Opencalls issue1

ISSUE 1

OPEN CALLS

Empowering Collaboration and Advancement Through Engagement

INSPIRATION & INNOVATION Breakthroughs in energy, agriculture, health, technology and more

Introducing a new magazine covering Horizon 2020 and its impact

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Welcome!

CONTENTS page 38

page 48

Welcome to the first edition of ‘Open Calls’, a new magazine celebrating the innovation inspired and funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme – and exploring the impact it could have on society.

This new quarterly magazine aims to highlight the most intriguing breakthroughs in energy, the environment, agriculture, health, technology, transport, civic life and international collaboration.

The Briefing section offers a quick and easy way of finding out about some of the thousands of exciting developments supported by Horizon 2020. The Features section looks at a variety of projects in more depth.

Each month, The Big Picture will demonstrate the enduring power of photography to tell a story.

At the back of the magazine, we’ve picked out some tweets from the Commissioners that provide a snapshot of what they were doing over a few days at the start of this summer. And, finally, a diary looks ahead to some key events coming up this autumn.

Over the coming months we aim to add more sections, featuring interviews, opinion and special reports. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this first edition and find it informative and engaging.

Briefing 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32

Climate Action and Energy Environment, Maritime and Fisheries Agriculture and Rural Development Health and Food Safety Education, Culture, Youth and Sport Transport International Cooperation and Development Digital Economy and Society

The Big Picture 36

Refugee education in Hungary

Features Climate Action and Energy 38 New standards post-2020 40 A hydrogen fuelled future 42 Wind beneath the wings 44 Reaching for the skies 46 Path of least resistance Environment, Maritime and Fisheries 48 Understanding the big blue 50 Revealing the hidden Atlantic 52 Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen Agriculture and Rural Development 54 Making local the new global

Publisher Andy Crielly. andy@opencalls.eu Editor Will Peakin. editor@opencalls.eu Commercial Rory Buckie. rory@opencalls.eu Graphic Design TMC Graphics www.tmcgraphics.com

Health and Food Safety 56 Showing international leadership 58 Creating a vaccine for cancer 60 Good genes for young hearts Education, Culture, Youth and Sport 62 The effects of mobility on society 64 Time to broaden horizons 66 Transporting priceless art safely Transport 68 On track to a stronger future 70 Making flying safe and secure 72 Whisper it: EVs need to make a noise International Cooperation and Development 74 Europe reaches out to the Ukraine 76 Using science as a common language 78 Strengthening collaboration with Japan Digital Economy and Society 80 Overcoming investment hurdles 82 Catapult’s support for Internet of Things 84 Next gen media monitoring

Social media roundup 86 A snapshot of Commissioners’ tweets

Diary 90 Looking ahead to key events this autumn

The views expressed in SI magazine are those of invited contributors and not necessarily those of ARC Engagement CIC. ARC Engagement CIC does not endorse any goods or services advertised or any claims or representations made in any advertisement in Open Calls, and accepts no liability to any person for loss or damage suffered as a consequence of their responding to, or reliance on, any claim or representation made in advertisements appearing in Open Calls. By responding or placing reliance, readers accept that they do so at their own risk.

Published by ARC Engagement CIC Ltd. Registered office Catchpell House, Carpet Lane, Edinburgh, EH6 6SS.

Communicate change and accelerate real world solutions through partnerships, competitions, events and knowledge.

THE CHALLENGE

Connecting To #TakeOn Climate Change

Take on climate change. Ending extreme poverty is impossible without tackling climate change. Now is the time to face the defining challenge of our generation.

YOUR COMMUNITY.

Communicate for action. Join an ever-growing community. Hear how others are taking on climate change and inspire by sharing your own stories.

Contribute online and face-to-face to grow the climate movement.

OUR NETWORK.

Collaborate for impact. Forge creative partnerships to advance solutions and bring new audiences into the climate change movement. Share experiences and knowledge.

“We will never end poverty if We don’t tackle climate change.”

- JIM YONG KIM PRESIDENT OF WORLD BANK GROUP

GET INVOLVED

HAVE YOUR SAY

Play your part in the global climate change movement by sharing your experiences, resources and knowledge.

Talk to us about developing innovative campaigns that will inspire, enthuse and reach new audiences.

GO SOCIAL Contribute on our blogs and post to our Facebook page. Tweet your thoughts and ideas. Taken some good pictures or video? Upload on Instagram, Vimeo or YouTube, then tag us to let us know. twitter/connect4climate facebook/connect4climate

instagram/connect4climate linkedin.com/company/connect4climate

youtube/connect4climate vimeo/connect4climate

www.connect4climate.org Supported by the World Bank Group and the Italian Ministry of Environment, and the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development Connect4Climate is a global community to take on climate change, promote solutions and empower action, reaching a global audience with more than 230 partners.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

BRIEFING CONTENTS page 21

4

Climate Action and Energy

‘

An engine than runs on hot water Turning CO2 into fuel using diamonds Scrutinising snow and ice from space Turbine to get superconductive generator Long distance light’ breakthrough Where there’s ‘Mucky’, there’s brass

8 Environment, Maritime

and Fisheries

Anti-ageing quest goes sub-sea Dealing with the world’s ‘CRT mountain’ Ole! Spanish make wine 16x faster Tackling the plastic waste legacy Understanding what lies beneath Fishing for sustainable growth

12 Agriculture and

Rural Development

A greenhouse inspired by jellyfish Coming to Ikea, a banana veneer table?

In every cloud, there’s a data point Quality control ripe for success Sun shines on rural communities Increasing equality through ecology

16 Health and Food Safety

The healing power of light More than a bliss blanket Diagnosing Alzheimer’s sooner Growing ‘organs on chips’ Watching every breath you take A question of taste

20 Education, Culture,

Youth and Sport

An academy for young entrepreneurs Seek out new life and new civilisations Preserving the future of modern art The Internet of historical things There’s a brand new dance Reducing the risk in running

24 Transport

Hybrid craft takes to the skies The new information superhighway Holoscan promises real-time screening Saving lives at sea with localisation A new way to move in town

28 International Cooperation

and Development

Natural resources and armed conflict Advancing biomedical research Fostering collaboration with China Increasing cooperation with the Middle-East Addressing educational exclusion

32 Digital Economy and Society

Small business making a big impact Improving machine language translation Welcoming Europe’s young hopefuls Using digital to research the Holocaust Giving people control over their data Revealing how public money is spent

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Briefing - Climate Action and Energy

An engine than runs on hot water “Our vision is to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions through the mass deployment of our products,” says Alan Healy, chief executive of Dublin-based Exergyn.

“One path to solving climate change is for Exergyn and other similarly-minded companies to develop technology that maximises energy efficiency.”

Exergyn has developed a patented engine that runs on waste hot water.

It converts so-called low-grade waste heat (LGWH) into power using nitinol, a metal alloy of nickel and titanium.

The company says that global carbon emissions could be reduced by up to 3% if its product was deployed to its full potential.

A commercial solution to LGWH could be worth €440bn and create 5,400 jobs across Europe.

The Exergyn Drive Budget €3.54 EU contribution €2.48 H2020-SMEINST-2-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197157_en.html

Turning CO2 into fuel using diamonds DIACAT aims to develop a new technology for the photocatalytic conversion of CO2 into fine chemicals and fuels using visible light.

It uses the unique property of man-made diamond, now widely available at low cost, to generate solvated electrons after being irradiated by light in a solution.

“Our approach lays the foundation for the removal and transformation of carbon dioxide,” say the project leaders, “and at the same time a chemical route to store and transport energy from renewable sources.

“This will have a transformational impact on society as whole by bringing new opportunities for sustainable production and growth.”

Diamond for the photocatalytic conversion of CO2 Budget €3.87 EU contribution €3.87 H2020-FETOPEN-2014-2015-RIA http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196959_en.html 4

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Scrutinising snow and ice from space Seasonal snow and glaciers are important resources, supplying Europe with water for human consumption, agriculture and hydropower. The melt rate of Europe’s snowy peaks and glacial lakes can have a huge impact. EU-funded researchers have developed applications that use satellite data to monitor them in near real time. “Snow and glaciers are not just about tourism,” says CryoLand project coordinator Thomas Nagler of engineering company ENVEO. “They are important water resources, especially in spring and summer, when snow and ice melts, trickling down to reservoirs. Snow and ice are also indicators of climate change.”

The CryoLand project combines data from a network of satellites with ground-based measurements and makes them accessible in customised online applications. CryoLand will ultimately use data from the EU’s Copernicus space programme; a fleet of satellites and ground stations being developed to monitor the environment.

GMES Service Snow and Land Ice Budget €2.82 EU contribution Budget €2.20 FP7-SPACE-2010-1 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/97901_en.html 5

Briefing - Climate Action and Energy

Turbine to get superconductive generator The EcoSwing generator is thought to be the first superconductive generator designed for a wind turbine and promises a step change in generator development.

“After years of research, superconductivity has finally matured to a level where it can be considered for testing and demonstration on a full-sized wind turbine,” said Anders Rebsdorf, head of Envision’s Global Innovation Centre.

The key advantage of the EcoSwing generator is a weight saving of more than 40% compared to conventional direct drive generators. EcoSwing technology also dramatically reduces rareearth material reliance. “The potentials for a light-weight and competitive generator are truly exciting,” added Rebsdorf . “The EcoSwing technology can be an important advancement in our continuous quest for lowering cost of renewable energy.”

EcoSwing Budget €13.84 EU contribution €10.59 H2020-LCE-2014-2 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/195203_en.html 6

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

‘Long distance light’ breakthrough So-called daylighting reduces the need for electric light in buildings by ‘piping’ in natural light.

Many systems have been developed, but none can bring daylight into buildings deeper than 20m from façade or roof, and thus are not suitable for deep-plan and high-rise buildings.

The ECHYNOXE SILICA project objective is to develop a new concept of daylighting based on highly light-transmitting fibre optics coupled with Fresnel lenses.

This disruptive innovation will have the opportunity to introduce ambient light up to 150m from the façade or roof, opening up the possibility of daylighting to all types of buildings.

The project is lead by ECHY, a French SME, which develops daylighting devices based on fibre optics, to improve the quality of diffused light and reduce electricity consumption.

Innovative long range daylighting system EU contribution: €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2015 https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/sme/5242/ innovative-long-range-daylighting-system

Where there’s ‘Mucky’, there’s brass Every year, Europe produces 2,500 million tonnes of waste, of which 55% is non-recyclable and dumped in landfills or incinerated. The ‘Mucky’ project aims to turn this waste into a valuable new resource for the chemical industry.

“The uniquely dimensioned reactor of the Mucky allows controlled thermal cracking of the mixed waste into linear hydrocarbons.” It will start with 100 plants by 2020, potentially growing to more than 50,000 – diverting waste from landfill and quadrupling the value of waste that normally goes to incineration.

Circular solution for municipal waste EU contribution €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2015 https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/sme/5529/mucky-circular-solution-valorisation-mixedmunicipal-waste-streams 7

Briefing - Environment, Maritime and Fisheries

Anti-ageing quest goes sub-sea A consortium has been established to develop compounds derived from the sea for use in anti-ageing drugs, food supplements and cosmetics.

The Tascmar consortium, based in Paris, is planning to collect marine invertebrates – sponges, echinoderms and soft corals – from the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Thailand, Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. It then aims to extract powerful bioactive compounds. If successful, it will build dedicated facilities for the cultivation of marine invertebrates and microorganisms.

Another team, NoMorFilm, based in Barcelona, plans to screen 4,000 species of microalgae, mostly from European waters, to identify new antimicrobial agents.

They would be incorporated with nanoparticles and to create antibacterial coatings for hip and knee implants.

Representatives from both projects attended an event earlier this year organised by the Research Executive Agency, which is managing a large share of the Horizon 2020 programme.

Marine derived biomaterials http://cordis.europa.eu/programme/ rcn/664754_en.html Novel marine biomolecules www.nomorfilm.eu

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Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Dealing with the world’s ‘CRT mountain’ For more than 60 years cathode ray tubes have been the main screen technology for televisions and, latterly, computers such as the original iMac. There are still 1.9 billion in existence, 500 million of them in Europe where the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive requires reprocessing. Current forms of reprocessing are energy-intensive and have a low financial return. UK-based Vitrus Projects has developed a novel hydrochemistry method to extract the lead in the glass, which can be sold.

The remainder can then be turned into high-silica concrete geo-polymer blocks which have exceptional resistance to salt, acids, water and high-temperatures. It makes them ideal for flood defences, waste storage segregation and road tunnels. “The new technology could enable waste recyclers and concrete block producers to co-operate to solve the CRT problem and capitalise on new business opportunities,” says the company.

Process to valorise hazardous leaded glass Budget €71,429 EU contribution €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197191_en.html

Ole! Spanish make wine 16x faster Agrovin, based in Alcázar de San Juan, is developing a way of cutting the first stage of winemaking from four days to just six hours.

‘Ultrawine’ is a low frequency high power ultrasound device designed for optimising the extraction of phenolic compounds from grape skins. As well as reducing the maceration time and tripling the amount of grapes that can be processed, it uses 30 times less energy.

“Ultrawine renders a high quality must with an intense colour and aroma, setting the basis for an excellent wine,” says the company.

Eco-innovative maceration system Budget €1.31m EU contribution €791,359 H2020-SMEINST-2-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197152_ en.html 9

Briefing - Environment, Maritime and Fisheries

Tackling the plastic waste legacy Nearly 50 million tons of plastic waste is produced in the EU every year, of which only 14% is recovered and only 19% burned to produce energy. Globally, an enormous plastic waste legacy now exists in our oceans and landfills.

UK-based Recycling Technologies has developed a method of transforming plastic into an energyrich hydrocarbon commodity called Plaxx. The process reduces it to the molecular level and removes additives and contaminants to produce a clean pure hydrocarbon that could be used for heat and power.

The system provides savings on waste disposal costs, plus revenues from the sale or use of Plaxx. Potential markets include waste operators, paper and plastic recyclers, anaerobic digester operators and local authorities that deal with large quantities of non-recyclable plastic waste.

Longer-term uses also include the recovery of plastics from the oceans and landfill.

Technology which can recycle mixed plastic waste Budget €71,429 EU contribution €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196998_en.html

Understanding what lies beneath A team of European, Canadian and American ocean mapping experts have launched the first trans-Atlantic mapping survey. Canada’s Fisheries and Marine Institute, based at Memorial University of Newfoundland, will use the Irish research vessel RV Celtic Explorer to map the seafloor.

The team will gather information on physical characteristics, such as water depth, hardness, roughness and the presence of geohazards.

They are key considerations for shipping safety, seabed engineering and sustainable fisheries.

The survey will follow the ‘great circle’ route between Ireland and Newfoundland, where the first trans-Atlantic cable was deployed in 1857. It coincides with the most dramatic topographic feature in the North Atlantic, the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone.

Scientists from Ireland’s national seabed mapping programme, INFOMAR, the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere will use multi-beam echo sounders.

“The North Atlantic Ocean is crucial to the ecological, economic and societal health and resilience of North America, Europe and the Arctic regions.

“The data we collect will be vital to understanding how we move forward together to ensure its sustainability,” said Glenn Blackwood, vice-president of the Marine Institute of Memorial University. http://bit.ly/1JXP39r

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Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Fishing for sustainable growth A team has embarked on a three-year project to investigate why Europe’s aquaculture industry appears to have peaked, while countries outside the EU are seeing substantial growth in the sector. The AquaSpace project, led by Professor Kenny Black, of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), brings together a global team of experts on aquaculture. The team will look at case studies across the world to find out how the EU can kick-start the industry to create more jobs and make the continent more self-sufficient.

“As the world population grows, we will have huge issues regarding food security. Aquaculture, if managed in a sustainable way, could be part of the solution,” said Professor Black. “We aim to find out how we can make space for sustainable aquaculture and use marine spatial planning to increase food security and employment opportunities. “We will also look at how society views aquaculture, whether their fears are justified or not and whether this creates uncertainty for farmers looking to start up a business.”

