With VIMpay petaFuel aims to develop a mobile based payment solution to a stage that it is ready for European market entry. The product will enable all smart phone users to participate in cashless payments, consolidating both card based payments (contactless as well as contactbased) and SEPA payments. The main USPs of the products are (1) that it enables users to do payments without the need for a bank account and (2) does so in a secure and convenient way without (3) requiring additional payment infrastructure, i.e. it is based on open and already established standards. petaFuel -together with third parties- has already established a sophisticated payment infrastructure and corresponding business processes and brought demonstrators and proof-of-concepts into the market. Within this project these processes and infrastructures are extended and integrated to provide a mobile based payment solution that ideally caters for all payment needs of end customers in the European SEPA region. This project does fit the call objectives by setting up a universal solution that enables smartphone users in the whole SEPA payment area to participate in online cashless payments. Furthermore VIMpay will be disruptive to the classic banking models for private customers as VIMpay will provide a bank-independent payment solution and therefore does cater for unbanked customers as well as banked customers in Europe. The aim of VIMpay is to provide a one-fits-all solution for payments consolidating technologies and standards.

The scientific term "hygiene" refers to the maintenance of health and healthy living. Our objective is to develop a low-cost household gadget (3E) that will generate an in-situ, ready-to-use, high performing, effective, and non-toxic disinfecting agent to reinforce the measures of keeping personal-hygiene at the highest level and helping in preventing the spread of diseases. 3E concept eliminates the need for using expensive, harsh, and toxic chemicals or alcohol-based personal disinfectant products. The gadget works only with tap water and table salt, Sodium chloride (NaCI), which can be found most probably in every house. The 3E gadget converts regular table salt and tap water into Neutral Electrolyzed Water to destroy infectious organisms. The electrolysis of salt produces a solution of hypochlorous acid (HOCI) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH). The resulting water can be used as a safe non-toxic disinfectant. The solution kills bacteria, microbes, and germs by 99,9%. The solution sterilizes, deodorizes, and purifies the air as well and is safe to use for delicate applications such as pets, kids’ toys, and food. 3E will sterilize and deodorize simply every surface and even clothes, carpets, furniture, and shoes. 3E gadget can be used at home, at the car, at the office, wherever sterilization and cleaning is needed. The expected outcomes of the project are increasing public health, reinforcing the prevention measures of the spread of germs, viruses, bacteria, and fungus, introducing a completely new, low-cost, safe household cleaning, a non-toxic disinfecting solution to end-users. Unlike conventional detergent and other disinfectant products, 3E solution can be used safely and easily on all surfaces, including food. The initial investment of buying the 3E gadget is returned in an average of 2 months and saves money throughout its lifetime.

The web nowadays is overloaded with huge volumes of disparate information and linked data (i.e. Big Data) which requires the use of specific tools, Data Science methods (e.g. Machine Learning) and emerging technologies in big data in order to improve transparency and recognition of domain specific skills through the web. Job profiles contain general job description, expected competencies, skills and duties. Moreover, job centers and agencies typically aim at matching desired job profiles with suitable candidates. However, job seekers face difficulties in better understanding of the required job knowledge and competences through reviewing job profiles. Moreover, public and private sectors need IT-based tools to simplify transparent recognition of domain specific job knowledge while setting up their job profiles. It becomes more challenging when different countries provide different priorities and job descriptions due to various job market characteristics, vocational and educational trainings (VET) and demographic circumstances. This challenge prevents mobility of skilled workers, youth and workforce across Europe. It is shown that unemployment problem and risk of social exclusion hit more youth and young workforce in the European countries. Specially, the current refugee crisis caused by large amount of refugees and asylums in Europe enforces further difficulties to earlier stated challenges. Considering all stated challenges, the massive amount of information on the web such as job announcements, forums and wikis, is a gold mine for job knowledge discovery. The main issue in this regard is how to retrieve, cleanse, explore, visualize and interpret such huge volume of web data and put them in a sort of Job Knowledge Base (JKB). In addition, semantic web mining promotes exploitation of semantic structures in the JKB formed through web mining. Accordingly, enriched JBK using web data analytics (1) improves construction of job profile templates, (2) contributes to job analytics, labor market demand analysis, wage analysis, (3) facilitates skilled worker mobility, (4) supports identification of required skills and qualifications and (5) helps strengthening key competences in VET curricula.DISKOW will provide a neat Job Knowledge Base (JKB) as a prototype which collects job specific data from the web and provides recommendations through analytics. Job knowledge catalogue of a job definition in the JKB will be equipped with a template of the most typically required competences and skills for that job. Job seekers will be able to use the JKB in order to develop their domain specific skills and competences based on recommendations in specific job knowledge catalogue. In this regard, the mined information of jobs as well as their relevant competences and skills can be used to identify list of top demanding jobs, skills and competences and provide predictive analytics.The consortium consists of four partners, namely the L3S Research Center at the Leibniz University of Hanover in Germany, the Institute of Economic Research at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (IER SAS), Engineering as a large enterprise in software development and skill analysis modeling provider in Italy and Petanux GmbH as a private data science and research exploitation company in Germany. The consortium as a whole provides professional competences for fulfilling the objectives and promises of DISKOW. In addition, the project partners will disseminate the project results in cooperation with their networks through governmental as well as private employment agencies, VET providers and other related stakeholders to flourish the results and outcomes and sustain the project and the platform in long term.From the non-technical point of view, DISKOW aims at analyzing the labor market at the level of consortium partnership countries whereas the proof of concept can be used to the labor market analysis at the European level. As a result, DISKOW will be able to provide a streamline of the workforce development and provide predictions and road-maps for the future of specific required competences and jobs. Accordingly, data science has moved to the top of European labor markets’ list. Due to the importance of data science jobs in the European labor market, DISKOW will focus on the identification of skills and qualifications in the data science sector as a specific case study. The final solution will be ready to be adapted to a wide variety of sectors and workforces. This proposal has been once accepted for funding last year with great scores. The University of Koblenz had internal difficulties with EU to sign the contract, therefore we agreed to resubmit the proposal once through LUH this year. Furthermore, thanks to reviewers of last year, we even improved the quality of proposal in terms of review critics from last year, meaning that this year's submission targets even review comments after acceptance of last year for having higher quality project.

