The Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) is an interdisciplinary research infrastructure on population and family dynamics. It collects, processes and disseminates cross-nationally comparable longitudinal data on young adults, families, generational exchanges, and the life courses of women and men. It is the only RI focused on answering the key scientific and societal challenges related to the causes consequences of demographic changes. The main objective of the GGP-5D project is to enhance the long-term sustainability of the RI (research infrastructure) with a view towards establishing it as a permanent one with its own legal entity. To achieve this, the GGP-5D project will work on enhancing five dimensions: (1) Technical excellence, (2) Scientific and socio-economic impact and engagement, (3) Financial sustainability, (4) Legal frameworks, and (5) Positioning in the landscape of RIs. Together these five dimensions are expected to contribute to the excellence and attractiveness of the European Research Area in the field of population studies, to provide a solid ground for investment in the GGP, and to result in a well-functioning ecosystem of social sciences RIs.

Europe's future depends on its youth. However, due to crises in many European countries, young people in particular are struggling with unemployment and lack of prospects. At the same time, according to an online-survey of EURES guidance counsellors in 2013, there is an increasing demand concerning qualified vocational, educational and professional guidance counsellors with regard to the areas of aptitude procedures, the classification of certificates into categories and evaluation of placement opportunities in the field of incoming and outgoing. Our project focuses on a practice-oriented European guidance counselling concept (eGuidance Concept), tailored to the international circular mobility of young people, who emigrate from their home country abroad as well as those who remigrate back to their country of origin, bringing along specific skills and intercultural competences. This concept imparted the basic methods of international career counselling and the essentials of the specific area knowledge as to how the international mobility processes of young people can be guided. It is also tailored to the advanced training of European guidance counsellors to answer the demand already mentioned and thus provides a best-practice model for European guidance counselling. Regarding the increasing demand for qualified guidance, the concept provides a best-practice manual of both guidance methods and content. It has been developed by universities with degree programmes in career counselling in close collaboration with experienced European guidance counsellors. The concept has been published and made available through an interactive e-Learning internet portal including a virtual classroom and e-Counselling facility. The manual has been conceptualized as a self-learning modular training programme, which allowed European guidance counsellors to gather and adopt basic methods and the essentials of the area knowledge needed in the field of international guidance of young people. Simultaneously, this interactive self-learning programme has been a concept for the sustainable implementation of advanced training methods for European guidance counsellors through a virtual e-Teaching classroom and served as a training unit for virtual e-Counselling dialogues. The concept and its components served as an advanced training programme for academically qualified guidance counsellors within the framework of a post-secondary and tertiary qualification.The project focused on 3 main outputs: 1. European Guidance Counselling Concept: It contains 7 modules, divided into basic methods and essentials of the area knowledge of guidance counselling. They are put into a manual, which is available not only in form of an interactive E-Learning internet training programme but also in form of documents available on the internet portal. The counselling concept, developed by the Federal Employment agency in 2010 and the handbooks of the projects BD-BG and Distance Counselling were used as a basis, which have been adapted to the specific needs of European guidance counsellors in the partner countries.2. Interactive E-Learning Internet Portal: The open source portal is primarily focused on the interactive process of counselling interviews containing basic guidance methods and the essentials of the specific area knowledge of the international mobility processes of young people, offering a practical training how to guide them up to exemplary dialogue sequences. The essentials of the area knowledge deal with different areas of international youth mobility.3. Advanced training through e-Teaching and e-Counselling: The European guidance concept has been the basis for advanced training measures for European guidance counsellors. These measures have been implemented in form of virtual e-Teaching trainings, which have been set up as an internet-based, modular application, allowing the training concept to be implemented in an open source virtual room. These trainings enabled guidance counsellors to conduct web-conferences and online meetings and carry out the advanced training methods of the European guidance concept. Furthermore the virtual classroom was used as a platform for virtual e-Counselling dialogues between counsellors and consultants.All three achievements have been made available in several languages, for mobile devices as well as for mobile applications. The first milestone was a draft of the eGuidance Concept. The second milestone was the open source interactive e-Learning internet portal. The third milestone was the implementation into advanced training methods through the use of an open source virtual e-Teaching classroom and the implementation of virtual e-Counselling dialogues. Some aspects of the previous EU-funded projects so far (e.g. EMAT, NICE, MEVOC, BD-BG, Distance Counselling and BeKo) have been integrated into our project and served as fundamental tools to be built on.

