Changes in rural areas, such as depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity, may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible. Policymakers can steer these developments in order to reduce their negative impacts but this requires knowing whether current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect people, planet, profits and land-use. To be truly useful, this knowledge must transcend siloed thinking and be the corollary of a joint effort uniting different actors under a common cause. PoliRur will provide this knowledge by combining several key activities needed to design effective place-based, human-centric and forward-looking rural policies. These include actionable research that takes place within an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that tries to glean the development trajectory of agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place. As a result of these activities, PoliRur will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.

The energy systems of 2025 will be based on increasing levels of RES penetration and DSO’s will need new insight into how their networks are performing to optimise their operations financially. At the same time, the 5G mobile networks will be deployed by 2025 offering low latency, high availability services enabling data driven control. The evolution of the energy sector is increasingly focused on energy as a service. What DSOs now need is to accelerate their ability to introduce innovations, such as those based on the sharing economy, by themselves using services increasing their flexibility to adapt and reducing their need for fixed investments. SOGNO will address this challenge by combining the application of deep intelligence techniques, industry grade data analysis and visualisation tools, advanced sensors, an advanced power measurement unit and 5G based ICT to provide fine grained visibility and control of both MV and LV power networks using end to end automation in a virtualised environment. Our results are provided as turnkey services, validated in DSO field trials (to TRL level 6) preparing them for market introduction beginning shortly after the project ends. An Open API will be provided to enable third parties to market their services in our eco-system creating further market growth. Regulatory and standards changes needed to enable the deployment of advanced techniques will be prepared by the project. Ethical business models will support the market introduction of turnkey services. Commercialisation of the project results, as energy services, will result in disruptive change in the DSO energy market enabling breakthroughs in the speed and cost effectiveness of DSO large scale roll out of automation and growth in the energy services market in Europe and beyond. The SOGNO vision will unlock a new service-oriented market making Europe’s energy sector the most advanced and open in the world.

Nowadays any communication barrier is detrimental to society. This project will research and develop the SignON communication service that uses machine translation to translate between Sign and spoken languages. This service will facilitate the exchange of information among deaf and hard of hearing, and hearing individuals. In this user-centric and community-driven project we will tightly collaborate with European deaf and hard of hearing communities to (re)define use-cases, co-design and co-develop the SignON service and application, assess the quality and validate their acceptance. Our ultimate objective is the fair, unbiased and inclusive spread of information and digital content in European society. Our project will develop a free, open application and framework for conversion between video (capturing and understanding Sign language), audio and text and translation between Sign and spoken languages. To facilitate these tasks we propose a common representation for mapping of video, audio and text into a unified space, that will be used for translating into the target modality and language. To ensure wide uptake, improved sign language detection and synthesis, as well as multilingual speech processing on mobile devices for everyone, we will deploy the SignON service as a smart phone application running on standard modern devices. We envisage the application as a light-weight interface. The SignON framework, however, will be distributed on the cloud where the computationally intensive tasks will be executed.The project will be driven by a focused set of use-cases tailored towards the deaf communities. We target the Irish, British, Dutch, Flemish and Spanish Sign and English, Irish, Dutch, Spanish spoken languages. However, SignON will incorporate sophisticated machine learning capabilities that will allow (i) learning new Sign, written and spoken languages; (ii) style-, domain- and user-adaptation and (iii) automatic error correction, based on user feedback