EVITA (Electric Vehicle and Infrastructures for Transport Applications) aims to consolidate a consortium on the training of Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) on innovative electrified vehicles and their infrastructures within a forward LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) approach to submit a proposal to MSCA doctoral network. Towards the energy transition, it is of high interest to train a cohort of high-level scientists to become key leaders in this mobility revolution. A first proposal has been submitted on this topic to H2020-MSCA-ITN-2020 (eCAT) and despite a mark of 93.6%, it has not been selected. EVITA aims to strengthen the consortium, include more relevant partners and improve the proposal quality. Only the core of this consortium is included in EVITA to reshape the project according to the evaluation summary report and also the new framework of the MSCA within Horizon Europe. EVITA is managed by University of Lille, which will be the coordinator for the proposal to the HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01-01 call. University of Lille has an expertise on simulation and control of various electrified vehicles. University of Lille is coordinator of the H2020 PANDA project (2018-2022, GA #824256) that develops a disruptive simulation method of electric vehicles. PANDA will serve as foundation for the new proposal by 1) training ESRs on these innovative methods, 2) inclusion of LCA indicators in the simulation of electrified vehicles, 3) extension of applications from automotive to subway and railways systems, and 4) integration of their supply infrastructures to have a broader approach of low-carbon urban mobility. Siemens Software Industry (Romania) has an expertise on simulation packages for automotive. Siemens is strongly involved in PANDA and will enable the development of innovative simulation tools. Vrije University of Brussels (Belgium) has a recognized expertise on electrified vehicles in particular using a classical LCA approach that will bring a real added value to the project. University of Oviedo has an expertise on railways transportation systems including their infrastructures. This partner will enable a valuable extension to the public transportation system. All these partners were beneficiaries for the previous proposal submitted to H2020-MSCA-ITN-2020. At the time, all the previous beneficiaries will be involved in the future proposal, including the members cited above and the Technical University of Eindhoven (Netherlands, expertise on electric buses). University of Lille will include 3 research Labs: L2EP (electrical engineering, electric vehicles), CRIStAL (computer sciences, autonomous vehicles) and TVES (human and social sciences, mobility policies) to extend the skills of the proposal and propose multidisciplinary trainings. Moreover, previous partner organisations will be included: MEL (Metropole Européenne de Lille, France, mobility planning), Rochester Institute of Technology (USA, economics and public policy), and Valeo (France, new electric powertrains). However, the evaluation summary report indicates that the involvement of some of other partner organisations was too weak and that the consortium needs to be completed. Therefore, new members should be included to complete the value chain. The MRSEI funding will thus enable meetings and discussions to 1) include new consortium members to complete and 2) increase the quality of the proposal by a consulting company working on the proposal writing, especially on the “impact” section. Moreover, EVITA will continue after submission in the philosophy of valorisation of the important work dedicated to this submission. In case the proposal is not selected, EVITA will analyse the feedbacks to reshape the consortium and/or the project. In case the new proposal is selected, EVITA will develop a new topic based on this positive experience, to submit a new proposal in future calls, knowing that the first submission is often a draft to be refined before a selection.

