The essence of FET Proactive is to encourage researchers from different disciplines to work together to open and consolidate promising paths towards radically new technological possibilities. Six specific topics were identified in the 2018 call:
- Artificial organs, tissues, cells and sub-cell structures
- Time
- Living technologies
- Socially interactive technologies
- Disruptive micro-energy and storage technologies
- Topological matter
Out of 96 proposals sent, 15 research and innovation projects were selected for a total budget of 89 million Euro, the average grant resulting around 5.9 million Euro for an average length of 53 months.
There are 135 participants in these 15 projects, 53% are from higher education, 24% from research institutes, 14% are SMEs; 9% other including industry.
The projects that have now been selected will face the challenge of making new and exciting breakthrough discoveries in these diverse research fields, creating tomorrow’s innovation.
Artificial organs, tissues, cells and sub-cellular structures
824070 – CONNECT – Connecting neural networks: Nervous-system-on-Chip Technology
CONNECT will develop the next level in vitro model systems (organ-on-chips) for the nervous system. The project acts at the convergence of a multitude of disciplines including nanofabrication, microfluidics, stem cell technology, tissue engineering and advanced imaging. The successful completion of this high risk-high gain project will enable for the first time to study a complete organ system and deliver a viable paradigm for future technology to study connectivity in the nervous system.
824164 – HERMES – Hybrid Enhanced Regenerative Medicine Systems
HERMES fosters the emergence of a novel biomedical paradigm (named enhanced regenerative medicine), rooted in the use of biohybrid neuronics (neural electronics). It proposes an innovative solution based on intelligent biohybrids, made by the symbiotic integration of bioengineered brain tissue, neuromorphic microelectronics and artificial intelligence, to effectively drive self-repair of dysfunctional brain circuits and validates it against animal models of epilepsy.
Time
824128 – VIRTUALTIMES – Exploring and Modifying the Sense of Time in Virtual Environments
VIRTUALTIMES will for the first time provide a personalized and neuroadaptive virtual reality technology enabling the systematic variation of time experience based on the rigorous study of the sense of time in different psychopathological conditions including depression, schizophrenia and autism. This should give raise to a professional VR- and game-based tool for prevention and therapy of psychopathological conditions.
824160 – EnTimeMent – ENtrainment and synchronization at multiple TIME scales in the MENTal foundations of expressive gesture
EnTimeMent aims at a radical change in scientific research and enabling technologies for human movement qualitative analysis, entrainment and prediction, based on a novel neuro-cognitive approach of the multiple, mutually interactive time scales characterizing human behaviour. EnTimeMent scenarios include health (healing and support of everyday life of persons with chronic pain and disability), performing arts (e.g. dance), sports, and entertainment group activities.
Living technologies
824074 – GrowBot – Towards a new generation of plant-inspired growing artefacts
GrowBot proposes a disruptively new paradigm of movement in robotics inspired by the moving-by-growing abilities of climbing plants. By imitating climbing parts, the GrowBot objective is to develop low-mass and low-volume robots capable of anchoring themselves, negotiating voids, and more generally climbing, where current climbing robots based on wheels, legs, or rails would get stuck or fall. Specifically, the ability to grow will be translated by additive manufacturing processes inside the robot, which creates its body by depositing new materials with multi-functional properties, on the basis of the perceived external stimuli (without a pre-defined design).
824060 – ACDC – Artificial Cells with Distributed Cores to Decipher Protein Function
ACDC will employ a living technology platform of artificial cell technologies towards the next generation of small molecule drug discovery, protein biophysics, and biochemical energy production. The project aims to emulate the structure and dynamics of living cells and cellular tissues by embedding biochemical and biophysical systems capable of sensing, reconfiguration, synthesis, electrochemical gradient production and biochemical energy production.
