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In early 2020, the EOSC Community took another crucial step on the road to the development and implementation of the European Open Science Cloud, as seven key EOSC-related Horizon 2020 projects signed a Collaboration Agreement in support of the EOSC Governance. The Agreement involves all the projects supported within the INFRAEOSC-05-2018-2019 call. The Agreement provides a useful framework for all parties to collaborate on a wide range of topics, in order to enhance synergies in all mutual activities related to the EOSC. The projects also agreed on a Joint Activity Plan, which will guide them towards the first iteration of EOSC. Overlaps and complementarities among projects were identified, as well as specific areas for potential cooperation, ultimately aimed at the development of a common strategy to synchronise activities with the EOSC Working Groups. Between April and May 2020, EOSCsecretariat.eu collected the position papers on EOSC compiled by the INFRAEOSC 5b projects, the subgroup that specifically includes the four regional projects covering all corners of Europe, as well as the thematic project ExPaNDS. We would like to thank the five Horizon 2020 projects which have contributed to the making of this compilation of EOSC position papers: EOSC-Nordic (GA No. 857652), EOSC-Pillar (GA No. 857650), EOSC-synergy (GA No. 857647), ExPaNDS (GA No. 857641), and NI4OS-Europe (GA No. 857645).

Our third newsletter including information about our main achievements during the second 6 months project period.

This is the first issue of the GERONTE H2020 project newsletter. The newsletter aims to communicate to all interested project research and innovation news and activities as they happen. The GERONTE Newsletter is published twice a year and archived on ZENODO for long-term open accessibility. To receive GERONTE newsletter by email on first publication, please subscribe on GERONTE website at https://geronteproject.eu

Complex service robotics scenarios entail unpredictable task appearance both in space and time. This requires robots to continuously relocate and imposes a trade-off between motion costs and efficiency in task execution. In such scenarios, multi-robot systems and even swarms of robots can be exploited to service different areas in parallel. An efficient deployment needs to continuously determine the best allocation according to the actual service needs, while also taking relocation costs into account when such allocation must be modified. For large scale problems, centrally predicting optimal allocations and movement paths for each robot quickly becomes infeasible. Instead, decentralized solutions are needed that allow the robotic system to self-organize and adaptively respond to the task demands. In this paper, we propose a distributed and asynchronous approach to simultaneous task assignment and path planning for robot swarms, which combines a bio-inspired collective decision-making process for the allocation of robots to areas to be serviced, and a search-based path planning approach for the actual routing of robots towards tasks to be executed. Task allocation exploits a hierarchical representation of the workspace, supporting the robot deployment to the areas that mostly require service. We investigate four realistic environments of increasing complexity, where each task requires a robot to reach a location and work for a specific amount of time. The proposed approach improves over two different baseline algorithms in specific settings with statistical significance, while showing consistently good results overall. Moreover, the proposed solution is robust to limited communication and robot failures.

Cold-water corals form substantial biogenic habitats on continental shelves and in deep-sea areas with topographic highs, such as banks and seamounts. In the Atlantic, many reef and mound complexes are engineered by Lophelia pertusa, the dominant framework-forming coral. In this study, a variety of mapping approaches were used at a range of scales to map the distribution of both cold-water coral habitats and individual coral colonies at the Mingulay Reef Complex (west Scotland). The new ArcGIS-based British Geological Survey (BGS) seabed mapping toolbox semi-automatically delineated over 500 Lophelia reef ‘mini-mounds’ from bathymetry data with 2-m resolution. The morphometric and acoustic characteristics of the mini-mounds were also automatically quantified and captured using this toolbox. Coral presence data were derived from high-definition remotely operated vehicle (ROV) records and high-resolution microbathymetry collected by a ROV-mounted multibeam echosounder. With a resolution of 0.35 × 0.35 m, the microbathymetry covers 0.6 km2 in the centre of the study area and allowed identification of individual live coral colonies in acoustic data for the first time. Maximum water depth, maximum rugosity, mean rugosity, bathymetric positioning index and maximum current speed were identified as the environmental variables that contributed most to the prediction of live coral presence. These variables were used to create a predictive map of the likelihood of presence of live cold-water coral colonies in the area of the Mingulay Reef Complex covered by the 2-m resolution data set. Predictive maps of live corals across the reef will be especially valuable for future long-term monitoring surveys, including those needed to understand the impacts of global climate change. This is the first study using the newly developed BGS seabed mapping toolbox and an ROV-based microbathymetric grid to explore the environmental variables that control coral growth on cold-water coral reefs.