Trace elements and their isotopes (TEIs) play a crucial role in the ocean and can be used as tracers for past and modern oceanic processes. Studying their biogeochemical cycles has direct implications in diverse research areas such as carbon cycling, climate, ocean ecosystems and environmental contamination. In this context, GEOVIDE proposes to undertake an integrated oceanographic transect in the North Atlantic and Labrador Sea. This area is crucial for the Earth climate and the thermohaline circulation as it represents a major overturning area of the so-called Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC). Moreover, TEI distribution is poorly constrained in this area. GEOVIDE is an international collaborative programme which aims at better constraining the uncertainties on water and heat fluxes across the cruise section, notably by adding information on the deep water mass export and circulation, but also in providing new information on chemical element fluxes. GEOVIDE will allow the quantification of processes that influence the distribution of key TEIs in this area, in particular advective and scavenging processes, biological uptake, exchanges with the margins, and atmospheric deposition. The main scientific objectives of GEOVIDE are to: 1- Better know and quantify the MOC and the carbon cycle in a decadal variability context, adding new key tracers 2- Map the TEI distribution with their physical and chemical speciation along a full-depth high resolution ocean section 3- Characterize the TEI sources and sinks and quantify their fluxes at the ocean boundaries 4- Investigate the link between the TEIs, and the production, export and remineralisation of particulate organic matter 5- Better understand and quantify the paleoproxies 231Pa/230Th, Nd isotopes, and Si isotopes. The project is based on a 44-day oceanographic cruise on the R/V “Pourquoi Pas?” (summer 2014). We will use a series of novel techniques and state-of-the-art instrumentation. The strength of the project resides in its interdisciplinarity: physical oceanography, geochemistry and biogeochemistry will be coupled, merging observation and modelling. GEOVIDE gathers highly qualified scientific teams from five different countries. This project will be the French contribution in the North Atlantic to the Global GEOTRACES TEI survey (official GA01 GEOTRACES section) and will provide essential information, notably for the modelling of the present and past ocean, on TEI distributions in this key area of the thermohaline circulation. GEOVIDE will also actively contribute to other international programmes, such as SOLAS, IMBER, CARBOCHANGE and CLIVAR. GEOVIDE is part of the axis 2 of the LabexMER “A changing Ocean” and is linked to the Equipex NAOS “Novel Argo Ocean observing System”, in particular to the WP5 “Deep oxygen floats in the North Atlantic”. GEOVIDE is also a strong international and original action of the UPEE Pole in the framework of the IDEX UNITI in Toulouse. Finally, GEOVIDE has an educational component at various academic levels and the results of the project will be incorporated into materials for web dissemination and public outreach, as well as through scientific publications and presentations at international conferences. Five young scientists (three research associates and two PhD students) will be trained during this project. The results obtained during this project will be available through various databases (SISMER, LEFE-CYBER, and the GEOTRACES International Data Assembly Centre).

Seven workshops, organized alternately in Europe and Asia, enabled skills building between the environmental and information science teams. The cross-skills thus established have enabled the majority of the members of the TORUS program to progress from a multidisciplinarity towards an operational transdisciplinarity - where the disciplines interpenetrate with a common language and knowledge bases. Details of the presentations and courses given during the workshops are available online on the program's website (http://www.cloud-torus.com):1.the meeting between two worlds, geosciences and cloud computing.2.computer architecture and application in environmental sciences.3.cloud computing for air pollution research.4.cloud computing for prospective studies of land use change.5.cloud computing for Remote Sensing.6.HUPI platform and sensitivity analysis.7.TORUS cookbook.In addition to the documents produced for the workshops, three books are published from TORUS productions. Books to be published in 2020 by ISTE editions. The first volume poses the problem of large data in geosciences before presenting the main methods of analysis and IT solutions mobilized to respond to them. The second volume presents remote sensing, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial data infrastructures (SDI) which are central to all disciplines dealing with geographic space. The third volume is a collection of thematic application cases representative of the specificities of the teams involved in TORUS and which motivated their needs in terms of cloud computing.TORUS also enabled the installation of the two computer servers initially planned and dedicated to cloud computing, one installed at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand, the other at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi in Vietnam. Because to be powerful, the dynamic sharing of IT resources available at the base of coud computing at a cost, having your own equipment allows you to no longer be constrained and limited. Each server is equipped with more than 200 CPUs and powerful processing and storage memories (details on the website), it is possible to use them directly at the infrastructure level (IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service) but the most users develop services at platform level (PaaS - Platform as a Service) in this case HUPI (http://hupi.fr).Finally, TORUS has multiplied communication and promotion actions in order to open the program to other environmental themes and to promote scientific research related to the program (two theses were funded).We had bet with TORUS to bring environmental sciences to information sciences to offer the former the skills to understand the current paradigm of big data and cloud computing while opening up to the latter the environmental thematic dimension taken at very broad sense of the term. There was and there is still an urgent need to bring these universes together so that they work together for the sustainable development of our planet, which needs environmental conditions monitoring and prospective modeling to provide knowledge bases for decision-makers.

