EU funded projects

Title: Air Carbon Recycling for Aviation Fuel Technology

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Harald Gröger

Faculty of Chemistry

Summary:

The global aviation sector has set a course towards meeting the climate objectives of the Paris Agreement. In this context, the EU-funded 4AirCRAFT project will develop the next generation of stable and selective catalysts for the direct CO2 conversion into liquid fuels for the aviation industry. The project will integrate three main reactions into one, allowing the production of sustainable jet fuel at low temperatures. This advanced technology will decrease greenhouse gas emissions and restrict dependence on fossil fuel-based resources. The project will integrate and exploit biocatalysts, inorganic nanocatalysts, electrocatalysts, and their controlled spatial distribution within application tuned catalyst carrier structures that are based on metal-organic frameworks and engineered inorganic scaffolds with hierarchical porosity distribution.

Duration: 05.2021-04.2024

Website

 

Title: Advancing Area-based Management Tools to Accelerate the Protection and Restoration of Marine Biodiversity across the European Sea Basins

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Tim Nattkemper

CeBiTec – Center for Biotechnology

Summary:

BioProtect will provide innovative, replicable and scalable ecosystem-based solutions that will accelerate the protection and restoration of biodiversity in European seas, in line with the EU´s 2030 targets and the European Green Deal. Pressures from multiple human activities and climate change are driving ecosystems degradation and biodiversity loss, threatening goods and services that are essential for human life and society. BioProtect aims to reduce these pressures by implementing an innovative area-based management decision support framework (ABM-DSF). The framework will include methods and capacity building to engage local stakeholders, to monitor and forecast changes in marine biodiversity, to map human pressures, to prioritise areas for protection and restoration, and to measure ecological and socio-economic impacts of conservation actions. These will be demonstrated in five sites from the Arctic to the Azores in the Atlantic. In the past, non-systemic approaches, focused on siloed sector-based management and single-spatial scales have failed to halt the loss of biodiversity. BioProtect’s novel and flexible framework will integrate different spatial scales and data sources. It will incorporate perspectives and knowledge from a wide range of stakeholders, to support the implementation and exploitation of its solutions by relevant end-users. BioProtect will consider “what-if” scenarios, including climate change, protection and exploitation strategies, and evaluate their ecological and socio-economic impacts. The BioProtect’s consortium holds cross-cutting knowledge and expertise, with the capacity to build on existing research and innovation within the Atlantic and Arctic basins. BioProtect will deliver impact-driven solutions to address biodiversity loss and climate change, with the aim to reach relevant EU Biodiversity Strategy targets for 2030, including a substantial contribution to reaching the EU nature restoration targets.

Duration: 05.2024-04.2028

Website

 

Title: Innovative tools for sustainable exploration of marine microbiomes: towards a circular bioeconomy and healthier marine environments

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Jörn Kalinowski

Prof. Dr. Alexander Sczyrba

CeBiTec - Center for Biotechnology

Summary:

Marine microbiomes represent 90% of the total living marine biomass but only a small fraction of them can be cultivated. For this reason, they are an underexplored source of bioactive compounds, carbohydrate polymers and proteins, among others. Sampling the marine biodiversity, screening, identifying and isolating the relevant microbes is cumbersome, expensive and results in a heavy environmental burden, low yields, high costs and long times to market. Therefore, new approaches are necessary to overcome the limitations for the study of marine microbial communities and their "econological use". BLUETOOLS will unravel the potential of marine microbiomes for healthier oceans and the Blue Bioeconomy through integration of different fields to develop cutting-edge tools that support fast, efficient AND sustainable exploration and exploitation of microbiomes, avoiding the drawbacks of conventional biodiscovery practices.

The expected results of BLUETOOLS include discovering several hundreds of enzymes, rhodopsins, resistance genes, antimicrobials and anti-microfouling agents, thanks to a hybrid workflow of in silico and microfluidics-based functional discovery, resulting in the commercialization of ≥400 enzymes for biocatalysis and ≥2 new solutions for plastic/polymer degradation, increasing the revenue of our industrial partners by 10-15%.

BLUETOOLS assembles 5 leading European companies, 8 academic teams and 1 private RTO that have pioneered approaches in functional metagenomics, microfluidics, microbial ecology and synthetic biology. The presence of diverse, complementary industrial stakeholders in the consortium (from pharma to materials science to sustainability) at different stages in the research-to-market process (from RTOs to SMEs to large end-users) provides a unique opportunity for broad value creation. The planned activities will span 48 months and the project is estimated at ca. 9 M€, with 60% of the total dedicated to creating highly-qualified jobs.

