Europe’s cities are some of the world’s greatest tourism destinations. The socio-economic impact of tourism is extraordinary and urban tourism, but it brings at the same time a range of negative externalities, including high levels of unsustainable resource consumption and waste production. In comparison with other cities, tourist cities have to face additional challenges related to waste prevention and management due to their geographical and climatic conditions, the seasonality of tourism flow and the specificity of tourism industry and of tourists as waste producers. UrBAN-WASTE will support policy makers in answering these challenges and in developing strategies that aim at reducing the amount of municipal waste production and at further support the re-use, recycle, collection and disposal of waste in tourist cities. In doing so UrBAN-WASTE will adopt and apply the urban metabolism approach to support the switch to a circular model where waste is considered as resource and reintegrated in the urban flow. UrBAN-WASTE will perform a metabolic analysis of the state of art of urban metabolism in 11 pilot cities. In parallel a participatory process involving all the relevant stakeholders will be set up through a mobilization and mutual learning action plan. These inputs will be integrated in the strategies along with a review of the most innovative existing technologies and practices in the field of waste management and prevention. The strategies will then be implemented in the 11 cities and the results will be monitored and disseminated facilitating the transfer and adaptation of the project outcomes in other cases.

Hubs of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the Transformation of Historic Urban Areas HUB-IN aims to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in Historic Urban Areas (HUA), while preserving the unique identity of the historic sites regarding their natural, cultural and social values. HUB-IN adopts the innovation and entrepreneurship as the main drivers of urban regeneration in HUAs and it´s fully aligned with the International agendas for Cultural Sustainable Development (UNESCO) and Cultural Heritage Strategy (Council Europe). HUB-IN will have two main stages. In the first stage, a network of Hubs of innovation and entrepreneurship (Hubs) will be developed in the HUAs of eight city partners and in the second stage, the resulting methods and tools will be upscaled to a global network of HUAs of follower cities. The Hubs of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Hubs) will test, demonstrate and pilot activities of co-creation and co-design in three meaningful clusters with potential for sustainable transformation of HUA: i) Cultural and creative industries, ii) New lifestyles and iii) Endogenous Natural & Social Resources. HUB-IN defines 12 specific goals, that will be achieved by the following methodology: i) Building an ecosystem of interconnected Hubs to accelerate urban regeneration in eight HUAs, ii) Creating value in pilot Hubs, piloting social innovation and accelerating sustainable entrepreneurship in HUAs, iii) Packaging, upscaling and exploiting the results and create collaborative global network of Hubs of innovation and entrepreneurship in HUA, iv) Creating the HUB-IN digital space. HUB-IN expect to contribute to reverse trends of abandonment and neglect of historic heritage in a systemic way through the creation of networks of Hubs where innovation will be the main driver. HUB-IN will also have a direct impact on the creation of new sustainable opportunities for local traditional businesses and for the development of new creative skills and jobs.

AI4PublicPolicy is a joint effort of policymakers and Cloud/AI experts to unveil AI’s potential for automated, transparent and citizen-centric development of public policies. To this end, the project will deliver, validate, demonstrate and promote a novel Open Cloud platform (i.e. AI4PublicPolicy platform) for automated, scalable, transparent and citizen-centric policy management based on unique AI technologies. The AI4PublicPolicy platform will be an Open Virtualized Policy Management Environment (VPME) that will provide fully-fledged policy development/management functionalities based on AI technologies such as Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), NLP and chatbots, while leveraging citizens’ participation and feedback. It will support the entire policy development lifecycle, based on technologies for the extraction, simulation, evaluation and optimization of interoperable and reusable public policies, with emphasis on citizen-centric policies development and optimization through the realization of citizen-oriented feedback loops. AI4PublicPolicy will complement public policy development functionalities with the ever-important process reengineering and organization transformation activities towards ensuring the effective transition from legacy policy development models to emerging AI-based policymaking. The AI4PublicPolicy VPME will be integrated with EOSC with a dual objective. First to facilitate access to the Cloud and HPC resources of EOSC/EGI that are required to enable the project’s AI tools, and second to boost the sustainability and wider use of the project’s developments. AI4PublicPolicy’s business plan for sustaining, expanding and commercializing the AI tools and the VPME is based on the development of a community of interested and engaged stakeholders (i.e. public authorities and other policymakers) around the project’s platform.

The proposed project aims for the development to market (TRL8-9) of EGNSS-based integrated low-cost sensor technologies and artificial-intelligence-driven open-architecture software solution (machine learning (ML) and machine vision (MV)), for the detection, classification, and georeferencing of roadway pavement surface anomalies and for the low-cost assessment of roadway pavements using participatory sensing. The proposed system is of practical importance since it provides continuous information about roadway pavement surface anomalies which are valuable for efficiently monitoring the transport infrastructure and for public safety. The vision for roadway condition assessment by utilization of smartphone-like technology is set in parallel with the hypothesis that such technology can be used for crowd-sourced data collection and analysis in GIS-based pavement management systems (PMS), and that the developed technology and related transport informatics are disruptive technologies that have the potential to reshape the transport and infrastructure O&M industries through the project objectives discussed in the proposal.

In line with WIDESPREAD-2014-1 TEAMING, this proposal puts forward the vision for establishing a “Research centre on Interactive media, Smart systems and Emerging technologies” (RISE). RISE aims to become a Centre of Excellence and a hub across the three continents bordering Cyprus, facilitating thus the local scientific, technological, and economic growth of the region. The proposal identifies the potential of Interactive Media to bring together several scientific areas, yielding applications in the priority areas of the Smart Specialisation Strategy of Cyprus. Therefore, research in RISE integrates the Visual Sciences, Human Factors and Design, and Communications and Artificial Intelligence, in a tight synergy that provides a unique interdisciplinary research perspective that emphasizes an “Inspired by Humans, Designed for Humans” philosophy. To support the implementation of the research and innovation agenda of RISE, the proposal puts forward the a consortium coordinated by the Nicosia Municipality, the largest regional authority of Cyprus with extensive experience in managing large projects and commitment in establishing and supporting an innovation ecosystem in Nicosia, along with all three public universities of Cyprus. The four local partners will contribute their research, infrastructure, and financial potential for the establishment of RISE and with guidance by two Experienced Partners (MPI and UCL) with unequivocal scientific excellence and demonstrated success in running Centres of Excellence, aim to establish a sustainable Centre of Excellence in Cyprus. With the long-term sustainable growth of RISE in mind, the proposal designates an administrative structure for the Centre to facilitate its interdisciplinary view of research, its outreach perspective towards human users and businesses, and its multi-institutional composition.