EU FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT TIPS

The AAL Association needs independent experts for the AAL Programme, the renewed € 700 million applied research and innovation programme in the field of ICT-based solutions for ageing well jointly undertaken by several Member States with the participation of the Union. The call for interest is launched now and will remain open until 2020.

The Digital Single Market Strategy will provide businesses and entrepreneurs with new opportunities to scale up across Europe and grow global. As a driver for growth, digital should also be embraced by SMEs and microenterprises to enable them to innovate and remain competitive.

ICT innovation vouchers are one of the tools regions can implement to support microenterprises and SMEs to maximise the potential offered by the digital economy. ICT innovation vouchers are an effective incentive for SMEs and microenterprises to innovate by investing in digital technologies and online services.

Specific challenge: Public administrations need to address the new challenges posed by the evolution of society. Financial constraints are making this task difficult. At the same time, expectations - in terms of burden reduction and efficiency of public services - are growing.

The take-up of new technologies, such as social media and mobile technologies, leads to increased connectivity.

The availability of open data and open services, in an open government setting support the collaborative forms of service design and delivery and they increase transparency.

Expected impact:

·           Stimulating the creation, delivery and use of new services on a variety of devices, utilising new web technologies, coupled with open public data.

·           More personalised public services that better suit the needs of users.

·           Reducing the administrative burden of citizens and businesses (e.g. collecting information from citizens only once).

·           Increased transparency of and trust in public administrations.

Deadline; 28-05-2015 17:00:00 (Brussels local time)

Specific Challenge: The development and integration of robust and fit-for-purpose digital technologies for learning are crucial to boost the market for and innovation in educational technologies.  This requires an industry-led approach in close cooperation with academia to defining the frameworks and interoperability requirements for the building blocks of a digital ecosystem for learning (including informal learning) that develops and integrates tools and systems that apply e.g. adaptive learning, augmented cognition technologies, affective learning, microlearning, game-based learning and/or virtual environments/virtual worlds to real-life learning situations. This challenge also encourages public procurement of innovative solutions to address the needs of the digital learning ecosystem in making better use of educational cloud solutions, mobile technology, learning analytics and big data, and to facilitate the use, re-use and creation of learning material and new ways to educate and learn online.

Scope: Activities will focus on innovative technologies for learning, on the underpinning interoperability standards and on the integration of different components into smart learning environments. They should combine different technologies (e.g. mobile, augmented reality, natural interaction technologies) and support composing, re-using and distributing interactive educational content and services, with assessment and feedback functionalities.  Based on technological advances enabled by research carried out so far, activities will support networking, capacity building and experimentations in methodologies and tools for data-driven, (including automated measurement of human-system interaction) non-linear approaches to adaptive learning and remediation technologies and cognitive artefacts (including toys) for effective and efficient human learning. 

The overall challenge is to deliver an Internet of Things (IoT) extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects. They support smart environments, businesses,
services and persons with dynamic and adaptive configuration capabilities.
The biggest challenge will be to overcome the fragmentation of vertically-oriented closed systems, architectures and application areas and move towards open systems and platforms  that support multiple applications. The challenge for Europe is to capture the benefits from  developing consumer-oriented platforms that require a strong cooperation between the
telecom, hardware, software and service industries, to create and master innovative Internet  Ecosystems.

Scope: The scope is to create ecosystems of "Platforms for Connected Smart Objects",  integrating the future generations of devices, embedded systems and network technologies and other evolving ICT advances.

Types of action:
a. Research & Innovation Actions – Proposals requesting a Large contribution are  expected
b. Coordination and Support Actions

Specific Challenge: A key structural change overtaking computing is the move towards a low-power computing continuum spanning embedded systems, mobile devices, desktops, data centres, etc. The demand for low-power multi/many-core computing systems is intensifying across all market segments.

Capitalising on Europe's industrial and technology strengths in low power computing and embedded and cyber-physical systems, the objective is to strengthen European competitiveness in the key parts of the emerging computing value chain. With the wider diffusion of embedded ICT and cyber-physical systems, security becomes increasingly important to be addressed across all levels starting from secure and trusted zones supported on hardware and software level.

Expected impact:

·         Reinforce and broaden Europe's strong position in low-power computing in traditional and new market segments by strengthening the technology competences of European suppliers and the academic community.

·         Reduction of energy consumption of servers by 2 orders of magnitude as compared to state of the art in 2013.

·         Double the productivity in efficiently programming and maintaining advanced computing systems powering cyber-physical systems as compared to state of the art in programming embedded systems in 2013.

·         Increase the adoption of form-factor data-centres and heterogeneous highly parallel computing systems.

·         Higher involvement of SMEs, both on the supply and the demand-side.

·         Increased adoption of concurrency in applications across all sectors; higher degree of parallelism in applications; increased public trust in embedded applications due to secure and reliable architectures.

Deadline Date 14-04-2015 17:00:00 (Brussels local time)

Types of action:

a.       Research & Innovation Actions – A mix of proposals requesting Small and Large contributions is expected

b.      Innovation Actions – A mix of proposals requesting Small and Large contributions is expected

c.       Coordination and Support Actions

An online networking tool is now available to proposers to find potential partners for proposing a project under the Horizon 2020 funding programme, topics 'ICT for Health, Wellbeing and Demographic Change' (Societal Challenge 1 or SC1).

If you are involved somehow in ICT procurement and want to know how other organizations similar to yours are successfully dealing with ICT "lock-in" when procuring their ICT Systems, you are warmly invited to attend the “Open ICT Standards for Public Procurement: Fostering interoperability” workshop, taking place in Brussels - at DG CONNECT - on November 13th, 2015.

