iMARECULTURE is focusing in raising European identity awareness using maritime and underwater cultural interaction and exchange in Mediterranean sea. Commercial ship routes joining Europe with other cultures are vivid examples of cultural interaction, while shipwrecks and submerged sites, unreachable to wide public are excellent samples that can benefit from immersive technologies, augmented and virtual reality. iMARECULTURE will bring inherently unreachable underwater cultural heritage within digital reach of the wide public using virtual visits and immersive technologies. Apart from reusing existing 3D data of underwater shipwrecks and sites, with respect to ethics, rights and licensing, to provide a personalized dry visit to a museum visitor or augmented reality to the diver, it also emphasizes on developing pre- and after- encounter of the digital visitor. The former one is implemented exploiting geospatial enabled technologies for developing a serious game of sailing over ancient Mediterranean and the latter for an underwater shipwreck excavation game. Both games are realized thought social media, in order to facilitate information exchange among users. iMARECULTURE supports dry visits by providing immersive experience through VR Cave and 3D info kiosks on museums or through the web. Additionally aims to significantly enhance the experience of the diver, visitor or scholar, using underwater augmented reality in a tablet and an underwater housing. iMARECULTURE is composed by universities and SMEs with experience in diverse underwater projects, existing digital libraries, and people many of which are divers themselves.

Since the emergence of Cloud Computing and the associated Over-The-Top (OTT) value-added service providers more than a decade ago, the architecture of the communication infrastructure - namely the Internet and the (mobile) telecommunication infrastructure - keep improving with computing, caching and networking services becoming more coupled. OTTs are moving from being purely cloud-based to being more distributed and residing close to the edge, a concept known to be “Fog Computing”. Network operators and telecom vendors advertise the “Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)” capabilities they may offer within their 5G Radio-Access and Core Networks. Lately, the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) came into the play as well offering what is known as Smart Speakers (Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod and Google Home), which can also serve as IoT hubs with “Mist/Skin Computing” capabilities. While these have an important influence on the underlying network performances, such computing paradigms are still loosely coupled with each other and with the underlying communication and data storage infrastructures, e.g., even for the forthcoming 5G systems. It is expected that a tight coupling of computing platforms with the networking infrastructure will be required in post-5G networks, so that a large number of distributed and heterogeneous devices belonging to different stakeholders communicate and cooperate with each other in order to execute services or store data in exchange for a reward. This is what we call here the smart collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm. The objective of SCORING project is to develop and analyse this new paradigm by targeting the following research challenges, which are split into five different strata: - At the computing stratum: Proactive placement of computing services, while taking into account users mobility as well as per-computing-node battery status and computing load; - At the storage stratum: Proactive placement of stores and optimal caching of contents/functions, while taking into account the joint networking and computing constraints; - At the software stratum: Efficient management of micro-services in such a multi-tenant distributed realm, by exploiting the Information-Centric Networking principles to support both name and compute function resolution; - At the networking stratum: Enforcement of dynamic routing policies, using Software Defined Networking (SDN), to satisfy the distributed end-user computation requirements and their Quality of Experience (QoE); - At the resource management stratum: Design of new network-economic models to support service offering in an optimal way, while considering the multi-stakeholder feature of the collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm proposed in this project. Smartness will be brought here by using adequate mathematical tools used in combination for the design of each of the five strata: machine learning (proactive placement problems), multi-objective optimization, graph theory and complex networks (information-centric design of content and micro-services caching) and game theory (network-economics model). Demonstration of the feasibility of the proposed strata on a realistic and integrated test-bed as well as on an integrated simulation platform (based on available open-source network-simulation toolkits), will be one of the main goals of the project. The test-bed will be built by exploiting different virtualization (VM/Containers) technologies to deploy compute and storage functions within a genuine networking architecture. Last but not least, all building blocks forming the realistic and integrated test-bed, on the one hand, and the integrated simulation platform, on the other hand, will be made available to the research community at the end of the project as open source software.

