COVID-19 pandemic manifested the vulnerability of industries, the unpredictability of external shocks and evidenced that traditional solutions do not suffice. Societal transformation and appropriate innovation models along with new technical solutions are seen as important pillars in solving environmental problems. Today, seeds of this societal and industrial transformation exist. Digital communities gather around open-source innovative projects, makers create collectives of professionals, artists and tinkerers in tier-places co-create solutions. SMEs, looking for more sustainable new business models, are inventing circular and sense-making businesses in various territories. User-centric, agile co-creation is a very well known development practice that can be expanded to the whole manufacturing chain. The transition to a low carbon, resource efficient, circular and sustainable bioeconomy, with its technological potentials and proven applications and initiatives like the New European Bauhaus offers solutions to the challenges society is facing today. LAUDS factories is an innovative concept aiming to create small, versatile factories in local and urban areas to co-create and produce customised products in small series. It seeks to incorporate innovative and active resiliency capabilities at production and supply chain levels to support a green, circular, and digital transformation. It can enable artists, creatives, and entrepreneurs to test new ideas and products, and reduce the carbon footprint by cutting transportation costs and time. It also aims to create a more personalised experience for customers, enhance their satisfaction, loyalty, and dynamize the job market. The key exploitable results include a sustainable model for local manufacturing, an updated digital product passport for transparency, and innovation services for makerspaces SMEs and creatives.

Greenhouse gas emissions for refrigeration systems worldwide were in 2019 equivalent to the whole EU emissions. Long-term sustainability requires improvements in energy efficiency, with a huge return on investment obtained from even slight improvements. The mechanocaloric effect, which refers to adiabatic temperature changes induced by stress or pressure, is one of the most promising energy-saving new technology for cooling systems. Mechanocaloric research produced in only 14 years highly performing materials, overcoming electrocaloric and magnetocaloric materials. Furthermore, mechanocaloric materials use non-critical, cheap, abundant and non-toxic elements. Recent papers evidenced colossal barocaloric effects around the Spin CrossOver (SCO) temperatures for some molecular complexes. The FROSTBIT project overall objective is to develop the first operative refrigerator based on a radically new solid-state technology by using barocaloric materials in a regenerative cooling device. In more specific objectives, the project aims to 1) Design sustainable syntheses of compounds for barocaloric applications, exploring synthetic pathways to optimize costs and low environmental impact/low carbon footprint vs. barocaloric performances; 2); Shape SCO materials in order to obtain densified objects with centimetric sizes, study extensively their thermal, mechanical and barocaloric behaviour and explore the optimization of those properties through the preparation of composites ceramics 3) Model, design and build the constituting elements of a barocaloric refrigerator: barocaloric regenerator, thermal and pressure fluid circuits. While the technology could potentially address a wide range of temperature, as an initial step we propose to specifically design and build a refrigerator yielding 100 W of cooling power at room temperatures and providing a temperature span of at least 20 K with a target COP between 4 and 6 (corresponding to 30% of Carnot efficiency).

The separation of molecules and ions by membranes is essential for the separation of gases, purification of water, energy conversion and storage, and many other applications, and is therefore of crucial technological importance for achieving the sustainable development goals "clean water and sanitation", "affordable and clean energy", and "climate action" defined by the UN. The membranes established to date suffer either from a poor compromise between permeability and selectivity or from fouling. Innovative concepts to extend the lifetime of membranes and to improve their separation performance are urgently needed to achieve the aforementioned goals as quickly as possible. PhotoBrane will train a new generation of leading experts in a completely new approach to membrane technology to take separation performance and longevity to a new level. Our research will be built on the most modern membrane materials, investigated by PhotoBrane’s PIs. In our new research approach, we are exploring how to use photochemistry methods to develop photo-switching regimes of the membrane’s wettability to prevent their fouling. To achieve unprecedented separation performance, we take the photo-switching a step further and investigate the influence of photo-tuning the structure, porosity, and polarity of dye-loaded membranes on their function in gaseous and liquid media. Through this research, the doctoral researchers receive interdisciplinary training and, through secondments to industrial partners, gain insights into various topics of photo- and material chemistry as well as membrane technology. The excellent research is carried out at renowned European centers of membrane research and photochemistry. The mobility within the network, combined with excellent research and training, creates a highly synergistic framework for success. This ensures an efficient transfer of excellent academic results to industry through a new generation of entrepreneurial and highly skilled scientists.

The overarching objectives of AQUASERV are to bring together, enhance, integrate and customise RI capacities (including facilities, instruments and expertise) and through the provision of transnational access (on-site or remote) and/or virtual access, to significantly further scientific advance and promote and facilitate the implementation of European Common Fisheries Policy, the Farm to Fork Strategy, the Sustainable Blue Economy and the European Green Deal. AQUASERV will achieve these objectives by offering scientists from academia and business remote and on-site transnational (TA) and virtual (VA) access to an advanced set of European research infrastructures and its nodes related to research and management of marine and freshwater biological resources, food and biotechnology. These include the European Marine Biological Resource Centre ERIC (EMBRC), the Analysis and Experimentation on Ecosystems ERIC, The Aquaculture for Excellence for Aquaculture in Fish (Aquaexcel), and the Infrastructure for Promoting Metrology in Food and Nutrition (METROFOOD), as well as the International Council for Exploration of the Sea, both a service provider and stakeholder. It also includes the Research Infrastructure for Science and Innovation Policy Studies (RISIS) to bring contributions from the social sciences and to bring results nearer to policy makers ensuring societal impact. To enhance, integrate and customise RI capacities, collaboration between partners and new pipelines to meet the objectives of the project will be developed during the first 3 years and will make available to users. To ensure these capacities will not be lost, a sustainability work package involving stakeholders will address the project legacy. To maximize impact, AQUASERV will build a communication network among the partnership and develop a dissemination and outreach programme. Furthermore, an advanced training programme will be developed to capture future users and will be updated during the p

Technology advancements enhance everyday life, but they also provide numerous opportunities for the proliferation of advanced cybercrimes, which, via innovative tactics and techniques, pose serious security and financial risks to EU and beyond. ENSEMBLE aims to provide a well-rounded response to the fight against (cross-border) cybercriminal activities, at the nexus of advanced AI-based technological solutions, (multi-stakeholder) investigations processes, training, and awareness in order to detect and prevent cybercrime-related activities, with particular focus on ransomware, cyber fraud, data theft and extortion as well as unauthorised access and crypto-jackings. This will be achieved via a three-pillar approach. ENSEMBLE will develop a modular AI-based, forensically sound investigation toolbox based on user centric criteria, to assist Police Authorities in detecting, extracting, processing, and analysing online information relevant to cybercrime activities, thus fighting sophisticated cyber-threats, capitalising also in joint multi-stakeholder operations both at national and cross border level and in secure data and information sharing mechanisms. Police Authorities, prosecutors, and judicial actors involved in such investigations will be offered innovative training curricula and methods as well as synchronous and/or asynchronous learning methodologies that will be aligned to their needs and improve their current capacity, taking into consideration the technological, procedural, operational, legal/multi-jurisdictional dimensions. Finally, public awareness and engagement with relevant actors for early identification and prevention of cybercrimes will be cultivated through targeted awareness raising campaigns and specific policy recommendations. Having brough together a multidisciplinary team of five LEAs, seven research/academic institutions and six industry partners (including five SMEs) with a wide range of expertise in the field, ENSEMBLE provides a compelling