According to the latest World Migration Report, 12 of the 20 top destinations for international migrants in 2020 were countries not belonging to what are considered traditional (Western) migrant-receiving countries in North America, Western Europe, and Australia. Yet, despite these ever-growing migratory processes in non-Western migration locales, the mainstream literature remains largely focused on the study of migrants’ experiences and immigration policies in the context of traditional Western liberal democracies. As a result, major non-Western migration destinations elsewhere in the world remain underrepresented by existing theories and comparative research within migration studies. The overarching objective of the MARS is to increase our scientific understanding about global, regional and national governance of migration and mobilities and thereby to contribute to the global and national efforts to facilitate safe, regular and orderly migration. This aim will be accomplished by conducting research and a staff exchange programme on non-Western migration regimes. More specifically, MARS is constructed around three interlinked goals, which are to 1) collect original empirical data on the interplay between migration governance processes and migrants’ experiences in non-Western migration locales; 2) engage with and situate our research in relevant theoretical and comparative debates within migration studies and thereby advance scholarly discussion on contemporary migration regimes (comparative migration studies) by developing new conceptual and methodological approaches to understanding migratory processes in non-Western locales; and 3) translate research findings into policy-relevant ways, including presentations and policy papers to provide strategic intelligence and policy insights for international organisations, development agencies, decision-makers, and practitioners inside and outside the EU on possible ways to improve migration governance practices.

The main objective of the storAIge project is the development and industrialization of FDSOI 28nm and next generation embedded Phase Change Memory (ePCM) world-class semiconductor technologies, allowing the prototyping of high performance, Ultra low power and secured & safety System on Chip (SoC) solutions enabling competitive Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Edge applications. The main challenge addressed by the project is on one hand to handle the complexity of sub-28nm ‘more than moore’ technologies and to bring them up at a high maturity level and on the other hand to handle the design of complex SoCs for more intelligent, secure, flexible, low power consumption and cost effective. The project is targeting chipset and solutions with very efficient memories and high computing power targeting 10 Tops per Watt. The development of the most advanced automotive microcontrollers in FDSOI 28nm ePCM will be the support technology to demonstrate the high performances path as well as the robustness of the ePCM solution. The next generation of FDSOI ePCM will be main path for general purpose advanced microcontrollers usable for large volume Edge AI application in industrial and consumer markets with the best compromise on three requirements: performances, low power and adequate security. On top of the development and industrialization of silicon process lines and SoC design, storAIge will also address new design methodologies and tools to facilitate the exploitation of these advanced technology nodes, particularly for high performance microcontrollers having AI capabilities. Activities will be performed to setup robust and adequate Security and Safety level in the final applications, defining and implementing the good ‘mixture’ and tradeoff between HW and SW solutions to speed up adoption for large volume applications.

Corruption has become a buzzword in both academic and policy debates over the last three decades. The initial view that “corruption greases the wheels of economic growth” in the newly independent states of Africa and Asia has lost its validity in the light of the current ever-growing global coalition against corruption, spearheaded by Transparency International and the World Bank. Despite the unrelenting global anti-corruption efforts, one thing seems clear: There is no such thing as a remedy to this “cancer”. In the light of the obvious failure of global anti-corruption initiatives, there has been a growing call to rethink the existing approaches, arguing for the necessity to understand better what corruption is, why it occurs, and what we can do to stop it. MOCCA is a research and staff exchange programme intended to contribute to the global and national efforts of understanding and counteracting corruption by conducting research on the multilevel orders of corruption in five countries in post-Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). This will enable the MOCCA team to: 1) gather original empirical data (based on research solidly grounded in fieldwork) on the interplay between international law norms, national laws, and local legal cultures and informal norms in Central Asia and their implications for understanding corruption and its societal effects; 2) engage with and situate our research in relevant theoretical debates and thereby advance scholarly debates on (anti-) corruption by developing new conceptual, methodological and comparative approaches to study and understand it; and 3) provide strategic intelligence for EU-based political and economic actors interested or already working in the region, and to inform international organisations and decision-makers in the EU and Central Asia on ways to combat corruption and improve the business and investment climate, the rule of law and governance in the region.

The BERNICA project is aimed at fostering education and research capacities of the Central Asian region in the promotion of healthy nutritional habits in order to improve the health of the population. Ten Central Asian medical universities with the support of two European Universities will build local expertise in the development and running of innovative curricula in Nutrition & Dietetics in line with Bologna principles and ENQA standards through a series of training sessions. All Partner Countries’ universities will develop different future-oriented courses/modules with innovative learning scenarios targeted for the various auditorium – undergraduate, graduate students, working medical doctors, and nurses.European partners will share their knowledge and good practice with the purpose to Increase research and innovation capacities of target universities in this field.The fulfillment of the project activities will lead to fostering regional and international networks through joint initiatives, and sharing of good practices in education, research, and practice in Nutrition & Dietetics.

Motivation: Wireless access is being used extensively in our life. Wireless access enabler, the frequency bands, on the other hand, is very scarce. It is very important that any wireless access system utilizes the frequency at outmost efficiency. One of the poorly utilized wireless bands is the FM Band between 88–108 MHz. The band is being allocated only for relatively high quality audio broadcast around the world. This band has good propagation characteristics and therefore its coverage range and its penetration through buildings are excellent. As FM coverage is so ubiquitous around the world, several applications are already considered to better exploit this useful band: (a) Software defined radios for public safety, (b) New digital audio broadcast services, and (c) the development of an emergency message delivery services. With one of these applications and good propagation characteristics, FM Band can enable a fully connected Europe. It is of significant interest to investigate and characterize channel properties of the FM Band for the potential wireless systems. Therefore, the objective of this novel research is for the first time to develop a complete channel characterization of FM Band and then to perform analytical directional channel modelling. The newly introduced models will then be validated through field trials, and will be able to support the parameters of the contemporary wireless systems with multiple antennae. Approach: The directional channel models will be developed through (i) geometrical (ray tracing) and (ii) tapped delay line (parametric stochastic modelling) approaches by considering 2-D (time and angular) channel impulse response. The models will be based on the specification of directional channel impulse response functions, large and small channel effects. The measurement campaigns will be carried out via channel sounders. Thus, we will have the first standard directional channel models of the FM Band.