EU countries

How can amateurs contribute to research projects? In this issue, we put citizen science in the spotlight

The Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Advisory Group has produced a report which proposes to put FET at the nucleus of the European Innovation Council.

This infographic describes what High Performance Computing (HPC) is, what the HPC applications are, and what the European Commission does within its HPC strategy.

Horizon 2020's design and rules have been simplified to make them more user-friendly.

Horizon 2020 is the EU’s biggest ever programme for research and innovation, and it has got off to an excellent start. This brochure presents information on the first 100 calls for proposals that closed by 1 December 2014.

On 25 September, the Commission launched an online survey to gather opinions from stakeholders on the impact of the simplification measures introduced in Horizon 2020, and to ask for new ideas on future simplification.

Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU research and innovation programme ever. Almost €80 billion of funding is available over seven years (2014 to 2020) – in addition to the private and national public investment that this money will attract. This publication presents the full set of Key Performance and Cross-Cutting Issues Indicators for Horizon 2020, including those for the European Institute of Technology and EURATOM.

Eight new Centres of Excellence (CoEs) for computing applications have been selected following the recent call under e-Infrastructures. They will help strengthen Europe's existing leadership in HPC (high-performance computing) applications and cover important areas like renewable energy, materials modelling and design, molecular and atomic modelling, climate change, Global System science, and bio-molecular research, and tools to improve HPC applications performance.

Six projects have successfully been launched following the Call on e-Infrastructures for virtual research environments. Two more have their grant agreement under preparation. The new projects will identify and build on requirements from real use cases, e.g. integrating heterogeneous data from multiple sources and value-added services for computing, modelling, simulation, and data exploration, mining and visualisation, taking due account of privacy aspects.

Following the call for proposals "Towards exascale high performance computing" 21 projects have been selected and are starting in autumn 2015. The aim of the call was to attract projects that can achieve world-class extreme scale computing capabilities in platforms, technologies and applications.

New priorities have recently been defined by the European Commission on Open Innovation, Open Science and Open to the World policies. The purpose of the consultation on the Charter for Access to Research Infrastructures is to verify whether the current draft version of the Charter for Access to Research Infrastructures needs to be updated in order to better reflect these new priorities.

59 SMEs from 16 countries have been selected in the latest round of Horizon 2020 SME Instrument Phase 2. For each project, the participants will receive up to €2.5 million to finance innovation activities and the development of their business plans.

Gadgets and wearables that support a healthy lifestyle are very hip today, but not always very attractive for the elderly. This is where ELF@Home comes in. It empowers people to manage their own health by self-check, self-care and self-fitness.

Latest news on Future and Emerging Technologies research: funding opportunities, latest Project news, reporting on workshops & conferences, future events.

Flagship-affiliated physicists from RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich together with colleagues in Japan devised a method for peeling graphene flakes from a CVD substrate with the help of intermolecular forces.

Researchers with Europe’s Graphene Flagship have demonstrated superconducting electric currents in the two-dimensional material graphene that bounce between sheet edges without scattering. This first direct observation of the ballistic mirroring of electron waves in a 2d system with supercurrents could lead to the use of graphene-based Josephson junctions in applications such as advanced digital logic circuits, ultrasensitive magnetometers and voltmeters.

Business Insider UK compiled a list of 50 scientists from across the globe who are changing the world for the better. Katrin Amunts, working at Jülich Research Centre (DE) has been nominated for her work on the "BigBrain", which aims to create a 3D atlas of the human brain and should lead to unprecedented insights into the construction and organization of the brain and how it drives our behavior. She is co-leader of the Strategic Human Brain Data subproject.

Graphene Flagship researchers have developed an optical fibre laser that emits pulses with durations equivalent to just a few wavelengths of the light used. This fastest ever laser based on graphene will be ideal for use in ultrafast spectroscopy, and in surgical lasers that avoid heat damage to living tissue.

The ISC High Performance is the world's oldest High Performance Computing (HPC) community event, presenting the latest HPC technological developments and their application in research and commercial environments. This year the conference celebrated its 30th anniversary with about 2800 participants from 56 countries ( July 12 to July 16, 2015).

142 SMEs from 23 countries have been selected in the latest round of Horizon 2020 SME Instrument Phase 1. For each project, the participants will receive €50,000 to finance feasibility studies. They can also request up to three days of business coaching.