We witness a rapid development of Brain/Neural Computer Interaction (BNCI) research including hyperscanning and collaborative BNCIs. Several recent BNCI community driven CSAs have addressed this topic (Future BNCI, BNCI Horizon 2020 ) with the BCI Society being in progress of establishing. At the same time, a growing community of international artists is exploring the boundaries of brain physiology based interaction in cinema, theatre and interactive installations. Artists address questions of BNCI ethics and aesthetics which are often overlooked by scientists but which spur general public discussion. Simultaneously we here the voices of BCI research community, especially young researchers, reasoning for collaboration with technologically oriented artists, which is not meeting proper response from institutions. Our project's objective is to organize the international artistic community experimenting with BNCI technologies and link it to the BNCI scientific community. We will center our activities around a series of enhanced hackathons with incubation support programme for young researchers. – Hackathons will be used as a platform to stimulate learning and exchange between artists, scientists and BNCI technology providers. The tangible outcomes of these workshops will be 1) new Spinal Projects of young creative with potential for further development; 2) wide media coverage of these events; 3) new application ideas and technological requirements for BNCI technology providers (e.g. open source software), 4) new scientific insights, and 5) ethical reflection on (artistic) applications of BNCI. Our project will bring the nascent artistic BNCI exploration to a new level of scientific and technological awareness, in turn raising public awareness of new neuroscientific tools and pushing the technology for exploring new applications inspired by artistic projections.

The VERTIGO project provides a major opportunity to develop more inclusive, intercultural, and thus productive and innovative approaches to the participation of artists in ICT research activities and for promoting synergies between creative arts, businesses, research organizations and the society at general. If the digital economy of Europe is to prosper over the long term, then its full and diverse talent base must be effectively engaged into new and innovative research projects with commercial viability, and research, business, investment and art communities must work together towards these endeavours. Our proposal will fully support these objectives and contribute to set new policies for creating and nurturing links between Arts, Science & Technology in the ICT sector. The project will build from the H2020 ICT36-2016 call objectives and guideline of activities in order to propose a fresh approach, targeted specifically at the deployment of a brokerage service for integration of artists in ICT research & innovation projects and promotion of synergy between ICT research & business communities, entrepreneurs, investors and arts. We strongly believe in the role of arts and ICT as a trigger for business development and a catalyzer to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) promptness to innovate. We therefore situate our action in the framework of the STARTS (Science, Technology and the Arts) initiative supported by the European Commission with the aim of linking R&D and innovation with the art world including design and creative industries. We will build on the new Art-Innovation Forum, announced by Centre Pompidou’s President Serge Lasvignes in September 2015, and will aim at expanding IRCAM’s unique and successful model of R&D&I in sound and music technologies driven by creation in performing arts to other artistic disciplines (visual arts, architecture, design…) with a high public exposure, while also relying on other validated approaches across Europe and on a strong network of artistic organisations that will allows to tap into the potential of creators and artists for enhancing the innovation process.

CREATE-IoT’s aim is to stimulate collaboration between IoT initiatives, foster the take up of IoT in Europe and support the development and growth of IoT ecosystems based on open technologies and platforms. This requires synchronisation and alignment on strategic and operational terms through frequent, multi-directional exchanges between the various activities under the IoT Focus Areas (FAs). It also requires cross fertilisation of the various IoT Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) for technological and validation issues of common interest across the various application domains and use cases. CREATE-IoT will align the activities with the Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI) and will coordinate and support the upcoming LSPs in sustaining the ecosystems developed during those projects through mapping the pilot architecture approaches, address interoperability and standards approaches at technical and semantic levels for object connectivity, protocols, data formats, privacy, security, trusted IoT, open APIs and share the road-mapping with international initiatives. The project will foster the exchange on requirements for legal accompanying measures, development of common methodologies and KPI for design, testing and validation and for success and impact measurement, federation of pilot activities and transfer to other pilot areas, facilitating the access for IoT entrepreneurs/API developers/makers, SMEs, including combination of ICT & Art. CREATE-IoT will build strong connections with Member States' initiatives and other initiatives and will transfer learning points to the broader IoT policy framework that include contractual PPPs (e.g. Big Data, Factories of the Future, 5G-infrastructure), Joint Technology Initiatives (e.g. ECSEL), European Innovation Partnerships (e.g. on Smart Cities) as well as other FAs (e.g. on Autonomous transport). It will also maintain a coordinated working relationship with the parallel CSA that is centere on RRI-SSH.

The traditional media landscape is in the middle of a monumental shift: boundaries between professional media houses, prosumers and small creators are blurring, the speed of communication and publishing is increasing, audiences are seeking more user-driven and accessible multimedia experiences. MediaVerse (MV) is an answer to this shift: a decentralized network for intelligent, automated, and accessible digital asset management systems, where traditional stakeholders and other media owners can share, enrich, verify, and monetize multimedia content. With this, MV aspires to disrupt current practices of working in isolated silos, while enabling secure and traceable media exchange. An instance of MV can be deployed as a node in the decentralized MV network, and provides its users with a blockchain-enabled rights management solution, AI-powered identification services and smart contracts that automate cross-network rights negotiation and content monetization. Following the European way, MV aspires to help users create and publish content, while keeping control over the content shared. For this, several AI-driven features are implemented towards supporting automated editorial content moderation and identification, authoring immersive experiences, making content accessible, and providing actionable insights through social analytics and collaboration tools. Integrated content adaptation services ensure the distribution of the created media over several networks, platforms and end-devices. The project will be validated through large scale pilots in the field of citizen journalism and co-creation of immersive and inclusive media, foreseeing also a STARTS-inspired use case that involves artistic experiments and practices, pushing forward creativity for a critical approach to user-centric media.