Our understanding of cosmology and fundamental physics continues to be challenged by ever more precise experiments. The resulting “standard” model of cosmology describes the data well, but is unable to explain the origin of the main constituents of our Universe, namely dark matter and dark energy. More than an order of magnitude improvement in the quality and quantity of observational data is needed. This has motivated ESA to select Euclid as the second mission of its cosmic vision program, with a scheduled launch in 2020. It is designed to accurately measure the alignments of distant galaxies due to the differential deflection of light-rays by intervening structures, a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Euclid will measure this signal by imaging 1.5 billion galaxies with a resolution similar to that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Although Euclid is designed to minimize observational systematics the observations are still compromised by two factors. Various instrumental effects need to be corrected for, and the tremendous improvement in precision has to be matched with comparable advances in the modelling of astrophysical effects that affect the signal. The objective of this proposal is to make significant progress on both fronts. To do so, we will (i) quantify the morphology of galaxies using archival HST observations; (ii) carry out a unique narrow-band photometric redshift survey to obtain state-of-the-art constraints on the intrinsic alignments of galaxies that arise due to tidal interactions, and would otherwise contaminate the cosmological signal; (iii) integrate these results into the end-to-end simulation pipeline; (iv) perform a spectroscopic redshift survey to calibrate the photometric redshift technique. The Euclid Consortium has identified these as critical issues, which need to be addressed before launch, in order to maximise the science return of this exciting mission, and enable the dark energy science objectives of Europe.

Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and in various industries, such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food and ceramics. Their thermomechanical behaviours are governed by the interactions between solid particles, as well as between particles and the surrounding media (gas or liquid). Although granular materials have been investigated extensively, there are still some unsolved challenging issues concerning the thermomechanical behaviours, including heat generation (i.e. self-heating) and transfer, and thermal effects on material properties and process performance. Furthermore, the unique thermomechanical attributes have led to emerging applications with granular materials, such as additive manufacturing, powder coating, high quality composites, insulation and efficient thermal processing for energy conservation, but there is a lack of mechanistic understanding of thermomechanical behaviour of granular materials in these emerging applications. MATHEGRAM will hence deliver a timely, concerted research and training programme to address these challenges, bringing together a multi-disciplinary and inter-sectorial consortium consisting of 6 leading academic institutes, 4 non-academic beneficiaries and 6 partner organisations from 8 EU member states. Our vision is to develop robust new numerical models and novel experimental techniques that can predict and characterise heat generation and transfer, as well as thermal effects in granular materials. The enhanced mechanistic understanding of granular materials will enable them to be used in diverse industries, while also achieving energy conservation and CO2 emission reduction. We will also train a cohort of 15 ESRs with balanced gender, who will be the next generation scientific and technological leaders with competency and the research and transferable skills to work effectively across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries.

5GMed5GMediaHUB aims to help EU to achieve the goal of becoming a world leader in 5G, by accelerating the testing and validation of innovative 5G-empowered media applications and NetApps from 3rd party experimenters and NetApps developers, through an open, integrated and fully featured Experimentation Facility. This will significantly reduce not only the service creation lifecycle but also the time to market barrier, thus providing such actors that are primarily from SMEs, with a competitive advantage against their rivals outside EU. In particular, 5GMediaHUB will build and operate an elastic, secure and trusted multi-tenant service execution and NetApps development environment based on an open cloud-based architecture and APIs, by developing and integrating a testing and validation system with two existing well-established 5G testbeds (by CTTC and Telenor) for enabling the fast prototyping, testing and validation of novel 5G services and NetApps. 5GMediaHUB will offer: (i) a DevOps environment for Testing as a Service; (ii) a rich set of Experimentation Tools that offer scheduling, validation, verification, analytics and QoS/QoE monitoring mechanisms; (iii) A set of re-usable vertical-specific and vertical-agnostic NetApps with easy to use APIs that can be consumed by application developers, reducing the complexity and risk of integrations and operations; (iv) a re-usable open-source NetApps Repository; (v) an umbrella cross-domain service orchestrator to deliver cross-domain orchestration of NetApps; (vi) an innovative security framework offering software defined perimeter protection and isolation of NetApps; (vii) incremental validation capabilities of the Experimental Facility evidenced through 3 novel media use cases with 2 scenarios each, over 3GPP R.16 and R.17 5G testbed releases. Our 17-partner consortium (9 SMEs) from 9 countries has extremely rich 5G-PPP experience, since 13 partners have participated in previous 5G-PPP projects and in several 5G-PPP WGs.

Present scholarship insufficiently addresses the linkages between Euroscepticism and supranational solidarity. On the one hand, scholars studying Euroscepticism argue that the lack of perceived benefits of the integration process explains EU citizens' opposition to their country membership in the union. However, this stream of literature does not inquire whether supranational social policies have the potential to change individuals’ perception of gains and losses related to European integration. On the other hand, the normative approach to European citizenship arguing for a transnational conception of justice and solidarity does not fully engage with the consequences of a social solidarity pillar in the EU. The SOCIALEU project builds on these two theoretical perspectives and investigates the role of a redistributive EU social policy in fostering citizen support for the Union. In particular, the project analyses the agenda-setting on social rights at the supranational level and subsequently inquires whether the provision of social benefits by EU institutions increases support for European integration and has the potential to turn populist party voters towards mainstream political parties. In doing so, the SOCIALEU project is the first theoretical and empirical undertaking that investigates the role that supranational social policy may have in changing people’s attitudes and voting behaviour in relation to the EU. I rely on the literature on welfare states’ role in strengthening national identity and social cohesion and argue that the provision of welfare goods at the EU level can strengthen support for the EU in general and among Eurosceptic citizens in particular. I employ an original research design that combines qualitative research in Brussels and survey experiments in France and Spain.