The aim of this supporting action is the planning and the organization of the World Manufacturing Forum 2015 (WMF2015) to be held in the second semester of 2015. Keeping the WMF2015 in Europe is pivotal in order to retain the European leadership in key Manufacturing enabling technologies. The aim of this specific proposal is the planning and the organization of an event that can represent the flagship initiatives for the year 2015. In order to take advantage of the previous successful experience and reputation accomplished, the event will be called World Manufacturing Forum 2015. Strategic objectives of the event are: • To be an open and independent environment where industry leaders and key policy makers from all over the world, together with all relevant stakeholder, will discuss global trends, challenges threats and objectives in Manufacturing to give authorities in policy, science and industries advice for the orientation of innovation perspectives for a global competitive and sustainable development; • To be a platform where the most recent state-of-the-art of the Manufacturing research is spread and disseminated at the same time where the most interesting trends and research needs are identified, discussed and shared among interested parties and involved communities; • To be a platform for the communication of the European Commission strategies and policies to a global audience; • To be an ambitious event to present results of the European cooperative research, to support the Horizon2020 and to discuss about international cooperation in R&D; • To create visibility and better synergies between industrial and social initiatives launched by the Commission and by the Member States in a fair interplay with the other global regions.

With the fast pace of digitalization, the European Union needs adequate workforce trained in Information Technology (IT), especially the programmers who form the core of the software development industry. Unfortunately, the lack of workforce having needed skills in this area has been observed since years in the whole European Union. An obvious solution is to increase the efforts on programming education, especially encompassing the groups who are now underrepresented in the IT workforce. The main barrier, however, is the difficulty in learning programming as observed by various researchers.The project is motivated by the opportunity for a progress in passing this barrier created by the combined use of automated assessment, which provides fast feedback to the students experimenting with their code, and gamification, which provides additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort. Thus, programming can be learned in a less stressful way and becomes more achievable by students with less background education in the area. In the long term, it may help improve the perception of learning programming, drawing more people to this subject of education that would otherwise avoid it.The aim of the FGPE project was to provide a framework for application of gamification to programming education, primarily in higher education institutions. Five intellectual outputs were delivered: 1) a scheme for effective programming course gamification, including featured gamification concepts and rules of their application;2) a standardized way for exchanging programming exercises for interactive educational environments based on two formats:a) YAPExIL, covering the contents of programming exercises, such as: introduction, description of the problem, initial code, automatic test definition, feedback messages,b) GEdIL, covering the gamification-related data, such as: virtual rewards for solving the exercises, gamification rules that trigger them, and dependencies between exercises;3) a web tool (FGPE AuthorKit) for authoring, managing and sharing exercises in the above formats, and converting them from/to other formats;4) an interactive educational environment (FGPE PLE) able to process the exercises complying to YAPExIL/GEdIL formats, present them to the students via a web browser, automatically assess students' solutions, trigger defined gamification rules and generate relevant feedback;5) an open repository of 480 gamified programming exercises (each one available in English and in a selected national language) which can be used as they are or adopted to suit specific educational objectives.All the project outputs are freely available in the Internet under open source licenses. The delivered intellectual outputs were presented at multiplier events and educational conferences attaining positive feedback from the audience.The project results helped to change the way programming education is served - so far at the project partners, improving students' learning experience and paving the way for the expected long-term impact of improving the efficiency of programming education. The FGPE project results form a base that will be further extended in the ongoing FGPE+ project (2020-1-PL01-KA226-HE-095786).

The INESCTEC.OCEAN proposal will create a Centre of Excellence in Portugal's Ocean Research and Engineering fields, synergistically addressing Marine Structures, Marine Robotics, Ocean Energy and Ocean AI Digitalization domains. It is envisioned as an unprecedented space of science, technology, and entrepreneurship for this region and an institution of global reference in ocean engineering in the medium term, reinforced with SINTEF OCEAN as the strategic advance partner. OCEAN.PLUS will be a lighthouse and a role model in this field, improving Portuguese R&I culture. The CoE will gather science, technology research, innovation and education/training to address the specific market needs, boosting the Blue Economy and fostering innovation and technology transfer to reinforce networking among academia, ocean R&D+I communities and Industries promoting the engagement of stakeholders in the field of sea technology as a global partnership. The anchor of the CoE will boost the attraction of human resources to the development of a sustainable regional ecosystem that allows for a large and diverse range of professional paths, ranging from the first education steps to a stage of maturity in a dynamic but stable professional career with a worldwide scope. INESCTEC.OCEAN will support early career and experienced talents through professional development and training on intersectoral mobility in the quadruple helix of the Sea ecosystem (academia & research, business, civil society and policymakers). Therefore, the creation of the CoE understood as a flagship for Portugal, is considered the logical next step in a consistent path of coordination in developing heterogeneous and complementary long-term national and international cooperative actions in OR&E.

The project aims at providing necessary software and educational content for an effective application of gamification in programming education primarily in higher education institutions by extending the key elements of the framework developed in the prior FGPE project. The project will deliver four intellectual outputs: 1. LTI Integration (software): enabling the use of gamified programming exercises within courses provided via popular LMS environments (such as Moodle and Open edX);2. Mobile gamified PLE (software): vastly improving the experience of the programming learning environment for mobile device users;3. Tutorial on gamification of programming exercises (guidance material): interactively guiding programming instructors on how to design and implement gamified programming courses;4. Extended gamified exercise base (Open Educational Resource): extending the set of open-source gamified programming resources with new courses featuring 520 programming exercises.All the project outputs will be freely available in the Internet under open source licenses. The project consortium involves partners with extensive and versatile experience in the domain of programming education and applied gamification. The expected impact is an improvement in efficiency of programming education and its student-perceived experience.

It is the purpose of EuConNeCts4, a Supporting Action, to organise the following 2 editions, 2020 and 2021, of the EC supported conference in the area of communication networks and systems (EuCNC - European Conference on Networks and Communications), continuing the successful organisation of this conference since 2014. EuCNC will continue to serve as a technical and scientific conference for researchers, namely European ones, to show their work in the area of Telecommunications, focusing on communication networks and systems, and also reaching services and applications. The conference will not be restricted to European researchers, rather aiming at attracting others from all the other regions in the world. It will also serve as a showcase for the work developed by projects co-financed by the EC, namely those arising from H2020 calls, and more specifically, those addressing 5G and beyond. Nonetheless, it also aims at attracting works in the area of communication networks and systems from other objectives. EuCNC will: 1) be a European conference, but with a large international dimension; 2) showcase the R&D activities performed within EC programmes, directly and indirectly; 3) showcase the cooperation in R&D between European organisations and worldwide ones; 4) bridge between academia / research centres and industry; 5) coordinate its goals with the EC and the main European players; 6) be a high-quality R&D conference; 7) be a well-recognised conference in Telecommunications; 8) provide a forum for the presentation of state-of-the-art technology, in both theoretical and experimental forms; 9) communicate the research results to the wide audience of the general public; 10) foster the participation of both established researchers and students, as well as industry members from various areas; 11) be a transparent and not-for-profit conference; 12) positively differentiate itself from other conferences, which will be achieved by reaching all previous objectives. With the extension, one more edition is organised, i.e., the 2022 one.