Scope:

Proposals should focus on how to extract, compare, correlate, filter, reason over and/or interpret suspect information, data, communications stored and/or transferred on the Internet including on the deepweb, darknet and other less easily accessible parts of networks, obtained under a lawful warrant, in order to discover facts and evidence to support forensic investigations (including e.g. resolving identities in social networks, authorship identification on webfora, shared media, etc.). Software and, if necessary, hardware tools, methods and guidelines should be proposed. They should tackle all the layers of analysis, from the data-packet level to the data mining, to language interpretation, semantic analysis, and information retrieval, including the multi-lingual aspects, and video and picture analysis. Investigative techniques on any kind of crime using the Internet to some extent (to communicate, transfer data, etc.) should be concerned. The proposed solutions should enable accelerated searches of the huge amount of data-transfer that occurs on the Internet, and to discover and make clear (interpret) out of it the relevant data and information. At the same time, limited, or at least controlled, pervasiveness of the proposed solutions must be guaranteed, in order guarantee the privacy of all the internet users. Ethical issues have to be clearly addressed. Appropriate solutions to fulfil the legitimate request of privacy by the citizens should be embedded in the very core of the proposed solutions. Also, all the developed tools, methods and guidelines should be supported by training support and curricula.

Expected impact:

- improved LEA capabilities to conduct investigations by using information travelling and stored on the Internet obtained under a lawful warrant ;

- improved training of LEA staff able to perform these investigations. increased crime prosecution capabilities;

- shorter court cases due to the availability of more solid court proof forensic evidence;

- increased privacy and data protection during forensic investigations;

- for industry better understanding of modern operational LEA requirements, thus increasing their competitiveness.

Deadline Date27-08-2015 17:00:00 (Brussels local time)

Proposals should aim to empower patients to manage their pre-existing conditions. Health management will be addressed holistically, including healthy lifestyle interlinked with disease management, placing the patient in the centre and putting increased emphasis on health education, secondary prevention and self-management of individual conditions, including co-morbidities.

Proposals should address all of the following elements a) personalised guidance to patients based on their profiles and the use of wearable/portable devices and improved individual/healthcare-professional interaction, b) engagement of patients as active members in managing their diseases, in particular addressing chronic diseases, co-morbidities, treatment adherence, rehabilitation, self-diagnostics and self-care and c) decision support systems interoperable and/or maintaining integrity with electronic health records.

Expected impact:

• Improving the participation of the patient in the care process.
• Improving the management of a disease by reducing the number of severe episodes and complications.
• Increasing the level of education and adherence of individuals, patients and care givers related to application of ICT for personalised care.
• Improved interaction between patients, their relatives, providers of health-, social-, and informal care givers.
• Strengthened evidence base on health outcomes, quality of life, care efficiency gains and economic benefits from the use of ICT in new care models.
• Reinforced medical knowledge with respect to efficient management of comorbidities.
• Increased confidence in decision support systems for disease/patient management.
• Involvement of health care providers/authorities with increased commitment in the deployment of innovative services empowering the patient.

Type of action: Pre-commercial procurement co-fund actions.

Call topics 

SCC-01-2015: Smart Cities and Communities solutions integrating energy, transport, ICT sectors through lighthouse (large scale demonstration - first of the kind) projects   

Scope: To identify, develop and deploy replicable, balanced and integrated solutions in the energy, transport, and ICT actions through partnerships between municipalities and industries.

Expected Impact:

The proposals are expected to have the impacts described below:

• deploy wide-scale, innovative replicable and integrated solutions in the energy, transport, and ICT;
• trigger large scale economic investments with the repayment of implementation costs in acceptable time lines (to facilitate the bankability of the projects);
• increase the  energy efficiency of districts and of cities and foster the use of renewables and their integration energy system and enable active participation of consumers;
• increase mobility efficiency with lower emissions of pollutants and CO2;
• reduce the energy costs;
• decarbonise the energy system while making it more secure and stable;
• create stronger links between cities in Member States with various geographical and economical positions through active cooperation.

It is envisaged that the proposals will also bring societal benefits:

• reduction of energy bills for all actors and especially for citizens and public authorities;
• Increase quality of life by creating  local jobs (that cannot be delocalised) in cities;
• Increase air quality.

SCC-03-2015: Development of system standards for smart cities and communities solutions

Scope: Today the standards are developed for specific components or areas such as smart meters, smart grids, ICT etc. With the development of integrated solutions of Smart Cities and Communities a system approach is needed. Furthermore through standardisation the solutions identified by smart cities and communities can envisage costs reductions. It is expected that this work is carried out by the industries cities and communities contributing to the Smart Cities and Communities European Innovation Partnership in cooperation with the European Standardisation Organisations (CEN, CENELEC, ETSI) as well as other Standard Developing Organisations (SDOs) responsible for technical specifications in the area of Smart Cities.  Social acceptance of developed solutions might be considered.

The submission session is now available for:

• ICT-04-2015: Customised and low power computing
• ICT-08-2015: Boosting public sector productivity and innovation through cloud computing services
• ICT-10-2015: Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation
• ICT-12-2015: Integrating experiments and facilities in FIRE+
• ICT-16-2015: Big data - research
• ICT-19-2015: Technologies for creative industries, social media and convergence
• ICT-20-2015: Technologies for better human learning and teaching
• ICT-24-2015: Robotics
• ICT-25-2015: Generic micro- and nano-electronic technologies
• ICT-27-2015: Photonics KET
• ICT-28-2015: Cross-cutting ICT KETs
• ICT-30-2015: Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects
• ICT-36-2015: Pre-commercial procurement open to all areas of public interest requiring new ICT solutions
• ICT-38-2015: International partnership building and support to dialogues with high income countries
• ICT-39-2015: International partnership building in low and middle income countries

Deadline Date 14-04-2015 17:00:00 (Brussels local time)