Cardiovascular disease (CVD), more specifically, vulnerable plaque rupture, remains the major cause of death for people at middle age. The CVENT consortium will revolutionize screening, diagnosis and monitoring of CVD by means of a compact photoacoustic imaging (PAI) system for vulnerable plaque imaging. In the carotid arteries feeding the brain, vulnerable plaque rupture initiates cerebrovascular ischemic attacks. The state-of-the-art decision-making approach for a high-risk surgical intervention to avoid plaque rupture is based on stenosis severity alone, measured with ultrasound (US) imaging. However, this does not distinguish between vulnerable (rupture-prone) and stable (harmless) plaques, leading to severe overtreatment. Consequently, there is a worldwide unmet and urgent clinical need for functional information to enable in-depth diagnosis of carotid plaque vulnerability, avoiding cardiovascular events (CVENT) and reducing overtreatment risk. The objective of the CVENT consortium is the development of a portable multimodal and multiwavelength PAI system with a 3 cm imaging depth, for diagnosis and monitoring of carotid plaque vulnerability. The combination of high optical contrast of PAI and the high resolution of US will be used to identify plaque vulnerability markers, typically lipid pools and intra-plaque haemorrhage. Improved diagnosis of carotid plaque vulnerability will lead to a significant reduction in CVD-related disability and mortality. Simultaneously, by stratifying patients into high and low risk groups, overtreatment is reduced, leading to better allocation of healthcare funds. The CVENT consortium unites leading research groups, clinicians, industrial partners, and their expertise on R&D and a focus on exploitation, creating a breakthrough in carotid plaque vulnerability diagnosis. CVENT will bring together leading experts in the field of CVD, functional US imaging and PAI, introducing clinically applied PAI into the vascular medical arena.

The Atmospheric Physics and Turbulence for Wind Energy (AptWind) Doctoral Network provides training for a new creative, entrepreneurial, innovative and resilient industry-oriented academic generation apt to face current and future challenges at the frontier of research within atmospheric flow physics and turbulence for wind energy applications, where the trained Doctoral Candidates (DCs) will be able to convert knowledge and ideas into new products, and services for economic and social benefit. The needs within this field recently became even more urgent by the launch of RePower EU and the Fit-for-55 package. There, the already ambitious climate goals were revised, and the Commission has committed to increasing its renewable energy target from 32% to 40% by 2030. This measure requires the installation of new wind farms with a power capacity of 30 000 MW every year until 2030, which heavily relies on the realization of taller, and therefore more powerful, wind turbine designs reaching into less well understood atmospheric flow regimes. AptWind will not only provide a new generation of professionals equipped with a portfolio of transferable skills that facilitates the transfer of high-level academic research into practical and useful tools and methods in the industry but also will contribute to breaking some major barriers for the ambitious green energy transition. The barriers are both in the domain of measurement technologies and modelling approaches as well as in the training domain as further described in this proposal.

VIZTA project, coordinated by ST Micrelectronics, aims at developing innovative technologies in the field of optical sensors and laser sources for short to long-range 3D-imaging and to demonstrate their value in several key applications including automotive, security, smart buildings, mobile robotics for smart cities, and industry4.0. The key differentiating 12-inch Silicon sensing technologies developed during VIZTA are: • Innovative SPAD and lock-in pixel for Time of Flight architecture sensors • Unprecedent and cost-effective NIR and RGB-Z filters on-chip solutions • complex RGB+Z pixel architectures for multimodal 2D/3D imaging For short-range sensors : advanced VCSEL sources including wafer-level GaAs optics and associated high speed driver These developed differentiating technologies allows the development and validation of innovative 3D imaging sensors products with the following highly integrated prototypes demonstrators: • High resolution (>77 000 points) time-of-flight ranging sensor module with integrated VCSEL, drivers, filters and optics. • Very High resolution (VGA min) depth camera sensor with integrated filters and optics For Medium and Long range sensing, VIZTA also adresses new LiDAR systems with dedicated sources, optics and sensors Technology developments of sensors and emitters are carried out by leading semiconductor product suppliers (ST Microelectronics, Philips, III-V Lab) with the support of equipment suppliers (Amat, Semilab) and CEA Leti RTO. VIZTA project also include the developement of 6 demonstrators for key applications including automotive, security, smart buildings, mobile robotics for smart cities, and industry4.0 with a good mix of industrial and academic partners (Ibeo, Veoneer, Ficosa, Beamagine, IEE, DFKI, UPC, Idemia, CEA-List, ISD, BCB, IDE, Eurecat). VIZTA consortium brings together 23 partners from 9 countries in Europe: France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Luxembourg, Latvia, Sweden, Hungary, and United Kingdom.