With the fast pace of digitalization, the European Union needs adequate workforce trained in Information Technology (IT), especially the programmers who form the core of the software development industry. Unfortunately, the lack of workforce having needed skills in this area has been observed since years in the whole European Union. An obvious solution is to increase the efforts on programming education, especially encompassing the groups who are now underrepresented in the IT workforce. The main barrier, however, is the difficulty in learning programming as observed by various researchers.The project is motivated by the opportunity for a progress in passing this barrier created by the combined use of automated assessment, which provides fast feedback to the students experimenting with their code, and gamification, which provides additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort. Thus, programming can be learned in a less stressful way and becomes more achievable by students with less background education in the area. In the long term, it may help improve the perception of learning programming, drawing more people to this subject of education that would otherwise avoid it.The aim of the FGPE project was to provide a framework for application of gamification to programming education, primarily in higher education institutions. Five intellectual outputs were delivered: 1) a scheme for effective programming course gamification, including featured gamification concepts and rules of their application;2) a standardized way for exchanging programming exercises for interactive educational environments based on two formats:a) YAPExIL, covering the contents of programming exercises, such as: introduction, description of the problem, initial code, automatic test definition, feedback messages,b) GEdIL, covering the gamification-related data, such as: virtual rewards for solving the exercises, gamification rules that trigger them, and dependencies between exercises;3) a web tool (FGPE AuthorKit) for authoring, managing and sharing exercises in the above formats, and converting them from/to other formats;4) an interactive educational environment (FGPE PLE) able to process the exercises complying to YAPExIL/GEdIL formats, present them to the students via a web browser, automatically assess students' solutions, trigger defined gamification rules and generate relevant feedback;5) an open repository of 480 gamified programming exercises (each one available in English and in a selected national language) which can be used as they are or adopted to suit specific educational objectives.All the project outputs are freely available in the Internet under open source licenses. The delivered intellectual outputs were presented at multiplier events and educational conferences attaining positive feedback from the audience.The project results helped to change the way programming education is served - so far at the project partners, improving students' learning experience and paving the way for the expected long-term impact of improving the efficiency of programming education. The FGPE project results form a base that will be further extended in the ongoing FGPE+ project (2020-1-PL01-KA226-HE-095786).

This proposal addresses “Topic 03: Aircraft Systems” of the SESAR ER RPAS call. Drones appear in a large variety of types, configurations and sizes. They are operated in a large variety of operational environments (i.e. locations, classes of airspace). However, it is essential that they interoperate with other drones as well as with manned aircraft. This proposal addresses the on-board technologies for drones that are required in order to implement the Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) concept for drone operations at Very Low Level (VLL) and within the Visual Flight Rules (VFR) environment. The project will cover Detect And Avoid (D&A) systems for cooperative and non-cooperative traffic, auto-pilot systems as well as Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) systems. This project will identify the available CNS infrastructure and on-board technologies to formulate an implementation approach. Based on this an on-board system concept will be developed and evaluated.

The project main objective is the demonstration of General Aviation and Rotorcraft capability to benefit from the concepts developed in the SESAR programme, in order to facilitate their integration into airspace and airports where the SESAR concepts and technologies are implemented. This objective will be achieved through live flight trials and preparatory Real-Time Simulation campaign, with hardware and humans in the loop, which will be focused on both procedural issues and technological aspects related to Global Navigation Satellite System technologies and simultaneous non-interfering operations. Specifically, the GRADE project will demonstrate in flight, by using GA aircraft and Rotorcraft equipped with non-certified or specific on-board equipment, the following existing SESAR Solutions: Solution #51 – “Enhanced terminal operations with LPV procedures”, Solution #55 – “Precision approaches using GBAS CAT II/III”, Solution #103 – “Approach Procedure with vertical guidance”, Solution #113 – “Optimised Low Level IFR routes for rotorcraft”. The project will also focus on technological aspects, testing in flight the following products, already available within the consortium and suitably customized to fit the above listed SESAR Solutions: GNSS EGNOS and GBAS navigation algorithms able to guarantee the applicable RNP; Portable non certified Primary Flight Display to support pilot decisions and operations. The live flight trials will be conducted at two different sites and using three different aircrafts (two fixed-wing and one rotary aircraft). Flight tests data and information will be collected and analysed by taking into account relevant applicable SESAR Key Performance Areas and suitably performance indices. Performance evaluation and lessons learnt will represent the outcome of the project and will be made available to support regulation, standardisation and certification activities, as well as the integration of GA and rotorcraft with commercial aviation.

Many low-power devices such as smartphones, tablets, notebooks as well as several other embedded systems can't always cope with the increased demand for processing power, memory and storage required by modern applications in gaming, vision, security, robotics, aerospace, etc. As a result, most such applications are only executed on high-end servers. RAPID tackles this challenge by taking advantage of high-performance accelerators and high-bandwidth networks. Following our approach, compute or storage intensive tasks are seamlessly offloaded from the low-power devices to more powerful heterogeneous accelerators, supporting multiple virtual CPUs and GPUs. We propose, for the first time, a secure unified model where almost any device or infrastructure, ranging from smartphone, notebook, laptop and desktop to private and public cloud can operate as an accelerated entity and/or as an accelerator serving other less powerful devices in a secure way. RAPID offers a registration mechanism, which permits the accelerated entities to automatically find and connect to nearby accelerators with the required resources. Next, a runtime system, running on each such accelerated entity, takes into account several parameters such as the local status, the environmental conditions, the task requirements, and the status of the accelerators it is connected to in order to decide whether local tasks (or incoming tasks if the entity also acts as an accelerator) should be executed locally or remotely. Novel scheduling algorithms, admission control policies, Service Level Agreements and license policies are employed to serve multiple accelerated applications efficiently on heterogeneous cloud infrastructures. An easy-to-use task-based programming model will be defined, while a novel runtime will automatically offload and execute the tasks transparently to the programmer. Within the RAPID project the first public acceleration cloud service will become available and commercially exploitable.