EU Horizon Europe Projects: ELLIOT and ELIAS

Europe’s vision for open, trustworthy AI

ELLIS Alicante participates in two flagship EU Horizon Europe initiatives representing €38M+ in investment across 30+ leading European institutions: ELLIOT (open multimodal AI) and ELIAS (sustainable AI).

ELLIOT: Open multimodal foundation models

€25M | 2025-2029 | 30 partners across 12 countries Coordinator: CERTH, Greece

What it does

Creates powerful open-source AI that understands images, videos, text, sensor data, and satellite imagery—freely available to universities, startups, and public institutions without depending on big tech companies.

Uses Europe’s fastest supercomputers to build AI aligned with European values of transparency, privacy, and democratic control.

ELLIS Alicante’s role

  • Ensuring Fairness: Identifying and correcting biases that cause discrimination
  • Making AI Safe: Developing safeguards to prevent accidents and misuse
  • Understanding Humans: Studying how people interact with AI to design intuitive systems
  • Meeting EU Standards: Ensuring compliance with regulations protecting rights and privacy

Why it matters

Democratizes access to cutting-edge AI, preventing power concentration in a few corporations. Complete transparency—models, data, code, and methods are openly shared and verifiable.

ELIAS: AI for Sustainability

€13M total (€11M EU) | 2023-2027 | 32 partners across 16 countries Coordinator: Università di Trento, Italy

Twin Focus

AI for Sustainability: Climate modeling, energy optimization, sustainable urban planning, resource management, combating misinformation

Sustainable AI: Reducing AI’s carbon footprint, mitigating algorithmic discrimination, addressing cognitive biases, protecting individual rights

ELLIS Alicante’s role

  • Preventing Discrimination: Ensuring AI treats everyone fairly regardless of background
  • Protecting Privacy: Developing techniques that enable AI to learn from sensitive data without exposing individual information
  • Understanding Decision-Making: Studying how people’s thinking interacts with AI recommendations
  • Reducing Environmental Impact: Researching energy-efficient AI training methods

Why it matters

Addresses climate crisis and energy transition while ensuring AI development itself is responsible, fair, and aligned with human values.

Combined impact

Together, ELLIOT and ELIAS create Europe’s complete AI ecosystem:

✓ Technical Excellence + Ethical Grounding — Cutting-edge capabilities with sustainability and responsibility built in

✓ Open Innovation + Value Alignment — Open-source models serving society broadly, not narrow commercial interests

✓ Infrastructure + Governance — European supercomputing resources paired with ethical frameworks and democratic oversight

✓ Research Excellence + Talent Development — Both projects heavily invest in training next generation through ELLIS PhD programmes

Resources

ELLIOT Project: Website: elliot-ai.eu | EU CORDIS: Project 101214398

ELIAS Project: Website: elias-ai.eu | EU CORDIS: Project 101120237

Selected Publications:

2026

01/25
Riccio, P., Galati, F., Schweighofer, K., Garcia, N., & Oliver, N. (2026). ImageSet2Text: Describing Sets of Images through Text. Proceedings of the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on AI.
01/15
Doh, M., Gulati, A., Canali, C.., & Oliver, N. (2026). Aesthetics as Structural Harm: Algorithmic Lookism Across Text-to-Image Generation and Classification. Preprint.

2025

12/12
Alicante, ES
Gulati, A. (2025). Judging Books by Their Cover: The Impact of Facial Attractiveness on Humans and AI. PhD Thesis, University of Alicante.
Thesis Defense
12/12
Favero, L. A., Pérez-Ortiz, J. A., Käser, T., & Oliver, N. (2025). Leveraging Small LLMs for Argument Mining in Education: Argument Component Identification, Classification, and Assessment. The 25th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA'25).
11/05
Höltgen, B., & Oliver, N. (2025). Reconsidering Fairness Through Unawareness from the Perspective of Model Multiplicity. EAAMO 2025.
10/20
Madrid, ES
Gulati, A., D'Incà, M., Sebe, N., Lepri, B., & Oliver, N. (2025). Beauty and the Bias: Exploring the Impact of Attractiveness on Multimodal Large Language Models. Eighth AAAI/ACM Confernece on AI, Ethics and Society (AIES).
10/14
Dubrovnik, HR
Németh, G. D., Fanì, E., Ng, Y. J., Caputo, B., Lozano, M. A., Oliver, N., & Quadrianto, N. (2025). FedDiverse: Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning with Diversity-Driven Client Selection. 3rd IEEE International Conference on Federated Learning Technologies and Applications (FLTA25).
09/26
Alicante, ES
Arnaiz-Rodriguez, A. (2025). A Sociotechnical Approach to Trustworthy AI: from Algorithms to Regulation. PhD Thesis, University of Alicante.
Thesis Defense

Through ELLIOT and ELIAS, the European Union demonstrates that AI development can be simultaneously world-class and values-driven, technically excellent and ethically grounded. ELLIS Alicante is proud to contribute our expertise in human-centric AI to this European vision.