Diversity permeates our everyday life and covers many dimensions, such as competence, culture, gender or economic across humans and social relations. Technology has evolved to a point where humans from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and experiences have an unprecedented ability to connect with each other. Yet technology does not in-and-by-itself provide support for developing and maintaining the social relationships that transcend geographical and cultural backgrounds. WeNet addresses this gap by providing a diversity-aware, machine-mediated paradigm of social relations. The goal is connecting people that can support each other, and the key is leveraging their diversity. The WeNet paradigm includes a family of computational diversity-aware models supporting human interaction. Learning models construct diversity profiles based on people's past behaviour and interactions. A diversity-aware search builds upon these profiles to connect the "right" people together. To support people’s interactions, a diversity alignment mechanism lifts communication barriers to ensure that messages between humans are interpreted correctly, and a diversity-aware incentive mechanism generates incentives to motivate people to support each other. The entire paradigm is developed taking into consideration ethical guidelines. The WeNet platform provides the technological infrastructure to set out a series of studies that will be carried within universities worldwide with diverse student populations, and with the final goal of improving students' quality of life inside and outside the academic environment. Beyond universities, WeNet's innovative paradigm impacts human interactions in general, especially those that may benefit from a collaborative approach (creative industries, medical diagnosis, ...). The WeNet consortium will develop a research infrastructure that will allow the exploitation of the project results and strengthen the European innovation eco-system in a worldwide perspective.

"The project presented pretends to create a Regional Observatory for Quality and Equity in Higher Education in Latin America (ORACLE). The project is based on the assumption that there is no possible quality without equity. For it, the project involves the participation of 35 universities from 15 countries from Latin America and 5 European countries. It will be developed for 36 months from 2016 to 2019.ORACLE is an innovative project although it seeks to give continuity and sustainability to 4 ALFA.3 projects supported by the EU. In order to achieve an optimal function of the Observatory, previously, it is going to be built a Quality and Equity Unit (UCE) in each one of the 30 universities that participate in the project. These UCE's will propose and design actions, policies and strategies of institutional quality assurance and equity. Likewise, these institutional units will operate in a reticulated way and they will be the starter point and the main emphasis of ORACLE. The creation of new structures will encourage the Organizational Development of the Higher Education institutions of ""la Región"".The groups in vulnerable situation that ORACLE's Observatory is focused on are a total of eight: indigenous people, women, people with disabilities, non- traditional students, population with very low HDI, immigrants, ethnic minority groups and citizens from rural areas. ORACLE aims to provide an integral and integrated service and, unlike other initiatives, it is not exclusively circumscribed on the academic development of the students, but it will also work with people in vulnerable situations among all levels (professors, students, administrative staff and managers) and all institutional functions: teaching, research and management."

The OVERALL AIM of the INNOVA project is to improve the research management of Higher Education Institutions in Bolivia and Paraguay, with a specific focus on Climate Change.This goal will be achieved by implementing the following SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:- Firstly, development and consolidation of Research & Innovation policies in Bolivia and Paraguay, with a specific focus in Climate Change, in order to meet international standards. - Secondly, setting-up of an innovative Forward-Looking Platform to orientate coordinated and sustainable policymaking in the field of research management in Bolivia and Paraguay, drawing upon foresight methods.INNOVA will contribute to tackle the manifest HEIs underperformance on Research and Innovation in Bolivia and Paraguay. The current situation calls urgently for effective formulation of legal and policy frameworks to articulate R&D actions at HE systemic level, which INNOVA will foster through fruitful interplay between HEIs, private sector and policymakers to move forward on S,T&I. In order to generate systematic impact, INNOVA will leverage the involvement in the Consortium of the Ministries responsible for HE from both countries together with a balances combination of public and private HEIs in the region, accompanied by two experienced EU partners.