The outPHit project aims to support building owners and housing companies in performing reliable, quicker and more cost-effective deep retrofits. Working on and collecting findings from real refurbishment projects, outPHit will promote renovation concepts like the Energiesprong approach or one-stop-shop solutions, but in highly efficient quality to NZEBs in EnerPHit standard, to stakeholders among neighbourhoods, municipalities, financing institutions and the building supply chain. It will lay the ground for regional players, particularly SMEs, to enter the market as providers of innovative out-of-the-box solutions, either consisting of conventional renovation concepts or of highly efficient prefabricated systems. While the focus is on residential buildings, most of the proposed approaches will also apply to non-residential buildings, thus widening the scope to educational and office buildings.

The digital transformation and the availability of more diverse and cost-effective methods for 3D capture has led to the creation of digitised representations of parts of our public spaces, machinery and processes, so-called Digital Twins. These Digital Twins are an important basis for building advanced XR applications for cityscapes and the industrial environments. These XR applications need high-fidelity models for accurate localization, which are kept in-sync with the real world. However, currently (i) creating high-fidelity Digital Twins is costly, (ii) integrating data from heterogeneous sensors is still challenging and (iii) the update of Digital Twins requires explicit manual intervention. The vision of DIDYMOS-XR is to enable advanced, more realistic and more dynamic extended reality (XR) applications, powered through artificial intelligence. The project thus focuses on advancing technologies for creating large-scale digital twins, synchronised with the real world. DIDYMOS-XR will research and develop methods for reconstruction and mapping from heterogeneous inputs, including static and mobile sensors, AI-based data fusion, scene understanding and rendering. Digtal twin based XR applications also require means of accurately positioning in the environment, aware of the dynamics of the scene, also addresed by the project. The capture of scenes at scale, as well as using cameras and other sensor data for synchronising the digital representation, bears the risk of capturing personal and sensitive data. Hence, the technologies resulting from DIDYMOS-XR must be and will be ethical and privacy-aware by design. In order to demonstrate and validate the enabling technologies researched and developed in DIDYMOS-XR, the project will address use cases of XR applications in two domains that differ in their scale and characteristics. One is urban planning and smart mobility, the other is the collaboration with autonomous mobile robots at an industrial production facility.

mCloud Alliance brings together 18 higher education institutions (HEIs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to develop Cloud-based European infrastructure and organisation for education in microelectronics providing a range of open educational resources (OERs), remote access and sharing of educational and professional software, remote and practice-based learning facilities. Neither university can afford the necessary infrastructure, clean rooms, technology and experts in all fields of this multidisciplinary science. Sharing of laboratory experiences, CAD tools, project ideas, and a common infrastructure represents a sort of “educational cloud” on top of the cloud software/hardware infrastructure. 8 European HEIs and 8 SMEs jointly developed e-learning materials for 25 courses on: CAD and technologies, test, and application of integrated circuits and systems, and we will deliver them as OERs to strengthen the virtual mobility. 4 of the courses are developed by the business partners. Each university provides remote access to its facilities, laboratory experiments/software systems for the partners in a cloud teaching system, giving them access to new resources. In the pilot test and field trial 1128 persons were involved and the results of the survey are very positive. All developed courses are considered to fulfill a more than average need of SMEs in short term. In long term the industry will need even more skills and competences in the proposed topicsWe can conclude that the university world is close to the industry needs in the sector of microelectronics.New National and Regional Knowledge Alliances were created – 45 memoranda of understanding for future collaboration within mClouds and knowledge sharing Business-Academia signed.More than 50 European enterprises involved and another 15 universities.New countries joined the Microelectronics Knowledge Alliance: Portugal, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Serbia.