Ihe Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of the University of Luxembourg revealed on Wednesday its results within Horizon 2020, the new funding line for 2015 of the European Commission: Nine approved projects and a total funding sum of €4 million.
According to SnT Director Professor Björn Ottersten, the result is reflective of the Centre's strategy to ensure its competitiveness, stating: "We boosted our success rate drastically last year. This is all the more pleasing because the competition is tough, and only the best applications have a chance of receiving EU funding."
He continued: "In recent years we have been able to acquire the world's best scientists from the field of information and communications technology, we have worked very hard on promoting young scientists, and we have placed great value on intensive cooperation with partners from industry and the public sector since the very beginning. That is how we established our excellent position in the international research environment."
A continuation of the European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020 represents the largest programme of its kind ever with nearly €80 billion in funding made available over 7 years, beginning last year. In its altered form, Horizon 2020 will shine a light on new areas of focus compared with its predecessor, with a stronger emphasis on innovation as a means of driving economic growth and stimulating job creation. With this in mind, the European Commission has redirected the project towards applicants with not only scientific excellence, but also a strong connection to the economic sector.
"To make a significant contribution towards the technological and economic development of Luxembourg and Europe in the ICT sector: That has been our strategiy aim since SnT was founded," explained Ottersten. "Now, we are situated right in the focus of Horizon 2020, and can further intensify our scientific work with the EU funds. This will give a new boost to the development of the ICT industry in Luxembourg."
The Projects:
Biotope: Building an IoT open innovation ecosystem for connected smart objects
The Internet of Things (IoT) offers many opportunities for society and economy. Yet, many architectures in the IoT – smartphones, smartwatches, networked vehicles or intelligent buildings – still use their own ICT approaches. This makes it difficult to design uniform interfaces that would allow true networking. Biotope is helping to overcome these obstacles and to leverage the potentials of IoT.
MIREL: Mining and reasoning with legal texts
Key challenges in legal informatics are managing large repositories of legal norms and the semantic access and reasoning to these norms. The scientists involved in the MIREL consortium aim to create an international and inter-sectorial network and corresponding tools that will significantly improve the IT-supported processing and use of texts with legal norms.
SANSA - Shared Access terrestrial - Satellite Backhaul Network enabled by Smart Antennas
SANSA aims at improving the capacity, resilience and coverage of mobile networks. It also aims to increase spectral width and energy efficiency. SANSA thus meets an important aim of the Digital Agenda 2020, by which the EU Commission intends to increase the competitiveness of the EU in mobile telecommunications.
STARR - Decision SupporT and self-mAnagement system for stRoke survivoRs
Stroke is one of the most common causes of death and disability. In Europe alone, strokes incur a cost of around 65 billion euros per year. In our aging society, this trend is rising. In order to counter it, people at risk must be put in a better position to self-manage the associated risk factors. This is the aim of the STARR project, by which those afflicted can adapt their daily way of life to the risk factors with IT assistance.
Flysec - Fly faster through an innovative and robust risk-based SECurity tunnel
Flysec is a research and innovation project aimed at developing an integrated end-to-end security process for the aviation industry. The goal is to enable a guided and streamlined security procedure from the landside to the boarding gates to the airside. The project integrates the expertise and research excellence from industry, small and mid-sized companies, and academic research and will involve airports, airlines and passengers.
TARGET - Training Augmented Reality Generalized Environment Toolkit
Highly skilled and accordingly expensive labour must be helped to develop competence and productivity in a new working environment. The training phase, however, is often very labour- and cost-intensive. TARGET aims to develop and research into new methods of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) that will allow rapid and efficient competence development of new employees.
Privacy Flag - Enabling Crowd-sourcing based privacy protection for smartphone applications, websites and Internet of Things deployments
In the globalised world, the protection of personal data has become an important yet highly complex issue for the individual. In Privacy Flag, the researchers at SnT and their cooperation partners will combine crowdsourcing, ICT technologies and legal expertise in order to better monitor and protect people’s privacy when visiting websites and when using mobile applications or smart devices.
ProLeMas - Processing Legal Language for Normative Multi-Agent Systems
Formal norms emerge from laws via an interpretation process. In ICT, large sets of norms for processing large volumes of data are difficult to manage. The researchers in ProLeMas intend to enhance an existing technology that effectively combines big data and normative reasoning, and bring it to practical maturity.
F-INTEROP
The scientists in F-Interop aim to develop and provide tools for supporting and accelerating standardisation processes. This will remove the current barriers that draw out such processes and drive up costs.
