<< Objectives >>SAYL enables young children (3-5) to engage in new adventurous stories. The project aims to build a book platform that includes excellent interactive digital stories in the majority and minority languages used in the five participating countries (Germany, Malta, Norway, the Netherlands, and Turkey). The platform is online and constructed to allow free access through most modern devices. The platform can thus make books available to children for various reasons deprived of good picture books.<< Implementation >>The books will have multimedia features that make them helpful in supporting meaning-making. In addition, the books include the possibility of adapting the semantic richness to children's narrative understanding, choosing a language, and interacting with audio, video, and animation. We present the books on a platform that provides, apart from access, the possibility to select a book and a language. Furthermore, it is equipped with features to motivate children to return to the platform.<< Results >>We expect the book platform to increase and enrich book reading in ECEC organizations and families. In addition, families' close cooperation with ECEC organizations due to access to the same books can bolster a book reading routine in families. Furthermore, the platform may boost book reading, particularly in disadvantaged groups, like immigrant children, children speaking a minority language, or children deprived of good picture books due to socio-economic factors or a pandemic.

Our Erasmus+ Project ENSITE (ENvironmental Socio-Scientific Issues in Initial Teacher Education) supports the development of future science and maths (from now on referred to as science) teachers’ environmental citizenship and related teaching competences.We face severe global environmental challenges such as deforestation and plastic waste. Europe’s society needs to acknowledge these challenges and accept their role in supporting sustainable development. Our educational systems have to fulfil the obligation to enable citizens to do so. Science education, in particular, must equip them with the ability to find adequate technological solutions.ENSITE supports this endeavour. Research proposes the engagement of socio-scientific issues (SSI) as one promising path to developing environmental citizenship competences. However, science teachers graduating from higher education (HE) institutions are not prepared to teach SSI, because they not only require teaching “scientific facts” but also involve controversial information, complex data sets and ethical, social, economic or cultural motives. Such aspects are rarely covered in initial teacher education (ITE).We aim at improving HE by including environmental SSI in science ITE. To this end we will develop an innovative approach to support teachers in (1) developing competences in dealing with environmental SSI (“Learning”) and (B) acquiring teaching skills to supporting their future students at school in becoming responsible citizens (“Teaching”) themselves.ENSITE consists of 11 HE teams from institutions across Europe comprising experts in science education (research and practice), environmental issues, pedagogical concepts to acquire transversal and forward-looking skills (e.g. critical thinking, creativity, reasoning, reflection), students’ mobility, diversity in science courses/classrooms and large scale dissemination. All partners acknowledged that their educational science courses rarely cover citizenship education and see huge potential with regard to benefits for them and their students.We decided on a thoroughly elaborated range of activities to produce purposeful results.Our research activities cover the development of 13 teaching modules on environmental SSIs for future science teachers. These intellectual outputs (IOs) cover subject knowledge on SSIs (definitions, topic areas, relevance, etc.) and how to deal with them, implications for learning/teaching processes, pedagogical concepts to design lessons, and the role of teachers’ background (beliefs, cultural, etc.) which affects teaching SSIs.In order to ensure highest quality and a convincing red thread relating to our overall topic (environmental citizenship education), each research activity follows a clear methodology: In our iterative design process, each development phase is followed by a review and pilot, optimisation loop and, finally, production. Every partner has precisely defined responsibilities. Project meetings will be organized to support internal communication.We perform several pilot activities validating our IOs at partner HEI and paving the way for long-term implementation. We use feedback from participating teaching staff and students to improve our IOs (content, user-friendliness, media format, impact etc.).We will also disseminate our results in three subsequent summer schools. Thus, in every project year we will reach out to future science teachers across Europe. We will present our IOs, engage students in a variety of innovative activities and stimulate inter-cultural and social experiences. Feedback collected during our summer schools will be used to further improve our materials.We organize (national and international) multiplier events to promote the project among relevant educational stakeholders, initializing dialogue on the matters at hand and substantiate our findings, as well as boost sustainable dissemination and exploitation.We plan several targeted European-wide and national communication, dissemination and exploitation activities, such as establishing a web portal, pursuing a flexible and modern social media strategy or scientifically present our research findings.We expect ENSITE to boost innovation in HE and more particularly science ITE across Europe. This will lead to a substantially higher number of HE educators with a versatile range of scientific, transversal skills, citizenship competences and related teaching competences. In the longer term, this contributes to a widespread shared awareness of social and environmental responsibility. Our open-access materials will support Europe’s science teaching staff to benefit beyond project duration. Our materials will particularly allow each partner HEI to strengthen their trans-national collaboration, implement innovative approaches in their science ITE programmes and facilitate institutional change, raise their reputation, and actively contribute to Europe’s smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

The Quantum Secure Networks Partnership (QSNP) project aims at creating a sustainable European ecosystem in quantum cryptography and communication. A majority of its partners, which include world-leading academic groups, research and technology organizations (RTOs), quantum component and system spin-offs, cybersecurity providers, integrators, and telecommunication operators, were members of the European Quantum Flagship projects CIVIQ, UNIQORN and QRANGE. QSNP thus gathers the know-how and expertise from all technology development phases, ranging from innovative designs to development of prototypes for field trials. QSNP is structured around three main Science and Technology (ST) pillars. The first two pillars, “Next Generation Protocols” and “Integration”, focus on frontier research and innovation, led mostly by academic partners and RTOs. The third ST pillar “Use cases and Applications” aims at expanding the industrial and economic impact of QSN technologies and is mostly driven by companies. In order to achieve the specific objectives within each pillar and ensure that know-how transfer and synergy between them are coherent and effective, QSNP has established ST activities corresponding to the three main layers of the technology value chain, “Components and Systems”, “Networks” and “Cryptography and Security”. This framework will allow achieving the ultimate objective of developing quantum communication technology for critical European infrastructures, such as EuroQCI, as well as for the private information and communication technology (ICT) sectors. QSNP will contribute to the European sovereignty in quantum technology for cybersecurity. Additionally, it will generate significant economic benefits to the whole society, including training new generations of scientists and engineers, as well as creating high-tech jobs in the rapidly growing quantum industry.

The main objective of the TAMED project is to devise new methods and algorithms for realising aspects of general emotional intelligence, one of the core long-term goals of artificial intelligence and artificial psychology. To move towards such an ambitious goal TAMED methods would be required to: a) derive accurate models from small-sized affect data corpora, b) eliminate the subjective biases inherent in affective ground truth, and c) limit overfitting effects of affect models given their context-specific nature. TAMED views general affect modelling from an ordinal perspective and interweaves uniquely novel tensor-based learning models with preference learning approaches. TAMED is highly innovative since it utilises, for the first time, tensor-based and preference (deep) learning models to capture general aspects of affect. Tensor models are characterised by high learning and generalization capacity, and are suitable across different learning paradigms, while preference learning can uniquely eliminate annotation biases and approximate more reliably the underlying ground truth of affect. TAMED methods will be used to investigate the degree to which context-free affect models are possible and general affect patterns can be captured across dissimilar tasks and users. The applicability of the derived models will be tested on the domain of digital games since they offer complex yet well-defined problems for exploring the capacities of general artificial intelligence. The aforementioned innovative aspects make TAMED highly interdisciplinary, with research activities spanning from affective computing and machine learning to digital game design and development. The fellowship will contribute to the researcher’s career development through the acquisition of advanced scientific and technical skills, as well as developing skills within academia and industry. The project will also serve to consolidate and extend the researcher's professional network within Europe and beyond.