EMERGENT takes up the broader scope of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Ex-change Scheme of promoting knowledge-sharing-based cooperation and moves its steps forward to actual-ly support and facilitate the movement of skilled people between academia and industry committed to work on a research topic dealing with green chipless RFID tags and sensors. EMERGENT will move towards strengthening of existing inter-sectoral networks between the three EU re-search institutes and the three EU SMEs involved by implementing a total of 68 knowledge transfer se-condments in order to facilitate the joint research and innovation work aiming to realize a new class of chipless RFID tags and sensors moving from conventional sensors towards next generation pervasive interconnected systems by employing environmental-friendly substrates such as paper and low-cost printing process. EMERGENT will design hand in hand with both the chipless tag and sensor a dedicated reader for extracting the desired information. To this aim, novel signal processing algorithms will be developed and tested. EMERGENT will focus on system parameters of prominent relevance reliability, calibration) to assess the true performance of the tag, and to make comparisons among different implementations. The critical issues regarding the sensitivity and resolution of the reader will be carefully addressed and solved. EMERGENT will deliver wireless passive chipless smart tags and sensors able to sense the changing environment by collecting information about quantities of interest which may include temperature, humidity, stress, gases. EMERGENT will enhance the performance and robustness of chipless RFID sys-tems and will bring RFID sensing outside research laboratories towards self-consistent products.

Nowadays we are lucky to have many exciting new technologies available, like Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), Mobile Computing (MobiCom) and the Internet of Things (IoT); in the following, we shall refer to them collectively as UMI. These technologies are so modern and powerful that can be both an educational means and end, thus fostering innovation and supporting promising scientific careers. The broad aim of the project is to investigate the introduction of UMI technologies in education. By carefully exploiting state of the art technologies in order to design educational tools and activities, the project aims to offer novel educational services, implement innovative pedagogies and enhance students’ and teachers’ creativity, socialisation and scientific citizenship. We intend to put these technologies in practice, so as to enhance the level of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education young girls and boys are receiving and at the same time make attractive the prospect of pursuing a career in domains pervaded by UMI. Inspired by M. Weiser’s idea, a tranquil environment for educational activities will be provided, where technology itself will not star but support the stakeholders of education, including, the educational community (teaching institutions, students, professors, tutors, etc), the industry (UMI companies, VET providers, publishers, etc), career consultants and educational authorities and policy makers. To this end, communities of practice (CoP) will be formed dynamically around UMI projects implemented at schools, including representatives of all necessary stakeholders. In this project we aim to develop an integrated yet open training framework for upper high school students.

Driven by the growing concern on the usage of personal and sensitive data in the Internet, DUCA aims at providing a framework to empower European users and organizations to take control of their data, thus easing confidentiality and personal data protection (including both personal data of citizens and confidential data produced by data-enabled organizations). This unified framework of security and privacy-enhancing solutions incorporates a set of building blocks to support the development of a modular architecture and reference implementation that will also include techniques for measuring privacy risk exposure. To be general and flexible, the main components will be designed as platform independent to ensure the compatibility of the DUCA framework with the many architectures and deployment models of the IoE. In order to achieve this, DUCA has the following concrete objectives: Objective 1: To build a flexible and easy to use distributed framework for managing data sharing agreements, which will empower users to control the usage of their data. Objective 2: To develop and integrate several security and privacy enhancing technologies and to tailor these to the specific needs of the DUCA platform and use cases. Objective 3: To deploy and validate the overall distributed data usage control framework in several use cases. Within the DUCA consortium, we have identified the following three use cases as relevant samples to showcase our framework: Smart energy, Usage control for Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, and Collaborative mobility. Several stakeholders will benefit from the awarding of DUCA, including the seconded staff members, who will increase his/her knowledge and career opportunities, beneficiaries will improve their research and innovation activities, and overall society will gain both socially and economically from advanced data protection mechanisms being developed.

POWER is a user-driven project to share knowledge and experience of water related issues in different EU local authorities to create a tool for EU water policy. It addresses four of the eight EIP WATER priorities: 1. Water reduction consumption 2. Water quality 3. Extreme weather events (surface water flood risk) 4. Variables related to water conservation It will develop a common DSP system prototype to be demonstrated in Milton Keynes, Sabadell, Leicester and Jerusalem. It will combine the experience of these Key Demonstration Cities with follower Cities. The followers are members of EIP Water Action Group City Blueprints, NetwercH2O and cities that have already produced a CITY BLUEPRINT. The objectives are: 1. Set up a user-driven Digital Social Platform (DSP) 2. Ensure the involvement of a wide society and knowledge community 3. Ensure social, technological, environmental and political uptake 4. Transfer the POWER model environment to other communities 5. Create new collaborative business models The POWER project will therefore: - Increase the transnational municipal network effect by facilitating unrestricted communication and community involvement - Influence related policy planning and decisions - Offer an innovative and effective open source solution to excluded regions, cities and users, based on a ‘link and scale up’ strategic network - Prioritise social value, scalability, transferability, society empowerment and motivation to act. POWER responds to the call and topic c) challenges by: - harnessing the collaborative nature of ICT to create awareness - reducing the gap between stakeholders of specific city challenges. - addressing scalability and deployment for new cases - involving excluded stakeholders - integrating water issues into economic and social policy .- being based on the networks: EIP Water - Action Group City Blueprints; and NetwercH20 - engaging with decision makers, professionals and the general public