<< Background >>The accelerated digital transformation that our societies have been undergoing for several decades has created significant generational, cultural, social and geographical differences that severely limit the opportunities and possibilities for inclusion in our future society. In addition, the recent health crisis has shown that the lack of digital resources and skills increases exclusion, as it strongly interferes with personal and professional interactions and, as a consequence, with the teaching and learning processes.To address these major challenges, CONNECT-UNITA aims to offer technical and methodological solutions to support the different actors in teaching and learning processes towards the new era of digital transformation of higher education, thus reducing existing gaps and maximising inclusion. The European UNITA alliance offers an ideal framework for the development of this project, as it integrates, on the one hand, common elements such as the situation of our institutions in rural and mountainous cross-border regions of southern, central and eastern Europe; the promotion of Romance languages as common academic languages, thus favouring inclusion; the development of strong links in education and research in 3 strategic axes: cultural heritage, renewable energies and circular economy; Moreover, transnational cooperation between our institutions offers us an ideal context to design and implement a digital and pedagogical transformation strategy enabling the reconciliation of geographical, linguistic, temporal and social distances, and to promote cooperation and experimentation by bringing together the stakeholders involved in the project of creating European universities and offers a springboard for its dissemination and transfer to other alliances and international cooperation networks.<< Objectives >>The main objective of this project is the development of a collaborative platform and methodology framework for innovation in teaching and learning that not only aims to achieve success in the acquisition of knowledge and competences, but also to break down barriers of geographical, linguistic, temporal and social distances, thus fostering inclusion and international cooperation. More specifically, our project aims to achieve the following objectives: - Meet the needs for integration of learning management systems and learning spaces for students and teachers of UNITA alliance institutions and future associated partners, in order to break down geographical, linguistic and temporal barriers and support collaborative digital learning spaces. This will be done by designing and developing an integration platform offering an innovative solution for automatic translation services and geographical distribution of learning content and synchronous or asynchronous monitoring of students in the framework of international cooperations. - Provide a unified framework to guide teachers through digital and pedagogical transformation in the creation or adaptation of learning resources and activities in order to remove barriers that limit international collaboration in teaching and learning. This framework will provide both a methodology and a technical-pedagogical model aimed at integrating the geographical, multilingual and hybrid dimensions of learning and fostering international collaboration in course construction and delivery. - Create an international teaching and learning living lab for teachers and students of the UNITA alliance, as well as for the international community, thanks to the co-design and co-production of courses, oriented both to the transfer and multiplication of competences in technical and pedagogical innovation and also in priority subjects of the UNITA alliance (such as cultural heritage, renewable energies, circular economy, among others). The teaching and learning living lab will also allow the development of virtual mobilities between UNITA consortium members as well as other external members and will offer a space for cooperation in pedagogical and digital innovation.<< Implementation >>To ensure an adequate management of the physical, human and financial resources of the project, integrating the time constraints and the requirements of the institutions and of the national and international regulations, several design, implementation and production activities will be carried out in the framework of well-adapted methodologies for the achievement of the objectives and the development of the product results. Activities related to the development of the integration platform and the methodological and pedagogical model framework will be carried out integrating the different design and development teams of the 6 institutions. These activites will be made up within 4 main stages: the inception stage for the identification of the context, the specification of the needs and the identification of the available resources; the elaboration stage oriented to the incremental design of the solutions and the development of prototypes allowing the validation by the different members of the project to ensure that the design responds to the needs and constraints; the construction stage allowing the development of the solutions in a partial and incremental way, including evaluation and continuous improvement phases; finally the transition stage, allowing the implementation of the support tools, maintenance and evolution of the results of the product to ensure sustainability and continuous improvement. A second set of activities framed in an agile methodology, better adapted to small working groups and shorter development cycles, will be applied to guide the design and implementation of several series of courses. This methodology will be guided by the list of requirements for each course, specified in the form of expected learning outcomes. Iterations will take place between the teachers and the technical-pedagogical referents, to progressively create the content using the CONNECT-UNITA platform and framework.<< Results >>The main results and outcomes of the project include: - A digital platform called ITLPaaS aimed at enabling the Integration of Teaching and Learning Services in order to meet the needs of students and teachers of the institutions of the UNIT alliance and beyond, based on an Open Source model and deployed in a scalable, elastic and extensible community cloud. This model will ensure the performance and sustainability of the platform as well as the software developed at UNITA consortium level and will also facilitate its growth through the flexible aggregation of additional resources from future partners. - A digital and pedagogical innovation framework called the Time-Spatial-Linguistic Teaching and Learning Travel Machine (TSL-TL Travel Machine) that provides both a methodology and a technical-pedagogical model to support collaborative course construction and delivery using the ITLPaaS platform. This framework, made available to the community under an open source model, will favour collaboration between teachers while allowing the systematic integration of digital and pedagogical innovations and the elimination of geographical, linguistic and temporal barriers. - A teaching and learning living laboratory for teachers and students of the UNITA alliance, as well as for the international community. This lab will offer several series of courses produced thanks to the framework and platform developed during the project and will be shared publicly with the community, thus serving as tools for the transfer and multiplication of technical and pedagogical innovation. The teaching and learning living lab will also enable the development of virtual mobilities between UNITA consortium members as well as other external members and will offer a space for cooperation in pedagogical and digital innovation. The lab will allow experimenting innovations in teaching and learning and in particular in the implementation of the COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) approach at European and international level.

