The BRIGHT-NIGHT 2022-2023 proposal, within the framework of the European Researchers' Night, aims at bringing research and researchers closer to the general public of the Tuscan region. In fact, the BRIGHT-NIGHT Consortium includes the main Tuscan universities whose decennial collaboration has already produced very successful ERN events. This objective will be achieved by showcasing research projects, with a specific focus on sustainability and societal challenges, through a rich and inclusive program of activities in open and public events throughout Tuscany. We will increase the awareness of how scientific research impacts on the daily lives of citizens, on the active role it can play in shaping the future and fostering young people’s interest in scientific studies with a gender balance approach, mostly in STEAM. After a set of preparatory events, the core activities will take place the last Friday/Saturday of September 2022/2023: hundreds of interactive, funny and inspiring activities in the cities, which will be populated by science hubs (shows, hands-on experiments, games, competitions, and exhibitions). To better stress the centrality of a joint European effort on the societal and sustainability challenges of our times, the event will revolve around the Horizon Europe missions, with particular emphasis on their interdisciplinary character. The two-year duration of the proposal will allow the involvement of students from primary and secondary schools encouraging to deliver a scientific presentation during the Nights: they will be supported by academic researchers, who will help them to select and prepare a topic. This activity aims at creating a long-term connection between researchers, (which will be trained on scientific communication skills for the purpose), young students and the general public. Such connection will make science research more "familiar", more understandable, and ultimately strengthen people’s trust in scientific methods.

STARHAUS has Moving from the DIY4U project (H2020), STARHAUS will design, test and validate 8 new hardware module prototypes for the existing DIY4U Manufacturing Demonstration Facilities (MDFs), to manufacture newly designed products for personalized fast-moving consumer goods. The project will focus on 4 new use-cases: pet food, fertilizers, beverage, breakfast cereals. STARHAUS will adapt technologies and design new services and processes in an interdisciplinary approach that involves: human centered design, social science impact and indicators, full technology cycle (hardware + software), creativity and arts, circularity and sustainability. The focus will be on sustainability and circularity, enabling the growth of efficient, effective, sustainable and stakeholder-aligned manufacturing methods through re-use, adapt, re-design and repurpose existing technologies as a value for the larger community. The project will be inspired by the New European Bauhaus, paying particular attention to regenerative design and regenerative and value-added manufacturing and adopting a Human-centric and participatory approach, with contributions from Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), the project will promote collaborative models between domain experts, artists, and technology providers. Improved access to flexible production capabilities in decentralised environments, especially for SMEs will be ensured by FSTP and accurate promotion of collaborative models with domain experts, artists and technology providers. The STARHAUS approach will leverage creativity in interdisciplinary and artistic disciplines and offer a process model towards viable solutions. STARHAUS is focusing on delivering an impact inside modern consumer communities to propagate behavioral and technological changes that can reshape our lives. The consumption habits of modern consumers must change to adopt healthy and sustainable solutions that can be achieved at affordable prices without compromising quality.

5G non-terrestrial networks (5G-NTN) satellite networks will soon be able to handle all types of applications and provide service to a massive number of users. In this complex and dynamic network ecosystem, and end-to-end adaptation of 5G-NTN towards the EU-GOVSATCOM services, requirements and use cases is of capital importance to efficiently deploy European governmental satellite services. To enable such a vision, 5G-GOVSATCOM targets the development and evaluation in a natural user environment of different key enabling technologies that aim to provide full integration of 5G-NTN in the EU-GOVSATCOM framework. In the radio technologies domain, 5G-GOVSATCOM targets the development of necessary adaptions and enhancements of radio access procedures to attend to geostationary mobile terminals in the exclusive governmental X-band. Furthermore, the integration of 5G-NTN user equipment with an antenna operationally focused on on-the-move and on-the-pause scenarios are planned. In parallel, in the inter-networking segments, 5G-GOVSATCOM aims to provide a seamless handover between terrestrial networks and NTN via a smart gateway while enhancing core-network functionalities. Finally, all project developments are planned to be first validated in a controlled lab with satellite connectivity and, posteriorly, experimentally tested in close collaboration with final users. These latter tests will constitute the first 5G-NTN trials with final users devoted to i) ubiquitous telemedicine in maritime areas and ii) crisis management connectivity bubble.

HARIA re-defines the nature of physical human-robot interaction (HRI), laying the foundations of a new research field, i.e., human sensorimotor augmentation, whose constitutive elements are: i) AI-powered wearable and grounded supernumerary robotic limbs and wearable sensorimotor interfaces; ii) methods for augmentation enabling users to directly control and feel the extra limbs exploiting the redundancy of the human sensorimotor system through wearable interfaces; iii) clear target populations, i.e., chronic stroke and spinal cord injured individuals, and real-world application scenarios to demonstrate the extraordinary value of the paradigm shift that HARIA represents in HRI and the great impact on the motivation to re-use the paretic arm(s), with consequent improvement of the quality of life. Supernumerary limbs will be partially controlled by artificial intelligence, and partially under the direct control of the human who gains the agency of some motion parameters of the supernumerary limbs. From the control point of view, it is fundamental to find the right trade-off between motion task parameters that are controlled by the user, and the level of robot autonomy. This interplay is enabled by the wearable sensorimotor interface that establishes a connection between the human sensorimotor system and the system of actuators and sensors of the robot, allowing reciprocal awareness, trustworthiness and mutual understanding. HARIA finds its natural application in assisting people with uni- or bi-lateral upper limbs chronic motor disabilities. Technology and methodology developments will follow a user-centered design approach, as only patients with disabilities are fully aware of their real (still unmet) needs in real life activities. This project will also go beyond the application to health, starting a new era of intuitive and seamless human-robot augmentation by wearable sensorimotor interfaces and supernumerary limbs.

Narratives – the stories people formulate to make sense of the world – contain at their core cause and effect relationships that people use to connect the events they observe. These relationships are crucial for interpreting data, forming expectations, and evaluating policy proposals. This project aims at improving our understanding of the role of economic narratives, their interaction with policy proposals, and how they can be manipulated by economic actors. The ultimate goal of this project is to suggest strategies to follow when faced with contexts in which struggles over policies might generate polarized views of how the world works. The project is divided into three areas and combines ideas and methods at the intersection between economics, sociology, psychology, and computer science. The first area of research involves behavioral experiments in which I will study how narratives react to the cost of policies available to agents. In particular, I will investigate whether agents tend to adopt narratives that are self-serving, that is, compatible with the policies they find least costly. The second area of research focuses on the role that narratives played in shaping political preference in the second half of the XX century. I will consider labor unions to study the factors behind the emergence in the United States of a narrative highlighting their mischiefs. These results could highlight the magnitude and importance of the consequences generated by those that become prevailing narratives in a society. The last area of research will involve a methodological study on how to measure narratives from text. I will work to extend the available methods with the goal of explicitly capturing causal relationships. This contribution could favor the emergence of new work in the field by other researchers who could easily analyze large corpora of text.