824162 – SYNC – A SYnaptically connected brain-silicon Neural Closed-loop Hybrid system
The scientific and technological objective of SYNC is to create a hybrid system where a neural network in the brain of a living animal (BNN) and a silicon neural network of spiking neurons on a chip (SNN) are interconnected by neuromorphic synapses, thus enabling co-evolution of connectivity and co-processing of information of the two networks
824069 – HIVEOPOLIS – Futuristic beehives for a smart metropolis
Honeybees are important pollinators and support various important ecosystems with their ecological services. Rapid anthropogenic changes cause disruptive disturbances of their habitats which are currently endangering honeybee colonies around the world and incurring an immense financial toll. HIVEOPOLIS aims to help the bees in coping with these adverse environmental factors by establishing technologies in and around a futuristic honeybee colony that allow the colony to perform well in very challenging environments
824071 – NeuHeart – A neuroprosthesis to restore the vagal-cardiac closed-loop connection after heart transplantation
The modulation of rate- and load-contractility relationship of the donor heart is significantly altered after transplantation even if using different surgical techniques. Addressing this fundamental clinical problem is the main goal of NeuHeart, that will be furthered by specifically investigating the physiology of denervated heart which will facilitate the development of a bioelectronic solution based on the closed-loop neuromodulation of the vagus nerve (VN), using a regenerative neural interface (for VN stimulation) and implanted artificial sensors (to record sensory information and close the loop).
Socially interactive technologies
824153 – POTION – Promoting social interaction through emotional body odours
POTION proposes a novel technological paradigm combining new knowledge about the chemical composition of human social chemosignals together with a novel olfactory-based technology designed to drive social behaviour. The artificially synthetized chemosignals of happiness and fear will provide the basis of an innovative computer-controlled odour delivery system able to drive the approach-avoidance social strategy. This breakthrough device will be controlled in a closed loop by the social-emotional state of the subjects evaluated through a novel computational neural model.
823783 – WeNet – WeNet – The Internet of US
Technology does not in-and-by-itself provide support for developing and maintaining the social relationships that transcend geographical and cultural backgrounds. WeNet addresses this gap by providing a diversity-aware, machine-mediated paradigm of social relations. The goal is connecting people that can support each other, and the key is leveraging their diversity.
Disruptive micro-energy and storage technologies
824066 – E-MAGIC – European Magnesium Interactive Battery Community
The rechargeable magnesium battery (RMB) constitutes a paradigmatic example of a promising, alternative non-lithium energy storage systems, that may overcome lithium-ion batteries issues. E-MAGIC gathers the key scientific and technical researchers in Europe to develop the required new frontier knowledge and foundational approaches on RMB, bringing an effective work on R&D by a rational design of high voltage/high capacity cathode materials and novel electrolytes in order to deliver a safe RMB with more 400 Wh kg-1 and less than 100 €/Kwh.
824072 – HARVESTORE – Energy HarveStorers for Powering the Internet of Things
The HARVESTORE project aims to power Internet of Things nodes from ubiquitous heat and light sources by using nano-enabled micro-energy systems with a footprint below 1cm3. Using disruptive concepts from the emerging Nanoionics and Iontronics disciplines, which deal with the complex interplay between electrons and ions in the nanoscale, a radically new family of all-solid state micro-energy sources able to harvest and store energy at the same time will be developed.
Topological matter
824123 – SKYTOP – Skyrmion-Topological insulator and Weyl semimetal technology
The overall objective in SKYTOP is to make cross-fertilization between different topological classes of materials to realize devices with intertwined electronic spin and topology. In particular, in this project the aim is to combine two “topological classes”, one existing in real space associated with skyrmions and a second one defined in the reciprocal space associated with topological insulators (TI) and Weyl semimetals (WSM).
824140 – TOCHA – Dissipationless topological channels for information transfer and quantum metrology
The goal of TOCHA is to develop the next generation of topological devices and architectures across which information can flow without losses for the development of technologies in fields ranging from information processing to quantum communication and metrology. TOCHA will develop ballistic transistors that could operate at THz cut-off frequencies and, for metrology, it will establish a new paradigm for electrical resistance quantization standardization.
These 15 new FET-Proactive projects have been selected for funding after the call for proposals H2020-FETPROACT-2018-2020, in the topic FETPROACT-01-2018
Article Source: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/15-new-fet-proactive-research-and-innovation-actions-chosen
