Human migratory flows are currently at an unprecedented scale. The majority of these flows concern forced displacements, turning into long-term settlements in host countries, making ethnic diversity a permanent feature of our societies. Managed incorrectly, rapid changes in ethnic composition can harm host communities’ social capital and give ways to ethnic conflicts and polarization. Given that immigration will remain an inevitable global reality for the foreseeable future, designing and implementing inclusive social policies emerge as pressing policy imperatives. Leveraging the power of public education, the overarching goal of the proposed study program is to offer evidence-informed policy actions to help build ethnically diverse communities characterized by tolerance and inclusion rather than conflict and segregation. The proposal builds on a decade long research agenda to implement and test two uniquely designed educational interventions, one mitigative, the other preventative in nature. These interventions will involve two large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to be run in parallel for four consecutive years. The first study concerns a unique educational action to mitigate ethnic tensions and conflict in at-risk post-primary schools. The second study involves a pedagogical transformation intervention targeting primary school children who will progress into the post-primary schools targeted in the first study. Both RCTs are novel with respect to the content and delivery of the interventions, comprehensiveness of outcomes to be measured, sample size, and long-term follow-up opportunity. The results of this research program will: (i) generate much-needed evidence to design effective educational policies aiming at building social cohesion in communities afflicted by mass migratory flows, (ii) unravel for the first time the causal role of public education in raising tolerant and inclusive generations, free from ethnic conflict and segregation.

Modern communication networks are rapidly evolving into sophisticated systems combining communication and computing capabilities. Computation at the network edge is the key to supporting many emerging applications, from extended reality to smart health, smart cities, smart factories and autonomous driving. SONATA is motivated by the fact that the large scale adoption of edge intelligence technology, while benefiting human productivity and efficiency, will result in a surge of data and computation in mobile networks, which, in turn, will exacerbate their already significant energy consumption. SONATA is an interdisciplinary effort to tame this growing energy demand by combining memristive hardware and energy harvesting technologies with novel machine learning algorithms and physical layer communication techniques. In particular, we want to combine the energy efficient in-memory computing and learning potential of memristive devices with an “over-the-air computation (OAC)” approach to edge learning, which turns the air from a purely communication medium to a computation unit. Our project not only aims at reducing the energy requirements of edge learning systems drastically, but also focuses on making them robust against stochastic failures, due to unreliable hardware or energy sources. We will exploit tools from circuit design, coding theory, wireless communications, machine learning and network science to achieve these goals. Results from SONATA will open up new directions for research and development of technologies that will allow mobile systems to offer the much anticipated communication and computing services in a sustainable manner.

The main objective of the RoboCom++ proposal is to lay the foundation for a future global interdisciplinary research programme (e.g., a FET-Flagship project) on a new science-based transformative Robotics, to be launched by the end of the H2020 Programme. RoboCom++ will gather the community and organise the knowledge necessary to rethink the design principles and fabrication technologies of future robots. RoboCom++ will aim at developing the cooperative robots (or Companion Robots) of the year 2030, by fostering a deeply multidisciplinary, transnational and federated effort. The mechatronic paradigm adopted today, although successful, may prevent a wider use of robotic systems. For example, system complexity increases with functions, leading to more than linearly increasing costs and power usage and decreasing robustness. RoboCom++ will pursue a radically new design paradigm, grounded in the scientific studies of intelligence in nature. This approach will allow achieving complex functionalities in a new bodyware with limited use of computing resources, mass and energy, with the aim of exploiting compliance instead of fighting it. Simplification mechanisms will be based on the concepts of embodied intelligence, morphological computation, simplexity, and evolutionary and developmental approaches. Exploring these concepts in order to develop new scientific knowledge and new robots that can effectively negotiate natural environments, better interact with human beings, and provide services and support in a variety of real-world, real-life activities, requires a coordinated and federated initiative. Ultimately, the Companion Robots conceived in RoboCom++ may foster a new wave of economic growth in Europe by boosting the deployment of ubiquitous robots and web-based robotic services. The RoboCom++ community will pursue these ambitious objectives by cooperating along three main lines of action: 1) building the community and the tools for research reproducibility (benchmarks, metrics, data sharing protocols, test platforms, standards); 2) proof-of-concept research pilots; and 3) defining the long-term S&T roadmap, competitiveness strategy, governing and financing structure, and the ethical, legal, economic and social framework of a future FET Flagship –like initiative on Robotics . RoboCom++ will actively pursue collaboration with industry, along with dissemination, community outreach and participation of EU citizens and stakeholders, with particular attention to the issue of robots and jobs, and to the analysis and proposition of viable policy options.

During the last decade, active matter has been attracting increasing interest because its study can shed light on far-from- equilibrium physics and provide tantalizing options to perform tasks not easily achievable with other available techniques on the micro- and nanoscale. We are now on the threshold of breakthroughs that will permit us to gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental challenges associated with far-from-equilibrium physics (e.g. the physics of living organisms, tissue formation and cancer growth) and to address several key technological challenges of great societal and economic impact (e.g. biomimetic materials, targeted localization, pick-up and transport of nanoscopic cargoes in drug delivery, bioremediation and chemical sensing). However, there are still several open challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve the full scientific and technological potential of active matter in real-life settings: 1. to develop biocompatible active particles, reducing their footprint by scaling them down towards the nanoscale; 2. to determine their emergent and synergistic behaviors in complex and crowded environments; 3. to engineer self-assembly in dense active and living matter systems. This ETN will provide the necessary infrastructure to train a new generation of physicists in the highly interdisciplinary fields related to active matter. ESRs will master the theoretical, numerical and experimental tools currently employed in the study of active matter, will create new tools for understanding active matter systems, and, through collaboration with companies, will be able to transfer this knowledge to biomedical, bioremediation and sustainability applications. Our ESRs will acquire highly demanded transferable skills increasing their future employability in academia and industry. Extending the reach of this ETN, we will also prepare interdisciplinary and interactive lecturing material to serve as foundation for study programs in active matter.

The aim of the present proposal is to initiate an interdisciplinary research program to develop 3D micromachining of silicon towards novel silicon photonics and microfluidic applications. We are motivated by the myriad of applications based on 3D micromachining of glass that peaked in the early 2000's, and still continues to impact integrated photonics and microfluidics, among other fields. These successes were achieved using lasers at wavelengths for which glass is transparent (most commonly 1 um, 800 nm and their second harmonics). Most of the important results demonstrated in glass can be carried over to silicon using a long-wavelength laser (beyond 1.1 um, silicon is highly transparent), though it is clear that the physics will be different, not least because glass is amorphous and silicon is crystalline. To this end, we propose an interdisciplinary research effort that includes first developing the necessary laser technology, then building up the physical understanding, and finally pursuing high impact applications. Our approach can be summarized as: (1) Developing a novel, femtosecond, high-energy laser at 1.5 um, (2) Developing in-situ diagnostics based on pump-probe imaging of the laser-material interaction, (3) Exploring the physics of the laser-silicon interaction, (4) Applying our physical understanding and laser technology as a platform to 3D micromachining of silicon towards novel silicon-photonics and microfluidic applications.