This is an horizon 2020 project. This is an EU program that distributes money to groups of companies + research institutions to do some research. The funding is usually a few millions over a few years. The requirements on the delivery are very lax. Basically you can get away with doing nothing useful, after all it’s research and you can’t be penalized for not finding anything, as long you show you did what you said you would try you’re ok. The commission requires the projects to have a validation part, what is described in the article is probably exactly that.
Having worked in such projects the money is sometimes completely wasted. There is a whole cottage industry dedicated in bidding and executing these projects, it survives just out of the research funding and they are expert in meeting the commission requirements instead of being expert in the subject matter. Sometimes I have the feeling part of this money is a way for EU to keep some engineers busy in the poor parts of the continent, some times I feel it’s just soft corruption (reviews are often also reviewees), but for sure some project are scientifically horrible: this one looks to be one of those.
That being said some projects are also nice, for instance Firefox is going to merge a web page translator which was produced by another h2020 project. The program as a whole is most probably a positive contribution to society as a whole. It’s like VC money for public research, many projects are a disaster but some are very good and make the endeavor worth.