The aquaculture industry within the EU has failed to grow in recent years, while countries outwith the EU, including other European countries like Norway, have expanded theirs. In China, the industry was worth more than $66bn in 2012 and it continues to grow year on year. Europe produces around 2% world’s aquaculture and imports 80 per cent of all its aquatic produce.

By 2020, the Scottish Government aims to increase fish production sustainably to 210,000 tonnes, from 165,256 tonnes in 2013, and shellfish production to 13,000 tonnes, from 6,757 tonnes.

Ecosystem Approach to making Space for Aquaculture Budget €3.62m EU contribution €2.98m H2020-SFS-2014-2 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/193235_en.html 11

Briefing - Agriculture and Rural Development

A greenhouse inspired by jellyfish With increasing demand on resources, how will we produce the food we need, where will we get fresh water and what about new areas for cultivation?

Pnat, a spin-out from Florence University made up of architects and botanists, is offering a radical answer to these questions.

Jellyfish Barge is a floating greenhouse producing food without consuming land, fresh water or energy.

Inspired by a jellyfish’s shape, the structure has been conceived for communities vulnerable to water and food scarcity.

It is built employing simple technologies and with low cost and recycled materials.

Fresh water is provided by seven ‘solar stills’, arranged around the perimeter, that use the sun to desalinate or cleanse up to 150 litres of water a day.

Fans and pumps are powered by renewable energy.

The greenhouse incorporates a hydroponic system, using 70% less water compared with traditional cultivation.

Each barge has been designed to support two families but connected barges can guarantee food security for a community, as well as providing a meeting and market place.

Jellyfish Barge - a floating greenhouse Budget €71,429 EU contribution €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197008_ en.html

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Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Coming to Ikea, a banana veneer table?

The Swedish home furnishing company is well known for popularising renewable materials.

Witness its range of bamboo veneer tables.

But next up could be banana.

Martinique-based FIBandCO hand-harvests the trunks of end-of-life banana trees, which would normally decompose, to create veneers for home and commercial use.

As well as being adopted locally by businesses in the Caribbean, the banana veneer has been used in a luxury Hong Kong residential development and a Bordeaux hotel.

Green Blade Budget €71,429 EU contribution €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196553_ en.html

In every cloud, there’s a data point Traditionally, farmers manage their crops by instinct. But gut feeling is not always the best way.

In farming, it can lead to inappropriate fertilisation, plant damage and unnecessary environmental impact.

A new project intends to commercialise ‘precision farming in the cloud’ to sustainably increase productivity and profitability. The AgriCloud system is the first approach, processing data from agronomic sensors, machinery and service companies. Supported by expert plant nutrition knowledge, it will allow a targeted use of fertilisers and herbicides, efficient machinery utilisation and workflow management.

AgriCloud’s designers say it will increase yield production between 3-10%, reduce fertilisers by 12-20% and improve harvest efficiency by 12-20%. The project could help maintain Europe’s agricultural sustainability and support climate change adaptation to ensure long-term food security and quality.

Cloud-based precision farming management system Budget €71,429 EU contribution €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196465_en.html 13

Briefing - Agriculture and Rural Development

Quality control ripe for success Fresh fruit can only be sold to consumers at a certain stage of ‘ripeness’, as judged by the sugar content and firmness.

There is significant commercial pressure on producers to provide produce that meets that standard.

As a result, fruits are tested many times during the production cycle, both in harvesting and distribution.

Fruit that does not meet the standard for consumers is sold wholesale or juiced.

The most widely used tests for both are destructive – the test fruit is then sold as animal feed, composted or sent to landfill leading to the loss of between 6% and 8% of harvested apples, for example, and around 5% of citrus fruits.

Worldwide, this amounts to between 4.6 and 6.1 million tonnes of apples and 6.6 million tonnes of citrus fruit annually.

At average European prices, this represents a combined economic loss of between €6.3 and €7.2bn every year.

Ripesense is an innovative solution to this problem; an automated system capable of non-destructively testing both the firmness and sugar content of fruits.

The makers believe it could reduce waste fruit going to landfill by 50% - and cut consequent greenhouse gas emissions – as well as reducing customer complaints by 30%.

It will also allow fruits to be optimally distributed to retailers with different quality criteria, further increasing yield efficiency.

An innovative fruit ripeness checker Budget €71,429 EU contribution €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196247_ en.html

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Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Sun shines on rural communities Rural areas represent 90% of land in the EU 27 and are home to 56% of the population. They generate 43% of all economic value and support 55% of all employment. There are 12,000 farms of which 69% are small and remote. For rural areas, off-the-grid energy is vital.

Solarbox Solar Solutions and Generaciones Fotovoltaicas de la Mancha have combined to create Suninbox, a portable Solar PV generator. As well as consumers in rural communities, it could be used to power transceiver stations for mobile communications networks.

There are around million radio base station sites in the global telecommunication network, 900,000 located in areas where central electricity grid connections are unavailable. The device could also be used for rural electrification in developing countries.

Portable distributed generation Budget €71,429 EU contribution €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196203_en.html

Increasing equality through ecology In rural Morocco, women are the gatekeepers of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), linked to natural resource management. But traditionally, they are undervalued for their important contribution to producing and securing food, managing natural resources, and their ability to earn an income through these activities.

Even though massive aid budgets from the major donors, including the European Union, are allocated to expand Morocco’s programmes to combat poverty, social exclusion and gender inequality, rural women are still poorly integrated in Moroccan society. Now a project will explore whether women are able to gain social status and economic development through applying their traditional ecological knowledge in the context of the Green Morocco Plan.

Empowering women with TEK Budget € 236,257 EU contribution € 236 257 H2020-MSCA-IF-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/195410_en.html 15

Briefing - Health and Food Safety

The healing power of light Chronic wounds represent a significant challenge to health care professionals.

A multi-national team is working on a patch that uses light to encourage healing as well as monitoring the status of the wound during therapy.

The red part of the light spectrum induces the growth of skin cells while the blue part is known to have antibacterial effects.

Medilight is described as a “photonic band aid”; a wearable, light-weight and low cost solution for wound care.

The device comprises electronic components and a disposable wound dressing.

It is embedded with optical waveguides and sensors for the delivery of light and temperature/blood oxygen monitoring of the wound.

Smart system to monitor healing Budget: €2.98m EU contribution: €2.48m H2020-ICT-2014-1 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194178_en.html

More than a bliss blanket One of the most promising applications of wearable technology involves monitoring the health of newborn babies.

Usually, in the first two to four hours of a normal birth there is no machine monitoring.

The baby, after an initial check, is given to the mother to bond. However, monitoring of biosignals during this period could be important in preventing critical problems arising.

Clinical textiles with discreetly embedded electrodes may provide the answer. A trial has yielded positive results; the next stage will explore regulatory approval and commercialisation.

Smart garments in newborns Budget: €71,429 EU contribution: €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2015 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196530_ en.html 16

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Diagnosing Alzheimer’s sooner There are more than 30 million people in Europe living with Alzheimer’s Disease. More than seven million have not been given a diagnosis, often because of the cost and potential side effects of current methods. Without diagnosis, patients miss out on treatment that can improve their quality of life – and the earlier the diagnosis, the better.

By 2050, 50% of the total European population will be over 65 years-old, one in three will suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease.

Currently, there are only two accurate methods of diagnosis; they are expensive, invasive and can have multiple side effects. One scans the brain after the patient is injected with a radioactive marker (cost, €1500), which can cause major allergic reactions. The other (cost, €400) analyses the cerebrospinal fluid, which requires a lumbar puncture. It can cause severe headaches, infections and bleeding into the spinal canal.

Raman HT has developed a non-invasive medical device to diagnose AD in blood plasma, at an estimated cost of €100.

Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis by Spectroscopy Budget: €71,429 EU contribution: €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2015 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197383_en.html 17

Briefing - Health and Food Safety

Growing ‘organs on chips’ There is increasing demand from the pharmaceutical industry for more reliable ways to test drug toxicity and efficacy at the initial stages of development. Early, reliable testing will have a major impact on drug development costs and human health. Ethical considerations are also increasing the pressure to replace animal tests.

Organs on chips can emulate healthy organs and, using engineered or human cells, emulate specific disease conditions. The technology combines modern cell biology with microfluidics and chip-based techniques to mimic organ functionality, better than cell cultures. Organs on chips are also ideally suited for high-rate drug screening.

MIMIC is an interdisciplinary European Industrial Doctorate at the interface of cell biology, engineering and drug development that aims to develop and improve novel organs on chips technology.

Mimicking organs on chips Budget: €1.05m EU contribution: €1.05m H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197368_en.html 18

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

A question of taste The ‘horse-burger’ crisis of 2013 may be a distant memory, but it demonstrated a unmet need for a fast way of establishing food provenance.

BeadCAP-DNA aims to create the first 30-minute on-site DNA test kit for food, effectively eliminating the usual two to five day wait from a central laboratory.

It is based on a novel merging of molecular biology and semiconductor capacitive sensing in a single-use microfluidic disposable DNA test kit.

The makers say it will help food processors and retailers eliminate costly quarantines and food recalls, food wastage, risk of reputational damage and loss of sales.

It could also accelerate uptake of European regulations on DNA-testing of food and shellfish, thus increasing food safety, and reducing food fraud, mislabelling, and adverse health issues.

Watching every breath you take

30-minute on-site DNA test kit Budget: €71,429 EU contribution: €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194691_en.html

Successful screening of medically vulnerable groups can result in earlier beneficial intervention. The ideal test is accurate, low-cost, non-invasive and repeatable – and operated by a layperson with minimal impact on their daily life.

The Sniffphone uses micro and nanotechnologies in a smart device that can be attached to a mobile phone and analyse disease markers from exhaled breath.

Statistical pattern recognition methods are applied to the data and a clinical report sent to an approved specialist.

The project involves universities and research institutes in Germany, Austria, Finland, Ireland and Latvia, an Israeli company NanoVation-GS, and Siemens.

Sniffphone Budget: €5.8m EU contribution: €5.8m H2020-ICT-2014-1 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194138_ en.html 19

Briefing - Education, Culture, Youth and Sport

An academy for young entrepreneurs There’s a real need in Europe for an innovative structure that will support young technology entrepreneurs. It’s a challenging task, since existing training initiatives are characterised by fragmentation and a lack of a ‘learning-by-doing’.

STARTIFY7 is an ambitious project aiming to go beyond the state-of-the-art while still creating synergies with existing initiatives and projects. It will establish a network of trainers focused on “hands-on and real-world knowledge transfer” as well as encouraging competition. Seven summer academies have been planned for this year and 2016.

STARTIFY7 hopes to generate 1,400 applications from potential entrepreneurs, 280 student participants, 90 produced demos, 70 mentors, two boot-camps with 63 participants, 10 venture capital/angel investors and 16 investment-ready proposals.

Academy system for future ICT entrepreneurs Budget: €1.42m EU contribution: €1.33m H2020-ICT-2014-1 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194206_en.html 20

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Seek out new life and new civilisations The Youth for Space Challenge - ODYSSEUS II aims to engage young people in space exploration.

A series of educational activities, which will combine scientific learning with hands-on experiences, will target pupils and students in Europe.

The project will encourage the development of qualified scientists, engineers and technicians who will be able to support European space policy. It will also foster international collaboration.

Youth for Space Challenge - ODYSSEUS II Budget: €2.06m EU contribution: €1.99m H2020-COMPET-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/193704_ en.html

Preserving the future of modern art The importance of European cultural heritage is well known.

A significant part of this heritage, however - modern and contemporary art - runs the risk of being lost for future generations, because it is difficult to preserve.

A new project aims to resolve fundamental questions concerning the identity and authenticity of modern art and the consequences for their conservation.

It involves rethinking traditional distinctions between the curator and the conservator and reorganising the institutional ecosystem. It will also mean establishing frameworks for international and interdisciplinary research and training.

The aim of the project is to educate a new generation of professional curators, conservators and academic researchers.

New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art Budget: €3.81m EU contribution: €3.81m H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197251_en.html 21

Briefing - Education, Culture, Youth and Sport

The internet of historical things Today’s technologies offer new ways to capture the essence of art. DigiArt aims to provide a cost efficient solution to the capture, processing and display of cultural artefacts. It employs 3D capture - including the use of drones – and semantic image analysis to extract features from digital 3D representations.

DigiArt also promises a ‘story telling engine’, to provide a deeper understanding of art, and augmented/virtual reality to view 3D models. The 3D data captured by scanners and drones, using techniques such as laser detection and ranging (LIDAR), are processed through robust features that cope with imperfect data. Semantic analysis by automatic feature extraction is used to form hyper-links between artefacts. The links will connect the artefacts in what the project terms “the internet of historical things”, available anywhere, at any time, on any web-enabled device. And the contextual view of art is enhanced by the story telling engine.

The system presents the artefact, linked to its context, in an immersive display with virtual and/or with augmented reality. Links and information are superimposed. The aim is to provide a way for museums to create a revolutionary way of viewing and experiencing artefacts.

The Internet Of Historical Things And Building New 3D Cultural Worlds Budget: €3.05m EU contribution: €2.35m H2020-REFLECTIVE-7-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196958_en.html 22

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

There’s a brand new dance How do you reach people who have shown no interest in science?

Why not chose icons from modern culture – a combination of poetry, art, theatre and consumers’ gadgets – as a means of communicating.

And partner with a consumer brand – French retailer FNAC - to support an awareness campaign.

Poems inspired by recent discoveries in physics and astronomy form a part of the project.

Augmented reality, robots, QR-bar codes and explanatory video games, are the highlight of a special tech section.

A kids’ corner featuring CERN’s Marie Curie fellows demonstrate the technologies.

And at the POP-science café, the menu includes liquid nitrogen ice cream.

Pop science Budget: €968,312 EU contribution: €210,00 H2020-MSCA-NIGHT-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/193210_en.html

Reducing the risk in running The world of running is experiencing a boom.

More and more runners are taking up the sport, with approximately 36% of 15 to 65 year-old Europeans - 80 million people - taking the streets, parks and gyms.

But many people start practicing running and then stop; injuries are the main reason not to run for approximately 60% of runners.

Spanish manufacturer New Millennium Sports has developed a running shoe that can prevent and reduce running injuries.

It is embedded with technology to measure the biomechanical parameters of running. Realtime feedback is provided via a phone app and training recommendations on a website.

Runsafer Budget: €71,429 EU contribution: €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197356_ en.html 23

Briefing - Transport

Hybrid craft takes to the skies Airlander is a new form of aircraft that combines the best attributes of an aeroplane, helicopter and airship with the latest innovations in materials.

It uses 33% less fuel than conventional aircraft, can stay aloft for five days and land anywhere.

It has previously flown before under a US Government programme, but is now being developed in the UK for commercial purposes.

Uses include freight transport, remote access, aid distribution, advertising, surveillance, communications and luxury passenger transport.

Its makers say the market could be worth $50bn ACEP Budget: â‚Ź4m EU contribution: â‚Ź2.5m H2020-SMEINST-2-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197545_ en.html

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Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

The new information superhighway Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) - such as adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection, collision avoidance and automatic braking - increase safety for everyone.

Although there is increasing demand for in-vehicle data systems, ADAS specifically requires a reliable and fast means of transfer – without interference from vibration, heat and electromagnetic fields.

Current in-car data communication systems are not robust and are incapable of transfer speeds of more than 150Mbps.

Spanish firm KDPOF has developed and patented a breakthrough low-cost technology, based on plastic optical fibre, which allows reliable data transmission at rates of up to 1Gbps.

CarNet Budget: €1.91m EU contribution: €1.34m H2020-SMEINST-2-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196392_en.html 25

Briefing - Transport

Holoscan promises real-time screening There are many types of equipment used for screening people and their baggage. They include X-ray, metal detectors, chemical trace based explosive detection and millimetre wave body scanners. But none is able to offer real-time or even rapid safe screening of large numbers of people moving simultaneously in public areas, such as airports.

