Numerous studies in science education, environmental education and sustainable development education have identified expressions of fatalism and disengagement among young people facing the ongoing environmental crisis. Yet we know that to engage youth in school and as citizens, one must take into account their social identity, their projects and further connect teaching practices and examples to the places they live in. Relying on sustainable development (SD) principles and in order to properly address the concerns of young people from different cultures living there, this research in intercultural environmental and sustainable development education (EIEDD) proposes to develop an innovative, comparative theoretical framework in order to analyse how 16 year old persons envisage SD issues linked to the river nearby. Four case studies will be conducted in very different cultural and environmental contexts. Data will be collected through questionnaires (N = 300) and individual interviews (N = 100). The aim is to characterize a number of "portraits types" of young persons describing their relationships to scientific knowledge and territories, and their dispositions and citizen practices with respect to social, political, economic, ethical or ecological issues they associate with SD of their neighboring river. Two case studies will be conducted in Quebec and two will be done in France. In each of these contexts, the first case study shall imply young people living in a multicultural area while the second will focus on young people from rural areas whose governance is guided by sustainable development principles, in order to identify common cultural elements or contrasts, more or less globalized, in France and Quebec, in a comparative way. The selected zones are the Seine River in France and the St.Lawrence River in Quebec, pursuing ongoing researchs made by the co-directors of this project. Secondly, young people interviewed will develop an interdisciplinary representation of the main issues they link with SD of the nearby river and will suggest citizen initiatives with the support of teachers of science and historyor geography, with actors involved in the area and members of the research team. These interdisciplinary representations and eco-citizen actions will be co-developed and disseminated in virtual ways within the four cultural contexts concerned.

Material culture and the relationship to its historical context and environment are at the heart of archaeologists’ concerns. Archaeological artefacts and sediments are fragile testimonies that should be analyzed, interpreted, preserved, and valorized. This complex relationship is changing in the digital era where archaeologists have access to interactive virtual representations of the object in Virtual Reality or a copy obtained by 3D printing. In recent years, digitization methods markedly progressed providing a relevant response with non-destructive solutions for preservation, analysis, and dissemination of knowledge on cultural heritage. However, those analytical techniques are limited to the surface of the objects, monuments or sites. Yet, the structural information yielding information on the transformation of raw material and the contextual relationship of its acquisition and use is a key aspect that can be handled by innovative digital approaches. INTROSPECT offers to archaeologists novel uses, tools to ease the access to new knowledge through digital interactive introspection methods that combine CT scans with 3D visualization technologies, such as Virtual Reality, tangible interactions and 3D printing. CT scans provides a systematic record of the densities of the raw materials composing an object and a 3D reconstruction. This method analyzes the inner part of the artifact without altering it and allows the specialist to define and understand its internal structure, method of manufacture and state of conservation. We propose to apply also this method to archaeological sediments. Virtual Reality provides a new context to the object and enhance the interaction between the analyst and the subject under investigation. Multidisciplinarity brings a major methodological challenge, however, the approach we propose involves the pooling of methods used in engineering, virtual reality, archeology and museology. Team members all collaborated in joint projects where everyone's experience in these different research fields was put to use. This project is part of the thematic focus “research in social sciences in the digital era” by proposing innovative ways of working based on digitization for the analysis and use of data in cultural heritage studies.

The overall objective of the ROAM project is to investigate and demonstrate the use of the orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes of light for communications and networking. Two are the primary objectives. The firs objective is to exploit the use of OAM modes in optical fibres as a disruptive means of increasing optical fibre transmission capacity for short-reach high data density applications. A transmission testbed utilising OAM multiplexing and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) dimensions will be demonstrated. The target will be a 10x or more capacity increase by employing 10 or more OAM multiplexed channels over a conventional WDM system. The combination of 10x OAM states with 16 wavelength channels will provide a total of 160 multiplexed channels. Full compatibility with legacy technologies will be demonstrated. Speciality fibres will be employed to support OAM modes transmission in the range up to 2 km. The second objective is to exploit the use of OAM domain as a switching resource in conjunctions with the wavelength domain to significantly improve the scalability and the power consumption of the switches in data-centres applications. A 10x improvement of the scalability of the data-centre switches will be targeted with the study and development of an OAM-based switch compatible with the WDM layer. A switch exploiting 10 OAM modes and 16 wavelengths as switching domains will be implemented. The developed two-layer switch will enable a more than 10x reduction of power consumption/Gb/s with respect to the current commercial switches. OAM switch configuration time of 100 ns will be demonstrated, with 8x improvement with respect to commercial switches. The project goals will be enabled by integrated high performance OAM components build on silicon photonics technology. ROAM consortium is composed by three universities, two research institutes, and two large companies, with the required knowledge and infrastructures to satisfy the project objectives.