Refugee migration to Europe present both opportunities and challenges for vocational education and training systems. On the opportunity side, an influx of highly-motivated individuals provides a boost to the labour force, and particularly to sectors that have difficulty filling demand. On the challenge side, refugees often enter host-country labour markets without orientation or even a basic concept of the types of VET and career tracks available. The proposed project seeks to address this challenge through research and innovation. Its primary output will be a multilingual application accessible by mobile phone. Users will take a Vocational Interest Self-Evaluation test, which will ask them to rank certain tasks (e.g. “repair engines,” “design websites,” “assist with vaccinations”) on a scale of interest. Based on the results, the tool will suggest VET and career options that both suit users’ interests and are relevant to local labour market needs. Users will then be able to use the app to access motivational Video Profiles of third-country nationals who have completed VET in their fields of interest, as well as to find and network with VET counsellors and providers in their areas. In parallel, the application will host Guidelines on Early VET Orientation and a Research Report, designed to assist stakeholders in addressing the needs of the app users and other under-served VET seekers.

UNIversities for Future wORk Skills 2020 - UNIFORS 2020 brings together a strong partnership (5 universities from Poland, Romania, Belgium, Spain and Portugal and two SMEs - one from Spain and one from Greece), which aimed to increase the chances of students to enter the labour market faster and better by improving their soft skills. The project explored the perspectives of employers, students and teaching staff in relation to specific soft skills gaps and collected best practices in this field at EU level. The partners developed a blended soft skills training programme including an innovative online course (36 hours). 80 students from 5 universities attended the soft skills course and half of them participated in a 5-day international intensive study program. More than 150 students from the partner universities received updated information on the needs of the labour market and became aware of the importance of soft skills for their future employment. The project increased the university's capacity to deliver soft skills courses by training teaching staff and experts (16 people) and strengthened cooperation between universities and the business sector/employers. Over 150 companies were involved in all stages of the project, from needs analysis to course development, implementation and evaluation. 2,500 members of the public, 500 students, 500 teachers, 25 other universities, 250 companies and 10 authorities from 5 EU countries have been informed about the project results. All partner universities have integrated the developed soft skills training into their curricula for optional/extra-curricular courses, with 300 students expected to be trained within 3 years after the end of the project.

European farming is strongly affected by the high-impact of climate change emerging as a major threat on agriculture in Europe and across the world. Even though the digital transformation of agriculture promises to solve numerous environmental, economic and societal problems, and important steps have taken place towards this goal, agriculture sector is the least digitized of all major productive activities. By increasing digitalisation and adopting climate-smart practices in agricultural makes it is possible to produce products with ever higher efficiency and ever lower environmental impact. However, adoption of a climate-smart agriculture is not only a farmers’ concern. It is an interdisciplinary issue for agronomists, ICT experts, farmers, breeders etc. that Higher Education Institutions need to respond by developing new skills and technologies in their curricula.SmartROOT focuses on the preparation of a new Joint Master Degree program in the field of Mixed Farming Systems (MFS) by introducing user-friendly ICT tools to improve the resilience of agriculture subject to climate change. The rational is not only to prepare an international master degree program. It is also to actively involve students in the preparation process, receive their assessment and feedback on the ICT tools and material developed in terms of their operability, the user-friendly environment, the knowledge gained, the extent of international cooperation and the extent of satisfaction of their expectations. It will be a dynamic, inter-active process which ends to a Joint Master Degree program ready to run after the completion of the project.SmartROOT not only aims to prepare the future professionals in the agricultural sector, but also promotes ways for small and medium-sized farms to benefit from the new technologies by introducing and familiarising farmers to digital technologies. Farmers will gain knowledge on methodologies to foster the synergies between agricultural production, climate change mitigation and adaptation. SmartROOT expected results can be summarised in the following lines:1) Build an international Joint Master Degree (JMD) program in Mixed Farming Systems ready to run after the completion of the project2) Actively involve students to the preparation, test and assessment of a JMD prior its official launch3) Enforce students’ insight to perceive the global trends on the agriculture domain in combination to climate change mitigation4) Increase students’ and stakeholders (e.g. farmers) awareness on environment friendly agricultural trends to minimise the climate change consequences5) Bridge the needs of agriculture experts and ICT scientists and familiarise farmers with ICT technological advancements6) Develop open educational and management platforms available to be used by individual farmers and agriculture professionals7) Act as a stepping stone towards the new challenge for HEIs in Europe as described under the Erasmus+ program: to create a network in the frame of the European Universities initiative SmartROOT’s results will be achieved through the following outputs:- O1 MFS e-book - O2 Open Hub for Knowledge Exchange - O3 SmartROOT Virtual Farm Hub- O4 MFS Educational Management Platform - O5 Augmented Reality Learning Environment - O6 SmartROOT Assessment Toolkit and Curriculum preparation1.Introduce the context of CSA and Mixed Farming Systems to HEIs involved through co-design of their curricula2.Educate students to new technological solutions for climate smart agriculture such as such as smart sensors, robots, UAVs, advanced tracking systems, long-range IoT-enabled sensors, middleware and gateways for extending the size of the potential monitoring area, facilitating, thus, data collection and processing of different farming systems at the same time, enabling optimal decisions,3.Develop an Open Access Climate-Smart agriculture platform to foster, support and promote Mixed Farming Systems (MFS), by facilitating the design, the deployment, and the management of crop-livestock-forestry combinations towards sustainable, efficient, and climate-aware MFS systems.4.Develop a continuous training platform, in the national language of each partner’s country, designed for the socio-professional network and based on the content and results of the 3-year project 5.Foster a European network between academia, experienced farmers and stakeholders, to engage end-users and allow exchange of knowledge on best practices on various combinations of mixed farming systems

