The principal aim of Networking Ecologically Smart Territories (NEST) will be to test the hypothesis that digital diversification, which will be explored as noodiversification and technodiversification as the conditions of resilience of human societies, holds the key to a reinvention of contemporary, proletarianising, industrial economics. For this purpose, a large transdisciplinary research mobility project is necessary in order to articulate local territorial situations with international concerns in the context of the Anthropocene. The aims will be achieved through an international and intersectorial exchange of researchers and staff across the academic and non-academic partners of NEST. The NEST consortium is made of 11 partners, 5 EU academic partners TU Dublin (IRL), IRI (FR), Paris Lumières (FR), USLK (PL) and UGE (FR), 2 Third Country academic Partners Uartes (EC), Berkeley (US) and 4 non-academic partners, DCC (IRL), CSSD( FR), Factory of the Living (PL), and Disnovation (FR) . There are 3 academic WPs.By extending the critique of digital technology already undertaken by the Digital Studies Network to reconsider the foundations of computer theory in relation to the concepts of locality, negentropy, anti-entropy, data economy and networked AI by developing the concepts of technodiversity and cosmotenchnics (WP1). To experiment and introduce new forms of collective responsibility through Territorial experimentation, enabling new forms of citizen participation in local governance through contributory research (WP2). To experiment and develop a network of territorial laboratories of digital contributory research in order to study the constraints acting on life and the archipelagos of ecological niches by species inhabiting the same territories, with a view to generating local understandings of living singularities and functional cooperations between territorial-laboratories and academics in view of the planetary threat. (WP3)

Since 2015, over 5 million people have arrived, or tried to arrive in the European Union seeking refuge. Other refugee receiving countries are faced with similar situations. Many of these refugees are young people. But whilst much has been written about the experiences of adult refugees and to a lesser extent about unaccompanied minors, there is very little research on the experiences of young refugees who are not (or are not recognized as) “unaccompanied”, and specifically about how these experiences impact their pathways to adulthood in or across borders. This in turn leads to an absence of effective policies to protect young people and to ensure their access to services which are essential to their well-being – both as young people and for their future adult lives. The project aims to provide timely new research focusing on various aspects of the experience of these young people growing up in a situation of forced migration, in order to contribute research both on youth, and on migration/mobility. In doing so it will also make recommendations on how to better support rights, agency and resilience of these young people. The research will be carried out in a range of countries in Europe (France, Greece, UK) and outside (Canada, South Africa) to analyse impacts of different social, legal and political contexts. The development of innovative methodologies combining traditional qualitative methods with social media research and digital communication tools, and emphasizing participatory research methods, will enhance the participation and self-expression of young refugees to allow them to “narrate” their lives and experiences. A feminist intersectional approach avoids essentialising young people as « vulnerable » and understands age as interacting with other social categorizations such as gender or race, to determine individual’s risks, vulnerabilities, but also possibilities for agency and resilience.

The Internet has been able to grow and develop very quickly in most countries because of its highly decentralized nature. Its resilience is based on a multiplicity of different paths that allow data to always bypass a blockage or a partial destruction of the network through alternative routes. This model is today called into question by a combination of dynamics. First, we observe a dynamic of fragmentation along national borders, at the initiative of some states who, in the name of national security, seek to restore control over the borders of what they see as their national cyberspace. Second, at a higher level of abstraction, we observe another dynamic, this time guided by market forces: the concentration of data traffic around a few major players in data routing and a few large platforms. Largely invisible, this concentration also leads to a form of fragmentation along commercial lines. These evolutions raise important issues in terms of cyber stability, resilience, free flow of data and human rights, that are largely overlooked short of scientific knowledge about the geopolitics of Internet data routes. DATAROUTES aims to carry out a cartography of Internet data routes in order to understand how the routing strategies of state and non-state actors shape cyberspace and to analyze, as a domain of application, the important security and policy issues it raises for the European Union. The goals of this project are to measure and map Internet routes using open source data, thanks to DATAROUTES’ Border Gateway Protocol observatory; investigate through field work the strategic goals of state and non-state actors uncovered by the cartography; and analyze the broader policy issues they raise for the European Union in the context of the implementation of the 2020 Cybersecurity Strategy for a Digital Decade. DATROUTES will provide a platform for open access to its data and methodologies in order to encourage a new stream of research on the geopolitics of data routing.

The aim of SMeLT is to provide a methodology to learn a similarity measure that is optimized for a given analogical transfer task. Among the different tasks that computational analogy systems implement, the transfer task matches a predictive and hypothetical inference in which some knowledge is extrapolated from a similar situation in order to interpret a new situation and complete its description. By providing a set of quality indicators for the similarity measure, and a metric learning method that optimizes these indicators, this project will unlock a major bottleneck that currently prevents a widespread application of transfer methods to real scenarii, which is to learn a similarity measure that is adequate for the task at hand. The project is a pluridisciplinary effort, that brings together researchers from cognitive science, computer science (computational analogy and similarity measures specialists), and health sciences (medical decision support specialists). The proposed methodology will be evaluated in two different application domains: the cooking domain, and the domain of decision support for the therapeutic management of breast cancer.