Getting flight heritage for innovative space technologies can be a challenge. While options exist for flying in Low Earth Orbit, few opportunities exist for flying outside the Van Allen belts, especially on the Geostationary orbit where are located the majority of commercial satellites. The PLUGIN project, or PayLoad Universal Geostationary Interface, aims at developing an open standard for hosting innovative packages as passenger payloads on-board commercial satellites. PLUGIN will propose a generic approach, including technical interface requirements and implementation schedule. PLUGIN will also present the business models for hosting such payloads on commercial spacecraft and associated contracting principles, together with a list of opportunities. Airbus Defence and Space (Formerly Astrium) is the leading European manufacturer of GEO communications satellites with 4 launchs per year to GEO orbit, and as such is in the perfect position to promote such initiative. Developing PLUGIN will benefit the whole European industry, by providing a recurring access to GEO orbit. Developing PLUGIN will also improve Airbus DS commercial offers. Airbus DS is teaming with ISIS and SSTL., 2 innovative industry leaders. The combined experiences and mindsets of the 3 companies will allow to assess the whole variety of requests for IOD/IOV in GEO and GTO orbits. The PLUGIN project will be structured around 2 groups : an Advisory Group and a Passenger Representative Panel. The Advisory Group will help the PLUGIN team to propose solutions commercially and technically acceptable by the various stakeholders of the industry. Participants will be ESA, satellite operators and insurers. The Passenger Representative Panel will focus on technical interfaces. The panel will include space hardware manufacturers from various European countries, both large companies, SMEs, and research labs. PLUGIN outcomes will be made public and available to the whole European Industry.

European Space GaN (ESGAN) aims to develop a 200V Enhancement mode GaN transistor (normally off) for use in power management circuits for space applications. The advantages obtained from Gallium Nitride (GaN) such as reduced mass, increased efficiency and the potential of radiation hardness are well known and the project will aim to exploit these in the development of the technology. Devices will be designed, produced, tested for radiation effects, thermal effects, structural effects and reliability performance and will be demonstrated in an application to verify the desired performance. The end goal will be to proceed with a space evaluation leading to a space qualification of the produced devices. Another of the principal objectives is to establish and exercise a fully capable, committed European Supply Chain to remove dependency from other countries and geographical regions. To achieve the goals of the project a strong consortium has been established in which the members cover each of the stages of the supply chain. The consortium is composed of the following companies. AIXTRON, a company dedicated to the design and manufacture of equipment to grow advanced substrates for GaN transistors. SEMI ZABALA, a company dedicated to the design, test and packaging of GaN transistors and integrated circuits. X-FAB, a semiconductor foundry company that has developed and offers processing services for GaN transistors. AIRBUS DEFENCE & SPACE, are one of Europe´s leading companies dedicated to the design and manufacture of satellite equipment and systems. The consortium covers an end to end supply chain from materials, design, processing packaging and test through to end users.

The HYBRINFOX project aims to contribute to the fight against online misinformation by studying and developing possible synergies between symbolic AI and deep learning approaches for the detection of fake news (aka. infox). The main lever is the identification of vague information, likely to introduce or promote bias (subjectivity, evaluativity). This project is a continuation of a RAPID program entitled DIEKB ('Disinformation Identification in Evolving Knowledge Bases', 2019-2022) between the CoLoR team at INSTITUT JEAN-NICOD (Paul Egré, Benjamin Icard, Thomas Souverain), MONDECA (Ghislain Atemezing) and AIRBUS (Sylvain Gatepaille, Guillaume Gadek, Souhir Gabiche, Paul Guélorget). This research produced promising results whose success calls for new resources and for scaling up (funding of two postdocs, integration of the current prototypes). This development justifies in particular the association of a new partner, the LinkMedia team of IRISA (represented by Vincent Claveau), specialized in deep learning and automatic language processing for the identification of fake news. The leading hypothesis behind this project is that some lexical markers of semantic vagueness, in particular evaluative adjectives, which favor subjective interpretations, constitute a relevant cue of the potentially false, biased, or unreliable character of some texts. This hypothesis was tested end of 2021 with the development of a symbolic AI algorithm, the VAGO tool, and by comparing it with a deep learning based algorithm, the FAKE-CLF classifier. The VAGO tool provides a measure of the vagueness versus precision of a text, and the subjectivity (opinion) versus objectivity (factual character) of a text. Comparison with the results of the FAKE-CLF classifier shows a positive correlation between subjectivity scores measured by VAGO and falsity scores predicted by FAKE-CLF. This result opens up several avenues of hybridization between the two methods, which the HYBRINFOX program proposes to develop. The ambition of the project is both scientific and industrial: first, we aim to make the deep learning method exemplified in classifiers like FAKE-CLF explicable through symbolic AI and the use of explicit semantic rules. Then, the goal is to leverage the symbolic AI method developed with VAGO to improve the performance of the deep learning models, and conversely to enrich the lexicon of VAGO as the underlying typology in order to refine the identification of textual falsity cues. Finally, the goal is to better define the boundary between truthful and non-verbatim uses of linguistic vagueness in discourse, by training and testing deep learning-based algorithms on more or less vague or precise corpora. By associating research partners (IJN, IRISA) and industrial partners (Mondeca, Airbus), the project will test the developed tools on novel use cases including for defense applications.

Improving our knowledge of the atmospheric water cycle requires vertical measurements resolved in time space of the two main water vapor stable isotopes relative abundance in the lower and mid-troposphere. We aim at meeting this challenge with a high sensitivity differential absorption LIDAR instrumentation, which will allow to fill the undeniable lack of observable data, in order to increase the accuracy of climate models. For this purpose the SWALIDE project proposes to combine state-of-the-art infrared detection technologies based on HgCdTe avalanche photodiodes with the first differential absorption lidar system WAVIL dedicated to the measurement of water vapor isotopic abundance. The first objective is to bring the lidar to an enhanced level of sensitivity for atmospheric science and future observation networks applications. For this, a specific avalanche photodiode with an original monolithic architecture will be developed to provide a breakthrough in terms of sensitivity and operability. To support this objective, the whole instrumentation will be tested and validated by inter-comparisons with other sensors such as industrial spectrometers designed for in situ measurements. The second objective is in line with future space lidar missions, which will extend the observations of water vapor and isotopic abundance to the global scale in order to build an unprecedented climatology of convergence and divergence zones of humidity in the atmosphere. For this purpose, the avalanche photodiode, its amplification and formatting electronics will be designed and built in collaboration with Airbus DS. This will prepare the spin-out of research to industry for future lidar missions that may be proposed by France to the European Space Agency with the support of CNES.