Norway’s Integrated Detector Electronics makes equipment used in space exploration, medical diagnosis and industrial inspection. It is developing Holoscan, a system for high-throughput millimetre wave screening that could allow real-time screening of large groups of people.

HOLOSCAN Budget: €71,429 EU contribution: €50,000 H2020-SMEINST-2-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194719_en.html 26

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

A new way to move in town It’s not a bike, it’s not a scooter, claim its makers: “It is a lot better; it’s Freeway!”

The French company says it is a “revolutionary” way to commute in an urban environment.

Protected by a worldwide patent, Freeway is a small and environmentally clean scooter.

It can be folded within seconds and moved on its two front wheels like a suitcase.

Freeway Budget: €2.36m EU contribution: €1.65m H2020-SMEINST-2-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196441_ en.html

Saving lives at sea with localisation Recent maritime disasters serve as stark reminder of the need for effective evacuation of large passenger ships during an emergency.

The Lynceus2Market project addresses this challenge with an innovative system based on people localisation technologies. It comprises bracelets and life jackets that provide passenger location in real-time during an emergency, smart smoke detectors and handheld devices for automatic identification and counting of passengers.

Information from these and other technologies feed into intelligent decision support software.

It combines all localisation, activity and disaster escalation data to provide integrated real-time visualisation, passenger counting and evacuation decision support. Shore or ship-launched drones would also be used to locate people in the sea, supported by low-cost rescue-boat mounted radars.

The proposed project is based on the promising results developed in the FP7 LYNCEUS project where the innovative technologies were tested in lab and in small-scale pilots.

Lynceus2Market brings together European global players in the field. They include cruise ship owners, operators, ship builders, maritime equipment manufacturers, a classification society, industry associations and technology organisations.

LYNCEUS2MARKET Budget: €10.15m EU contribution: €7.26m H2020-MG-2014_TwoStages http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/193392_en.html 27

Briefing - International Co-operation and Development

Natural resources and armed conflict An international team is investigating the relationship between local armed conflicts and the trade in natural resources. It involves experts in economic geography and conflict studies.

The project, Glonexaco, is being coordinated by the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, an inter-university institute of Barcelona’s public universities. It will be conducted in collaboration with the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence at Yale University.

It brings together two different research fields in an innovative and multidisciplinary analytical framework, the ‘global-local nexus of armed conflicts’ (Glonexaco).

Incorporating the concept of global production networks from the field of economic geography to map international trade streams, it will also use elements of conflict studies. Researchers will focus on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

GLONEXACO Budget: €257,191 EU contribution: €257,191 H2020-MSCA-IF-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197441_en.html 28

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Advancing biomedical research The African population has the greatest genomic diversity on the planet.

The continent’s rapidly evolving biobanks represent an incredible resource to advance biomedical research.

The B3Africa project aims to integrate African and European biobanks and bioinformatics research.

Organisations involved include the Human Heredity and Health in Africa project, European Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources and the LMIC Biobank and Cohort Network.

B3Africa Budget: €2.03m EU contribution: €2m H2020-INFRASUPP-2014-2 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197193_ en.html

Fostering collaboration with China China is already an important global player in the fields of research and innovation. It has the potential to become a leading force in the next few decades.

Dragon-Starplus aims to support European and Chinese researchers. It will also provide Europe with a strategy for long-term cooperation with China strategy in research and innovation.

Dragon-Star Plus Budget: €2.22m EU contribution: €1.94m H2020-INT-INCO-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/196631_ en.html 29

Briefing - International Co-operation and Development

Increasing cooperation with the Middle-East The Middle East Research and Innovation Dialogue aims to increase cooperation between the European Union and the Middle East region. It will involve partnerships with Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine.

The project intends to build upon the experience gained with countries that have already participated in the previous framework programmes, such as Egypt and Jordan. However, the needs of Iran and Iraq will inevitably prove different from those of countries where cooperation with the European Union has a proven track record.

The project’s backers believe it has high potential to deliver long-lasting impact and structuring effects on cooperation between the EU and the Middle East region.

MERID Budget: €999,750 EU contribution: €999,750 H2020-INT-INCO-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194397_en.html 30

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Addressing educational exclusion Seven research groups – from Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, Hungary, South Africa and Spain – are collaborating to address educational and social exclusion.

The ‘Innovative Education for a New Century’ project will study existing successful work with children.

It will also provide training programmes, carry out research, develop interdisciplinary solutions and create a global programme of successful educational actions to be implemented across educational systems.

SALEACOM Budget: €499,500 EU contribution: €391,500 H2020-MSCA-RISE-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194355_ en.html

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Briefing - Digital Economy and Society

Small business making a big impact Social responsibility shopping (SRS) is an innovative business model, conceived by Italy’s Citybility. It is designed to enable small retailers to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility in a way often only achieved by larger companies.

Similarly, local charities will be able to fundraise as if they were well-known charitable organisations. Thanks to SRS digital platform, small retailers can sustain a charity nearby and attract customers that share the same ethical values, by giving money every time a transaction is made. While helping shopkeepers to develop their business, SRS aims to support thousands of local charities to carry out their projects, and even encourage citizens to establish new charities.

Launching later this year, SRS is expected to stimulate local fundraising and to sustain local consumption at the same time, permitting local economies to thrive.

Social Resp Shopping Budget: â‚Ź71,429 EU contribution: â‚Ź50,000 H2020-SMEINST-1-2015 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/197380_en.html 32

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Improving machine language translation A European digital single market free of barriers, including language, is a stated EU objective to be achieved by 2020. But only three of the EU-27 languages currently enjoy moderate to good support from machine translation technologies.

It is a key obstacle impeding the free flow of people, information and trade in the digital single market. Many of the languages not supported show common traits: they are morphologically complex, with free and diverse word order. Often there are not enough training resources and/or processing tools. Together this results in drastic drops in translation quality.

The combined challenges of linguistic phenomena and resource scenarios have created a large and under-explored grey area in the language technology map of European languages. Combining support from key stakeholders, QT21 will addresses this by developing substantially improved statistical and machine-learning based translation models.

Quality Translation 21 Budget: 3.99m EU contribution: 3.97m H2020-ICT-2014-1 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194324_en.html 33

Briefing - Digital Economy and Society

Welcoming Europe’s young hopefuls A project aims to connect four European entrepreneurial ecosystems – in Berlin, Dublin, Milan and Madrid.

‘Welcome’ will connect investors, corporates, media and successful web entrepreneurs with emerging start-ups. The goal is to create a pan-European ecosystem that engages every web entrepreneur. It will encompass young hopefuls, start-ups, investors, established companies, and media.

The objective is to connect start-ups and investors, but also start-ups with other startups and build a cross-border investor network.

WELCOME Budget: €2.85m EU contribution: € 2m H2020-ICT-2014-1 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194183_ en.html

Using digital to research the Holocaust A bid to transform archival research on the Holocaust has been launched. The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) aims to integrate the data, services and expertise of existing Holocaust infrastructures on an unprecedented scale.

It will allow researchers from across the globe transnational and virtual access to material and provide them with innovative digital tools and methods to collaboratively explore and analyse Holocaust sources.

The EHRI consortium includes 22 partners, spread across Europe and beyond. EHRI will continue to serve as a ‘best practice’ model for other humanities projects, and its innovative approach to data integration, management and retrieval will have impact in the wider cultural and IT industries.

EHRI Budget: €7.96m EU contribution: €7.96m H2020-INFRAIA-2014-2015 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194942_en.html 34

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Giving people control over their data Online advertising generates more than $42bn in revenue annually and supports around 3.5 million jobs in Europe.

It supports some of the most important Internet services such as search, social media and user generated content sites.

But the lack of transparency regarding tracking techniques and the type of information companies collect about users is creating increasing concerns.

Increasingly, people are using ad-blockers that threaten the business model of many companies.

The TYPES project aims to create tools that guarantees both transparency and privacy preservation, give the end user control of the amount of information they are willing to share, and defines privacy-by-design solutions.

TYPES will demonstrate solutions that protect users’ privacy while empowering them to control how their data is used by service providers for advertising purposes.

At the same time, TYPES will make it easier to verify whether users’ online rights are respected and if a balance can be achieved between personal data shared and value provided.

TYPES Budget: €4.66m EU contribution: €3.99m H2020-DS-2014-1 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194867_en.html

Revealing how public money is spent Increasing the transparency and efficiency of public spending in the age of austerity presents challenges for Europe. Public procurement is prone to corruption and budget deficit.

The objective Digiwhist is to combine data on public spending with governance indicators and thus strengthen the accountability and transparency of public administrations.

The project will collect, analyse, and disseminate tender-level information on public procurement in 35 jurisdictions across Europe.

Partners in the project include scientists and researchers from computer and political sciences, sociology, criminology, and economics at six institutions in four European countries.

DIGIWHIST Budget: €3.02m EU contribution: €2.98m H2020-INSO-2014 http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194398_en.html 35

The Big Picture

Thirst for knowledge

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Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

An improvised classroom for children of refugees in Harmanli, Bulgaria.

Because of the high demand for places and shortage of desks, some children are forced to sit on the floor.

The picture was taken by Hristo Rusev, who is 20 years-old and studying International Relations at the Varna Free University.

It won the Education theme of the European Parliament’s guest photographer competition, which runs until September. http://bit.ly/1uKVFmW

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Climate Action and Energy

New standards post-2020

By Commissioner Miguel Areas Canete One of the cornerstones of our climate and energy policy framework for 2030 is a binding domestic target to reduce EU greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% compared to 1990 levels.

To get there, non-ETS sectors, that is to say transport, agriculture and the building sector, will have to reduce emissions by 30% compared to 2005. To achieve our overall target, all sectors need to contribute.

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Today, road transport accounts for about one-fifth of the EU’s carbon dioxide emissions.

We must continue our efforts to bring these emissions down.

That is why the Energy Union strategy we launched last February addresses the decarbonisation challenge as part of a bigger picture. Together with the need to strengthen the security of our energy supplies, improve our internal energy market, increase energy efficiency and boost research and innovation.

There are two specific areas to highlight.

First, energy efficiency. In fact, “efficiency first” has become my motto – simply because it makes so much sense. Consuming less energy means polluting less, paying less and sustaining more of our energy sources.

This also applies to vehicles. Efficiency gains help us not just cut emissions, but also save consumers fuel and money. For an average car, our 2020 target of 95 grams of CO2 per

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

We need effective cooperation across sectors, member states and policy areas”

renewables target. And the clear conclusion is that we are on track to meet this target with more than 15% of the EU’s energy coming from renewables.

When it comes to transport, the report shows that with a share of 5.7% in 2014, achieving our 10% target of renewable energy in transport will certainly be challenging, yet feasible. This means determined collective efforts to achieve our target of raising the share of renewables to at least 27% by 2030.

It also means making renewables an integral part of our energy system. We need a properly connected, flexible internal electricity market which is compatible with renewables.

To this end, I will present a package including a consultative communication on market design and a new energy deal for consumers, to be followed by legislation in 2016.

kilometre is estimated to help the consumer save around 3000 euro in fuel costs over the car’s lifetime, as compared with the 2015 target.

Moreover, saving fuel also helps reduce our dependency on imported oil. And the money saved at the gas station can be used to benefit other sectors of the economy.

This brings me to my second point – renewable energy and its essential role in building a more sustainable future for Europe. Over the last two decades we have seen renewables move from the fringe into the mainstream. But this is not enough.

Our goal is for the EU to be the world leader in renewables. I have presented the latest figures on our progress to meet our 2020

We will also need innovative solutions for grid management technologies that are fit for renewables and can give consumers greater control over their energy use. Users should be able to charge their electric vehicle when prices are low and reduce their consumption when prices are high.

This will also be a challenge for our transport infrastructure. New solutions will only gain ground if vehicles, fuels and infrastructure – such as refuelling and recharging stations – are rolled out together successfully. Our policies will have to reflect this. That’s why we taking an integrated approach is so important.

Another building block of solid policies is a thorough assessment of facts. Indeed, evidence shows that our legislation to reduce road transport emissions is working. As stated before, the emission limit targets set for cars and vans for 2015 and 2017, respectively, were achieved well in advance.

But we need to go further. That’s why our to-do list for the Energy Union for the next two years includes a review of the Regulation setting emission performance standards to establish post-2020 targets for cars and vans.

There will be new standards post2020. These targets will be ambitious but achievable. Any decision on future requirements will be based on a thorough understanding of the costs and benefits.

This is why, our first challenge will be to carefully determine, in the context of the Effort Sharing Decision, the scale of contribution of transport and the overall cost vis-à-vis other non-ETS sector (agriculture and building).

So, in the first half of next year, together with the Effort Sharing Decision, the Commission will also present a Communication on Decarbonisation of Transport which will set out our strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in transport. This will be followed, later on, by specific legislation.

We need to anticipate future developments in the transport system. This requires continued efforts on research, development and a forward-looking approach that would not lock Europe in the technologies of the past.

The future of the transport sector is full of exciting possibilities; new high-tech materials; connected cars getting smarter and smarter and one day autonomous; seamlessly functioning, intelligent transport systems.

One thing all these innovative technologies and solutions have in common is that no one can develop them alone. We need effective cooperation across sectors, member states and policy areas.

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Transport

A hydrogen fuelled future

By William Peakin Now there’s a map for it, courtesy of the International Energy Agency.

in buildings, to large-scale underground storage (the way gas is often kept).

Hydrogen and fuel cell technologies are still in early stages, but they could eventually allow for the storage of low-carbon energy (when the sun’s not shining).

Hydrogen is an energy carrier that partly offers the advantages of fossil fuels – flexibility and energy density – with potentially a low carbon footprint.

This offers the flexibility that’s now covered by gas and coal-fired electricity in responding to peaks and lows in demand, but it’s cleaner and greener.

As a storehouse of low-carbon energy, it offers a means to integrate high shares of variable renewable electricity into the energy system.

Governments have a role to play in developing the technology and putting it to use, the agency says.

The potential for hydrogen fuel cells is broad, from electric cars, to power and heat generation 40

But as the IEA Technology Roadmap: Hydrogen and Fuel Cells explains, not only is hydrogen technology’s economic success uncertain, its necessary components are less advanced than those of many other lowcarbon technologies.

However, it also makes clear that hydrogen holds promise for some of the key challenges facing emissions reduction in sectors such as transport, industry and buildings, as well as the electricity system.

The report details the steps governments, industry and researchers need to take to foster and track deployment of hydrogen technology, if it is to be a significant energy carrier by 2050.

Hydrogen is a flexible energy carrier that can be produced from any regionally prevalent primary energy source. It can be effectively transformed into any form of energy for diverse end-use applications.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

The potential is broad, from electric cars, to power and heat generation in buildings”

It has the potential to facilitate significant reductions in energy-related CO2 emissions and to contribute to limiting global temperature rise to 2°C, according to the IEA’s estimates.

In addition, hydrogen use can lower local air pollutants and noise emissions compared to direct fossil fuel combustion. By enabling continued use of fossil fuel resources for end-use applications that would limit global warming to 2 degrees centigrade, hydrogen production in combination with CCS can provide energy security benefits and help maintain a diversified fuel mix.

As an energy carrier, hydrogen can enable new linkages between energy supply and demand, in both a centralised or decentralised manner, potentially enhancing overall energy system flexibility.

By connecting different energy transmission and distribution networks, sources of lowcarbon energy can be connected to enduse applications that are challenging to decarbonise, including transport, industry and buildings. In remote areas with little access to

the power grid, these connections can expand off-grid access to energy services while minimising emissions.

Hydrogen is particularly useful as an energy carrier, because it allows low-carbon energy to be stored. Small quantities of hydrogen with a low carbon footprint can be stored under restricted space and weight requirements to enable long-distance, low-carbon driving using fuel cell electric vehicles.