Glycoscience has gained such significant technological advances over the past decade, that it is now poised for giving an unprecedented contribution to high-demanding societal needs. GlyCanDrug is a glycoscience-oriented DN that aims, for the first time, to take a step ahead in the design of precision therapeutics targeting key glycan motifs implicated in cancer. These glycans are fingerprints of many cancers. Thus, their targeting has the striking potential to overcome cancer heterogeneity that limits the current targeted therapies providing new opportunities for the discovery of precision therapeutics. The credibility and high quality of GlyCanDrug are ensured by top-level glycoscientists from 9 academic institutions (8EU & 1US) and 6 SMEs which encompass complementary and intersectoral expertise, and unique state-of-the-art technological tools to train 10 doctoral candidates (DCs). GlyCanDrug focuses on the precise inhibition of the expression of cancer-associated glycans and the development of cutting-edge tools for their targeting. The unique combination of scientific excellence in interdisciplinary fields and industry know-how will cover the entire process from obtaining fundamental insights to the implementation of innovative solutions. GlyCanDrug aims at creating a critical mass of uniquely skilled graduates in glycan-based therapies. To this aim, we will equip DCs with a thorough multifaceted knowledge of the potential of glycoscience in the discovery of cancer precision therapeutics and the necessary transferable skills. This will put DCs in an advantageous position for job opportunities in both academia and industry. Deciphering the glycome expands the frontiers of knowledge and discovery and enables addressing fundamental challenges in cancer. Therefore, GlyCanDrug DN will strengthen the European innovation capacity by bringing new glycoscience concepts in the development of cancer precision therapeutics to market and policy stakeholders.

The ESPERANTO project aims at pushing speech processing technologies to their next step in order to enable the diffusion of these technologies in European SMEs and to maximize and securize their use in the civil society for forensic, health or education. The ESPERANTO consortium forsees that the next generation of artificial intelligence algorithms for speech processing should : 1. be more accessible : via a larger number of spoken languages, and for applications where resources are strongly limited (health, education, robotics…); 2. integrate a human in the loop to guaranty a higher usability and ease of deployment and maintenance; 3. be explainable in order to enable sensitive applications related to forensic or health and contribute to personal data preservation by detecting and characterizing existing biases due to the data-driven nature of current speech technologies. ESPERANTO intends to lead the scientific community by releasing evaluation metrics, protocols and standards that will boost the development and evaluation of this new generation of algorithms. To achieve this ambitious goal, the ESPERANTO project gathers a large and trans-sectorial community of experts in speech related applications such as speech transcription, separation, enhancement, translation, understanding and speaker recognition and diarization to transfer knowledge, organize, produce and standardize resources with the aim of catalyzing and cross-pollenizing this area. The main goals of the ESPERANTO project are: - support the development of open-source tools that will encourage fast developement, exchanges and reproducibility; - produce tutorials and competitive baselines on various topics of speech processing in order to boost the fostering of new speech-AI students, researchers and engineers; - facilitate the collection and sharing of linguistic and speech resources through standards; - organize workshops to progress on the speech technologies and favor tranfer of knowledge.