This action supports physical and blended mobility of higher education students and staff from/to third countries not associated to Erasmus+. Students in all study fields and cycles can take part in a study period or traineeship abroad. Higher education teaching and administrative staff can take part in professional development activities abroad, as well as staff from the field of work in order to teach and train students or staff at higher education institutions.

This action supports physical and blended mobility of higher education students and staff from EU Member States and third countries associated to Erasmus+ to any country in the world. Students in all study fields and cycles can take part in a study period or traineeship abroad. Higher education teaching and administrative staff can take part in professional development activities abroad, as well as staff from the field of work in order to teach and train students or staff at higher education institutions.Mobility consortium descriptionAn effective matching between labour market opportunities and qualified professionals’ profiles and skill sets is crucial to ensure a successful combination of economic/cultural development and high degree of occupation of graduated citizens. In southern regions of Italy, youth unemployment rate is relatively high and the number of graduates in the population is significantly below the EU average. On the other hand, the EC last Erasmus+ Higher Education Impact Study (2019) highlights the importance of Erasmus+ experiences on the development of employability skills, intercultural openness and personality development, with higher perceived benefits by students in Southern European Countries. This context constitutes a strong motivation for the present Consortium to build further on the previous solid experience in providing specific traineeship opportunities abroad to academic students.The Consortium project is named G.R.E.A.T. (“Gaining a Robust Education Across Traineeships”). It is rooted into the last fourteen years of coordination of similar Erasmus+ projects (“ASPE” and “BetforJobs” mobility consortia for Erasmus+ traineeship). In the 2021-27 timeframe of the project, ambitious objectives will be pursued with renewed energy and enthusiasm by most of the HEI partners participating in the last consortium project edition and new ones, capitalizing on the past decades valuable experience into new ideas and a long-term vision. The overall aim of the G.R.E.A.T. project is to set up a framework for top-quality traineeship mobilities across Europe and support the spreading of experiences abroad among the students and staff of participating HEIs with a direct impact in terms of excellence, acquisition of transferable (digital, work-related, linguistic and communication, personal) skills, employability, mind openness and creativity, innovation. Starting from the past successful experience, multilateral cooperation between European educational institutions, organisations, companies and public and private bodies will be stimulated. This will be realized by using the large database of host organisations assembled in previous projects, totaling around 1,000 institutions. Therefore, the traineeship mobility Consortium G.R.E.A.T. will pursue the following main objectives: a) to improve the professional, social and intercultural skills of students and graduates in order to facilitate a more qualified entry into labour market; b) to increase the international dimension of partner HEIs by expanding their offer of high-quality international traineeships, thereby contributing to strengthening the European Education Area;c) to develop innovative and supportive frameworks, based mostly on digital on-line tools and a dedicated website, also complying with the European Student Card Initiative, for traineeship experiences that maximise return and impact. The activities will involve the following key elements and responsibilities:-) the coordinating University together with all the HEI partners will develop a shared set of annual selection criteria, trainee preparation methodologies and best practices for support, which will ensure quality, equity, transparency and inclusion of participants with fewer opportunities, across the whole Consortium;-) while centrally coordinated, all HEI partners will carry out and be responsible for the annual selection of their respective trainees;-) a centralized and supportive database of destination opportunities will be developed by leveraging the new tools made available thanks to the Digital Transformation, in order to facilitate the matching between the candidate background/ambitions and the characteristics of appropriate destinations;-) dissemination and monitoring strategies will be agreed across the Consortium in an “Implementation Plan” and put in place to ensure that: all mobilities will be based on preliminarily signed Learning Agreements for Traineeship; the corresponding credits will be automatically recognised and count towards the degree, whenever possible; financial and management rules will be adhered to; sustainable means of mobility will be favored.The activities of the consortium are expected to generate significant results and impact. The planned number of mobilities is in the order of 250 per annum, although this number may vary if new partners will join the Consortium. The communication and dissemination will be carried out through a Consortium's dedicated website, which will include news, events and promotion initiatives sections. It will present successful stories and will offer companies the possibilities to apply to join the list of destinations. Appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) will be identified in the “Implementation plan” for each communication and dissemination measure. In this way, targeted recipients will be effectively reached and the project will ensure a maximum impact.

