"The project aims to sensitize university staff to the inclusion of international students, mainly refugees and migrants from third countries, and to maximize inclusion processes. Thus, the opening up of the university is promoted in the sense of an inclusive self-perception and also internal processes can be reflected in this sense and possibly modified.The employees (primary target group) can improve their intercultural and communicative skills, e.g. in the context of counseling or teaching. The focus of the teaching and learning concept developed in the project is on concepts such as fair treatment (irrespective of religion, origin and gender), which can be linked to the current discourse of civic/citizenship education and didactics of social sciences.Refugees and migrants are the secondary target group of the project. They will benefit from the improved skills of the staff in the start-up and counseling centers of the universities. The role of counseling for (international) students is repeatedly attributed great importance (see HRK, 2018).The concept is based on the experiences of intercultural and civic adult education. There are many years of expertise in working with heterogeneous learning groups in this field. And it was often institutions of adult education that created educational offers for newcomers as part of the so called ""refugee crisis"". Methods and exercises from inclusive adult education are therefore adapted for the concept. In addition, concepts and contents of civic education are included in the project.In order to determine the exact need for the specific contents of the modules of the curriculum and to develop corresponding offers and exercises for the further education, a needs analysis in the national contexts at the universitiesis going to be carried out. Based on this, the partners develop the modules of the curriculum by exploiting their joint, partly specific expertise.The curriculum is divided into different modules:1. Self-reflection on (conscious or unconscious) assumptions of refugees / migrants (civic education)2. Communication strategies in consultation as well as in everyday exchange3. (Inter) cultural diversity and intercultural learningThese three form the cross-section modules that are relevant for all employee groups. In addition, the professional groups addressed require group-specific offers. These specific offers (for example, only for university teachers) are the content of a fourth module, which is made up of target group-specific offers.At a joint, four-day workshop, the concept will be tested together and critically evaluated within the project consortium. Here, groups of people from different levels of the universities (administration, teachers, student groups) should participate.This is also the start of a comprehensive practice-oriented evaluation phase, which in turn is divided into:Local evaluation phase: The project involves a total of five universities that carry out the evaluation within their own institutions. The employees previously involved in the workshop now function as ""practical consultants"" who, on the one hand, continue to transfer and disseminate the developed content, and on the other hand are actively involved in the evaluation process.(Over) regional evaluation phase: Thereafter, a transfer is made from the local to the (above) regional level, by evaluating the program with one more university each in the nearby area of ​​the respective partner institution. For this purpose, an online course will be developed in the form of a webinar, which will facilitate access to (over) regional universities and provide additional feedback. The webinar will also be further developed as an independent output and thus contribute to a sustainable continuation of the project concept.The collected evaluation results and feedback from the participants ultimately lead to a didactically concept, which is made available as a handbook and digital manual in all partner countries. The distribution is thus national and EU-wide."

EMERALDSs vision is to design, develop and create an urban data-oriented Mobility Analytics as a Service (MAaaS) toolset, consisting of the so-called emeralds services, compiled in a proof-of-concept prototype, capable of exploiting the untapped potential of extreme urban mobility data. The toolset will enable the stakeholders of the urban mobility ecosystem to collect and manage ubiquitous spatio-temporal data of high-volume, high-velocity and of high-variety, analyse them both in online and offline settings, import them to real-time responsive AI/ML algorithms and visualize results in interactive dashboards, whilst implementing privacy preservation techniques at all data modalities and at all levels of its architecture. The toolset will offer advanced capabilities in data mining (searching and processing) of large amounts and varieties of urban mobility data and its efficiency will be assessed, validated and demonstrated in three TRL5 pilot use cases (by following a co-development approach with mobility and city stakeholders to improve decision making in urban smart city environments), and deployed/showcased in two early adopters data-driven TRL6 applications (by integrating the new services to existing systems to improve commercial offerings).