Since the emergence of Cloud Computing and the associated Over-The-Top (OTT) valueadded service providers more than a decade ago, the architecture of the communication infrastructure − namely the Internet and the (mobile) telecommunication infrastructure – keep improving with computing, caching and networking services becoming more coupled. OTTs are moving from being purely cloud-based to being more distributed and residing close to the edge, a concept known to be “Fog Computing”. Network operators and telecom vendors advertise the “Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)” capabilities they may offer within their 5G Radio-Access and Core Networks. Lately, the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) came into the play as well offering what is known as Smart Speakers (Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod and Google Home), which can also serve as IoT hubs with “Mist/Skin Computing” capabilities. While these have an important influence on the underlying network performances, such computing paradigms are still loosely coupled with each other and with the underlying communication and data storage infrastructures, e.g., even for the forthcoming 5G systems. It is expected that a tight coupling of computing platforms with the networking infrastructure will be required in post-5G networks, so that a large number of distributed and heterogeneous devices belonging to different stakeholders communicate and cooperate with each other in order to execute services or store data in exchange for a reward. This is what we call here the smart collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm. The objective of SCORING project is to develop and analyse this new paradigm by targeting the following research challenges, which are split into five different strata: At the computing stratum: Proactive placement of computing services, while taking into account users mobility as well as per-computing-node battery status and computing load; At the storage stratum: Proactive placement of stores and optimal caching of contents/functions, while taking into account the joint networking and computing constraints; At the software stratum: Efficient management of micro-services in such a multi-tenant distributed realm, by exploiting the Information-Centric Networking principles to support both name and compute function resolution; At the networking stratum: Enforcement of dynamic routing policies, using Software Defined Networking (SDN), to satisfy the distributed end-user computation requirements and their Quality of Experience (QoE); At the resource management stratum: Design of new network-economic models to support service offering in an optimal way, while considering the multi-stakeholder feature of the collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm proposed in this project. Smartness will be brought here by using adequate mathematical tools used in combination for the design of each of the five strata: machine learning (proactive placement problems), multi-objective optimization, graph theory and complex networks (information-centric design of content and micro-services caching) and game theory (network-economics model). Demonstration of the feasibility of the proposed strata on a realistic and integrated testbed as well as on an integrated simulation platform (based on available open-source network-simulation toolkits), will be one of the main goals of the project. The test-bed will be built by exploiting different virtualization (VM/Containers) technologies to deploy compute and storage functions within a genuine networking architecture. Last but not least, all building blocks forming the realistic and integrated test-bed, on the one hand, and the integrated simulation platform, on the other hand, will be made available to the research community at the end of the project as open source software.

Digital scores utilising computational technology and digital media are emerging worldwide as the next evolutionary stage in the concept of the music score (Vear 2019). Yet there has been no scientific study of digital scores; nor their effect upon creativity and musicianship. This is remarkable for two reasons: First, because digital scores are generating new music experiences, innovative compositional approaches, novel performance opportunities, and broader accessibility for a vast number of musicians and music cultures around the world. Second, because many topics immediately adjacent or informing digital scores have been theorised thereby liberating these subjects and innovating creative practices, e.g. digital media art, digital performance, electro-acoustic music. This project will launch the first scientific investigation into the transformation of the music score through computational technologies. The core aims of the project are to: (1) determine scientific knowledge of how digital scores stimulate new creative opportunities and experiences within a range of music practices, (2) develop a theoretical framework for digital scores as an important transdisciplinary area of research, (3) build a scientific study of inclusive digital musicianship through the transformative potential of the digital score. This project will investigate these questions through an innovative combination of artistic and scientific research methods, undertaken by a transdisciplinary and international team of scientists and artists, led by a world expert of digital scores: Prof. Dr. Craig Vear. This is real “frontier research”, the benefits of which extend beyond music studies into computer science, new media research, digital humanities, performance studies and creative practice.

Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) have emerged as an important means to address pressing societal challenges: Based on the collaboration across business, public, and civil society sectors, CSPs are expected to enable greater social effectiveness (i.e. addressing the social challenge and fostering positive societal impact) than unilateral or intra-sector actions. While previous studies in management research have examined the challenge of aligning diverse partner interests and ways of working in CSPs, insights into their social effectiveness remain surprisingly scarce. Initial evidence however suggests that CSPs do not necessarily live up to their potential, such as by failing to deliver on their targeted goals or by provoking beneficiary dependence. Consequently, this project is organized around two key aims. First, it aims to systematically explore the social impact of CSPs. It will do this by uncovering underlying mechanisms and extent deficits in CSPs’ social effectiveness through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary literature review. Second, this project aims to push extant research frontiers by scrutinizing opportunities to strengthen CSPs’ social effectiveness and elucidate the theoretical and managerial implications on the basis of a comparative, multiple case study design. The empirical approach thereby focuses on two, so far insufficiently analyzed levers to strengthen CSPs’ social effectiveness: companies’ evolutions from business-centric to society-centric approaches in their CSP engagement and the importance of investigating CSP closure dynamics and strategies through which social effects are sustained or eventually undermined. By integrating these insights into multi-level process frameworks, this project establishes much-needed connections between the discourse on CSP management and research insights into the addressing of societal grand challenges. From a societal perspective the project insights will help managers anticipate the challenges of and opportunities for strengthening CSPs’ social impact and, as a result, use this type of sector-spanning collaboration more effectively. Overall, advancing the CSP discourse and encouraging a more comprehensive view on these partnerships’ social effectiveness is critical at a time where the international community strongly advocates CSPs as a pivotal tool for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.