Duration: 12.2022-11.2026

Website

Title: Climate, Inequality, and Democratic Action: The Force of Political Emotions

Principal Investigator:

Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Anna Pospech Durnova

Faculty of Sociology

Summary:

Evidence suggests that emotions play a fundamental role in political participation and communication. It is therefore crucial to comprehend and appropriately address citizens’ emotional needs and reactions to climate policies to achieve coordinated democratic action. The EU-funded CIDAPE project will research the interplay between citizen engagement, climate change and inequalities. By investigating the role of emotions in shaping rational argumentation and engagement, the project aims to gain insights into how people comprehend, and actively respond to, climate change challenges. CIDAPE reveals political action mechanisms and puts forth tools, policy instruments and guides. It underscores the climate crisis as a unique opportunity to foster solidarity and achieve depolarisation in the public debate, emphasising the importance of public trust, robust institutions and policies that resonate with citizens.

Duration: 01.2024-12.2027

Website

 

Title: Dignity For Irregular Migrants in EU Farm2Fork Labour Markets

 

Proncipal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Kayvan Bozorgmore

Faculty of Public Health

 

Summary:

DignityFIRM contributes to improving conditions of irregular migrants (IM) working in Farm to Fork (F2F) labour markets in four EU member states (IT, NL, PL, SP) and two associated countries (MO, UA). To derive structural recommendations for improvements, we analyse regulatory infrastructures that govern these conditions distinguishing five influential spheres of stakeholders at the EU, national, and local levels, and at the level of employers and IM themselves. The focus on IM in F2F labour markets is timely given the instrumental role of these industries in securing EU livelihoods, the high systemic dependency on IM that coincides with persistent group vulnerabilities. By providing knowledge and innovative tools to improve regulatory infrastructures, this project enhances IM's access to basic rights and services, and improves their precarious working conditions. Doing so, we contribute to systemic resilience of F2F industries and the EU's ambitions for social and economic transformation.

Our project adopts a mixed-method research approach, that includes a special focus on the division of labour in F2F markets with respect to gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, health and safety. Doing so, we provide new knowledge on 1) the multidimensional regulatory infrastructure and the conditions of IM therein, 2) their access to basic rights and social services, and 3) employer reliance on IMs. We build on our analysis of the current situation, and work towards innovative solutions by developing Dignity tools in co-creation with stakeholders across the five stakeholder spheres. We propose group sensitive policy measures at EU, national, and local level, across four policy domains: migration management, EU pillar social rights, labour market sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Doing so, we create a pathway for impact towards upholding IMs' access to rights and services and simultaneously addressing labour market needs and wellbeing of host communities.

 

Duration: 04.2023 - 03.2026

 

Website

Title: EdTech Talents

PI: Dr. Cristina Popescu

Faculty of Educational Science

Summary:

The recent COVID-19 era demonstrated the need for seamless education, accessible under most challenging circumstances. It was revealed that while the technologies for facing these challenges exist, more work is needed to adapt these in modern education – a task that requires significant collaborative effort from academia and the rapidly developing Educational Technology Sector (EdTech) in order to involve best practices and validate novel products and services for the real world classroom use. For various reasons, this collaboration has been meagre so far. The goal of the EdTech Talents project is to strengthen academia/non-academia cooperation and reinforce the EdTech innovation ecosystems of Estonia, Hungary and Serbia by conducting a long-term knowledge transfer process for (a) the researchers and their support staff of these widening countries to learn from the EdTech spin-offs and consulting companies of Austria, Germany and Spain; and (b) the researchers of these advanced countries to share their relevant intellectual capital with the EdTech start-ups of these widening countries. During this process, knowledge transfer is supported via dedicated mentoring and training that aim at establishing continuous and more impactful flow of innovation, ideas, knowledge, know-how and relevant services among all involved, corresponding with the scope of ERA Policy Agenda and ERA Talents call for cross-sectoral talent circulation and academia-business collaboration, with the focus on widening countries.

