Within the Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2014-2015, the FET Proactive call "Emerging themes and communities" had three initiatives: Global Systems Science (GSS); Knowing, doing and being: cognition beyond problem solving (KnowDoBe); and Quantum simulation (Q-SIM). The call closed end of March 2014, and 13 projects have been selected for funding.

Here is a short description of the projects retained in the three FET Proactive initiatives. Some are still in the Grant Agreement preparation phase, while some will start as January 1st 2015.

GSS aims to help integrate the abundance of data on social, economic, financial, technological, and ecological systems available today and elaborate societal responses across policy domains and cross-cutting authorities. The retained proposals reflect the wide variety of topics involved.

• CIMPLEX will develop tools to predict and influence the spread of diseases in complex social systems.
• DOLFINS will provide tools to improve policy development connected with the management of financial crises and with the facilitation of long term investments.
• GRACeFUL will develop scalable rapid assessment tools for collective policy making in global systems, and test these on climate-resilient urban design.

KnowDoBe pursues to establish new foundations for future robotics and other artificial cognitive systems with clear progress beyond current capabilities and design concepts.

• DREAM paves the way for a new generation of autonomous robots which incorporate sleep and dreamlike processes within a cognitive architecture for the discovery, optimization, re- structuring and consolidation of knowledge.
• FLORA ROBOTICA will study how plants can grow and develop through the progressive and symbiotic guidance of a robotic system, and how such a plant-robot-human ecosystem can be adaptive to the human environment.
• TIMESTORM aims to develop a robot that is sensitive to the passage of time and hence better able to cooperate with human agents in natural tasks that require knowledge of, and sensitivity to, temporal factors.
• socSMCs aims at the implementation of social behaviour in robots by modelling social interactions using sensory-motor patterns and action-effect contingencies, to achieve social human-robot interaction and cooperation.
• subCULTron aims for achieving long-term autonomy in a learning, self-regulating, self-sustaining underwater society/culture of robots in a high-impact application area: Venice, Italy.

Q-SIM challenges the research community to develop solutions using quantum simulation technologies to address real world problems that are fundamentally beyond the reach of classical computing.

• AQuS will develop platforms for dynamical simulators, and use these to address largely unexplored key questions on the power of quantum simulators, as well as to probe important questions in fundamental and applied physics.
• QUCHIP aims at implementing quantum simulation on integrated photonic processors to perform tasks with controlled quantum systems going beyond what can be achieved with ordinary digital computers.
• QUIC seeks to understand quantitatively the subtle interplay of quantum phenomena in insulators and conductors, and lay the foundations for the design of the quantum materials of tomorrow.
• QuProCS works on the development of a radically new approach to probe complex quantum systems for quantum simulations, based on the quantification and optimisation of the information that can be extracted by an immersed quantum probe as opposed to a classical one.
• RYSQ will implement a family of Rydberg Quantum Simulators with potential applications in artificial light harvesting systems, large quantum systems with controlled decoherence, and novel materials.