Large quantities of hydrogen can be stored over long periods of time, facilitating the integration of high shares of variable renewable energy into the energy system for power and heat. Hydrogen-based systems such as power-to-fuel, power-to-power or power-to-gas can be employed to make use of variable renewable energy that would otherwise be curtailed at times when supply outstrips demand.

reduction in transport transport-related carbon emission reductions. Assuming a fast ramp-up of FCEV sales, a self-sustaining market could be achieved within 15 to 20 years after the introduction of the first 10,000 such vehicles.

While the potential environmental and energy security benefits of hydrogen and fuel cells in end-use applications are promising, the development of hydrogen generation, transmission and distribution and retail infrastructure is challenging.

For example, the risks associated with market uptake of this kind of car have been a significant barrier to infrastructure investment.

For each of the assumed 150 million such vehicles sold between now and 2050, around $900 to $1,900 will need to be spent on hydrogen infrastructure development, depending on the region.

Full report: http://bit.ly/1JnFPIH

Fuel cell electric vehicles can provide the mobility service of today’s conventional cars at potentially very low carbon emissions.

Deploying a 25% share of in road transport by 2050 could contribute up to a significant 41

Climate Action and Energy

Wind beneath the wings 42

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

After its acquisition by Google in 2013, Makani Power has developed a 600 kW energy kite”

When people talk about energy from wind, most think of a fixed tower, turbines and a heavy generator.

But while this method of harnessing power from a natural resource is increasingly commonplace, it has some flaws.

At increasing altitudes, the costs for the tower increase exponentially and require a sophisticated infrastructure for transporting the heavy components and assembling the power plant.

Less well-known is the fact that it is the only the outer most part of the huge and heavy wings that create the most energy.

Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) takes advantage of this phenomenon and significantly simplifies the design of wind based power generators.

AWE could replace large fixed towers with a tether connecting a kite to the ground.

Different shapes and materials are possible for the kite, from fixed wings like a glider airplane, to soft wings as used by surfers and parachutists.

The kite is the equivalent of the wing tips of the conventional turbine. It flies in circles or figures of eight to increase the effective wind speed.

By removing the heavy components from the system, this type of power plant is much more flexible in terms of location, and considerably cheaper in construction.

Power generation comes either from small turbines mounted on the wing or by a generator on the ground.

In the latter case the kite pulls out the tether with positive electricity output and is pulled in at the end of the cycle with less negative

output by adjusting the angle of wing to wind, thus lowering the opposing force.

AWE systems allow wind farms at higher altitudes, which go hand in hand with higher, and more constant wind speeds.

Over the past decade the AWE scientific and industrial community has grown considerably.

Several teams operate technology demonstrators in the electricity output range up to 80 kW. After its acquisition by Google in 2013, Makani Power has developed a 600 kW energy kite and is performing flight tests.

Ampyx Power has developed two prototypes of the PowerPlane AP-2 and registered these with the aviation authorities as aircraft.

EnerKíte and TwingTec have also developed new generations of prototypes for automatic launching and landing. e-Kite has built an advanced 50 kW ground station for pumping kite power systems, using a direct drive electrical machine.

International AWE conferences have been held in the United States and Europe.

AWEC 2015, held in the Netherlands in June, was the first international conference organised within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Initial Training Network AWESCO (Airborne Wind Energy System Modelling, Control and Optimisation).

The doctoral training network is funded to the tune of €3.4m by Horizon 2020 and the Swiss federal government and will employ 14 PhD fellows. AWESCO is coordinated by Delft University of Technology and will run until 2018. www.awesco.eu 43

Climate Action and Energy

Reaching for the skies It can be windy, standing on the top of a tall building. But for Alexander Suma, it wasn’t this that was the inspiration for his potential breakthrough in wind power generation.

The idea for the Integrated Roof Wind Energy System (IRWES) came to Dr Suma in 2008, while he was studying for his PhD at the University of Miami; he was prompted by the noise of air conditioning fans in the street where he lived.

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Suma began to think about buildings differently; that while they are built to guard against external forces – the sun, wind and rain – they could also use those to capture natural energy. Along with colleague Dr Rossella Ferraro, he used his design and engineering skills to come up with a roof that channels wind, directing it to an integrated turbine.

Urged by their tutors to secure a patent for the technology, in 2011 Ferraro was granted a Marie Curie Fellowship from the EU-FrameWork 7, and selected the Eindhoven University of Technology as a host institution

with Dr Faas Moonen as her mentor. Suma moved to Europe as he finished his PhD and joined the rest of the team.

Product and business development began and after three months the project won an award for most promising research at the university.

A grant award provided the means to build a full-scale prototype and carry out a feasibility study. The prototype was built in Maastricht and tests showed an accelerated wind flow between 170% and 260%, which confirmed the potential of the technology.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

IBIS Power uses its skills to disrupt the status quo of today’s renewable energy solutions”

per area than PV panels when mounted on roofs higher than 20m.

The novel system has highest efficiency based on IP protected and tested technology.

It reduces the payback time by effectively producing electric power in both high and low wind speeds resulting in both more efficiency and operational hours.

As Suma focused on the business development and commercialisation of the IRWES, IBIS Power was founded in 2012.

Strategic partners were found to support each step. After receiving the second part of the initial grant, a newly revised plan was executed. That included finalisation of the research and development.

IRWES has developed into a breakthrough solution; a roof-mounted, aesthetically pleasing structure with an internal – nonvisible – turbine making smart use of aerodynamics. It is more efficient than any existing urban windmill, and more efficient

In the Netherlands alone there are 35,000 buildings suitable for application with attractive return on investment, while even greater impact can be achieved in Europe where one in six of the population lives in highrise buildings.

Suma said that IRWES is a business opportunity ready for large growth, to serve the, until now, unreachable segment of local renewable energy supply to high buildings, while seamlessly aligning with the Horizon 2020 Work Programme objectives.

IRWES addresses European and global challenges such as reducing the risk of carbon “lock-in”, offering sustainable and affordable

alternatives to rising electricity prices as well as closing the gap between R&D, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The beginning of 2015 marked a very important time for IBIS Power, when it exceled on all criteria with an overall score of 14.35 out of 15 and received an important funding in the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument programme.

By making optimal use of market evaluations, prototype testing and validation, IBIS Power is on track for fast growth to serve a large global market and make substantial green and economic impact on society and its environment.

“We want a world that runs completely on renewable energy and where all renewable energy sources are available for everyone in every part of the world. We envision this through solutions that fit in the human lifestyle as well as in nature,” said Suma.

“IBIS Power uses all its knowledge and skills to disrupt the status quo of today’s accepted renewable energy solutions.”

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Climate Action and Energy

Path of least resistance Envision Energy, the world leading Smart Energy solution provider, has plans to install a superconductive generator on one of its most advanced wind turbines. The product, EcoSwing, is designed for a +3 MW class direct drive turbine, and will provide enough electricity to power 1000 households.

Anders Rebsdorf, Head of Envision’s Global Innovation Centre, said: “After years of research, superconductivity has finally matured to a level where it can be considered for testing and demonstration on a full-sized wind turbine.

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“The EcoSwing DD generator will be one of the most ambitious superconductive systems in terms of torque density, and we are proud to spearhead this important milestone project.”

EcoSwing has received funding from Horizon 2020. The generator is thought to be the first superconductive generator designed for a wind turbine and promises a step change in generator development.

The key advantage of the EcoSwing is a weight saving of more than 40% compared to conventional direct drive generators. For the entire housing, this results in 25% less weight, and of course proportionally less material usage.

A particularly welcomed side effect is that the EcoSwing technology dramatically reduces rare-earth material reliance - a commodity of scarce supply and price fluctuations.

The consortium, composed of members from industry and science, anticipates that EcoSwing drive-train will result in a competitive solution compared to direct drive or geared solution.

Rebsdorf added: “The potentials for a lightweight and competitive generator are truly exciting. The EcoSwing technology is an important advancement in our continuous quest for lowering cost of renewable energy.”

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

The technology is an important advancement in our continuous quest for lowering cost of renewable energy�

Superconductors are capable of conducting electricity without resistance. They are thus highly complementary to energy efficient technologies as a substitute to copper. In comparison to copper they can carry 100 times the current density, making electrical machinery compact and lightweight. Vastly reduced material usage contributes to making this technology highly competitive to conventional machinery.

Envision Energy is the world leading smart energy solution provider whose offerings include smart wind turbines, smart wind/solar management software, and smart energy technology services. Globally there are over 3 GW of Envision Smart wind turbines are in

operation, while Envision Wind OS and Apollo solar platforms help manage more than 13 GW of renewable energy assets worldwide.

It is the third largest turbine company in China, the largest offshore turbine supplier in China and the largest renewable asset management service company in the world.

The company’s vision is to enable solar and wind to become the primary energy sources by 2025, by using the latest IT and communication technologies including cloud computing, advanced sensor and big data analytics to transform the conventional energy world.

EcoSwing addresses multidisciplinary aspects of research and development and will advance industrial superconductivity, cryogenics, and power conversion. To address technology implementation, the consortium will carry out risk studies and assess regulatory aspects.

After thorough ground-based testing in a certified laboratory the EcoSwing generator is planned to operate for over one year on a large-scale modern wind turbine in Denmark.

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Environment, Maritime and Fisheries

Understanding the big blue

By William Peakin 48

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

We probably know more about the surface of the moon than we do about some parts of the oceans”

less bio-diverse. These and other influences of the Atlantic Ocean on the coastal states and continents are immense.

The AtlantOS project will work towards an integrated Atlantic Ocean Observing System to enhance our knowledge of the ocean thus contributing to Europe’s Blue Growth agenda.

Horizon 2020 is co-funding the 62-partner strong project with about €21m over a period of four years.

As Franz Immler, Head of EASME’s Climate Action sector, says: “Nowadays we probably know more about the surface of the moon than we do about some parts of the oceans,” echoing a common concern of ocean scientists.

The project brings together research institutes and organisations from the European Union, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, South Africa and the US. It will contribute to implementing the Transatlantic Ocean Research Alliance as well as to the Group on Earth Observations initiative.

A wide range of areas will benefit from a better understanding of the ocean – from transport through disaster resilience and ecosystem management to health and fresh water supply.

New services will also increase the safety of offshore activities and coastal communities.

The Atlantic Ocean is a major trade route, provides the oxygen we breathe, most fish we eat and is responsible for the mild climate in northern Europe.

Environmental change causes the ocean to warm, sea levels to rise, fish populations to decline and migrate, the water to become more polluted, more acidic, deoxygenized and

“Many benefits will be brought to the communities around the Atlantic Ocean and beyond,” said Martin Visbeck, of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, and coordinator of the AtlantOS project. “like getting more efficient information gathering, new technologies to ocean observing, new services and products for a better measure of factors which influence oceans.”

The United States, Canada and the EU have committed themselves to strengthen their cooperation in the sustainable exploration of the Atlantic by signing the ‘Galway Statement on Atlantic Ocean Research Cooperation’.

The aim is a better understanding of the

Atlantic Ocean and a more collaborative and sustainable management of its resources.

“AtlantOS is one of the first major projects which aims to support this agenda. Therefore our project includes a strong transatlantic component and we have partners such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from USA or the Dalhousie University in Halifax from Canada,” said Visbeck.

Data from the deep Atlantic ocean are still scarce: “Studies in recent years have repeatedly shown that even processes in the deep sea have an impact on the marine ecosystems and on climate in Africa, Europe or America,” he said.

The project also aims to increase the interactions between the physics, chemistry and ecology but also between open-ocean and coastal observing: “The ocean is a highly complex and interdependent system in which all components are closely linked,” said Visbeck, “our observational efforts need to reflect that also.”

The AtlantOS project partners want to ensure that future measured data will be more compatible by defining common standards.

At the same time, they fill gaps in the existing observing systems.

“However,” Visbeck added, “we need not build a completely new observing network. It is all about connecting the existing infrastructure and infuse modern technology and use the whole system in a more efficient and integrated way.

“We have set ourselves very ambitious goals. But the relevance of the Atlantic for Europe is too significant to explore it only in bits and pieces.

“We need more national commitment and increased capabilities to ensure more effective, fit-for-purpose and sustainable ocean observing as a permanent basis for future marine research and information product delivery.”

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Environment, Maritime and Fisheries

Revealing the

hidden Atlantic

Unchartered features of the Atlantic seabed, including mountains and ridges more than 1,000m high, have been discovered by a multi-national team of ocean explorers.

The survey onboard Ireland’s national research vessel, the RV Celtic Explorer, is one of the first projects to be launched by the Atlantic Ocean 50

Research Alliance formed following the signing of the Galway Statement on Atlantic Ocean Cooperation between Canada, the EU and the US in May 2013.

Its goals are to join resources of its three signatories to better understand the North Atlantic Ocean and to promote the sustainable management of its resources.

The team comprises members of the Marine Institute and Geological Survey of Ireland, the Fisheries and Marine Institute of Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Seeing dramatic seabed features reveal themselves for the first time was a real highlight”

real highlight of the survey. We need to better understand the features that make up the ocean seabed.

“With global population and seafood demand spiralling, we need to map our seabed to define favourable habitats for fishing, key sites for conservation, and safe navigation for shipping. Map it, manage it, and mind it.”

It used the latest multi-beam echo sounder technology on the Celtic Explorer to create high-resolution images of dramatic seabed features. The survey uncovered 235km2 of iceberg scarred seabed, ancient glacial moraine features, and buried sediment channels on the Newfoundland and Labrador shelf.

and set out to ‘groundtruth’ seafloor features identified through satellite altimetry research in the last two years.

The team also charted a 15km long downslope channel feature on the western Atlantic continental slope, most likely formed by meltwater run-off associated with ice cap grounding during the last glaciation, approximately 20,000 years ago.

“It shows what can be achieved when we pool our resources, sharing knowledge, infrastructure and technology. And we hope to build on this next year, when Ireland’s R.V. Celtic Explorer will be joined by research vessels from Norway and the USA, and in subsequent years.”

As part of the journey, it crossed the dramatic Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge creating a 3D visualisation of a 3.7km high underwater mountain. Continuing eastward a straight asymmetric ridge feature came to life standing proud from the flat seabed over 140km long, peaking at 1108m high.

“This survey marks the beginning of an exciting Atlantic research mapping collaboration between the US, Canada and Europe,” said Dr Peter Heffernan, of Ireland’s Marine Institute.

Tommy Furey, the Institute’s Chief Scientist, added: “Seeing dramatic seabed features reveal themselves for the first time was a

The survey was part funded by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador which has invested approximately $5 million in RV Celtic Explorer expeditions since 2010 to support fisheries science activities.

The vessel had just completed the annual fisheries survey in Newfoundland and Labrador, which provided the opportunity to embark on the trans-Atlantic mapping survey on the return journey to Ireland.

The survey is one of the first projects to be launched by the Alliance, formed in May 2013 following the signing of the Galway Statement on Atlantic Ocean Cooperation between Canada, the EU and the US. The three signatories agreed a common goal to jointly undertake the challenge to better understand the North Atlantic Ocean, and to promote the sustainable management of its resources. The Horizon 2020 programme is investing €70m in related projects.

The ambitious survey route included an area off Newfoundland and Labrador where cold water corals and sponges are known to occur and crossed the OSPAR designated Marine Protected Area in the dramatic topography of the central Atlantic.

It also targeted the drop location for the first trans-Atlantic telecommunications cable laid in 1858 between Ireland and Newfoundland, 51

Environment, Maritime and Fisheries

Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen We drink water, we bathe in water and we are made of water. It is the most important liquid, and we don’t fully know it.

Why does water increase density upon melting? Why does its viscosity decrease under pressure? Why does it have such a high surface tension? Can water really exist 52

as two liquids?

Professor Anders Nilsson of Stockholm University proposes to address some of the most important outstanding questions of a microscopic understanding of water.

Nilsson will investigate the structure and dynamics of the hydrogen-bonding network, which gives rise to the unique

properties of water, and how it is affected by temperature, pressure and interaction with solutes and interfaces.

He will be studying water with new x-ray freeelectron lasers and plans to further develop fast cooling and ultrafast x-ray probing and novel experimental methods to reveal the mysteries of H2O.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

The President of the ERC, Professor JeanPierre Bourguignon, added: “This year the competition has been particularly fierce and many more than the 190 laureates would have deserved support.