Duration: 06.2023-05.2027

Website

Title: Empower citizeNs to join Forces with public authORities in proteCting the Environment

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Barbara Hammer

CITEC - Cognitive Interaction Technology Center

Summary:

Assuring environmental compliance requires a strong network of stakeholders, from citizens and researchers to governments and environmental organisations. Through creative toolkits and protocols, ENFORCE aims to tackle the frequent mismatch between the environmental data gathered by citizens and what authorities require for enforcement purposes. The project will address the challenges in data reporting coming from both the citizens side and the authorities’ side, in order for the obtained data to be usable for environmental enforcement. In this line, ENFORCE introduces the concept of Data Readiness Level (DRL) to assess the maturity of data to be used as evidence in environmental compliance cases. In addition, the project will capitalize on the use of geo-spatial intelligence and AI-enhanced tools, strengthening their capacities, promoting good practices and preparing an inventory on geo-spatial intelligence and AI use. The proposed solution will ensure alignment with the Green Deal Data Space to ensure trustworthy data exchange among the relevant stakeholders. The project encompasses 8 case studies that involve all relevant actors including grassroots organizations, local and regional authorities and a diverse group of experienced researchers forming a scientifically robust interdisciplinary team. The lessons learnt and evaluation results from the case studies will feed the replication guidelines that will be promoted through the ENFORCE capacity building programme and associated policy recommendations to create a multiplier effect for the adoption of citizen science data to support environmental compliance.

Duration: 09.2024-08.2028

Website

 

Title: EOSC-ENTRUST: A European Network of TRUSTed research environments

 

Summary:

The mission of EOSC-ENTRUST is to create a European network of trusted research environments for sensitive data and to drive European interoperability by joint development of a common blueprint for federated data access and analysis.
Countries and institutions have made significant investments in secure and trusted data environments to meet the need for research and policy-driven analysis of sensitive datasets such as people's health and socio-economic status, the habitats of vulnerable species and geo-spatial locations of protected sites. There are now a large number of such secure environments in operation - linked to national centres, individual organisations or specific research communities. This fragmented landscape poses challenges for both users and providers: researchers are faced with a large number of different systems and access procedures; providers need to manage federated access across multiple, potentially incompatible, technology and governance frameworks.
EOSC-ENTRUST brings together providers of operational Trusted Research Environments from 15 European countries with a shared goal to implement, validate and promote their capabilities through a common European framework using shared standards and common legal, operational and technical language. This blueprint for interoperability is anchored in the EOSC Interoperability Framework spanning the four dimensions of Legal, Organisational, Technical and Semantic interoperability. EOSC-ENTRUST has identified four driver projects covering Genomics, Clinical trials, Social science, and public-private partnerships to benchmark capabilities, inform blueprint design and demonstrate secure data analysis using federated workflows.
Targeted outreach activities will expand this open network with further providers and develop policy papers and guidelines for the full range of stakeholders to create a long-term operational TRE framework within the European Open Science Cloud.

Duration: 03.2024-02.2027

Website

Title: European, extendable, energy-efficient, energetic, embedded, extensible, Processor Ecosystem

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ulrich Rückert

CoR-Lab

Summary:

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is leading the EU-funded EuroHPC eProcessor project. Its objective is to deliver the first entirely open source European full stack ecosystem based on the open source reduced instruction set computer, RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). In eProcessor, a novel, multi-core out-of-order processor is coupled to multiple diverse accelerators that target traditional high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, as well as extending into mixed and reduced precision workloads for high-performance data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning and bioinformatics application domains. The eProcessor will be extendable (open source), energy efficient (low power), extreme scale (high performance), suitable for uses in HPC and embedded applications, and easy to extend with on-chip and/or off-chip components.

Duration: 04.2021-03.2024

Website

Title: Family-focused adolescent & lifelong health promotion

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Nina Heinrichs

Faculty of Psychology and Sports Science, Department of Psychology

Summary:

Young people in Eastern Europe face risks to their health and wellbeing due to factors including violence, poverty, inequality, and other adverse experiences, exacerbated by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Programs focusing on the adolescent-caregiver relationship are an evidence-based solution to supporting adolescent health by addressing a cluster of common individual and family risk factors. Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) is one such program, developed for implementation and scale-up in low-resource settings. FLOURISH will adapt, implement, and evaluate the PLH Teens programme. The program will be adapted to the service delivery and cultural setting of two countrywide health networks, in North Macedonia and Moldova, including the needs of the refugee populations from Ukraine. The program covers evidence-based skills, such as problem-solving and emotional regulation, for adolescents 10-14 years old and their caregivers. Through building skills and strengthening the adolescent-caregiver relationship, communication, and caregiver monitoring, the program has the potential to prevent and reduce multiple common mental health problems and risk behaviours, such as alcohol misuse, therefore reducing the risk of future non-communicable diseases. Informed by co-production with stakeholders and intervention process evaluation, FLOURISH will explore the cost-effectiveness of intervention components and test the final intervention package in a hybrid implementation-effectiveness randomized trial, as well as develop a scaling strategy informed by qualitative data and statistical modelling. The project will foster methodological innovation. FLOURISH will advance the uptake and scale-up of evidence-based, open-source, and sustainable family interventions for adolescents in low-resource settings, and therefore have a profound impact on reducing the risks for future non-communicable diseases.

