ELLIOT, a Flagship Initiative to Research and Develop Open Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Robust Artificial Intelligence Operation in the Real World

ELLIS Alicante is one of the 30 leading AI organizations from 12 European countries participating in this €25 million 4-year EU HE research and innovation action.

A new chapter in European Artificial Intelligence (AI) research begins today with the launch of ELLIOT – European Large Open Multi-Modal Foundation Models For Robust Generalization On Arbitrary Data Streams. Funded under the Horizon Europe programme with a €25 million grant, this four-year Research and Innovation Action will bring together 30 leading AI organisations from 12 European countries to pioneer the next generation of trustworthy, general-purpose AI models with strong generalization and reasoning, built for real-world, data-rich applications, adhering to open-source research and development. The Kick-Off event starts today at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) in Thessaloniki, Greece.

At the heart of ELLIOT is the development of open Multimodal Generalist Foundation Models: AI systems designed to learn 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 transfer the generic knowledge learned in generalist manner to a wide variety of downstream tasks. Unlike current foundation models that face significant challenges in terms of generalisation capabilities and support for multimodal data, ELLIOT’s models will be capable of robust generalisation across conditions not seen during the training, coping well with dynamic, noisy, and temporally-evolving multimodal data streams.

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.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach that promotes ethical and trustworthy AI research and development, ELLIOT will also investigate technical, legal & social challenges of multimodal foundation models, including EU regulation, societal and ethical impact, fairness and bias mitigation, privacy concerns, diversification, explainability, and security. ELLIS Alicante, with its leadership in human-centric AI, will contribute with research efforts in algorithmic fairness, transparency, AI safety, human-AI interaction and the ethical implications of AI. In the words of Dr. Nuria Oliver, Director and co-founder of ELLIS Alicante:

“ELLIOT is an extraordinary opportunity for Europe to not only compete with big tech in the development of multimodal large language models, but especially to open the path for a technological innovation that is aligned with European values, placing the wellness of humans and the planet at its core. This aspiration is fully aligned with the mission and vision of ELLIS Alicante”.

Moreover, ELLIOT’s results will empower new breakthrough applications and strengthen Europe’s position in the domains of media, earth modelling, robotic perception, autonomous driving, computer engineering and workflow automation. Key activities around the proposed research include community development and training of the next generation of European machine learning and AI researchers by leveraging the highly successful and internationally recognized ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) PhD program. This will result in a complete ecosystem of European AI: built in Europe, for Europe, and adhering to European values.

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 and the contributions of ELLIS Alicante among its partners,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.

List of ELLIOT partners:

• Information Technologies Institute - Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (Coordinator) (Greece)
• Tübingen AI Center / University of Tübingen (Germany)
• Research Center Juelich (FZJ) / Juelich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) (Germany)
• University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
• Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands)
• University of Trento (Italy)
• Computer Vision Center (Spain)
• Jožef Stefan Institute (Slovenia)
• LOBA (Portugal)
• Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain)
• CSC - IT Center for Science (Finland)
• CINECA (Italy)
• Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany)
• University of Valencia (Spain)
• University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy)
• Aalto University (Finland)
• ELLIS Alicante (Spain)
• ELLIS Institute Tübingen (Germany)
• Czech Technical University in Prague (Czech Republic)
• CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Germany)
• KU Leuven (Belgium)
• Voxist (France)
• Valeo (France)
• RoboTwin (Czech Republic)
• Openchip (Spain)
• Deimos Engineering and Systems (Spain)
• Department of Territory, Housing and Ecological Transition of the Catalan Government (Spain)
• Flemish Radio and Television Network Organisation  (VRT) (Belgium)
• EPFL (Switzerland)
• ETH Zurich (Switzerland)

For more information about ELLIS Alicante and its research activities, please visit ELLIS Alicante.

PRESS-RELEASE-ELLIS-ALICANTE-ELLIOT-2025-07-08.pdf