Understanding the human journey of global colonisation is the history of modern humanity and the development of the diverse characteristics of peoples and cultures around the world. This five-year interdisciplinary project will investigate the peopling of South America, the last continental terra incognita (other than Antarctica) to be colonised by humans, constituting a virtually unprecedented migration of modern humans across richly diverse, empty landscapes during the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene transition. Situated at the geographical gateway to the continent, the project will investigate one of the most momentous demographic dispersals of our species into the diverse environments of north-western South America, encompassing coasts, savannahs and lowland, Sub Andean and Andean tropical forests. This process took place amidst one of the most significant climatic, environmental, and subsistence regime shifts in human history, which contributed to the extinction of megafauna, plant domestication, and today’s remarkable diversity of indigenous South American groups. Despite its geographical importance and a wealth of archaeological and palaeoecological data across its diverse environments, north-western South America has only been given cursory consideration to understand processes of human dispersion. This project will redress this imbalance by applying an innovative interdisciplinary approach that integrates state-of-art archaeology, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, palaeoclimatology, palaeoecology, ancient environmental DNA and isotope studies. The results will provide a global comparative perspective to the study of Late Pleistocene human colonisations, hunter-gatherer adaptations, the demise of megafauna and the beginning of plant cultivation and domestication. The results of the project have broader implications not only for archaeology but also for geography, palaeoclimate, palaeoecology, and molecular biology.

4AirCRAFT’s ultimate goal is to develop a next generation of stable and selective catalysts for the direct CO2 conversion into liquid fuels for the aviation industry, enabling the synthesis of sustainable jet fuel. 4AirCRAFT will overcome the current challenges by combining three main reactions into one reactor to increase the CO2 conversion rate and reduce energy consumption. 4AirCRAFT technology will produce sustainable jet fuel at low temperature (below 80 ºC), contributing to a circular economy and leading to a decrease in GHG and reduced dependence on fossil fuel-based resources. In order to achieve this goal, we will move beyond the SoA by precisely integrating and taking advantage of biocatalysts, inorganic nanocatalysts, electrocatalysts, and their controlled spatial distribution within application tuned catalyst carrier structures. These catalyst carrier structures will be based on metal-organic frameworks and engineered inorganic scaffolds with hierarchical porosity distribution. This will unravel the activity of catalytic active phases and materials based on earth-abundant elements allowing us to achieve high CO2 conversion percentages and selectivity towards jet fuels (C8−16). By achieving this we will be able to circumvent the need for Fischer–Tropsch synthesis, that is unselective for the synthesis of fuels, therefore eliminating further steps for hydrocracking or hydrorefining of Fischer–Tropsch waxes. In terms of inorganic catalysts, size and shape of metal NPs, metal clusters, and single atoms at the surface of catalyst carrier structures will be developed, and precise structure-performance-selectivity relationships will be established. In terms of biocatalyst, special emphasis will be given to assure the long-term stability of deployed enzymes through programmed anchoring and shielding from detrimental reaction conditions. Together application tuned catalyst carrier structures will be employed to steer selectivity towards C8−16 molecules.

Key industrial sectors e.g. automotive, are rapidly transformed by digital and communication technologies leading to the fourth industrial revolution. New ones are in the making, e.g. Smart Cities, which inspire a new breed of applications and services. The salient characteristic of these sectors, known as verticals, is that they are rapidly becoming open ecosystems built on top of common physical infrastructures and resources. This requires a high degree of technological convergence among vertical industries empowering them with enhanced technical capacity to trigger the development of new, innovative products, applications and services. 5G network infrastructures and embodied technologies are destined to “become a stakeholder driven, holistic environment for technical and business innovation integrating networking, computing and storage resources into one programmable and unified infrastructure”. It is this 5G vision that when it is further projected to accommodate verticals raises a number of technical issues Motivated by them, 5GinFIRE project aspires to address two interlinked questions: - Q1: How such a holistic and unified environment should look like? - Q2: How can 5GinFIRE host and integrate verticals and concurrently deal with reconciling their competing and opposing requirements? Addressing these key questions, 5GinFIRE main technical objective is to build and operate an Open, and Extensible 5G NFV-based Reference (Open5G-NFV) ecosystem of Experimental Facilities that integrates existing FIRE facilities with new vertical-specific ones and enables experimentation of vertical industries. In order to guarantee architectural and technological convergence the proposed environment will be built in alignment with on-going standardization and open source activities. Accordingly, the Open5G-NFV FIRE ecosystem may serve as the forerunner experimental playground wherein innovations may be proposed before they are ported to emerging “mainstream” 5G networks.

The vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV)-Zaire Ebola vaccine (VSV-ZEBOV) is a recombinant vector-based vaccine in which the VSV envelope glycoprotein was replaced with the Zaire strain Ebola virus glycoprotein. Within one year of the initiation of its clinical development, the VSV-ZEBOV vaccine has demonstrated safety, immunogenicity and a remarkably high protective efficacy against Ebola Virus Disease, using a high vaccine dose (2x107 pfu) in the WHO-sponsored VSV-ZEBOV ring-vaccination trial in adults in Guinea. However, several key questions remain unanswered, including its mode of action, its correlation with protection and reactogenicity, the expected duration of protective efficacy and determinants of long-term responses, the influence of baseline immunity on vaccine “take”, and the vaccine efficacy in children - a most vulnerable population. Following the interruption of the 2014-2015 Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak, these questions, being central to the future licensing and use of VSV-ZEBOV, may not be addressed by collecting field data. The VSV-EBOPLUS project therefore proposes to use cutting-edge systems biology approaches to address these key questions, capitalizing on the unique availability of large series of extremely well defined samples from clinical vaccine studies with the VSV-ZEBOV vaccine in three different continents (Europe, Africa, US). Specifically, the overarching objective of VSV-EBOPLUS is to comprehensively decipher the immune and molecular signatures of adult and pediatric responses elicited by VSV-ZEBOV through systems biology approaches. VSV-EBOPLUS will benefit from harmonized and standardized clinical trial protocols, in almost 1’000 adults, adolescents and children. We propose: 1) to examine early (days 0 to 7) blood samples from 512 adults injected with graded doses (from 3x103 to 1x108 pfu) of VSV-ZEBOV;

Wind as a clean and renewable alternative to fossil fuels has become an increasingly important contributor to the energy portfolio of both Europe and Brazil. At almost every stage in wind energy exploitation ranging from wind turbine design, wind resource assessment to wind farm layout and operations, the application of HPC is a must. The goal of HPCWE is to address the key open challenges in applying HPC on wind energy, including efficient use of HPC resources in wind turbine simulations, accurate integration of meso- and micro-scale simulations, and optimization. The HPCWE consortium consists of 13 partners representing the top academic institutes, HPC centres and industries in Europe and Brazil. By exploring collaborations between Europe and Brazil, this consortium will develop novel algorithms, implement them in state-of-the-art codes and test the codes in academic and industrial cases to benefit the wind energy industry and research in both Europe and Brazil.