“The scientists responsible for the selection in the 25 peer review panels, covering all fields, were faced with a very difficult task of choosing proposals bold enough to provide radical new knowledge while having a good chance of being successful.”

The research has the potential to bring the most significant advances in years”

The research has the potential to bring the most significant advances in the study of water in years.

Nilsson has been awarded €2.5m by the European Research Council (ERC). At the end of June, the ERC announced the award of its prestigious Advanced Grants to 190 senior researchers. The funding, worth in total €445m, will enable them and their teams to pursue groundbreaking ideas.

These are the first ERC Advanced Grants awarded under the ‘excellent science’ pillar

of Horizon 2020. Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, said: “Scientists benefitting from these ERC Advanced Grants work at the frontiers of human knowledge.

“They have groundbreaking ideas that may be risky to pursue, but that also reap exceptional gains. They also often spark new discoveries and tackle the biggest challenges for society.

Thanks to funding for excellent science from Horizon 2020, the EU’s research and innovation programme, they will be able to continue exploring these ideas.”

The grantees will work on a wide range of topics and will follow many different approaches as the ERC supports frontier research in all areas of knowledge in a very open format.

As well as Professor Nilsson, they include a researcher in Italy setting up a team pioneering gene therapy for heart arrhythmias and a Czech biologist will investigate biodiversity in tropical and temperate forests.

ERC grants are awarded to researchers of any nationality based in, or willing to move to, Europe. In this competition, researchers of 23 different nationalities received the funding, with British (38), German (33), Dutch (18), French (17) and Italian (16) researchers awarded the highest number of grants.

The new ERC projects will be hosted in 17 countries across Europe, with the United Kingdom (45 grants), Germany (29) and France (23) as top locations.

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Agriculture and Rural Development

Making local the new global

By Commissioner Phil Hogan 54

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Let’s make our rural communities the drivers of innovation in the 21st century” We cherish our rural communities in the European Union, and view them as key drivers of our shared prosperity and sustainable growth.

As problems of an urgent global nature multiply, rural areas are increasingly being viewed as holding many of the solutions, in terms of food security, renewable energy, environmental sustainability and water provision.

Providing genuine connectivity will be vital if we are serious about enabling rural areas and the communities that live in them to be full partners in developing these solutions.

In the agri-food sector, developing and using technological innovations for precision farming requires rapid connection to the Internet. A plethora of small and medium-sized business opportunities will be available to any given area when full connectivity is realised. These will incentivise rural dwellers to stay in their local areas as well as attracting new residents.

Easy access to technology leads to innovation which leads to jobs. We need not look far for evidence – I recently learned about the Sinclair, an early 1980s computer that was made in Dundee, with cheap copies easily available. As a result, Dundee became a micro-culture of tech and computer games, and today hosts over 40 gaming firms and the UK’s biggest games prize – The Abertay.

Fast Internet connectivity can lead to similar micro-cultures developing in remote areas, leading to a new influx of jobs and growth.

Furthermore, affordable fast Internet access in the countryside will benefit society as a whole via new developments such as telemedicine or tele-learning services – areas of research that cannot be rolled out in most European countries until greater rural connectivity is developed.

Bringing fibre to the hardest to reach places first will also stimulate existing providers to invest in their own infrastructure before they start to lose customers.

A rural user’s experience of using the Internet will be entirely revolutionised with a decent fibre connection. A farmer could instantly download his Single Farm Payment form in one corner of the screen while having a simultaneous Skype call with his agricultural advisor.

Meanwhile, his son’s band are performing live via video link-up while his mother is being remotely treated by her specialist telemedicine carers from the clinic in the nearest big town. This picture is not pie-inthe-sky – it is achievable.

The paradigm shift we must work towards has a name: FttH or “Fibre to the Home”. If telecoms companies can’t be steered to make these necessary changes, solutions may be found in rural areas themselves. Communities throughout Europe have developed innovative models of cable installation and financing.

In rural Lancashire, a project called Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN) will have connected 5,000 properties in 35 outlying parishes by the end of 2015, with an impressive local take-up rate of 65% for the service.

This success story came about because the local community came together: local residents have managed every stage of the process, developing a share-based funding model; laying the cables and providing a voluntary help service when B4RN customers have computer or tablet problems.

So I am convinced that our goals are achievable with joined-up thinking, enlightened collaboration, and – of course – funding. We have to use taxpayers’ money to attract private investment.

The European Commission is committed to adding value by putting its money where its mouth is. One of the aims of the EU Digital Single Market package is to close the digital gap between urban and rural areas, with the ambition of providing fast or ultra-fast broadband across the EU by 2020.

Roughly €21.4bn from the five EU Structural and Investment Funds will be devoted to information and communication technologies.

Within this, approximately €6.4bn EUR will finance the roll-out of high speed broadband.

The estimated contribution from Rural Development funding will be between €1.6bn and €2bn.

I have placed the prioritisation of high speed broadband for rural areas as an important policy objective for my mandate.

I am working closely with the Commissioner for Regional Development Corina Cretu to deliver a good result. These amounts will all be co-financed by investment from other private or public sources.

The development of tailored financial instruments may also be desirable, so that local projects could access loans at competitive rates over a 10-15 year period.

The Commission in cooperation with the European Investment Bank is assessing options for this at present.

It is no exaggeration to say that the future of farming, of rural entrepreneurship, and indeed of our rural communities generally, relies to a large extent on the rural right to fast Internet connectivity.

This is the key to enabling remote working and business from rural areas; eCommerce, creative sectors; precision farming; and all the commercial, social and community benefits arising from full connectivity.

If the countryside enters an era of genuine FttH connectivity, there is no reason in the world why tomorrow’s information society jobs cannot be carried out in the country.

The wealthy information economy we dream of can start from the edge – literally – if we embrace the challenge together. Let’s make local the new global; and make our rural communities the drivers of innovation in the 21st century.

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Health and Food Safety

Showing international leadership

By Franz Fischler It was my pleasure to chair the Expo 2015 EU Scientific Steering Committee tasked with producing the discussion paper on the role of research in global food and nutrition security as part of its participation at Expo Milano 2015.

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The issue of food and nutrition
is one that affects us all. We must look to innovative solutions to increase food production if we are to feed a growing world population healthily and sustainably. European research has a key role to play in unlocking the potential of agriculture and in enabling those in developing countries to escape poverty.

The steering committee prepared a clearcut and realistic research agenda focused on where the EU can add most value in addressing the production of, access to and consumption of food. We also tried to address structural issues related to new knowledge and the transfer of knowledge into use.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

European research has a key role to play in unlocking the potential of agriculture�

over- consumption of calories coupled with low levels of physical activity.

The drafting of the paper was guided by 11 scientific experts along with five stakeholder participants and advisers of international repute. Throughout the process we kept one goal always in mind, to draw on the crucial role that research can play in the fight against world hunger and overcoming the challenges associated with ensuring food and nutrition security for all.

It gives an overview of where European research can add the most value in relation to tackling food and nutrition security challenges and points to areas where we can expand our research potential. Moreover, it highlights the need to develop a governance structure that will allow sharing of best practices and facilitate the transfer of knowledge and innovation to feed the planet sustainably.

It should stimulate a global discussion with stakeholders and the general public.

The EU is a unique entity with coordination in research, policy and practice across a large number of countries, geo-climatic regimes and cultures. The EU hosts a huge human capital of researchers, with significant amounts of world-leading expertise.

Economic, public and environmental health have all been considered as we looked at seven main themes where research could be better utilised to ensure food and nutrition security. We chose to use the term food and nutrition security throughout as the issues at stake are so much more complex than ensuring availability, access and stability of calories.

The EU has already demonstrated its commitment to turn the tide against undernutrition; however, we have a political and moral responsibility to go further, and this may include encouraging healthy eating patterns to avoid diseases associated with

Many of the issues raised by the food and nutrition security challenge are inherently interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral and culturally entrenched. The significant Horizon 2020 investments are aimed at undertaking strategic and policy relevant research for the benefit of the member states.

We already have a strong track record of coordination between research providers, within and across countries, between research users across policy domains; indeed this is an area where we are arguably world leading.

The EU therefore has an important role to play in delivering research to overcome these challenges, but also showing international leadership in research and innovation into use for economic and societal benefits: enhancing health and well-being, sustainability and generating economic growth and employment.

There is scope for the further development of mechanisms for enhancing research-into-use. For example, developing research prioritisation to ensure that knowledge is generated across the complex global agri-food system that leads to the most positive impacts for the health of the public, environment and economy.

Also, developing instruments for aligning complex research challenges across complex societal needs that change across space (within and between member states and beyond) and developing a sophisticated and inclusive innovation culture building on the European Innovation Partnerships, within Europe as well as beyond, for example in Africa).

It could also include facilitating a sustainable bio-economy and sharing related science and institutional knowledge internationally; developing channels of communication and knowledge exchange that are inclusive and respectful of cultural complexity; and developing models of governance for delivering sustainable agriculture and nutrition from local to supra-national scales. 
 Franz Fischler was European Commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development and Fisheries from 1995 to 2004.

An online consultation on the Role of Research in Global Food and Nutrition Security is open until 1 September. http://europa.eu/expo2015/onlineconsultation 57

Health and Food Safety

Creating a vaccine for cancer The Medical University of Innsbruck has launched an innovative research project to implement modern, personalised cancer immunotherapy.

However, clinical application is currently hampered by specific bottlenecks in bioinformatics, which the Innsbruck-led team aims to address.

Cancer treatments that involve the use of the adaptive immune system have demonstrated profound tumour regressions including complete cure.

Dr Zlatko Trajanoski, Director of the Innsbruck Division of Bioinformatics, is coordinating APERIM, the ‘Advanced bioinformatics platform for PERsonalised cancer Immunotherapy’ project.

Importantly, technological advances in next-generation sequencing allow, for the first time, the development of personalised cancer immunotherapies that target patient specific mutations.

Eight academic partners and three companies are working on practical implementation of immunotherapy specifically for unique tumour mutations of individual patients. The researchers will receive €3m from Horizon 2020.

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“We are creating the conditions needed to better treat cancer with state-of-the-art precision medicine,” said Trajanoski. “Many research papers have shown that cancer immunotherapy is suitable for successfully treating cancer.”

The immune system protects the human body not only against foreign pathogens, but also against tumour cells. Cancer cells can escape the control of the immune system in various ways. However, this reduced defensive reaction can be stimulated therapeutically, as numerous research papers have shown.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

That will allow all molecular properties and specific mutations of a tumour to be stored and retrieved: “This comprehensive information will then provide an important foundation for diagnosis and therapy,” said Trajanoski.

The second step will be the development of a tool for quantifying tumour-infiltrated T cells.

“It is essential to determine the density and the subpopulations of the tumour-infiltrated T cells precisely to be able to identify high-risk patients. The more specific immune cells are infiltrating, the higher the chances of survival of cancer patients,” he said.

We are creating the conditions needed to treat cancer with precision medicine” The new findings and ways of obtaining more and more information from samples, known as ‘next generation sequencing’ methods, require the development of new platforms to utilise the data to treat patients.

Treatment platforms process the individual data of cancer patients to allow it to be used for therapy recommendations, for example.

Bioinformatics methods permit the evaluation and processing of the specific information on the molecular fundamentals of individual tumours, which in turn forms the basis for personalised cancer immunotherapy.

The “APERIM” project has four goals: a new database will store all molecular information on a tumour; a new analysis tool will permit quantification of tumour-infiltrated T cells; a software application will provide the information required to produce personalised; and therapeutic vaccinations and a new method will be used to develop a special T cell gene therapy.

Trajanoski and his colleagues plan to develop a database in which all information on a tumour – findings from the histopathological image analysis as well as genetic and clinical data – can be entered.

The third step will be to develop software to identify antigens for the development of individualised cancer vaccination based on the comprehensive detailed information. Every tumour has different properties, which makes it impossible to develop a single vaccination for a type of cancer.

“Therapeutic vaccinations of this kind for treating cancer must be personalised and the software must facilitate the analysis required for this,” adds Trajanoski.

The fourth and final step is to form a vision for the future, as there have only been a few experimental studies to date.

“We want to develop a new method which makes it possible to predict the antigen specificity and tumour activity of the T cells.

Based on this information, individual T cell gene therapy will be developed.”

The APERIM project will evaluate the quality of such predictions.

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Health and Food Safety

Good genes for young hearts With some 400, 000 cases every year, sudden cardiac death (SCD) is a leading cause of mortality in Europe.

Among younger people it is mainly the inherited arrhythmogenic diseases that causes SCD. Professor Silvia G. Priori, of the University of Pavia in Italy, will pioneer gene therapy for prevention of SCD - a virtually unexplored 60

field. Her project will target two inherited, life-threatening conditions: dominant catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) and long QT syndrome type 8 (LQT8).

Priori and her team will investigate strategies of gene-delivery, gene-silencing and gene-editing, comparing efficacy of different methods that could permanently correct the disorders.

The prevention of arrhythmias using gene therapy poses challenges; it is difficult to modify electrical properties of the heart without eliciting pro-arrhythmic side effects.

She expects that the results will not only improve treatment of CPVT and LQT8 but will foster development of gene therapy for other inherited and acquired arrhythmias.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

The applications are evaluated and selected after a peer-review process involving every year hundreds of renowned scientists coming from all over the world.

The scientific quality of the proposal, aiming for excellence, is the only selection criterion. The ERC operates according to an ‘investigatordriven’ approach, allowing researchers to identify new opportunities in any field of research, without thematic priorities.

From 2007 to 2013, under the seventh EU’s Research Framework Programme (FP7), the ERC’s budget was €7.5bn. Under the first pillar – ‘excellent science’ – of Horizon 2020, the ERC has a budget of €1.6bn for each of the years 2014, 2015 and 2016.

To date, the ERC has funded more than 5,000 top researchers at a variety of stages in their careers, giving high priority to young researchers (the 5000th ERC grant was celebrated on 16 June).

Professor Priori will pioneer gene therapy for prevention of SCD” Priori’s work is being funded to the tune €2.3m by the European Research Council (ERC), as part of the first tranche of its Advanced Grants to be awarded under the ‘excellent science’ pillar of Horizon 2020.

Set up in 2007 by the European Commission, the ERC is the first European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Every year it selects and funds the

very best individual scientists to run fiveyear projects in Europe.

Competitions are open to researchers of any nationality, age or scientific area, including humanities and social sciences, hosted in a university or research centre based in the EU or in one of the countries associated to Horizon 2020.

The ERC has also supported more than 40,000 team members, who benefit from cutting-edge research training opportunities.

By offering them funding, autonomy and prestige, the ERC contributes to the development of a new generation of top researchers in Europe, who are competitive at a global level.

More than 40,000 articles featuring ERC projects have been published to date in international scientific journals. Also, the ERC is changing the scientific landscape in Europe as several countries are reforming their funding agencies or policies on the basis of the ERC approach.

The ERC consists of an independent governing body, the Scientific Council, and an implementing body, the Executive Agency.

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Education, Culture, Youth and Sport

The effects of mobility on society

By Ute Karl MOVE is a three-year EU funded project that was launched in May and is part of the Horizon 2020’s Societal Challenge 6 ‘Europe in a changing world’ scheme fostering good mobility and diminishing negative effects in consideration of the objective and subjective perceptions of young people.

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Relevant target groups are the international academic and scientific community, European and national policy makers, labour unions, employer associations, educational institutions and networks, chambers of industry and commerce as well as the general public.

MOVE focuses on cross-border geographic mobility of young people within the EU. Our main research question is how mobility of young people can be ‘good’ both for socio-economic development and for individual development of young people, and what are the factors that foster/hinder such beneficial mobility.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

I am sceptical when there seems to be evidence that a phenomenon is ‘good’ per se”

of the social background including gender specific constraints and opportunities, migration background, impairments or disabilities, and the situation itself, including social relations, kin and non-kin social networks institutional frames, forms of learning, working and living.