TEMA will greatly improve Natural Disaster Management (NDM, e.g., for wildfires, floods) by automating precise semantic 3D mapping and disaster evolution prediction to achieve NDM goals in near-real-time. It will analyze and fuse many heterogeneous extreme data sources: smart drone and in-situ sensors, remote sensing data, topographical data, meteorological data/predictions and geosocial media data (text, image and videos). TEMA will focus on the extreme nature of the data, due to their varying resolution and quality, very large volume and update rate, different spatiotemporal resolutions and acquisition frequencies, real-time needs and multilingualism. It will develop an integrated, ground-breaking NDM platform, focusing on real-time semantic extraction from multiple heterogeneous data modalities and sources, on-the-fly construction of a meaningful semantically annotated 3D disaster area map, prediction of disaster evolution and improved communication between service providers and end-users, through automated process triggering and response recommendations. Semantic analysis computations will be distributed across the edge-to-cloud continuum, in a federated manner, to minimize latency. Extreme data analytics will be performed in a trustworthy and transparent way, by greatly advancing state-of-the-art AI and XAI approaches. The constantly updated 3D map and the disaster evolution predictions will form the basis for an advanced, interactive, Extended Reality (XR) interface, where the current situation will be visualized and different response strategies will be dynamically evaluated through simulation by NDM personnel. The innovative, scalable and efficient TEMA platform will provide precise NDM support, based on extreme data analytics. It will be validated on two critical disaster use-cases (wildfires and floods), in four EU countries, and will form the basis for the TEMA NDM-Analytics-as-a Service (NDM-AaaS) model.

FEEDACTIV focuses on the development of innovative aquaculture feed based on natural bioactive compounds that boost the immune system of farmed fish. Various species of marine microalgae as well as seaweed and land based herbal plants are going to be used as enrichment of the fish feed and hopefully as partial fishmeal substitution with low cost ingredients. The use of natural compounds, polyunsaturated fatty acids (ω-3, ω-6 and ω-7), phenols, carotenoids and protein from marine and land based flora, aims to improve the breeding and quality of farmed species while drastically reducing the annual cost of the aquaculture companies by focusing on the processes that boost the immune system of the fish. The production of these functional products will cover the consumers’ demands for the consumption of foods with increased functionality and absence of any chemical additives giving them the following comparative advantage over the competition. The overarching objective of this project is to form an international and inter-sectoral network of organizations working on a joint research programme in the fields of aquaculture and feed formulation. Therefore, FEEDACTIV will bring together experts from industry and academia that specialize in interdisciplinary/inter-sectorial, yet highly complementally, research areas of Aquaculture, Animal Feed Production, Feed/Food safety, Process Analysis and Design of food products. It is a joint research and innovation project that will develop a strong partnership involving 8 partners from 3 European countries (Romania, Greece, and Italy) and with different technical backgrounds from the academic and non-academic sectors (SMEs). The execution of the project and the knowledge sharing will be based on secondments (exchanges) of research and innovation staff with an in-built return mechanism strengthening collaborative research among the different countries and sectors.

"Mobility and propensity for mobility are essential to enhance competitiveness, and contributes to building up a knowledge based society where awareness of cultural diversity and traditions is an incentive, rather than an obstacle, to innovation and international cooperation, even talkin’ about a Higher Education Insitution. This why the University of Messina is committed to foster its participation in international programmes of didactic and research, and opt for increasing its quality standard in order to strengthen the international appeal of its academic offer, better off students employability and rise its capacity to attract foreign students, researchers and scholars. UniMe recognizes mobility as a civil right; so, this time we tried to guarantee mobility opportunities to ALL the academic components, using different and easier criteria in selecting beneficiaries, and helping them to face the main obstacle to mobility: language competence. This is also important for an ""ancient"" University such UniMe is, that constantly developpes its abroad programmes with the final aim to fulfill the University's strategy of teaching innovation, diversity in teaching methods, and interdisciplinary studies, so that UniMe could become such the first choice for anyone abroad wishing to study at a university in Sicily, a country historically evaluated as retarded and barely interested in cultural renewal and competition. From a different point of view, we think that increasing and promoting our experience in European Projects could have a new great role in the number of students who choose to study at our University, thanks to the large number of mobility programmes granted in the past, that allowed many students even to find good jobs or great personal experiences in other Countries.Numbers are clear: in the last years, UniMe worked out to carry on a wide internationalization strategy, and all the efforts made are now starting to be rewarded. From 2013, more than 70 new Bilateral Agreements were signed; the number of students granted for a study experience abroad has constantly grown ( 2013: 99 /2015: about 200 granted outgoing students), just as the number of foreign students hosted, and the same happened for those who were granted for a traineeship experience ( some of them were later assumed by their host institution ).All these motivate and stimulate all our academic community to improve each daily experience of study/work/search with a new consciousness about “being European”, and encourage the sense of personal and professional responsibility among the whole academic community , respecting different rules and habits in order to reach a new collaborative system inside and outside our Institution; and all these, in other words, is a success just for itself."