Methanol is an appealing energy vectors, with attractive volumetric and gravimetric energy values, storable in liquid phase at ambient conditions of pressure and temperature, and that can be used as fuel directly or converted into chemicals or gasoline. However, its production lacks a sustainable route. Thus, the METHASOL project aims to produce methanol through a sustainable and cost-effective process based on the selective visible light driven gas phase CO2 reduction, with a solar to methanol energy conversion efficiency of 5%. During 42 months, METHASOL will gather 14 partners from EU/Associated MS, China and the USA, including some of the world’s most recognized researchers on artificial photosynthesis, to achieve a ground-breaking combination of a CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) system based on Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) and a graphitic Carbon Nitride (g-CN) for photocatalytic oxygen evolution reaction (OER), through a Z-scheme heterojunction. Following the definition of the system specifications (WP1), a first set of materials for OER and CO2RR will be synthesised and their photocatalytic activity and stability will be screened (WP2). The most promising materials will be further analysed thanks to experimental characterisation and modelling (WP3), leading to guidelines used for designing an enhanced CO2RR and OER materials (WP4). The best systems will then be integrated through a Z-scheme heterojunction, either with or without a mediator, and tested in tailored reactors operating in the gas phase under different conditions (WP5). A complete sustainability analysis will be conducted (WP6) to ensure the clean production of methanol. The cooperation between European and Chinese research entities will be consolidated to last beyond the project lifetime through the creation of a common exploitation plan (WP7). Through its ambitious activities on photocatalyst developments for solar to methanol conversion, METHASOL will propose a new path for decarbonizing Europe.

Five leading European supercomputing centres are committed to develop, within their respective national programs and service portfolios, a set of services that will be federated across a consortium. The work will be undertaken by the following supercomputing centres, which form the High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform of the Human Brain Project (HBP): ▪ Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) in Spain, ▪ The Italian supercomputing centre CINECA, ▪ The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS, ▪ The Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, and ▪ Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), France (joining in April 2018). The new consortium will be called Fenix and it aims at providing scalable compute and data services in a federated manner. The neuroscience community is of particular interest in this context and the HBP represents a prioritised driver for the Fenix infrastructure design and implementation. The Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the HBP (ICEI) project will realise key elements of this Fenix infrastructure that are targeted to meet the needs of the neuroscience community. The participating sites plan for cloud-like services that are compatible with the work cultures of scientific computing and data science. Specifically, this entails developing interactive supercomputing capabilities on the available extreme computing and data systems. Key features of the ICEI infrastructure are: ▪ Scalable compute resources; ▪ A federated data infrastructure; and ▪ Interactive Compute Services providing access to the federated data infrastructure as well as elastic access to the scalable compute resources. The ICEI e-infrastructure will be realised through a coordinated procurement of equipment and R&D services. Furthermore, significant additional parts of the infrastructure and R&D services will be realised within the ICEI project through in-kind contributions from the participating supercomputing centres.

Understanding the tempo and mode of species diversification and concomitant ecological divergence has been a long-sought goal in evolutionary biology. As clades diversify, disparity in niches typically increases when new lineages colonize previously unfilled zones of niche space. Despite its critical importance in understanding life’s evolution, the universality of an interdependence between species diversification and niche evolution, as well as the directionality and drivers of this association, are still poorly understood. This is presumably attributable to the inherent computational and mathematical challenges to develop process-generating models that would couple diversification and niche evolutionary dynamics and the limited availability of extensive and comparable datasets to characterize niches over large radiations integrating neontological and paleontological data. In this project, I will first develop much-needed novel flexible models that allow joint inference on coupled diversification and trait evolution dynamics by allowing joint rate-heterogeneity for radiations of considerable size. Subsequently, I will enhance biological realism by expanding to multivariate evolution of traits, better characterizing the niche concept, and by integrating paleontological data. Finally, I will allow inference on biotic and abiotic drivers of the interrelationship of species and niche diversification. These models will enable examining hitherto untestable classic evolutionary hypotheses in a formal framework on the feedback between diversification and niche evolution, at the intersection of ecology and evolutionary biology. By applying these models to big scale curated datasets of species-level niches and recently available phylogenetic trees for thousands of species and the ability to integrate fossil information, I will substantially increase our understanding on how biodiversity, both in terms of richness and niches, is generated.

TARGET will deliver a pan-European serious gaming platform featuring new tools, techniques and content for training and assessing skills and competencies of SCA (Security Critical Agents - counterterrorism units, border guards, first responders (police, firefighters, ambulance services civil security agencies, critical infrastructure operators). Mixed-reality experiences will immerse trainees at task, tactical and strategic command levels with scenarios such as tactical firearms events, asset protection, mass demonstrations, cyber-attacks and CBRN incidents. Trainees will use real / training weaponry, radio equipment, command & control software, decision support tools, real command centres, vehicles. Social and ethical content will be pervasive. Unavailable real-source information will be substituted by AVR (Augmented / Virtual Reality - multimedia, synthetic role players). Near-real, all-encompassing and non-linear experiences will enable high degrees of dynamics and variability. The distributed Open TARGET Platform will provide extensible standards driven methods to integrate simulation techniques and AVR technology with existing SCA training equipment and be customisable to local languages, national legal contexts, organisational structures, established standard operational procedures and legacy IT systems. At key training points real-time benchmarking of individuals and teams will be instrumented. TARGET will support inter-agency SCA exercising across the EU and act as a serious gaming repository and brokerage facility for authorised agencies to share training material and maximise reuse and efficiency in delivering complex exercises. TARGET, combining training, content and technology expertise, will be co-led by users and technologists, mainly SMEs. 2 successively developed and trialled versions of the TARGET Solution will support user-technologist dialogue. The TARGET Ecosystem will enable sustainable impact, commercial uptake and synergies at EU level.

Experiencing music as a listener, performer, or a composer is an active process that engages perceptual and cognitive faculties, endowing the experience with memories, joy, and emotion. Through this active auditory engagement, humans analyze and comprehend complex musical scenes by invoking its cultural norms, segregating sound mixtures, and marshaling expectations and anticipation. These remarkable feats are beyond our understanding and far exceed the capabilities of the most sophisticated music analysis systems. The goal of the proposed research is to investigate how cortical neuroplasticity in humans and animal models facilitates the musical experience over multiple time-scales, to explain how we assimilate musical norms and scales with long-term exposure, and rapidly recruit auditory-motor associations when listening to musical rhythms. The proposed research exploits neuroscience and computational approaches developed and effectively applied by the PI to study the cortical processing of speech. It will harness the power of these ideas and techniques to delineate the role of cognitive functions and adaptive sensory processing in forming musical structure and perception. The project builds upon the internationally recognized leadership of the PI in the fields of auditory cognition, cortical physiology, and computational neuroscience, and his pioneering research into rapid neuroplasticity in the auditory cortex. The project recruits the necessary complementary expertise both to record high-resolution spatiotemporal cortical responses to music in behaving humans, and to frame the proposed experiments in a musical context by garnering insights from music theory, performance, and composition. These diverse approaches will provide new insights into brain function; they will also promote a novel view of musical perception and cognition that will mutually benefit this team and the intellectually vibrant landscape of the neuroscience of music cognition in Paris and Europe