New EU Project ELLIOT Aims to Advance Multimodal Generalist Foundation Models

The new EU-funded initiative, ELLIOT (European Large Open Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Robust Generalization on Arbitrary Data Streams) aims to develop open, multimodal foundation models that can generalize robustly across real-world, noisy, and dynamic data streams. With €25 million in funding under the Horizon Europe programme, ELLIOT brings together 30 research and industry organisations across 12 countries and will run from July 2025 to June 2029.

For the AI/ML research community, ELLIOT represents an important milestone in Europe’s pursuit of open, general-purpose AI aligned with scientific rigor, reproducibility, and societal benefit. The project builds on a foundation of academic excellence, infrastructure, and open research practices established by the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). That includes the ELLIS PhD Program, the ELLIS Unit Alicante and the ELLIS Institute Tübingen, as well as affiliated institutions that are now participating in or contributing to the project.

ELLIOT’s technical focus is the development of multimodal generalist models capable of learning across a wide variety of data types — text, images, video, sensor data, satellite feeds — and transferring that knowledge to diverse downstream tasks. Unlike current commercial models that often lack robustness or openness, ELLIOT aims to produce models, datasets, and training pipelines that are fully open-source and reproducible, allowing researchers across Europe to study, adapt, and build upon them.

The initiative will leverage Europe’s supercomputing infrastructure, including JUPITER, LUMI, Leonardo, and MareNostrum, and draw on trusted data sources such as European Data Spaces. Applications will span media, Earth observation, robotics, autonomous systems, and more.

Importantly for the ELLIS community, ELLIOT includes dedicated activities to train early-career researchers, many of whom are already associated with ELLIS through the PhD & Postdoc Program. This makes ELLIOT not just a large-scale technical effort, but also a meaningful extension of ELLIS’s mission to foster world-class AI research in Europe.

The project also addresses broader concerns in foundation model development, including fairness, explainability, privacy, and alignment with evolving EU AI regulation, areas that continue to be key priorities across the ELLIS network.

For researchers interested in open-source AI, multimodal model development, and robust generalisation, ELLIOT will offer valuable infrastructure, community contributions, and technical results over the coming years.

Read the full announcement by ELLIOT.

About ELLIOT

Grant agreement no: 101214398

Project duration: July 2025 – June 2029

Funded under: Horizon Europe – HORIZON-CL4-2024-HUMAN-03

Coordinator:Information Technologies Institute (ITI) - Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Greece

Contact person: Dr Yiannis Kompatsiaris <ikom@iti.gr>, CERTH-ITI

Follow ELLIOT’s social media accounts:LinkedIn, Bluesky

List of ELLIOT partners:

1. Information Technologies Institute - Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (Coordinator) (Greece)
2. Tübingen AI Center / University of Tübingen (Germany)
3. Research Center Juelich (FZJ) / Juelich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) (Germany)
4. University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
5. Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands)
6. University of Trento (Italy)
7. Computer Vision Center (Spain)
8. Jožef Stefan Institute (Slovenia)
9. LOBA (Portugal)
10. Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain)
11. CSC - IT Center for Science (Finland)
12. CINECA (Italy)
13. Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany)
14. University of Valencia (Spain)
15. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy)
16. Aalto University (Finland)
17. ELLIS Alicante (Spain)
18. ELLIS Institute Tübingen (Germany)
19. Czech Technical University in Prague (Czech Republic)
20. CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Germany)
21. KU Leuven (Belgium)
22. Voxist (France)
23. Valeo (France)
24. RoboTwin (Czech Republic)
25. Openchip (Spain)
26. Deimos Engineering and Systems (Spain)
27. Department of Territory, Housing and Ecological Transition of the Catalan Government (Spain)
28. Flemish Radio and Television Network Organisation  (VRT) (Belgium)
29. EPFL (Switzerland)
30. ETH Zurich (Switzerland)

About ELLIS

ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) is a pan-European AI network of excellence founded in 2018. It builds upon machine learning as the driving force of modern AI and aims to secure lasting international leadership in AI developed in Europe. By fostering collaboration among top researchers and creating a multi-centric research laboratory, ELLIS ensures that Europe remains at the forefront of cutting-edge AI innovation. The network has grown to include 43 ELLIS Sites at world-class institutions across 16 countries, 16 specialised research programs, and a pan-European PhD/Postdoc program. Through these efforts, ELLIS shapes the future of artificial intelligence in alignment with Europe’s values of openness, collaboration, and societal impact. 

More about ELLIS: ellis.eu

For media: ellis.eu/media