HEREDITARY aims to significantly transform the way we approach disease detection, prepare treatment response, and explore medical knowledge by building a robust, interoperable, trustworthy and secure framework that integrates multimodal health data (including genetic data) while ensuring compliance with cross-national privacy-preserving policies. The HEREDITARY framework comprises five interconnected layers, from federated data processing and semantic data integration to visual interaction. By utilizing advanced federated analytics and learning workflows, we aim to identify new risk factors and treatment responses focusing, as exploratory use cases, on neurodegenerative and gut microbiome related disorders. HEREDITARY is harmonizing and linking various sources of clinical, genomic, and environmental data on a large scale. This enables clinicians, researchers, and policymakers to understand these diseases better and develop more effective treatment strategies. HEREDITARY adheres to the citizen science paradigm to ensure that patients and the public have a primary role in guiding scientific and medical research while maintaining full control of their data. Our goal is to change the way we approach healthcare by unlocking insights that were previously impossible to obtain.

- Context of the project: Persist_EU is an Erasmus+ project, co-funded by the European Commission, that aims to evaluate the knowledge, beliefs and perceptions on scientific issues of European university students in five countries: Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany and Slovakia, as well as providing with an ICT tool for teachers and science communicators to evaluate their activities.Attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and trust seem to have a greater impact on decision making than factual knowledge. Therefore, understanding how EU student opinions are formed and how we can improve their scientific literacy in order to allow them to participate more actively in the design of public health or environmental campaigns or programs is key for the promotion of a more democratic European Union.- Objectives: 1. To produce an ICT based assessment method for the teaching of science among University students that might be applicable in the future for any teaching activity and potentially to any educational level. The platform will be also useful for science communicators.2. To improve the knowledge for science social appropriation of University students across the EU on specific topics of substantial social influence: climate change, vaccines, the use of CAMs, phytosanitary strategies and food safety.3. To analyze the regional, gender-related and cultural differences of University students in regards to their science social appropriation. For that purpose, the activities will be carried out in five different EU countries, two central European (Germany, Slovakia) and three south European nations (Portugal, Spain, and Italy). Therefore, we ensure to cover differences related to socio-geo-political issues.- Number and profile of participants: The activities of the project involved different types of participants.Learning, Teaching and Training activities (LTTA): 16 participants including IT experts, teachers, sociologist, science communicators and training developers.ScienceCamps: 572 university students from 5 different European countries (Germany, Slovakia, Spain, Portugal and Italy). 473 of which tested the online platform.Multiplier events (ME): 500 participants, including University students, teachers, researchers, science communicators.Description of undertaken activities: LTTA, oriented towards training the personnel of the different organisations participating in the project. It allowed preparing the transnational activities to evaluate the ICT platform as an assessment method and designing in a co-creative way the ICT platform itself. The scientific partners shared their desired features and the technical partners fixed the bar for what is achievable in the set time frame of the project and presented the partners the available options.ScienceCamps: in order to know the origin of the ideas and values of the students around topics of great relevance and social impacts such as climate change, genetically-modified organisms, or alternative therapies, different activities were carried out in five European countries (Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and Slovakia). These activities were called Persist_EU ScienceCamps and, in total 575 students participated, voluntarily, offering their point of view to generate knowledge about beliefs and perceptions of great value for the future construction of the EU. ScienceCamps are divided in two parts, A first part of receiving information about the different topics, through short videos and talks held by experts in each topic and a second participatory part consisting of a Q&A section, a discussion for finding arguments in favour or against a sentence presented for each topic and a final debate among the students. ME: the different ME were the closing events for the project as well as the presentation of the project results. They allowed the dissemination of the project results and the generation of connections to ensure the suistainability of the project.-Results and impact attained: ICT tool for the assessment of natural and social science teaching activities. The ICT tool developed allows to assess the initial knowledge of European students when configuring their beliefs and perceptions on different scientific topics and also the changes undergone during their participation in the project activities. A digital book and country reports with the methodology of the project, indications to use the ICT tool and an analysis of the science social appropriation of European University students on science-related hot-topics (climate change, vaccines use, complementary therapies, GMOs) that have a significant impact in EU day-to-day life and policy.The intellectual outputs created and the different activities resulted in an improvement of the transnational relations among partners, an improvement of the scientific literacy of the student's participating in the activities and an improvement of the appreciation of science by the student participant in the activities.