Based on a quantitative survey and qualitative case studies we will reconstruct mobility patterns of young people, the fostering and hindering conditions and the positive and negative effects of mobility. These case studies include student mobility for higher education, cross-border volunteering, employment mobility, mobility for a vocational training, pupil’s exchange, and entrepreneurship mobility.

Looking at the countries involved in MOVE Luxembourg, Germany, Romania, Hungary, Norway and Spain - it is already obvious that there are very different levels of mobility in regard of the mentioned forms of mobility. So we will be able to identify different patterns of mobility and its effects on a personal and societal level.

One major aim is to reconstruct mobility patterns of young people and to understand how they achieve the capacity to cope with their situations. The decisions pro or contra mobility arise in a specific context with specific constraints and possibilities, relating to past experiences and expectancies for the future.

This perspective is sensitive to the influence

This is also important to make researchinformed recommendations for interventions to facilitate and improve the institutional, legal and programmatic frames of mobility with regard to different forms and types of mobility as well as to the conditions and constraints of mobility for young people in Europe and to give consultation and expertise to those countries facing significant challenges related to geographical mobility of young workers.

MOVE aims at providing profound knowledge and deep understandings of the mobility patterns of young people aged 18 to 29 in Europe. MOVE will identify examples of good practice to be able to make a researchinformed contribution to the improvement of the mobility of young people in Europe, looking at the same time at the negative and positive impacts of mobility and migration in some geographic regions, and the impacts on family and social networks.

The overall ambition of MOVE is to generate detailed and systematic knowledge about the complexities of young people’s mobility patterns on an individual and sociostructural level.

As a researcher I am always very sceptical when there seems to be evidence that a phenomenon is ‘good’ per se. Very many statements on the European level take it for granted that mobility of young people is good and most of the existing analysis presupposes that mobility is the better way for socioeconomic development and the young people.

MOVE goes beyond the results of the current state of research by asking how mobility can be ‘good’ both on the individual/family and the socio-economic level, and what are the factors that hinder such a beneficial mobility. Qualitative and quantitative evidence will be brought together to explore factors that contribute and factors that hinder good practice.

Ute Karl is Associate Professor of Social Work/Intervention Sociale at the University of Luxembourg.

We have already built up a network of partners on the respective national levels and on the European level so that the transfer between research and practice will be one central aspect during the duration of the project.

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Education, Culture, Youth and Sport

Time to broaden horizons More than a third of UK students are interested in studying abroad, according to research by the British Council. Studying at undergraduate level overseas has become particularly popular, with half of those considering a university course in another country wishing to study at that level compared with 35% a year ago.

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The ‘Broadening Horizons 2015’ research based on a survey of almost 3000 UK students found overall, 34% of all respondents to the survey said they were interested in some form of overseas study. The research was launched in June at the British Council’s annual Going Global conference for leaders of international education in London.

At the conference, the British Council and the UK Higher Education International Unit provided a comprehensive view of students’ own perspectives on the impact of outward mobility as part of a UK higher education, identify the barriers and suggest solutions to help policy makers and institutions identify positive messages of the benefits of mobility.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

A growing number of students are recognising the huge value to be gained from international experience”

Although the UK is established as the most popular destination for new international students, and hosted a total of 493,570 international students in 2013-14, in 201314 UK universities reported that just 28,640 students (22,100 of whom were UK domiciled) went abroad, although this is up from 18,105 the previous academic year.

the UK by the British Council, published for the first time at Going Global, revealed that in 2013/14, the final year of the Erasmus programme as a part of the Lifelong Learning programme, 15,566 UK students spent up to a year in another European country – 10,316 on a study placement, 5,250 on a work placement. This is a 6.8% growth year on year.

According to a 2013 CBI report, 55% of UK employers were unhappy with UK graduates’ foreign language abilities and 47% were disappointed in graduates’ cultural awareness.

Looking ahead from a European perspective, the Erasmus+ programme aims to boost skills and employability, as well as modernising education, training, and youth work. The seven year programme has a budget of €14.7bn; a 40% increase compared to current spending levels, reflecting the EU’s commitment to investing in these areas.

Professor Rebecca Hughes, British Council Director of Education, said: “This latest evidence confirms that a growing number of the UK’s students are recognising the huge value to be gained from international experience. Our universities play an important role in supporting those ambitions.

“The UK needs graduates who have the skills and confidence to compete globally, and can compete against foreign talent that may speak more languages, and have wider international experience. The barriers, real and perceived, to British students going abroad are gradually diminishing, and the UK’s Strategy for Outward Mobility is a very positive step in the right direction.”

The British Council, together with the UK Higher Education International Unit, is conducting an in-depth analysis of what motivates students to go abroad and what universities can do to support more British students to go overseas, which will complement the findings of Broadening Horizons.

Vivienne Stern, Director of the UK HE International Unit said: “The Broadening Horizons research and our own research with the British Council will support the UK Strategy for Outward Mobility and will provide universities with the intelligence they need to better understand students’ motivations and the barriers they face to going overseas which in turn will inform institutions’ future approaches to outward mobility.”

Erasmus+ brings together seven existing EU programmes in the fields of education, training, youth and, for the first time, is providing support for sport. Its backers say that, as an integrated programme, Erasmus+ offers more opportunities for cooperation across the education, training, youth, and sport sectors and is easier to access than its predecessors, with simplified funding rules.

Erasmus+ provides opportunities for more than four million Europeans to study, train, gain work experience and volunteer abroad.

It supports transnational partnerships among education, training and youth institutions and organisations to foster cooperation and bridge the worlds of education and work in order to tackle the skills gaps in Europe.

The programme also supports national efforts to modernise education, training, and youth systems. In the field of sport, there is support for grassroots projects and cross-border challenges such as combating match-fixing, doping, violence and racism.

The most recent statistics from the European Union’s Erasmus programme, managed in

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Education, Culture, Youth and Sport

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Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

A moment’s inattention during the arduous journey could damage this invaluable work”

Transporting priceless art safely Earlier this year, at Rome’s National Gallery of Ancient Art, staff packed Narcissus, a masterpiece by Caravaggio, in preparation for a long journey. Like many fine art works, the late 16th century painting was being loaned to a temporary exhibition in another museum.

A moment’s inattention during the arduous journey could damage this invaluable work.

So the gallery teamed up with engineers from a European research project to test a smart technology system to keep an eye on such priceless objects.

“This gallery has a very rich collection beginning from the 12th century and many of our works are very valuable – not just economically, as you can imagine, but also culturally,” Cinzia Ammannato, the gallery’s director, told the European Commission’s Research & Innovation Information Centre.

While visible damage almost never happens in transit, restorers are still concerned with microscopic-level problems that may arise especially if the art piece gets exposed to extreme ambient conditions.

Ugo Maria Colesanti, a research engineer in computer systems and the Head of Sensing Systems, explained some of the measures taken in crating up the painting: “We’re applying sensors with special glue to the aluminium parts and after it solidifies we can correctly measure the vibrations during the journey.”

Some of the sensors are attached to the frame of the painting, others on the crate. Comparing their measurements will show how efficiently the special container absorbs shocks.

Then the painting inside the truck must be securely protected from changes in temperature, humidity and vibration.

Intelligent sensors continue the monitoring along the way.

The sensor data is constantly recorded, logging the micro-climate changes and any shocks that might occur. The smart devices involved, developed at the University of Rome, don’t use much energy; that gives them weeks or even months of autonomy.

They are also extremely robust, so they can be used outdoors as Chiara Petrioli, a professor of computer science at the University of Rome and Genesi project coordinator explained: “This technology has the potential to be used in different situations at very low energy levels.

Along with art works we can monitor larger objects, like tunnels or bridges, which are another application.”

Giani, a physicist with ISCR, MiBACT involved in the research.

While experts inspected the surface of the painting for signs of damage, engineers downloaded the recording on the computer to visualise the timeline of the trip.

“Once we’ve loaded the information on the computer, we can see the curves of the temperature and humidity in transit. Here we can see a shock, for example, but inside the box it was completely dampened, which indicates that the work was correctly isolated,” said Colesanti.

Next, engineers aim to create a compatible smartphone app to keep an eye on the transported object in real time.

After six hours on the road, Narcissus arrives at its destination – the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza, north-eastern Italy. The recording showed the transit was safe and smooth. Such data could reduce the costs of insurance, making art exchange more affordable.

“The transport of paintings, terracotta, statues and so on is a very important activity of our ministry, particularly this year as we’ve moved more than 6,000 art works,” said Elisabetta 67

Transport

On

track to a stronger future

Following its adoption by the European Union’s Council of Ministers, the Shift2Rail Joint Technology Initiative was launched a little over a year ago, alongside six other JTIs under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research programme.

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Co-ordinated by UNIFE, the professional association for the railway supply industry, on behalf of eight founding members and 130 other organisations across the rail sector, Shift2Rail is intended to create “a step change in rail technology”.

Its aim is to enhance the capacity of Europe’s railways to cope with rising demand, increase the reliability and quality of rail services, and reduce significantly the life-cycle cost of the railway system.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

This is a major milestone for our industry currently facing immense competition from outside Europe”

The programme is expected to see around €920m invested over the six years, of which €450m will come from the Horizon 2020 budget, and the remainder from the industrial partners. Around 40% of the spending is expected to be allocated for the founding members, with 30% for associated companies and academic institutions in consortia, and the remaining 30% reserved for open calls.

Shift2Rail got underway in June this year, with the launch of three ‘lighthouse’ projects; Roll2Rail, which seeks to improve the trains and signalling equipment, In2rail, to improve the way the pan-European railway network works and IT2Rail, which hopes to provide a seamless travel experience, from passenger information to ticketing.

The three projects were selected following the first ‘Mobility for Growth’ call of Horizon 2020.

Roll2Rail and IT2Rail will be coordinated by UNIFE, while Network Rail, which manages the UK’s rail infrastructure, will coordinate In2Rail.

A ‘kick-off’ meeting in Brussels last month brought together 200 participants from the rail industry sector - representing railway undertakings, infrastructure managers, industry, SMEs, research institutions and academia from Western, Central, and Eastern EU Member states - and high level representatives from the European Commission, the European Railway Agency and the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking.

The Shift2Rail programme is focused on five workstreams covering cost-efficient, reliable, high-capacity trains; advanced traffic management & control systems; cost-efficient, reliable, high-capacity infrastructure; IT systems for attractive railway services; and technologies for attractive and sustainable European rail freight.

The award and official start of these lighthouse projects is the first of many stepping stones along the way to achieving the ambitious EU transport and competitiveness goals of the Shift2Rail initiative.

Roll2Rail aims to develop key technologies and to remove barriers to innovation in the field of railway vehicles as part of a longer term strategy to revolutionise the rolling stock of the future. At the end of the project all the results will be further developed,

leading to demonstration in real vehicles or relevant environments feeding into Innovation Programme 1.

IT2Rail aims to create a seamless travel experience through a complete multimodal travel offering, connecting the first and last mile to long distance journeys combining air, rail, coach and other services whilst offering a seamless access to all travel services, enhancing the travel experience through the integration of a wealth of travel services supported by innovative digital technologies.

IT2RAIL will feed into the proposed work of Innovation Programme 4.

In2Rail aims to set the foundation for a resilient, consistent, cost-efficient, high capacity, and digitalised European rail network. A holistic approach covering Smart Infrastructures, Intelligent Mobility Management (I2M) and Rail Power Supply and Energy Management will be applied. In2Rail will feed into Innovation Programmes 2 and 3.

Philippe Citroën, Director General of UNIFE, the European Rail Industry Association, commented: “This is a major milestone for our industry which is currently facing immense competition from outside of Europe.”

Alison Smith, Head of Technology & Innovation for Network Rail, added: “The In2Rail project is a key step on the journey to deliver the railway of the future, and for Network Rail, the project presents a significant and hugely exciting opportunity to improve the railway - an opportunity not to be missed by us or the other project partners.”

Keir Fitch, Head of Unit, Research & Innovative Transport Systems at the European Commission’s DG-Move, said: “DG-Move looks forward to a fruitful cooperation on these Shift2Rail lighthouse projects which represent the real start-up of the research and innovation work of Shift2Rail.”

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Transport

Making flying safe and secure The European Commission’s Flight Path 2050 vision aims to achieve the highest levels of safety to ensure that passengers and freight, as well as the air transport system and its infrastructure, are protected.

Safety’, a projected seven-year joint research programme on aviation safety. The first phase is being funded by Horizon 2020 to the tune of €14.88m. It brings together 33 European partners to develop new tools and new approaches to aeronautics safety.

However, trends in safety performance over the last decade indicate that the Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe ‘Vision 2020’ safety goal - of an 80% reduction of the accident rate - is not being achieved.

It is part of Future Sky, launched by EREA, the European Research Establishments in Aeronautics, and designed to prepare the future of aviation beyond the next generation vehicle and air traffic management.

Future Sky’s overall goal is 24-7; full airside mobility; “24 hours a day, seven days a week, resilient against any impacts, such as

The need for a stronger focus on security has resulted in the establishment of ‘Future Sky 70

disruptive events like extreme weather, in line with the goals laid down by FlightPath 2050”.

The first joint research programme, Future Sky Safety, builds on European safety priorities and safety challenges.

The initial phase, lasting four years, will focus on four main topics; building ultra-resilient vehicles and improving the cabin safety, reducing the risk of accidents, improving processes and technologies to achieve near-total control over the safety risks and improving safety performance under unexpected circumstances.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Future Sky Safety comprises seven projects: 1 Coordination of institutionally funded safety research: P1 will deliver an annual Aviation Safety Research Plan for the participating research establishments that will also be shared with the main European stakeholders;

2 Dissemination, exploitation and communication: P2 will ensures that all aspects of dissemination are efficiently and effectively managed over the duration of the project, aiming at communicating dynamically, in a consistent and distinctive way, while engaging and involving different categories of audiences;

3 Specific solutions for runway excursion accidents: P3 aims to have tackle the cause of more than half the fatalities in commercial flight, where aircraft fail to abandon a problematic take-off or landing in time.

4 Total risk assessment: P4 aims to provide aviation system actors with near-total control over the safety risk in the air transport system;

5 Resolving the organisational accident:

Future Sky Safety aims to achieve less than one accident per 10 million commercial aircraft flights” The programme will also help coordinate the research and innovation agendas of several countries and institutions, as well as create synergies with other European Union initiatives such as the Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research programme (SESAR) and Clean Sky 2, the initiative to reduce the environmental impact of aviation.

Future Sky Safety aims to achieve, by 2050, a safety record of less than one accident per 10 million commercial aircraft flights, and an 80% reduction of the accident rate compared with 2000.

The UK Civil Aviation Authority’s Global Fatal Accident Review puts the current rate at 0.6 fatal accidents per one million flights for the period 2002 to 2011 The programme also aims to “gather panEuropean critical mass, overcoming gaps, duplication and fragmentation, create a leverage effect, enhance coherence and efficiency of aviation safety research in Europe and underpin development of future safety regulation, operations and technology”.

P5 will tackle the current and new risks of people and the organisations operating the air transport system;

6 Human performance envelope: P6 Rather than focusing on one or two individual factorsfor example, fatigue, situational awareness -will consider a range of common factors in accidents and map how individually or collectively they affect safety;

7 Mitigating the risk of fire, smoke and fumes: P7 will improve understanding of fire behaviour of composite materials and explore new generations of mitigating solutions.

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Transport

Whisper it:

EVs need to make a

noise

By William Peakin Electric vehicles may be great for the planet, but they could prove a hazard for pedestrians. The problem? They are so quiet; studies have shown they are twice as likely to hit people as ordinary cars.

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The most likely occurrence involves electric or hybrid vehicles (EV or HEV) moving slowly, backing up or parking. But cyclists at junctions have also shown to be vulnerable. And there is a general concern that people crossing a road without looking first will subconsciously

assume it is clear because of the lack of engine noise.