Duration: 01.2023-12.2026

Title: iCulture: A digital bio-platform and co-culture bioprocess to prospect and utilize macroalgae responsibly and sustainably.

PI: Prof. Dr. Volker F. Wendisch

Faculty of Biology

Summary:

Over 100 Megatons of seaweed constitute Europe's largest biomass, but less than 0.25% is utilized. Marine industry stakeholders are currently left with 50-70% of residual side-streams sold as low-cost fertilizers. Existing data on more than 10000 macroalgae species could help this industry to improve their processes but the data is too large and manual curation is not feasible. Despite the progression of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and digital instruments, these techniques have barely entered the biobased sector.

iCulture is a cross-disciplinary consortium where European expertise on ICT, bioinformatic, biodiversity, biotechnology, synthetic biology and bioprocessing is combined to develop a set of digital toolboxes that can prospect for new species of seaweed, utilize these in microbial fermentation, and understand how to use it responsibly and sustainably.

Over 80 TB of existing seaweed data and 700.000 genes will be mined by machine learning algorithms in an A.I. toolbox to identify macroalgae characteristics: growth, response to environmental conditions, chemical composition and more. These will be used by a predictive Model toolbox, with models for compositional changes, recovery, resilience and Dispersion, to deliver key features that are important for responsible resource management. A Bioprocess technology toolbox will use this information for a machine learning controlled microbial co-culture, that will convert complex sugar mixtures to catalysts producing high-value antimicrobials.

The multiple benefits of this digital platform are 1) boost the prospecting efficiency of new species by using powerful A.I. algorithms 2) help to understand the potential and vulnerability of resources, so that a responsible management strategy can guide the operations of stakeholders, and 3) create a novel value-chain, valorizing European seaweed side-streams into valuable antimicrobials (>$150/kg) for feed, food and pharma, while reducing CO2 footprint more than 20%.

Duration: 09.2023-08.2027

Website

Title: Providing research infrastructure services to support Next Generation EU

University Library

Summary:

In the world of open science, fair, user-friendly and open communication and information sharing are key. Therefore, in order to promote research, content and information must be easily discovered and viewed. The EU-funded OpenAIRE Nexus project is presenting a framework of services that could greatly assist in publishing research, monitoring its impact and helping promote its discovery. These services are provided by public institutions and entities, having already been used in Europe and beyond. The goal is to integrate this framework into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the open science community worldwide.

Duration: 03.2024-02.2028

Website

Title: Policy Alignment of Open access Monographs in the European Research Area

Principal Investigator:

Dirk Pieper

University Library

Summary:

Academic books continue to play an important role in scholarly production and research communication, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. As an important output of scholarly production, academic books must be included in open science/open access policies and strategies developed by research funders and institutions, to ensure that open science becomes the modus operandi of modern science across all disciplines. However, contrary to article publishing in journals (especially in the areas of Science, Technology, and Medicine) academic books have not been a focus point for open access (OA) policymakers. Consequently, books are only rarely mandated to be published OA by research funders and institutions. PALOMERA will investigate the reasons for this situation across geographies, languages, economies, and disciplines within the European Research Area (ERA). Through desk studies, surveys, in-depth interviews, and use cases, PALOMERA will collect, structure, analyse, and make available knowledge that can explain the challenges and bottlenecks that prevent OA to academic books. Based on this evidence PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the overall objective of speeding up the transition to open access for books to further promote open science. The recommendations will address all relevant stakeholders (research funders and institutions, researchers, publishers, infrastructure providers, libraries, and national policymakers). The PALOMERA consortium broadly represents all relevant stakeholders for OA academic books, but will facilitate co-creation and validation events throughout the project to ensure that the views and voices of all relevant stakeholders are represented, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.This will assure maximal consensus and take-up of the recommendations.