"""Between 50% and 80% of students in EU countries never use digital textbooks, exercise software, broadcasts/podcasts, simulations or learning games. Most teachers at primary and secondary level do not consider themselves as 'digitally confident' or able to teach digital skills effectively, and 70% would like more training in using ICTs."" (European Commission release on 'Opening up Education').As the European Commission has identified the digitization of the education and the necessity of modernizing the learning environment for the young Europeans as a top priority, the Digital Education Action Plan has been adapted including actions to support technology-use and digital competence development in education. These actions concern and lead to making better use of digital technology for teaching and learning as well as developing digital competences and skills of both teachers and their pupils. In that framework and based on the idea of introducing a new innovative e-tool accessible and open to all the schools in Europe, we have developed the “VR in School Education & Civic participation” project idea. This 24-months project seeks to expose both teachers and the participating students to a new experience of learning through a Virtual Reality Game. The aim of their participation is to enhance their digital and soft skills while at the same time enrich their knowledge on specific issues that will be explored during different phases of the project. The Virtual Reality Game that will be played by the students concerns a digital simulation of the European Youth Council where all participants will express their opinions and make proposals on the issues of:1.Safe use of Internet and social media2.Bulling at schools and Cyber bullying3.Human rights & Multicultural environment in the EU4.European Citizenship & Rights5.Environmental Behavior6.Sustainable Growth in EU7.Circular Economy in EU and abroadDuring the project, both participating students and teachers will follow physical workshops and MOOC on-line courses and will be given guides and information materials so that they get well- prepared before the real-time Virtual Reality game playing. The aim of the workshops is to familiarize themselves with the innovative and non-traditional learning tools which are being applied in the non-formal learning while the aim of the on-line courses is to prepare themselves on the topics that will discuss during the game. These seven topics have been carefully selected as they are trending in the daily life of the students and will also have an added value on their perspective as European citizens. Apart from the direct effect on the students in terms of enriching their skills, attitudes, knowledge and their European identity, the project seeks to influence the teachers as well by exposing them to new, innovating learning models. The project identifies and covers the need for accelerating the digitalization in the education field through an innovative way by providing an inclusive, costless and open tool for the teachers to use in their classrooms. However, the project does not target only the students and their teachers, but it aims to affect all possible stakeholders in the education and training field to acquire such digitalized methods of learning and include non-formal learning tools on their educational procedures. The consortium of the project consists of 8 partners, among which are Experts in the field on non-formal education and the educational activity of the simulation, Schools of secondary level from 4 countries, an SME expert in the digital tools of VR and the Laboratory on Bioeconomy and Sustainable Growth of the University of Piraeus, as an expert in the topics of sustainable growth, environmental behavior. From the project 100 students and 20 teachers from 4 EU member states will be directly benefited and engaged on the development of the module and/or will participate on the testing phase of the intellectual outputs. As all partners are from different countries and have a variety of professional backgrounds, they will bring to the project their expertise, their knowledge of good practices from their national education system ending up in outputs and materials that can – and hopefully will – be broadly used at European level. The project will develop methodology and material for an affordable and flexible way to acquire new skills, advance careers and deliver quality educational experiences for both teachers and students."

ATMOSPHERE (Adaptive, Trustworthy, Manageable, Orchestrated, Secure Privacy-assuring Hybrid, Ecosystem for REsilient Cloud Computing) is a 24-month project aiming at the design and development of an ecosystem of a framework, platform and application of next generation trustworthy cloud services on top of an intercontinental hybrid and federated resource pool. The framework considers a broad spectrum of properties and their measures. The platform supports the building, deployment, measuring and evolution of trustworthy cloud resources, data network and data services. The platform is demonstrated on a sensitive scenario to build a cloud-enabled secure and trustworthy application related to distributed telemedicine.

With the emergence of the digitization of information, ICT infrastructure and communications gave an unprecedented push towards the realization of truly interconnected passenger transport ecosystems at city-level. The emerging notion of multimodality supports a plethora of diverse transport services, typically offered from a central location. There however, the complex interconnected infrastructures ease the cyber-threats propagation while the underlying mosaic of fleets, personal hand-held devices and non-standardized data types increase the system's attack surface and require the authorities collaboration to proactively handle severe incidents. CitySCAPE leverages the skills and mature technology of its 15-partner consortium to systematically explore all different cybersecurity dimensions of multimodal transport. These dimensions will drive a characterization of the cyber-threats in the ICT multimodal transport, extended to the close-by power and financial sector. Innovative software tools will be introduced to estimate the threats propagation in the system. Then, CitySCAPE will realize a modular software toolkit enabled to be seamlessly integrated into any multimodal transport system to: a)detect suspicious traffic-data values and identify persistent threats; b)evaluate an attack's impact in technical and notably in financial terms; c)combine external knowledge and internally-observed activities to enhance the predictability of zero-day attacks; d)instantiate a networked overlay to circulate informative notifications to CERT authorities and support their interplay. The CitySCAPE solution will be tested over a timely set of use-cases involving ticketing applications, cyber-fraud and location data in the regional transport system of two European cities, where extensive experiments will showcase its effectiveness. The findings will steer training sessions of expert/non-expert audience and shape a strong standardization contribution to security (labelling) protocols.