WHY: 2015 has been named by the United Nations as the International Year of Light (light2015.org). Light has had many obvious benefits for human mankind, but it also poses some relevant threats: the everyday-increasing excess of light thrown by humans to the sky seriously threatens to remove forever one of humanity’s natural wonders, the view of our universe. More importantly, it has also an adverse impact on our environment and economy (energy wasted to the sky costs 2 billion US$ per year in the USA and 6,3 billion € per year in Europe) and on the health of hundreds of species, including pathologies in human beings (e.g., stress, insomnia). Many professional and amateur scientists are already fighting against light pollution. However, it is necessary to increase social awareness about the importance of preserving the darkness of our cities and environment. WHAT: STARS4ALL will create an Light Pollution Initiative (LPI) incubation platform that will allow generating (and maintaining) customizable on-demand domain-focused LPIs (e.g., a light pollution working group in Brussels). The platform will be self-sustainable: it will integrate a crowdfunding tool to obtain funding for the LPIs; it will consider incentives that motivate citizens to participate in LPIs, as well as policies to handle those incentives; and it will provide innovations in data acquisition from sensors deployed by citizens and in games with a purpose. HOW: STARS4ALL will initially deploy 10 LPIs, which will be available by the end of the 1st semester of project execution, and will be operating and creating collective awareness during the rest of the project. At that moment we pave the way the creation of other LPIs by citizens, specially in other disciplines such as Energy Saving, Biodiversity, and Human Health, and will organize open competitions among them.

The Future Internet (FI) represents an age of unprecedented opportunities for social, economic, and business growth thanks to the global scale connectivity of the virtual as well as of the physical world. This indeed opens up a wealth of innovative and revolutionary real-life scenarios, as for instance illustrated by the smarter cities perspectives where envisioned scenarios significantly ease daily human activities and give support for the growth of new markets and employment opportunities. However, leveraging the FI for the development of innovative software applications remain a challenging task even though major enablers are readily available by ways of service-oriented and cloud computing. It is in particular our vision that enabling the choreography of FI services shall play a significant role in the provisioning of innovative applications. However, existing choreography-based service composition approaches are rather static and are poorly suited to the need of the FI that is a highly dynamic networking environment, further bringing together highly heterogeneous services ranging from Thing- to Business-based services that span different security domains. As a result, the technology is not mature enough for market take-up. CHOReVOLUTION elevates the Readiness Level of existing choreography technologies in order to drop the dynamism and cross-organization security barriers via the automated synthesis of dynamic and secured choreographies in the FI. To meet its objectives, CHOReVOLUTION undertakes both research and innovation tasks. The former concentrates on choreography modelling, synthesis, adaptation, service bus, security, and cloud; the latter focus on industrial validation, development support and integration platform, and the establishment of a CHOReVOLUTION community and market take-up. Last but not least CHOReVOLUTION outcomes are assessed by experimenting with new applications in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems.

The objective of the proposal is research in semantic, ontology based automation of transformations between heterogeneous data formats, and its application to a complex ‘after-sales’ process use case in an actual run-time demonstration scenario. The technology will leverage Shift2Rail Interoperability Framework (IF) components developed in the IT2Rail “lighthouse” project, extending it for use in related Shift2Rail projects under the “S2R-CFM-IP4-01-2015: Shopping, booking and ticketing of multimodal travel solutions” and “S2R-CFM-IP4-02-2015: Travel companion and tracking services” calls. The project will additionally provide a case scenario for exercising the Governance and management structure developed under the related “S2R-OC-IP4-01-2016: IF Governance, ensuring its market uptake and sustainability” call. The objectives will be achieved through a partnership of specialist participants including research institutions, a major European rail operator, industry associations representing the rail sector and public transportation authorities, and industrial providers of mission critical ICT solutions to the rail sector. Participants, which are also involved in the original consortium of designers for the IF in IT2Rail, will perform work organised in specific work packages focused on fundamental industrial research in semantic web technologies. These technologies will comprise ontology engineering and automated semantic transformations, in a dedicated work package, to provide the actual runtime demonstration scenario of the application of such technology to transformations of existing European TAP-TSI specification exchanges executed on an existing industrial platform for such exchanges. The project extends the capabilities of the IF as described in the Shift2Rail Multi Annual Action Plan contributing to the realisation of a distributed semantic “web of transport” integrating the TAP-TSI specification as one of its elements.

The SEC-AIRSPACE project aims to enable a more resilient ATM, by focusing on reducing the risks of virtualization and increased data-sharing between all components of the ATM infrastructure and the relevant stakeholders. The project will enhance the state-of-the-art security risk assessment methodology(ies) currently adopted in ATM with prominent cyber security components. Further, the project will investigate the potential of applying the concept of People Analytics (PA) to increase cyber security awareness in ATM organizations. The project results will be validated and demonstrated through two realistic use cases, involving relevant stakeholders.