background with active participation in a intersectoral programme enabled by Europe’s MSCA-SE.

    DUCA secondments are open to staff members from all partner organisations including Early-Stage Researchers and Experienced Researchers / Staff, covering researchers at any career stage, from PhD candidates to postdoctoral researchers, as well as administrative, technical, or managerial staff involved in research and innovation activities.

    Coordinated by the Walton Institute, partners of the four year DUCA project (2023 – 2026) are interdisciplinary specialists in cybersecurity, privacy, trust, data protection including South East Technological University (SETU), Ireland; Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche, Italy; Universidad de Malaga, Spain;  Universite Paul Sabatier Toulouse III, France;  Consortium Ubiquitous Technologies S.C.A.R.L; YL-Verkot Oy, Finland; Universita Degli Studi di Trento, Italy; Ubitech Design Planning Implementation & Sale of Information Works, Greece; and Fortiss GmbH, Germany.

    Key Objectives

    Objective 1: To value and consolidate a community of skilled staff on the wide area of data sovereignty, by means of proper secondments and training.

    Objective 2: To build a flexible and easy to use distributed framework for managing trustworthy data sharing agreements, which will enable data sovereignty of users.

    Objective 3: To develop and integrate several security and Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and to tailor these to the specific needs of the DUCA platform and use cases.

    Objective 4: To deploy and validate the overall distributed data usage control framework in several use cases: Smart grids; Usage control for Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI); and digital-twins data spaces.