The electric Vehicle Alert for Detection and Emergency Response (eVader) has been a European Commission project in which a an

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

You can’t have electric vehicles that are quiet and then put on speakers making an awful lot of noise”

It worked to balance detectability with noise abatement, account for variations in ambient noise and include a directional element so that only vulnerable pedestrians or cyclists would be targeted with an alert. The system detects those at risk of collision and directs a warning sound specifically at them.

The sound is optimised to be clearly audible to the targeted individuals, but barely perceptible to other road users. “We only warn the person in danger,” said project coordinator Juan García, of Applus IDIADA in Spain.

While e-cars are not inaudible, they produce far less noise than conventional cars, particularly at very low speeds. “The main objective of eVADER was to develop an AVAS to address the safety issue while controlling the amount of noise that is introduced into the environment,” García explains.

An optimal sound volume is determined for each warning and depends on the level of background noise, ensuring that the alert is loud enough, but no louder than it needs to be.

The timbre of the sound is also optimised for the best possible compromise between high detectability and low noise pollution.

“You can’t have electric vehicles that are very quiet and then put on speakers and start making an awful lot of noise,” he said.

“We decided that the solution would be a directional system, which is basically an acoustic source that radiates sound mainly in the direction where you want this sound to travel.”

11-strong consortium representing seven EU member states, including academic institutions, manufacturers, suppliers and representative public organisations, has developed a next-generation audible alert system solution for EVs and HEVs.

The research involved major car manufacturers and automotive suppliers, universities and research institutes as well as the European Blind Union, which supplied the input of road users who are particularly reliant on sound.

Directional sound is produced by arrays of loudspeakers that boost the sound in a specific direction and cancel it out in others, García said. eVADER developed a prototype of

an intelligent system that detects at-risk road users by means of the camera and radar equipment already available in many cars, which is likely to become increasingly common.

The information is fed into a control system designed by eVADER to enable the equipment to swap information with the associated acoustic system. The warning sound is emitted by six loudspeakers at the front. The level of ambient noise, determined with microphones, is factored in to ensure that the sound is clearly audible at the location of the at-risk individual, but no louder than necessary.

To guarantee maximum safety, the targeted warning is always combined with a low-level omnidirectional sound. Depending on future legislation, a different sound could also be integrated, to indicate that the car is reversing.

Car manufacturers will be required to install an acoustic vehicle alerting system in new types of hybrid and electric cars by 2019 and in all new hybrid and electric cars by 2021.

Most of the underlying technologies already existed, says García, but they were disconnected from each other. “We recognised that we could assemble them and produce an integrated system that is more intelligent than the average vehicle, in the sense that it can not only see, but also hear,” he notes.

“We need this hearing capability to adjust the sound to the level of background noise.”

The controller allows the car to process this ‘sensory’ information and respond accordingly.

“We have an acoustic source able to talk to the camera and say ‘Where is the pedestrian I should warn?’ and then the sound is directed at this person,” said García.

Tests involving both blind and sighted volunteers have been very successful, he said, but noted that it couldn’t account for careless pedestrians who insist on wearing headphones.

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International Cooperation and Development

Europe reaches out to the Ukraine 74

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Ukraine’s great research and innovation potential offers promising partnerships for Europe”

opening up new opportunities for research and implementation of innovative technologies “Ukraine has hitherto participated in EU research programs at the level of third countries, thus it had limited opportunities,” said Natalia Hnydiuk, Deputy Cabinet Minister.

Hnydiuk, who is also Director of the Government Office for European Integration, added: “The associations to this programme opens to Ukrainian scientists most benefits enjoyed by their counterparts from EU countries.

“We hope that the agreement on the participation of our country in the Horizon 2020 will be ratified by the Verkhovna Rada as soon as possible. This puts our country to a new level of integration with the EU in the field of science and technology.

“In particular, the associated status will now enable Ukraine to become a full member of the European Research Area and get the same rights, responsibilities and activities with the EU Member States.

“Thus, the simplified procedure of participation in European grant projects will increase the level of funding for domestic research, accelerate the development of innovative component of Ukraine and its economy, as well as improve the competitiveness of Ukrainian enterprises.”

The Government of Ukraine has approved a bill which provides for the participation of the country in Horizon 2020.

After the adoption of the bill by the Verkhovna Rada, the country’s parliament, Ukraine will an associate member of the programme,

Last March, Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, travelled to Kiev to participate, together with Serhii Myronovych Kvit, Ukrainian Minister for Education and Science, in the signature ceremony of the Agreement for the Association of Ukraine to Horizon 2020.

Researchers, businesses and innovators from Ukraine will now be able to fully participate in Horizon 2020 on equal terms with EU Member States and other associated countries.

During his stay, Carlos Moedas also visited the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev, meeting Leonid V. Hubersky, its Rector (pictured, right, with Moedas), as well as the Paton Electrical-Welding Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

“I am very pleased to welcome Ukraine into our EU research funding programme Horizon 2020,” said Moedas. “Ukraine has chosen to invest in its knowledge and in its people and chosen to contribute to the common goals of the wider science and technology community.

“Ukraine’s great research and innovation potential offers promising partnerships for Europe, and Ukraine will now have access to the full spectrum of activities funded under Horizon 2020, helping spur its economy. I hope Ukraine will make the most of these opportunities.”

In June, the European Commission also announced €55m of funding to support the development of the Ukrainian economy.

The ‘EU Support to Ukraine to Re-launch the Economy’, or EU SURE, project will support national, regional and local authorities and other stakeholders to develop and implement effective economic development policies, including SME policy.

One component will be the setting up of business support centres to cover 15 different regions. The centres will be managed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for the development of regional capacities and training in entrepreneurial skills in at least 15 regions of Ukraine.

The initiative will be conducted in association with local business associations, banks and local/regional authorities. Particular emphasis will be put on the areas affected by the conflict in order to contribute to the recovery. It will also facilitate the Ukraine’s participation in Horizon 2020.

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International Cooperation and Development

Using science as a common language

By Tracey Elliott 76

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

What is needed is for EU and Middle East partners to create the space and mechanisms for dialogue”

Following his speech at the Royal Society in May, Commissioner Carlos Moedas led an EU delegation to Jordan the following month to reiterate his commitment to science diplomacy and his ambition to focus on the Middle East as a priority.

During a symposium attended by HRH Princess Sumaya of Jordan – Addressing shared challenges through Science Diplomacy: the case of EU-Middle East regional cooperation – Commissioner Moedas promised that he would put his political weight and commitment behind science diplomacy during his five year tenure.

He stated that the vision and “ingredients for success” were already there for a potentially fruitful relationship between the EU and Middle East, but that these were not enough: they now needed to be turned into action. As an analogy, he cited Ada Lovelace’s vision of the computer over 100 years before it was actually developed.

Jordan is an important facilitator and convenor for the rest of the world’s engagement with the Middle East region because of its political stability and security.

Perhaps the best illustration of this is the fact it hosts SESAME, a shared synchrotron facility for the region that continues to be upheld as a model of best practice in science diplomacy – the ‘CERN for the Middle East’.

On current trajectory, it is anticipated to be running experiments between the end of 2016 and early 2017, and it could ultimately spawn regional collaboration in other areas.

Jordan will also host the World Science Forum in 2017.

It is encouraging that the EU may be more predisposed to support science and innovation in its ‘extended neighbourhood’ and to increase scientific cooperation on areas of mutual interest and shared benefit.

The symposium was certainly full of promise and optimism.

Zafra Lerman, President of the Malta Conferences Foundation, talked about scientists helping to build “weapons of mass construction” and suggested that science is both a common language and a common nationality.

We heard examples of projects investing in people and in research and education infrastructure; of scientists working together on societal challenges – water security being a particularly acute challenge for the region; of providing technical advice to governments and multilateral agencies; and of ways of stimulating global research and policy debates.

There were several take-home messages: the importance of scientific excellence being the driver for cooperation; of sustained, long-term engagement and support; of inclusion and genuine partnership; of cooperation being research and action oriented, as well as demonstrating societal impact; and of all of this being given sufficient time to develop and flourish.

The majority of participants at the symposium were from the research community. It is clear that what is needed now is for EU and Middle East partners to create the space and mechanisms for dialogue between the key constituencies to identify initiatives that can further the interests of both foreign policy and research communities.

The symposium was perhaps best summed up by Chris Llewellyn Smith’s paraphrasing of Anton Gramsci’s quote; that the optimism of the will should override the pessimism of the brain.

Tracey Elliott is the former Head of International at The Royal Society.

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International Cooperation and Development

Strengthening collaboration with Japan 78

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Europe and Japan must tackle many of the same challenges such as energy security, ageing populations or access to critical materials” challenges such as energy security, ageing populations or access to critical materials.

“So it’s only natural that we also work together closely to find solutions to these challenges.

The joint vision will take our cooperation to the next level.”

The agreement will build on the strong research ties in areas like ICT and aeronautics and strengthen collaborations in health and medical research, environment, energy and physics.

The partners will also set up a joint funding mechanism that will make it easier to finance common research and innovation projects, including Horizon 2020, and collaborate more closely on policy aspects, like open science.

In addition, an agreement to stimulate scientific exchanges has also been signed between the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the European Research Council.

Japan was an active partner in the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). As of May this year, Japanese entities had participated 116 times in FP7 signed grant agreements, involving 56 different Japanese organisations and receiving a total EU contribution of €9.8 million.

During this time, 352 Japanese researchers have been funded through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and 18 Japanese researchers have received an ERC grant.

At the 23rd EU-Japan Summit in Tokyo earlier this year, the EU and Japan agreed to deepen their cooperation on research and innovation based on a joint vision.

Carlos Moedas, Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, said: “Europe and Japan must tackle many of the same

Since the start of Horizon 2020 there have already been 28 Japanese participations in EU projects. In addition, the Commission has co-financed 20 joint projects in ICT, aeronautics, materials and energy for a total EU contribution of €34m.

European Commission President JeanClaude Juncker, Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President

of the EC, and Cecilia Malmström, Member of the EC in charge of Trade, were also in Tokyo for the summit.

They were joined by Shinzō Abe, Japanese Prime Minister, and Donald Tusk, President of the European Council.

The summit marked the 70th year of the end of the Second World War in Europe and in Asia. It was the opportunity to reflect on the importance of reconciliation and regional cooperation and recognise the contributions that both Japan and the EU had made to the peace, stability and prosperity.

Leaders agreed to accelerate the negotiations for a strategic partnership agreement and a free trade agreement between the EU and Japan. They also decided to enhance their security partnership, including a possible participation from Japan to crisis management missions.

Regional issues, such as the latest developments in the EU’s and Japan’s respective neighbourhoods, in Ukraine and in South East Asia, and global issues such as Iran’s nuclear talks, the situation in the Korean peninsula, Syria and Iraq, were also on the agenda.

Leaders also agreed to step-up the cooperation on counter-terrorism between the EU and Japan. International climate change negotiations were discussed and Japan affirmed its intention to submit an ambitious target for its contribution to limit climate change. Both parties also repeated their commitment to agreeing an ambitious post2015 development agenda.

At the summit, Cecilia Malmström held several bilateral meetings with Fumio Kishida, Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs, and Yoichi Miyazawa, Japanese Minister for Economy, and Shinichiro Ito, Chairman of the Committee on Promotion of Economic Partnerships of Keidanren, the Japan Business Federation (pictured with Malmström).

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Digital Economy and Society

Overcoming investment hurdles

By Commissioner GuĚˆnther Oettinger The Digital Single Market needs to be enabled by unconstrained connectivity for everyone and everything, everywhere.

More than ever, Europe needs connectivity.

This is true for each and every citizen. And this is also true for industry, for businesses, 80

whatever their size, for schools, research and innovation centres, for public services across Europe.

It is the availability and the use of highquality connectivity that will enable and ultimately determine the success of the Digital Single Market.

This is why we constantly monitor the development of economic indicators and the regulatory environment that may influence incentives and market conditions across Europe and determine, whether Europe is an attractive place to live, work and invest in.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

We are still facing a lot of resistance from public and private stakeholders to invest in this sector�

We have just released our latest annual Digital Agenda Scoreboard, where we measure how much progress Europe has been making over the last five years in the digital sphere. There is no doubt that we are making progress, on all fronts. In particular, ever more citizens are going online, to do shopping, administrative procedures and much more.

For broadband, the scoreboard shows considerable progress. Next Generation Access fixed-line technologies capable of providing at least 30Mbps were available to 68% of EU households last year, compared with 62% a year before.

But it also shows that much remains to be done to catch up with the speed of the global digital economy. For instance at the end of last year only 6% of European homes had a subscription of above 100Mbps services.

Europe. We will launch a public consultation for all stakeholders, but in particular for users and developers of future applications on this topic in order to anticipate as best we can in all our policy processes their needs a decade or more from now.

We also need extra and quick investment efforts by the industry, by public authorities and by investors. Building the network takes time and is extremely expensive. We cannot afford to get it wrong as starting again is not an option.

We need to take the right investment decisions to ensure the adequate Internet speed and quality for the next decades. These decisions have to be taken quickly, including if we want to make the best use of the European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI).

And overall, be it in terms of fixed or mobile connectivity, there are very important differences between and within Member States as far as broadband coverage and takeup are concerned.

The Council and the European Parliament have reached an agreement on the Regulation concerning EFSI. Now, it is time to focus on the core work, implementing this ambitious vision, which offers a one-of-akind opportunity to foster growth, jobs and investments across Europe.

In addition, connectivity needs are continuously increasing, driven today primarily by video. The Internet of Things, the data economy, the abundance of content and increasingly cheaper mobile devices are expected to accelerate this trend. They render the availability of bandwidth and the ease of upgrading networks a key enabler for the vibrant digital economy and society.

For the digital sector, this investment plan is an opportunity to support innovative projects on a large scale, which, in Europe have received less political support than in other parts of the world. Attracting global financing into innovation and networks of the future is a key to our future.

Our investment decisions of today will determine the quality of networks well beyond 2020. We need to better understand the Internet functionalities that are necessary for our digital future. We also need to reflect what fixed and mobile connectivity speed and quality features will be necessary if the digital single market is to drive growth well into the decade beyond 2020.

We need a cross-sector, cross-generational debate on future-oriented connectivity for

country of the European Union, I encourage these projects come forward. We need to make sure digital is set as a priority in all our countries.

In a very near future, high-speed data networks will be as important as roads and electricity lines. Broadband connectivity is already one of the basic needs of any citizen of Europe. Europe’s excellence in computer science and microelectronics need to be exploited and expanded in a competitive global environment.

For us, who are involved in this sector in our day-to-day activities, the fantastic added value of the digital sector, as well as its potential for growth and jobs, are obvious. Nevertheless, we are still facing a lot of resistance from public and private stakeholders to invest in this sector.

Technology risk and complex regulation are some of the reasons often brought to our attention as hurdles to investment.

I call for support to emphasise the amazing opportunities the digital sector can offer to our societies and our economies. Risk and challenges associated with them should not be ignored but we can address them, and in some cases reduce them.

EFSI is an opportunity for the digital sector in Europe, but it will not achieve its goal unless private and public players in the sector work together on building up a pipeline of digital projects.

The range of projects that can be financed under EFSI is very wide, and therefore it will allow any type of business models, even those that may be disruptive , to be eligible.

For example, we are already discussing with the European Investment Bank projects of rural broadband networks, cloud services and computing, that may be considered for financing under EFSI. This opportunity should not be missed. Now we have the tools in place to offer flexible financing solutions for digital projects in any 81

Digital Economy and Society

Catapult’s support for Internet of Things

By Maurizio Pilu I have been fortunate enough in the last few years, first while working at InnovateUK, the UK’s innovation agency, and now at the Digital Catapult, the government-backed RTO in the digital/ICT space, to be close to the European Commission’s research and innovation programmes, in particular H2020 and its predecessor, FP7.

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Readers will be familiar with H2020; it’s an €80bn, multi-year, pan-European research and innovation programme which is delivered by the European Commission through a set of ‘instruments’ in a number of technology areas and industrial sectors.

