The Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme continues its journey towards scientific and technological breakthroughs with the funding of 12 new projects under Horizon 2020.
The essence of FET Proactive is to encourage researchers from different disciplines to work together to open promising paths towards radically new technological possibilities. Four specific topics were identified for this call:
- Future technologies for societal change,
- Biotech for better life,
- Disruptive information technologies,
- New technologies for energy and functional materials.
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.
ODYCCEUS - Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces
The idea behind ODYCCEUS is that detecting conflict at an early stage could help prevent social crises. The project aims to better understand the societal challenges by monitoring the information circulating in social media and digital news. The project will develop ways to translate this bold vision into reality and demonstrate its relevance in a large number of cases in the Euro-Mediterranean public arena.
MECHANO-CONTROL - Mechanical control of biological function
Understanding and controlling the mechanical forces transmitted through specific molecular bonds that drive biological function offers huge potential in oncology, regenerative medicine and biomaterial design. With that aim, MECHANO-CONTROL will develop and integrate different technologies to measure and manipulate mechanical and adhesive properties from the nanometre to the metre scale.
CResPace - Adaptive Bio-electronics for Chronic Cardiorespiratory Disease
CResPace will pioneer disruptive technology for bio-electronic medicine to provide much-needed therapies for cardiorespiratory and functional neurological disease. The technology uses small neural networks known as central pattern generators (CPG) to deliver fit-and-forget bio-electronic implants that respond to physiological feedback in real time, are safer, simpler, non-invasive, and will last a lifetime.
Neurofibres - Biofunctionalised Electroconducting Microfibres for the Treatment of Spinal Cord Injury
Neurofibres aims at a breakthrough in “Neuroregenerative Bio-electronics” by developing dual-function devices that will serve as electroactive scaffolds for central nervous system (CNS) regeneration and neural circuit activation.
BrainCom - High-density cortical implants for cognitive neuroscience and rehabilitation of speech using brain-computer interfaces
The goal of BrainCom is to develop a new generation of neuroprosthetic devices for large-scale and high density recording and stimulation of the human cortex, suitable to explore and repair high-level cognitive functions.
Plan4Act - Predictive Neural Information for Proactive Actions
Plan4Act sets out to go beyond reactive and reflex-like systems by inferring actions from action-predicting neural activity of complex action sequences. The goal of the Plan4Act project is to record and understand predictive neural activity and use it to proactively control devices in a smart house.
HOT - Hybrid Optomechanical Technologies
HOT will work on a new generation of devices, connecting or even containing several nanoscale elements in a single “hybrid” system. A particular focus will be on nano-optomechanical devices based on electrical, microwave or optical systems together with micro- and nano-mechanical systems. The potential of such devices is significant as it can provide new interfaces between optical, radio-frequency and microwave signals.
OPRECOMP - Open transPREcision COMPuting
OPRECOMP aims at demolishing the ultra-conservative “precise” computing abstraction and replacing it with a more flexible and efficient one, namely transprecision computing.
Bio4Comp - Parallel network-based biocomputation
Bio4Comp will establish the technological and scientific baseline and the interdisciplinary innovation eco-system needed to scale-up Network-based BioComputation (NBC) approach for parallel computing and applications. The vision is to use future NBC devices to solve specific problems, including non-deterministic-polynomial-time complete problems that are difficult to achieve with conventional, sequentially-operating electronic computers.
VIRUSCAN - Optomechanics for Virology
VIRUSCAN aims to apply frontier advancements in optomechanics to the biosensing and diagnostic fields and to create a new interdisciplinary research community with the goal to advance optomechanics, nanoelectromechanics, native mass spectrometry and biophysics towards clinical applications.
A-LEAF - An Artificial Leaf: a photo-electro-catalytic cell from earth-abundant materials for sustainable solar production of CO2-based chemicals and fuels
A novel concept for a photo-electro-catalytic (PEC) cell able to directly convert water and CO2 into fuels and chemicals (CO2 reduction) and oxygen (water oxidation) using exclusively solar energy will be designed, built, validated, and optimized.
MAGENTA - MAGnetic nanoparticle based liquid ENergy materials for Thermoelectric device Applications
MAGENTA proposes a brand new technological path in thermoelectric materials research for waste-heat recovery applications. The originality of the project is based on the newly discovered thermal-to-electric energy conversion capacity of ionic-liquids and ferrofluids; i.e., colloidal dispersions of magnetic nanoparticles in ionic liquids (IL-FFs).
These 12 new FET-Proactive projects have been selected for funding after the call for proposals H2020-FETPROACT-2016-2017 - Boosting emerging technologies.