The SHARPER goal is to make the researchers’ passions accessible and comprehensible to everybody, starting from young generations, through engaging communication formats and activities that take place in unusual venues and make the researchers’ life a shared experience with a large audience in Italy. Researchers are evidences hunters, their passion for facts, data and observations collected, accumulated and interpreted with a constant and patient day by day activity, is one of the researchers’ main features. It is usually combined with their ability and commitment to use these evidences to tackle some of the more complex issues that are relevant to all of us: from fundamental research problems such as those related to the origin of the Universe or the structure of our brain to technological endeavours and societal challenges. The constant quest for evidences reveals, not only their insatiable curiosity but also their passion for challenging the limits of our knowledge and innovate going beyond the known, being able to accept and adapt to the changes or, in a sentence, to show a profound passion for resilience. The combination of these researchers’ passions for identifying and understanding facts and for wisely adapt and evolve by innovating and the opportunity for citizens to meet them, seems to be vital in a constantly changing society.. The acronym SHARPER - Sharing Researchers’ Passion for Evidences and Resilience summarizes all these elements and is the name of the European Researchers’ Night in Italy that will take place on the 28th of September 2018 and on the 27th of September 2019 simultaneously in 11 cities: (North Italy) Trieste (hosting city of ESOF 2020) Pavia; (Centre Italy) Ancona, Macerata, Perugia, L'Aquila; (South Italy) Napoli (Sicily) Palermo (Italian Capital of Culture 2018), Catania (Sardinia) Cagliari and Nuoro.

The TRESCA Project focuses on developing trust in science and innovation through innovating communication practices between scientific researchers, journalists and policy makers. It does this by drawing on the expertise of a diverse set of partners, both scholars and practitioners, from multidisciplinary backgrounds. The project’s goals are to systematically understand what drives public trust in science communication through large scale, experimental survey research and qualitative, deliberative research. TRESCA is designed to build long-term impact and produce positive change through the engagement and training of stakeholders, including scientists, journalists, policy makers and the public, in order to increase the production, exchange and consumption of more trustworthy, reliable, and accurate scientific communications. TRESCA’s focus in doing this is unique. TRESCA foregrounds the communication of findings from Social Science and Humanities (SSH) research related to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) developments around digitalisation. As digital devices and services are ubiquitous and permeate people’s everyday life, TRESCA relies on visual communications to empower people with that knowledge which is relevant to thrive in the digital ecosystem. The project focuses on three areas of concern around digitalisation: misinformation and digital safety; environ-mental health; automation and the future of skills and work. TRESCA develops a set of tools for improving science communication including a tested and assessed animated science communication video; the prototype of a misinformation widget working on encrypted communication channels to help distinguish trustworthy contents and sources; and a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for scientists, journalists and policy makers to learn how to best facilitate reliable and trustworthy science communication.

CONCISE aims to generate a European-wide debate on science communication, involving a wide array of stakeholders, from media outlets to policy makers, from scientists to business companies, from science communicators to civil society organisations. CONCISE aims at providing qualitative knowledge through citizen consultation on the means/channels (media and social networks, life experience, relatives, religion, political ideology, educational system...), by which EU citizens acquire their science-related science knowledge, and how this knowledge influences their beliefs, opinions, and perceptions. For this purpose, CONCISE will explore the understanding of 500 citizens (representing the 500 million EU citizens), regarding four selected topics: vaccines, complementary and alternative medicine use (CAM), genetically modified organism (GMO), and climate change. CONCISE will carry out a citizen consultation in four countries: Lisbon (Portugal), Valencia (Spain), Vicenza (Italy), Trnava (Slovakia) and Lodz (Poland), with the participation of 100 citizens in each country (selected volunteers and representatives of different social groups, considering gender, age, educational level, ethnic minorities, impaired people, and professional careers). Their understanding and position on these four scientific topics will be evaluated, validated, compared and analysed, in order to publish the results in open access by the CONSORTIUM team. Citizen opinions will be recorded; transcript and analysed with a corpus linguistics software in order to get different indicators that will help all stakeholders to have a more direct and fruitful communication, avoiding the danger of discourses that generatedistrust and misunderstandings. CONCISE results will be scalable and its methodology could be applied to other European countries in order to increase the communication of science in terms of quality and quantity all over Europe.