On July 8-9, 2025, the members of the Natural Language Processing team of the JSI Department of Knowledge Technologies (E8) attended the kick-off meeting of a new European project, ELLIOT, in Thessaloniki (Greece). The project is devoted to training, fine-tuning and applying the next generation of Multimodal Foundation Models, with a commitment to robust, open and fair AI. With a total budget of 25 MIO EUR, this project will run for four years and is executed by a consortium of 30 partners from 12 countries, bringing together leading European AI researchers. With a budget of 700.000 EUR, the JSI team will contribute to foundation model fine-tuning and algorithmic fairness, and will lead the ELLIOT’s community building efforts by supporting the mobility of researchers and organising conferences, workshops, summer schools and other events, in collaboration with the ELIAS and ELLIS scientific consortia. With ELLIOT, 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.