H2020 is of course mainly seen as a funding mechanism, impossible not to when it has €80bn to invest! However, a lesser-known, yet essential, aspect is what the Commission

does to create, grow and nurture communities around the research and innovation challenges.

The UK is no stranger to the vital importance of these activities for the innovation ecosystem. For instance InnovateUK funds the Knowledge Transfer Network to underpin, with sectorial and interdisciplinary community activities, not only its own investments, but also to foster open innovation and knowledge exchange without funding.

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

It’s important for Europe not to miss the chance to be driving the IoT revolution”

“external world” (e.g. a standards body), or take their work into another programme.

Yet evidence shows that the incentives are not there for this to happen unless specific overarching communities and coordination activities are in place, and that’s why they are often set up and/or funded separately along side large programmes (for example, Coordination & Support Actions, or CSAs) Which brings me to the Internet of Things (IoT) and one such initiative recently announced by the Commission called Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI).

For the Commission this has unique additional challenges. First it has to happen at a European scale, with its notorious fragmentation. How do you put together world class cybersecurity players in the UK with the German “Industrie 4.0” movement? How could the world-class Italian design community engage with the game community in Helsinki?

These pan European activities work best when there is funding (or the prospect of funding) as a powerful catalyst, but also when innovation barriers are delocalised by nature and/or require EU-level action, such as on spectrum & 5G, content licensing, entrepreneurship, medical research data (which if shared could save lives), standards, and so forth.

But another reason is borne out of a technicality. Funding agencies fund procedurally and contractually on a (R&D) project-by-project basis. Yet, for issues that are bigger than the sum of their parts, projects have to talk to each other or to talk to the

But first, a step back. What’s IoT? And why does it need these coordination actions. IoT is generally speaking the trend of having more and more everyday objects and assetts “connected”. While the concept is relatively old now, the convergence of pervasive connectivity, cheap and low power hardware, the cloud and the internet itself is laying the foundations for acceleration, with projections of market opportunities in the trillions.

According to many it is the natural evolution of the Internet into the physical world. But it’s not all rosy. Issues of silos, security and trust, interoperability, system design, business models, misaligned incentive (to invest versus valuerealised) and many more such systemic aspects are holding back the whole market.

While a number of Commission coordination initiatives have been designed in the past to bring together relevant actors to address these issues (e.g. the IERC http://www. internet-of-things-research.eu/), new needs have emerged, in particular bringing in the demand (sectors) side together with the ICT side (the ‘traditional’ community for these R&D initiatives), the digital single market drivers, supporting new large and integrated IoT investments, and more.

It is for this reason that the Commission has decided to start a new coordination initiative, the Aliance of Internet of Things Innovation, a community which brings together ICT industry, SMEs, sectors that can be transformed by IoT, RTOs, universities players. Substantial funding will be allocated to IoT in the following years, and part of its mission will be to contribute to large scape pilots (LSPs), develop ecosystems, and drive adoption of standards and interoperability.

The Digital Catapult is ideally positioned to help UK industry to address big systemic issues in IoT and connect to the wider EU platforms and that’s why we have decided to become a founding member of AIOTI. We will be particularly active in the Ecosystem and Policy work packages that, in our view, offer tremendous leverage opportunities.

The AIOTI initiative is still early and new member are joining every day. It may evolve into a number of directions, such as a more formal association structure (such as the Big Data Value Association, of which we are full members too), or strengthen the central coordination with a secretariat, or keep it as it is now; a lightly coordinated, member driven initiative. Time will tell.

One thing is sure. The opportunity to innovate in IoT is as vast as the business potential and it’s important for Europe, and the UK, not to miss the chance to be driving the IoT revolution, and not become just a passive user. The stakes are too high, and the European Commission knows that too well.

Maurizio Pilu is Executive Director, Collaborative R&D, at the UK’s Digital Catapult www.digitalcatapultcentre.org.uk

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Digital Economy and Society

Next gen media monitoring

By Guntis Barzdins Today’s natural language understanding technologies are good but not perfect, as we can see from Apple’s Siri speech recognition or from Google translation services. But they are getting better.

The Horizon 2020 LEIT (Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies) initiative recognises that the key factor in strengthening Europe’s competitiveness is the successful application of the KETs (key enabling technologies).

The question is should we wait for the language technologies to become perfect, or should we start using them industrially now, knowing that their quality will improve over the time?

This is what the SUMMA (Scalable Understanding of Multilingual Media) project is about; integrating the natural language understanding (NLU) technologies into industrial applications now- and as a result being at the forefront of the next

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industrial revolution driven by the artificial intelligence breakthroughs.

Deep learning applied to gig data is among the NLU breakthroughs already powering the industrial giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Baidu. Pooling the AI research and development resources necessary to overhaul the next generation of the industry is the key challenge.

Within the SUMMA project, three European news broadcasters - BBC, Deutche Welle, and

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

The aim is to revolutionise the international news monitoring industry”

the Latvian news agency LETA - are joining the forces with other organisations.

They are the University of Edinburgh, University College London, Swiss IDIAP Research Institute, Qatar Computing Research Institute and Priberam Labs, of Portugal.

The aim is to revolutionise the international news monitoring industry. The project is driven by the three industrial partners to ensure that its outcome is relevant to the industry, rather than only to academic research.

Monitoring the international news media is of critical importance to broadcasters, news agencies, and journalists, as well as to EU and governmental agencies, and many industrial sectors ranging from advertising to finance and to sports.

Spotting trends, tracking people in the news, and identifying differences in reporting on the same events is a vital for organisations with a global outlook.

That is the aim of SUMMA - to significantly improve this process through the creation of a platform to automate the analysis of media streams across many languages, to aggregate and distil the content, to automatically create rich knowledge bases, and to provide visualisations to cope with this deluge of data.

The scale of the task is increasing massively, year-on-year, through a rapidly growing number of Internet broadcast and text portals, and the increasing number of broadcast media sources.

In March 2015, BBC Monitoring had access to 13,580 sources, of which 1,500 were television broadcasters and another 1,350 were radio. The European Media Monitor at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre ingests textual material from over 10,000 RSS feeds, from 3,750 key news portals worldwide, plus 20 commercial news feeds, in over 60 languages.

A recent analysis by the Arab Advisors Group determined that there were 658 fully launched and operational Free-to-Air satellite channels targeting Arabic countries in May 2013, an increase of 600% since 2004, with over 100 extra channels in the previous year.

This is a tremendous volume of data and current approaches to monitoring, in particular for audio and video content, simply cannot cope; current media monitoring systems are severely limited in terms of the number of streams that may be simultaneously monitored, support for multiple languages, the ability to ingest and process multiple media types, and the richness of the automatic analysis that they supply.

BBC Monitoring undertakes one of the most advanced, comprehensive, and large scale media monitoring operations, providing news and information from media sources around the world. Around 300 people monitor TV, Radio, Internet, and Social Media sources to detect trends and changing media behavior, and to flag breaking news events.

Media monitoring journalists look for emerging themes – political, societal, and economic – and aim to anticipate certain stories and events.

BBC Monitoring journalists translate from over 30 languages into English. A monitoring journalist monitors four TV channels and several online sources simultaneously – which is about the maximum for any person to mentally and physically be able to monitor.

The required human effort thus scales linearly with the number of monitored sources.

Monitoring journalists constantly need to be on the lookout for more sources and to follow important stories; but as it is, they are tied down with routine monitoring tasks.

The landscape has become too large to maintain the traditional approach; SUMMA will address this through the development of a petascale platform for intelligent media

monitoring and advancing the state of the art in a number of technologies.

They will include multilingual stream processing including speech recognition, machine translation, and story identification; entity and relation extraction; natural language understanding including deep semantic parsing, summarisation, and sentiment detection; and rich visualisations based on multiple views and dealing with many data streams.

The central idea behind SUMMA is to develop a scalable multilingual media monitoring platform that combines “shallow” media stream processing (speech recognition, machine translation, story clustering) with “deep” natural language processing that constructs a rich knowledge base of reported facts and entities mentioned, and that extracts and summarises storylines in the news.

The media monitoring system will need to automatically process and correlate huge amounts of streaming media, leading to new level of language understanding fueled by the completeness and up-to-date coverage of the input data.

This calls for suitable large-scale machine learning algorithms capable to operate in the streaming mode rather than in the traditional batch mode. Besides scaling, another key technical challenge of SUMMA is to ensure that the shallow stream processing occurs with sub-minute latency that is essential for the news monitoring use case.

Despite the challenges mentioned before, the scaling of NLU within the SUMMA project will bring us closer to practical NLU and unlocking the treasures of knowledge stored in the up-todate global media.

Guntis Barzdins is a professor at the University of Latvia and a senior adviser to LETA, the Latvian news agency

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Social media roundup

“#Greece is Europe, #Europe is Greece” / “Η Ελλάδα είναι Ευρώπη, η Ευρώπη είναι Ελλάδα” 29 June: President Jean-Claude Juncker retweets the official European Commission’s exhortation.

@JamesPanichi The meeting was with @arminvanbuuren and his rights’ agency, @BumaStemra, who are in the Register 30 June: First Vice-President Frans Timmermans meets Armin van Buuren, the Dutch music producer and DJ.

Meeting with @JZarif in Vienna for #IranTalks 28 June: High Representative Federica Mogherini and Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, discuss Iran’s nuclear programme.

@MasoudDara Agree. Small country acting responsibly at home and within the EU. Has been an example for others to follow. #eu2015lv 30 June: Vice-President Kristalina Georgieva celebrates Latvia’s Presidency of the European Union.

A sleepless night for some... but a good result. NO to #roaming & YES to #netneutrality 29 June: Vice-President Andrus Ansip retweets new DG Connect Director General Roberto Viola.

From #WSCT in Lyon today to #EnergyUnion tour & #EUdialogues in Lisbon tomorrow 1 July: Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič busy amid the EU-Russia-Ukraine trilateral gas talks.

Whatever course events in Greece take, I am convinced that the #EU Economic and Monetary Union will be able to weather them #EMU 1 July: Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis expresses optimism.

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Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

China still represents only a modest portion of the total foreign investment in Europe. There is plenty of room for improvement. #investEU 29 June: Vice-President Jyrki Katainen after a landmark EU-China summit.

I want to transform European cities into innovation hubs attracting fresh ideas & disruptive thinking #Unconv2015 1 July: Commissioner Günther H. Oettinger after speaking at Unconvention15.

Before opening the exhibition “Women of #Srebrenica”, I met representatives of 15 #CivilSociety Organisations fr #BiH 1 July: Commissioner Johannes Hahn on the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide.

Vacker solnedgång i Visby. Just anlänt till #Almedalen2015 Intensiv dag imorgon med flera seminarier om TTIP. 2 July: Commissioner Cecilia Malmström arrives in Visby for Sweden’s week-long festival of politics.

The #EYD2015 theme for July is #children and #youth. Young people are our future. They deserve our full support.

2 July: Commissioner Neven Mimica on the European Year for development

With @KarmenuVella at Informal #EaP Ministerial Dialogue: good team-work to push #environmental agenda in #EaP 29 June: Commissioner Karmenu Vella discussing the EU Eastern Partnership initiative.

Discussed #energy security and Ukraine-EU cooperation with @NaftogazUkraine CEO Andriy Kobolyev #EnergyUnion 1 July: Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete meets the man who has to buy gas from Russia.

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Social media roundup

I invite all the #NGOs working on the field fighting #ebola to apply!

18 June: Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis calls for entries to EU Health Award, closing 31 July.

#Hungary #MigrationEU challenge can only be met if we work together 30 June: Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos in Hungary to discuss immigration.

At ceremony of the 2nd European Award for Social Entrepreneurship & #Disability 1 July: Commissioner Marianne Thyssen speaks out on realising the potential for all people.

Réaction aux écoutes de mes conversations par #NSA. Le temps d’une explication exigeante est venu 30 June: Commissioner Pierre Moscovici on Europe’s relationship with the United States.

Reiterated to @Yatsenyuk_AP that EU’s aim is a solution to crisis in #Ukraine respecting territorial integrity, sovereignty & intl law 2 July: Commissioner Christos Stylianides on a visit to Slavyansk in eastern Ukraine.

Address to @EU_EESC: we must deepen our discussion re developing the social dimension of the #CAP and other EU policies. #EESC 1 July: Commissioner Phil Hogan speaking at the European Economic and Social Committee.

We have a deal on the Insurance Distribution Directive - Well done @eu2015lv @Europarl_EN @langen_werner 30 June: Commissioner Jonathan Hill on getting a better deal for consumers on their policies.

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Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

Full house today at the @EU_EESC for a public hearing on an integrated #EUAviation policy.

2 July: Commissioner Violeta Bulc on EESC as it grapples with a European aviation industry under pressure from global competitors.

Meeting in Rome w/ minister @sandrogozi: EU industrial strategy, unitary patent, #competitiveness, single market.

1 July: Commissioner Elżbieta Bieńkowska after speaking at conference on ‘Development, Growth and Innovation in strategic high-tech sectors’.

Mourning the loss of Sir Nicholas Winton, a true hero whose courage saved Prague’s Jewish children 1 July: Commissioner Věra Jourová describes Sir Nicholas as a “symbol of humanity and modesty”.

The big winners from the 2015 #EUPL Awards w/@TNavracsicsEU @SilviaCostaEU 1 July: Commissioner Tibor Navracsics at the European Union Prize for Literature

I met with the President of the @EUAuditorsECA and I told him how much I value the work of the Court 1 July: Commissioner Corina Creţu on the independent auditor of the EU budget, guardian of the financial interests of EU citizens.

Godt for den grønne omstilling - den europæiske fond for strategiske investeringer er i gang 2 July: Commissioner Margrethe Vestager celebrates EIB backing of innovative Dutch renewable energy infrastructure fund.

190 new #ERC Advanced grants financed by @EU_H2020 (€445M) to pursue ground breaking ideas in all areas of knowledge 1 July Commissioner: Carlos Moedas highlights grants awarded under the ‘excellent science’ pillar of Horizon 2020.

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Diary - Looking ahead

September 10

European Economic and Social Committee/ Citizens rights Assessing the impact of the UN Committee of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities concluding observations Capsis hotel, Thessaloniki, Greece

14-15

European Commission/Health New interventions to reduce overconsumption of alcohol Odessa, Ukraine

14-18

EU PVSEC/Energy European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference Hamburg, germany

15-16

European Commission/Regions European Territorial Cooperation Annual Meeting Esch-Belval, Luxembourg

17-18

European Commission/Travel European Tourism Forum 2015 Luxembourg

23

European Commission/Science and technology 10th Anniversary of the European Researchers’ Night Autoworld, Parc du Cinquantenaire, Brussels, Belgium

17-18 European Commission/Travel European Tourism Forum 2015 Luxembourg

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30

European Commission/External relations Building a resilient Europe in a globalised world Brussels, Belgium

Open Calls magazine Summer 2015

1-2

October

European Commission/Citizens rights Annual Colloquium on Fundamental Rights “Preventing and Combating anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim Hatred in Europe�

Brussels, Belgium

1-2

European Commission/Science and technology CONCORDi 2015 - 5th European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation Seville, Spain

6

European Commission/Science and technology EU brokerage event on key enabling technologies in Horizon 2020 Strasbourg, France

14-15

European Commission/Agriculture, fisheries and food Shaping the future of food safety, together Congress Centre Stella Polare, Milan, Italy

20-22

European Commission, Events/Science and technology ICT 2015 - Innovate, Connect, Transform Lisbon, Portugal

20-23

European Commission/Transport Aerodays 2015 London, United Kingdom

21-22

European Commission/Events Conference on e-skills in tourism The Square, Mont des Arts, Brussels, Belgium

21-22

Committee of the Regions/Business EuroPCom 2015: 6th European Conference on Public Communication European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium

6 European Commission/Science and technology EU brokerage event on key enabling technologies in Horizon 2020 Strasbourg, France

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European Commission/Agriculture, fisheries and food Atlantic stakeholder platform conference Brest, France 91