MyPal aims to foster early palliative care for cancer patients by leveraging patient reported outcome (PRO) systems through their adaptation to the personal needs of the cancer patient and his/her caregiver(s). Through this intervention, MyPal aspires to empower cancer patients (and their family members) in capturing more accurately their conditions, communicate them with a seamless and effective way to their healthcare providers and, ultimately, foster the time for action through the rapid identification of important deviations in the patient’s state and QoL. Providing this information in a timely and comprehensive manner throughout the disease course will reinforce the potential for applying a patient-centred and integrated palliative care approach for cancer with the participation of all relevant healthcare providers (i.e. oncologists, specialized physicians, psychologists, nurses), which is necessary to cope with the specific disease. In order to accomplish its mission, MyPal will exploit technological advances on digital health to support patients, family members and healthcare providers in gaining value through this systematic and comprehensive PRO-based intervention. Overall, the foreseen advancement through MyPal reflects a paradigm shift from passive patient reporting based on conventional PRO approaches to active patient engagement and a closed-loop approach (bridging the gap between patient reporting and effective actions by healthcare providers to meet the varying patient needs) for coping with palliative care challenges in cancer. MyPal will demonstrate and validate the proposed intervention in two clinical studies, an RCT for adults with hematologic cancers and an observational study for children suffering from solid tumors and hematologic malignancies, hence targeting different age groups and cancer types. The clinical studies will be conducted in diverse healthcare settings in 6 clinical sites from 5 European countries.

Cancer occurs in more than 2 million individuals every year in Europe alone. It is widely recognized that early diagnosis and monitoring of the disease - during therapy and post-treatment follow-up- is a key step for successful patient management: it helps to offer on-time curative intervention and selecting the most appropriate therapy, improves the quality of life, while contributing to reduce the economic and social burden for both patients and society. There are screening programs available for early detection of some cancers such as colorectal cancer (CRC). Unfortunately, current CRC screening tests suffer with unsatisfactory sensitivity and specificity and low compliance of targeted population. On the other hand, there are cancers with poorly performing biomarkers as in the case of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), or no biomarkers at all (e.g. renal cell carcinoma (RCC), which limits not only the screening options but also the diagnosis or monitoring of the disease. Therefore, there is a need for new diagnostic biomarkers and accurate technologies to enable precise detection of asymptomatic tumors in a short time, low costs and, if possible, with minimal invasiveness and risks for the patients. From this perspective, cancer specific small non-coding RNAs (small ncRNAs) circulating in body fluids such as blood serum or plasma present promising diagnostic approach. Project RNADIAGON aims at development of personal skills and knowledge of early-stage and experienced researchers working in the field of small non-coding RNA diagnostics from five European research institutions through their long-term stays at one of the world-leading ncRNAs research centers in United States and traineeships at the education center and manufacturing facilities of industrial partner developing small ncRNAs-based certified diagnostics. This research and innovation staff exchange will increase the scientific excellence and quality of related research in the EU research institutions.

The goal of Project RELIEVE is to build the very first non-invasive effective closed-loop monitoring and intervention system for brain-related disorders. The outcomes can be used to treat or manage various psychiatric and neurological disorders. We do this by pushing the technological boundaries in two separate domains. (1) AI domain: We develop a class of mathematical and algorithmic tools for brain data based on the recently developed mathematical theories that are potentially useful for the real-time monitoring of the brain data. Such advancements have shown promise in robotics and self-driving cars and have high potential to work efficiently in highly dynamic environments where personalization and low computation power is a must. This makes such algorithms runnable using brain data such as EEG (electric activity on the head surface) on ordinary wearable devices. (2) Neurostimulation domain: We combine two characteristics of the ultrasound waves in stimulation and imaging of the nervous system to build the first smart-navigated wearable ultrasound patch. We also choose the vagus nerve as the target for neurostimulation as one of the most promising sites to interact with the nervous system with proven implications for a large spectrum of neurological and psychiatric disorders (e.g. dementia, depression, epilepsy, etc.). We call this unit 'WU-VNS' standing for non-invasive wearable ultrasound vagus nerve stimulation. In the next three years, we will use epilepsy as the first use case of the developed technologies to train and test a closed-loop system. For this, the AI monitors the brain through a patch that records EEG in addition to other physiological measures such as heart rate and motion. Upon prediction of a forthcoming anomaly (seizure in this case) by the AI unit, the neurostimulation module activates and stimulates the vagus nerve non-invasively. During this process also a so-called 'active learning' happens in which the AI learns from the reactions of the nervous system to the stimulation protocol and can fine-tune the protocol for future interventions. To achieve this, we have designed a complex phase-based development and testing plan: The first two generations (Gen. 1 and 2) are the intermediate versions of the full system and act in open loops validating each of the AI and neurostimulation subsystems. These two generations already have high potentials to independently turn into medical device products with large market needs. Ultimately, in Gen. 3 we close the loop by integrating the AI and the WU-VNS and consequently validate the efficacy and the usability of the system.