Duration: 01.2023-12.2024

Website

 

 

Title: Performance in Robots Interaction via Mental Imagery

PI: Prof. Dr. Thomas Schack

Department of Psychology and Sports Science

Summary:

The next generation of personal robotic systems needs to reach a level of cognition and motor intelligence that provides autonomy in any environment, effective interaction with humans, and adaptation of their actions to a broad range of open, dynamic situations. Robots are expected to be able to predict perceptual and functional changes that result from human actions and replicate human activities taking into consideration their own capabilities and limitations.
The required human-like physical performance and reasoning cannot be achieved with the mainstream AI and robotics paradigms, because they are missing the required co-design of body (robot) and mind (AI) and are based on inefficient computing and sensing resources that cannot be scaled up to the required level.
To go beyond what is currently possible, PRIMI will synergistically combine research and development in neurophysiology, psychology, machine intelligence, cognitive mechatronics, neuromorphic engineering, and humanoid robotics to build developmental models of higher-cognition abilities – mental imagery, abstract reasoning, and theory of mind – boosted by energy-efficient event-driven computing and sensing. It will produce a new unifying concept for the next generation of autonomous interaction technologies, capable of more autonomous, faster, safer, and precise interaction with real-time learning and adaptation, thanks to the integration of the capabilities to mentally represent themselves, the physical and social worlds, resemble experiences and simulate actions.
PRIMI’s ambition is to induce a paradigm shift in AI and robotics to create truly autonomous socially interactive robots, which will offer new technological perspectives for transforming personal robotic services.
As a proof-of-principle of the technological advancement in a relevant scenario, prototypes of neuromorphic humanoid robots will be validated in clinical pilot studies of robot-led physical rehabilitation of stroke survivors.

Duration: 11.2023-12.2027

Website

Title: Building REsilience against MEntal illness during ENDocrine-sensitive life stages

 

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Doreen Reifegerste

Faculty of Public Health

Summary:

Mental illnesses represent a huge burden for society, the economy, and the affected individuals. To significantly increase citizens? mental health, today?s symptom-based diagnoses need to be complemented by biological criteria accounting for individual and sex differences. Furthermore, early detection and prevention measures need to be improved. RE-MEND addresses the current gaps and challenges with an interdisciplinary approach by: i) focusing on four critical life stages in which an individual?s susceptibility to mental illness is strongly influenced by changes in endocrine signalling, including sex hormones, namely early life, puberty, peripartum, and transition into old age; ii) integrating data from large population-based longitudinal cohort studies allowing for discovery of risk and protective factors as well as biological patterns that influence mental states in the general population across these life stages; iii) complementing epidemiological with experimental studies to establish correlative and causative links leading to mechanistic understanding; iv) using advanced biostatistics as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence for data integration and biomarker and drug target discovery; v) combining the biological approaches with communication science studies to efficiently translate its results to societal impact. Ultemately, RE-MEND will result in: i) Significantly increased mental health literacy among stakeholders and citizens; ii) Validated biomarkers for assessing mental health state and its predisposition as well as more accurate diagnoses and personalised preventive and therapeutic measures; iii) Recommendations for early detection, better prevention, and drug design strategies to protect vulnerable individuals from mental illness in sensitive life stages; and iv) strategies on how these advances can be used to decrease stigma and increase prevention behaviour.

Duration: 01.2023 - 12.2027

Website

Synthetic biology United with Nanotechnology –A Biohybrid Approach to Improve Light-harvesting and CO2 Fixation for High Performance Sustainable Solar Fuel Production

 

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Olaf Kruse

CeBiTec – Center for Biotechnology

Summary:

The advancement of direct solar fuel technologies is key to provide a sustainable, secure energy supply for the EU and other global regions, and for the challenging-to-electrify aviation and maritime sectors. State-of-the-art technologies for solar fuel production (including natural photosynthesis) suffer from low solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency, low production rates and prohibitively high costs. Within the framework of SUN-PERFORM, we will address these critical limitations through an innovative biohybrid approach based on innovations in nanotechnology and synthetic biology. SUN-PERFORM aims to: 1) to develop artificial nanocrystal light-harvesting systems, to efficiently harvest a larger part of the solar light spectrum, 2) to generate advanced microalgal solar cell factories, by introducing synthetic pathways for a more efficient, rapid conversion of light energy and CO2 into lipid fuel precursors. Microalgal lipids are promising hydrocarbons for fuels, being already approved production pathways for Sustainable Aviation Fuel. However, current lipid production is still too inefficient and slow, hindering the cost-effective generation of renewable fuels. Through the implementation and integration of groundbreaking innovations at a pilot scale, SUN-PERFORM aims to achieve a remarkable four-fold increase in the existing solar-to-fuel efficiency. This will be demonstrated across two case studies reflecting the different solar irradiances received in Europe and Africa. In addition to technical advancements, SUN-PERFORM will comprehensively evaluate the sustainability, techno-economic and social aspects of this novel route, to guide its development as a truly sustainable, secure and affordable production platform. Diverse stakeholders, including industry and several partners in Africa, will be involved in SUN-PERFORM to support the global development and the European leadership and export position for solar fuel technology.

Duration: 11.2024-10.2028

Website