The IoT will contain a huge number of devices and objects that have very low or nonexistent processing and communication resources, coupled to a small number of high-power devices. The weakest devices, which are most ubiquitous, will not be able to authenticate themselves using cryptographic methods. Other important tasks in the IoT will be to verify if an object is authentic, or to identify an object. Our plan is to address these issues using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). PUFs, and especially Quantum Readout PUFs, are ideally suited to the IoT setting because they allow for the authentication and identification of physical objects without requiring any crypto or storage of secret information. Furthermore, we foresee that back-end systems will not be able to provide security and privacy via cryptographic primitives due to the sheer number of IoT devices. Our plan is to address these problems using privacy-preserving database structures and algorithms with good scaling behaviour. Approximate Nearest Neighbour (ANN) search algorithms, which have remarkably good scaling behaviour, have recently become highly efficient, but do not yet have the right security properties and have not yet been applied to PUF data. Summarised in a nutshell, the project aims to improve the theory and practice of technologies such as PUFs and ANN search in the context of generic IoT authentication and identification scenarios.

As the adoption of digital technologies expands, it becomes vital to build trust and confidence in the integrity of such technology. The SPIRIT project will investigate the Proof-of Concept of employing novel secure and privacy-ensuring techniques in services set-up in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, aiming to increase the trust of users in IoT-based systems. The proposed system will address distinct issues related to security and privacy, hence, overcoming the lack of user confidence, which inhibits utilisation of IoT technology. The proposed system will integrate three highly novel technology concepts developed independently by the consortium partners. Specifically, a technology, termed ICMetrics, for deriving encryption keys directly from the operating characteristics of digital devices comprising the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to provide an authentication framework for their operation. This prevents spoofing of such devices compromising users’ confidential data, and hence leading to increasing the trust and providence of such devices. This technology has been developed by the Universities of Kent and Essex in the UK. Another technology, termed a Semantic firewall, is a highly flexible network security system, developed by the University of La Rochelle (ULR) in France. The semantic firewall is able to allow or deny the transmission of data derived from an IoT device according to the information contained within the data and the information gathered about the requester, hence ensuring that access to such data is governed by the access permissions commensurate with the requester. Thirdly, a technology based on creating a content-based signature of user data /documents, in order to ensure the integrity of sent data upon arrival. This technology has also been developed at the University of La Rochelle but not as yet employed in the IoT domain. The integration of these technologies will be demonstrated in use case scenario in an IoT based service. In the demonstrator, data extraction and analysis will also be carried out, in order to produce content and semantic information needed by both the content-based signature and the semantic firewall technologies. This part will be carried out jointly by the University of La Rochelle and the University of Geneva in Switzerland. This project aims to build upon the highly significant results produced by the partners and to research the challenges of how these technologies can be adapted for IoT environment.

Vaccination is one of the most effective strategy for prevention and control of infectious diseases. However,current vaccines are not available for all infectious diseases especially endemic diseases in developingcountries including Thailand possibly due to their low incidence and lacking public attention. In addition, mostcommercially available vaccines in Thailand are imported and too expensive for the general population andpopulation at risk. Therefore, vaccine research and development especially for emreging diseases, such asLeptospirosis and Dengue, is crucial in Thailand.The research partners from Thailand and Switzerland have previously established collaborations for vaccinedevelopment. The “Southeast Asia – Europe Joint Funding Scheme for Research and Innovation” wouldpush forward this primary project, to the next step of a concrete collaboration to the institutional level and willfocus on adjuvanted leptospirosis and dengue vaccine development. Thereby, this project will aim to:1. Investigate the use of adjuvant systems in order to enhance the immunogenic properties of new multiplesubunit vaccines for leptospirosis and suitable tetravalent DNA vaccine for dengue fever to allow higherimmunogenicity and enhanced protection.2. Develop new oral vaccination approaches against leptospirosis and dengue, which combine M-celltargeting strategies and specific mucosal adjuvants.3. Organize a workshop on mucosal vaccination in Chulalongkorn University, with the collaboration of swissand french partners.4. Expand the collaborations to the institutional level between the Chula Vaccine Research Center (ChulaVRC), Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, the Vaccine Formulation Laboratory (VFL), University ofLausanne, Switzerland, the School of Pharmaceutical Sceinces Geneva-Lausanne (EPGL), Switzerland, andthe Faculty of Medicine in Saint-Etienne, France.This funding will not only help in strengthening the potential in vaccine research and development inThailand, but it is also critical to transfer the knowlege and technology from project partners in Switzerlandand France for adjuvanted vaccine development to Thailand. The different domain of expertise of the projectpartners, and their experience in transnational projects, will ensure the development of innovative solutionsto reduce the risks of infectious disease in Thailand.

The recent rapid evolution of citizen science due to the increased availability of digital platforms and low-cost science tools represents a key opportunity to address the societal challenges that are emerging from the need to adapt to climate change and the crises that are caused by it. Citizen science has potential to be a key foundation in the development of evidence-based knowledge and strategies for sustainability that are engaging society at large while solving multiple challenges. In order for citizen science to play a significant role in scaling up and speeding up the transitioning towards more resilient socioeconomic models, we propose to develop new digital tools that can greatly enhance the impact of collaboration practices aligned with existing communities of citizen science projects, for the European Green Deal Call (H2020). To this end, the objective of the Citizen Climate Monitor proposal (CCM) is to combine co-design and community engagement methodologies for the iterative development of digital dashboards to monitor, assess and strengthen citizen science initiatives around climate change challenges. Such R&D process development, built on top of the current EU projects that applicants are involved in, Crowd4SDG (2M€, 2020-23) and EU-Citizen.Science (2M, 2019-21) and based on a co-created approach to citizen science, requires a network of partners around existing open source tools and digital-based community projects. As a unified technological framework to handle data collection, analysis and community coordination, CCM will allow for a comprehensive and SDG-oriented visualization of open research initiatives and results in climate change related citizen science. On the other hand, it will serve as a collaboration and awareness tool for different stakeholders: researchers, civil society and the media, industry representatives and policy-makers. Focused on the call area “Enabling citizens to act on climate change through better monitoring and observing of the environment and their environmental impacts”, our current priority is to develop a strong network of partners at the local and international levels. This is needed in order to achieve a solid proposal strategy, conceptual approach and project plan, based on scientific advances and social innovation practices. In light of new cross-disciplinary approaches and participation models in citizen science, our aim is to co-develop an integrated solution that in addition to data collection allows for faster and more effective open collaboration dynamics, especially in phases of research project design and transversal impact analysis. Such large-scale open collaboration dynamics have flourished on the internet during the Covid crisis and in particular the lockdown period, and there are lessons to be learned from this experience on how to scale up participation and impact for the equally urgent climate crisis. This implies a series of actions under a co-created citizen science perspective, where in parallel to the co-creation of CCM open dashboards several analyses and interventions are also applied to properly integrate a diversity of stakeholders. Of particular importance, due to the localised and frequently small scale of these activities, is to identify new ways to accelerate knowledge sharing across European countries, and in particular those where citizen science is not well established. Our aim is to advance research-based solutions for European climate challenge resilience, in connection to community initiatives already operating from the Just One Giant Lab and Open Humans platforms, which will serve as case studies and proofs of concept. These collaborations will allow us to use our learnings from the analysis of the co-creation process within the CCM and rapidly implement them within these existing and thriving citizen science networks, thus helping us to overcome one of the main road blocks in community-driven inquiries: the creation of new communities.