This poster introduces the idea of a multi-user, multi-device XR-system to be set up at a construction site, for both co-located and remote use. This concept will be reified and implemented during the EU-funded project "BIMprove – Improving Building Information Modelling by Realtime Tracing of Construction Processes", starting September 2020. Building Information Modeling (BIM) facilitates a cooperative method of working, and transparent communication between all stakeholders of a building (or built asset in general), by the use of digital models that hold all relevant data and information about the building. This includes 3DCAD- data, but also non-geometrical data. So a building information model is a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility, forming a reliable basis for decisions during its life-cycle; defined as existing from earliest conception, through construction and operation, to demolition.

In the HIIG blog series on metaphors of the digital society, we uncover the vocabularies that are thrown around almost haphazardly these days. These terms are often deployed in the scholarly and societal discourse without much thought about their meaning and use. Here, Benedikt Fecher and Tony Ross-Hellauer dismantle one of these metaphors of the digital society: open science. We believe that, depending on how you look at it, open science can be understood as both a tautology and an antithesis.

Sustainable urban mobility planning (SUMP) is a strategic and integrated approach to dealing with the complexity of urban transport. One of its eight principles emphasises the importance of taking the entire functional urban area into consideration when developing and implementing such a strategic plan. What must not be forgotten, however, is that a city consists of many different neighbourhoods and this planning level is of equal importance. This SUMP topic guide highlights ways in which planning efforts at the neighbourhood level and at the city-wide level can complement one another. It is based on the experience of the CIVITAS project SUNRISE and its sister projects. The document highlights the specific advantages of planning for sustainable mobility at the neighbourhood level. The neighbourhood is where people’s everyday-life unfolds and where many mobility-related choices are anchored and determined. It is also a spatial level with certain features that can and should be utilised on the way to a more sustainable mobility system. This includes short distances that are conducive to active modes of transport, but also a shared sense of identity, detailed local knowledge and established communication channels etc. Another key advantage of working at the neighbourhood-level is the opportunity to involve residents and stakeholders intensively along all steps of the innovation chain – much more than what is typically possible in city-wide (SUMP) planning processes: The identification of problems, the development of measures, their implementation and their evaluation. The starting point of this Topic Guide is therefore the nexus between “co-creation” as a procedural approach and the neighbourhood as a spatial / social unit. However, there is usually a lack of power at the neighbourhood level, a lack of specialist expertise, of quality data, of paid staff capacity and of influence on infrastructure decisions that affect the neighbourhood. All of this means that efforts at the neighbourhood-level should be “joined-up” with efforts at the city-wide level. It also means that if a city’s high-level mobility planning ignores the reality in its many neighbourhoods, it runs the risk of “structural arrogance” and/or ignorance and simply of limited effectiveness. In other words, if mobility does not “work” in the various neighbourhoods it is unlikely to work in the city as a whole. Therefore, neighbourhood-based and city-wide planning must be aligned. The Topic Guide highlights situations where this alignment makes most sense and how such an alignment can be achieved. If well coordinated, SUMP activities can support actions at the neighbourhood level in various ways and ensure that decentral efforts are compatible with city-wide goals and measures. Vice versa, initiatives for sustainable mobility in a neighbourhood can be the spearhead of certain measures that are supposed to be implemented in the entire city.

This document describes the output of Task 4.1 of the SSHOC (Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud) project funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement N° 823782. A technical infrastructure called Web Panel Sample Service (WPSS) has been implemented following the specifications published in November 2919 as deliverable 4.11 "A sample management system for cross- national web survey". This WPSS technical infrastructure is aimed at supporting large-scale, high quality cross-national multi- language web surveys. It provides a centralised management of survey fielding orchestration (publishing surveys, sending survey invites and reminders, fieldwork monitoring), and a decentralised and privacy- compliant handling of panellists’ data. This document outlines the twofold infrastructure that has been implemented, a Python2 / Django3 web application paired with a Qualtrics survey platform license. WPSS interacts through the API provided by Qualtrics4 to a dedicated and tailored Qualtrics License. After presenting the user roles involved either in the study coordination, sample management, messages and questionnaire editors and translators, the document presents the platform (WPSS or Qualtrics) each role is granted access to, and the actions available. Last, the document describes the relations between the 4.2 deliverable and the CRONOS-2 project led by ESS ERIC (funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement ESS-SUSTAIN-2 N°871063); a WPSS instance dedicated to the first use case of the D4.2 "a ready to use sample management system" deliverable, the "Opinion survey for <country>" survey.