COVID pandemia has seriously affected the way High Education Institutions are delivering training to their students. UPV, that is participating in this project; has been the first University in Spain to close a whole campus due a COVID outbreak. Their 25.000 students have been receiving distance learning classes since early october. But many other Universities in Spain and in Europe are facing similar problems . Supporting teachers and students is crucial in this situation. 95% of HEI in Europe were forced to pivot to distance learning due the first COVID wave, and the number of HEI affected by the second wave increases every day. The project will:Design and develop the training plan and materials to create a virtual hackathon on any topic based on design and system thinking. The theoretical framework will be set by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Just Transition.Design and develop an innovative learning platform to facilitate the practical training process of students in virtual technologies and the organization of teams to participate in virtual hackathons.Needs of the target group:Adaptation to distance learning and virtual activities because COVID situation. Collaboration opportunities among students from different countries (in a virtual environment).Promote the SDGs to achieve the goals and a fair society for all. Development of soft skills to improve the employability of students and the acquisition of skills required by the New green deal and towards a more sustainable economy in Europe. Project results: O1. Online training materials on Sustainable Development Goals and Just Transition. 1000 teachers, students and researchers will download or access the curricula from the project webpage.O2. Online platform for the online course and the Virtual Hackathons. 300 participants registered in the platform that are participating in the online course and Virtual Hackathons by the end of the project.

DeepCube leverages advances in the fields of AI and semantic web to unlock the potential of big Copernicus data. DeepCube is impact driven; our objective is to address new and ambitious problems that imply high environmental and societal impact, enhance our understanding of Earth’s processes, correlated with Climate Change, and feasibly generate high business value. To achieve this we bring mature and new ICT technologies, such as the Earth System Data Cube, the Semantic Cube, the Hopsworks platform for distributed DL, and a state-of-the-art visualisation tool tailored for linked Copernicus data, and integrate them to deliver an open and interoperable platform that can be deployed in several cloud infrastructures and HPC, including DIAS environments. We then use these tools to develop novel DL pipelines to extract value from big Copernicus data. We implement a shift in the use of AI pipelines. DeepCube 1) develops novel DL architectures that extend to non-conventional data and problems settings, such as interferometric SAR, social network data, and industrial data, 2) introduces a novel hybrid modeling paradigm for data-driven AI models that respect physical laws, and 3) opens-up the DL black box through Explainable AI and Causality. We showcase these in five Use Cases (UC), two business, two on earth system sciences, and one for humanitarian aid. These are: UC1: Forecasting localized extreme drought and heat impacts in Africa, UC2: Climate induced migration in Africa, UC3: Fire hazard short-term forecasting in the Mediterranean, UC4a: Automatic volcanic deformation detection and alerting and UC4b: Deformation trend change detection on PSI time-series for critical infrastructure monitoring, UC5: Copernicus services for sustainable and environmentally-friendly tourism.