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.

The main objective of the project is to strengthen Indo-Pacific studies. As the broad region of Indo-Pacific is getting more and more attention both from policy-makers and scholars, there is a growing demand for better understanding of the region which is provided by the growing research area of Indo-Pacific studies. For the purpose of the project Indo-Pacific studies are defined as a multidisciplinary research area focusing on the political, economic and social developments in the Indo-Pacific region. The concept of Indo-Pacific is derived originally from geography and comprises the areas of two oceans: Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean with exclusion of the coast of Americas and polar regions. Indo-Pacific spans from India and Pakistan, east through Southeast Asian states to China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. There is a world-wide need to build and strengthen Indo-Pacific studies. This demand for deepening of the understanding of the region can be justified as follows. Firstly, it is the region inhabited by over 1/3 of the humankind. Secondly, the countries of the region are developing very rapidly and their impact on global affairs is increasing. From the EU perspective the region is especially important for EU because it represents the biggest export market for the European products. 5 EU HEIs and 2 HEIs from India and Japan will collaborate for 31 months, involving 22 scholars to obtain the following OUTPUTS: -1 curriculum report with recommendations (O1)-22 podcasts recorded to popularize science (O3)-1 Digital, Open Access handbook (O2) with 22 chapters including: glossary, learning outcomes, smart index, exercises, cases, assignments, future reading list, follow-up questions + 1 annex with guidelines for teacher and a guide for self-study (O4)-7 partners will update their curricula and teaching techniques for IPS at MA level-21 educators trained in teaching IPS, will do field trainings in the EU (C7), India (C5) or Japan (C6)-240 students will test handbook chapters in India and Japan (C5 and C6)-90 students will test chapters in the EU (C7)-4 dissemination events OUTCOMES-changing study programs in the EU to establish and support IPS-improving didactic potential of teachers of Indo-Pacific Studies by providing them with innovative didactic tools, competences and recommendations-increasing the number of students specialized in IPS (through teaching) – 350 MA /yearly-increasing the number of scholars specialized in IPS (also through self-study) – 100/yearly-increasing awareness among the general public about the importance of the Indo-Pacific Region – 150 during, 4000 after project has ended.Specific for EU partners:-enhanced networking opportunities for partner institutions and staff-gather teaching materials from the region (C5 C6)All these outcomes are self-reinforcing like a virtuous circle: IPS programs will be active (and relevant) for years to come considering the rise of the Indo-Pacific region regarding global capital flows, trade, services, political influence, development, migration, regional security challenges and global challenges like multipolar great power rivalry (beyond the US-China rivalry), ecology and climate change. These factors in turn will create a growing need (pull factor) that will ensure a stable increase of new specialists on the region, which in turn will reinforce the human capital at HEIs (in the EU and beyond) to study the region, and engage with it professionally, legitimizing its pivotal role in global affairs. This same growing need will attract future funding by policy-makers for HEIs that have successfully adopted IPS. This will be a push factor for those Asia studies that have not conformed to ISP yet and do not focus on the interlinkages of Asia’s ever increasingly connected subregions.Since all outputs are tangible, and available through OPEN ACCESS on various online platforms or e-resource databases (O2). These platforms will receive funding for their upkeep by the coordinator - and the handbook availability in online databases will be guaranteed (by legal contract) by collaborating with a renowned publisher.The MONEY-VALUE of the handbook, which will of course be free in its digital version, will without doubt outcompete many of its future competitors for years to come, especially since at the moment NO handbook on this topic is available. EISIPS scholarly expertise that will be put into its development, cannot be outdone by single institutions, and will not easily be outdone by consortia either without similar funding opportunities