According to the survey of World Economic Forum [tinyurl.com/jzlr5le], the Digital Transformation, especially in Industry (Industry IoT / IIoT), is one of the top technological drivers of change for the future of jobs, employment, skills, and workforce strategy in the 4th Industrial Revolution. On one hand, the preparation of the European workforce for such an enormous diversity of skills in the field of digital transformation requires the support of the Higher Education Institutions (HEI) towards integrating IIoT skills. On the other hand, the pandemic situations negatively affect the quality of the support of HEIs in this respect and force the HEIs to limit their face-to-face activities and a sudden shift to online and distance learning as a result. For example, based on the survey on the impact of the COVID-19 on European Universities (May 2020,), 88 HEIs out of 92 HEIs have provided distance learning opportunities to 60% or more of their students, and 58 HEIs stated to have implemented online courses [https://ec.europa.eu/]. As a result, the HEIs plan the quicker move with more funds to digital transformation. Also, the pandemic situation affects mobility matters. The survey also described that the COVID-19 crisis has negatively affected 86 out of 92 HEIs in student mobility and 81 out of 92 HEIs in staff mobility. Therefore, the activities including blended mobility formats (i.e. short physical mobility that is blended with virtual mobility) and the development of online courses and virtual support are of the utmost importance in response to the pandemics. Furthermore, for this development to be considered successful, the design of all the activities need to make sure that they are not leaving anyone behind, and that they are ensuring equal opportunities among people of all backgrounds. In particular, the design of these activities needs to aim at shrinking the gender gap in ICT-related disciplines, which is currently causing both vertical and horizontal job segregation (Verdin et al, 2018) [doi:10.3390/socsci7030044], and also to diminish inequalities due to disabilities. Only by taking these aspects into account, the HEIs can fulfill their commitment with the society to contribute to a preparation of the European workforce that is truly inclusive. The main goal of the SkoPS project is the inclusive empowerment of the European workforce development through online/virtual skills training for digital transformation towards mitigating the impact of pandemic situations, taking into account the support of HEIs to boost the up-skill and re-skill readiness in society and industry. This project promotes the skills of engineers and workforce in the domain of IIoT, one of the most influencing and emerging technologies with significant economical and social benefits as well as trade and collaboration potentials. The project explicitly includes the gender and accessibility perspective. SkoPS is particularly designed to equip education based on virtual cooperation of its network around the EU and targets the growing demand for professional IIoT skills by providing innovative and inclusive methods and digital tools for blended teaching, training, learning, and assessment including open-access IIoT online courses and webinars especially designed for the European workforce. In this regard, SkoPS strengthens the virtual cooperation and networking between its partners and across the EU to provide the required skills towards improving the competitiveness of the European workforce through the safer support of digital technology. In order to meet this objective, the consortium delivers open-access online/virtual training materials consisting of state-of-the-art skills based on the IoT curricula at HEIs at the European standard levels. A selection of the courses will be designed to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible and will be designed with the aim to attract more women to the IIoT field. The provided courses and webinars are adapted to the newest online training materials of the European partners of the project and fill the training gaps in the European Workforce. The virtual skills training and periodical live Q&A sessions’ programs will be available on the project website and the users will have access to an online/virtual education portal that includes all the skills training materials. The online support center will check the responsiveness of the virtual/online training platform. The consortium for the strategic partnership consists of four partners from three European countries ranging from academia to industry. The involvement of non-academic partners ensures harmonizing the workforce training courses and webinars with the market and industry needs. In particular, the consortium delivers accessible and inclusive courses and webinars with state-of-the-art skills in digitalization for engineers and experts following European standards.

In response to the growing need for specialized data scientists in healthcare, our initiative aims to establish an international, interdisciplinary graduate school that educate the next generation of medical data scientists, with a strong translational focus bridging academia and industry. This is strengthened by the active involvement of leading global pharmaceutical and med-tech companies as well as SMEs in the AI field, thus ensuring that our research and training remain at the forefront of industry and healthcare. We propose a comprehensive training program offering PhD students not only a robust foundation in data science, including AI/ML and digital health, but also a deep understanding of ethical, legal and regulatory frameworks, including GDPR, the European Health Data Space and the AI Act. Our curriculum is unique in its integration of entrepreneurial thinking and a focus on Parkinsons disease (PD) as an application field. At the same time, the methodologies and insights gained will have broader applications in various disorders, thus applicable to other areas of healthcare. We will move with our research program clearly beyond the state of the art by: - Developing new AI/ML models spanning the entire journey of a PD patient to support medical decision-making on a more individual basis, - Pioneering the use of recent causal AI/ML techniques in PD research, - Investigating the optimization of future clinical trials, - Providing novel insights into digital and neuroimaging markers, - Developing innovative algorithmic solutions to enhance the generalizability of AI/ML models, - Providing understanding of the ethical, legal and regulatory basis of the use of AI in medical practice. All participants are highly committed to the research, teaching, supervision and management activities in this program, and this commitment is supported by existing working relationships through other projects, such as ERA PerMed DIGIPD, IHI PREDICTOM and IHI IDERHA.