Biometrics refers to the automated recognition of individuals based on their behavioural or biological characteristics. In spite of their numerous advantages over traditional authentication systems based on PINs or passwords (e.g., biometric characteristics cannot be lost or forgotten), biometric systems are vulnerable to external attacks and can leak privacy. Presentations attacks (PAs) - impostors who manipulate biometric systems by masquerading as other people - are serious threats to security. Privacy concerns involve the use of personal and sensitive biometric information, as classified by the GDPR, for purposes other than those intended. Vulnerabilities to PAs and privacy leakage are unacceptable and have hindered the deployment of biometric technology in commercial applications. The biometrics community has responded with presentation attack detection (PAD) technologies and privacy preservation mechanisms (biometric template protection schemes, BTP). Even though the latest PAD technologies are largely successful in protecting biometrics systems from known forms of PA, they tend to lack generalisation to different forms of attacks. The standard approach to privacy preservation involves some form of encryption or irreversible transformations, though the most recent fully homomorphic algorithms are general computationally prohibitive. Multi-biometric systems, explored extensively as a means of improving recognition reliability, also offer potential to improve PAD generalisation. Multi-biometric systems offer natural protection against spoofing since an impostor is less likely to succeed in fooling multiple systems simultaneously. For the same reason, previously unseen PAs are less likely to fool multi-biometric systems protected by PAD. Unfortunately, each sub-system in a multi-biometric approach to recognition has potential to leak privacy. Multi-biometric systems only compound the need for computationally prohibitive privacy preservation. RESPECT, a Franco-German collaborative project, will explore the potential of using multi-biometrics as a means to defend against diverse PAs and improve generalisation while still preserving privacy. Central to this idea is the use of (i) biometric characteristics that can be captured easily and reliably using ubiquitous smart devices and, (ii) biometric characteristics which facilitate computationally manageable privacy preserving, homomorphic encryption. The research will focus on characteristics readily captured with consumer-grade microphones and video cameras, specifically face, iris and voice. Further advances beyond the current state of the art involve the consideration of dynamic characteristics, namely utterance verification and lip dynamics. The core research objective will be to determine which combination of biometrics characteristics gives the best biometric authentication reliability and PAD generalisation while remaining compatible with computationally efficient privacy preserving BTP schemes.

The aim of this project is to bring together subject matter experts from the academic and non-academic sectors to create a holistic informatics platform for rapidly integrating genomic sequences, electronic health records (EHRs) and research repositories to enable personalised medicine strategies for malignant melanoma treatment. The consortium has engaged in a pre-proposal process with active clinical end users who have highlighted the need for more innovative approaches for the treatment of cancer - in particular the treatment of malignant melanoma, including inter alia the ability to rapidly query of geno-phenotype associations in melanoma such as the recently discovered rs2301641 SNP variability with ABCB5 function and CDK4 gene indicators . Hence we aim to develop a scalable HPC framework that allows the semantic interlinking between spatially distributed electronic patients’ health records, associated genomic sequences and published research, thereby allowing clinicians to make reasoned queries over vast knowledge bases for the diagnosis, treatment and management of malignant melanoma.

Biometrics recognition technology has revolutionised traditional person recognition technologies which rely on tokens or passwords. Whereas the latter can be lost, stolen, or easily forgotten, biometrics technology relies on biological and/or behavioural traits to infer identity. A soaring proliferation of cloud applications calls for enhanced security protection for distributed person authentication using biometrics, whereas the new European general data protection regulation (GDPR) demands stringent provisions for privacy preservation. Unfortunately, concerns regarding security and privacy vulnerabilities, coupled with a lack of sufficient expertise to tackle them, present barriers to European competitiveness. Europe needs a new community of biometrics researchers capable of innovating the next generation of biometrics technology designed to protect security and preserve privacy simultaneously. The TReSPAsS-ETN project will deliver security protection through generalised PAD capabilities, deliver privacy preservation through computationally feasible encryption solutions and deploy these new technologies to commercial-grade systems in full compliance with the new European GDPR legislation. The project will enhance European research leadership and competitiveness and will help to sustain the flourishing biometrics market. The comprehensive TReSPAsS-ETN Marie Skłodowska-Curie Early Training Network will couple specific technical and transferable skills training including entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, management and communications with secondments to industry. TReSPAsS-ETN will produce a cohort of early stage researchers equipped with the necessary multidisciplinary skill set and capacity to innovate the next generation of secure and privacy preserving biometrics technologies and thus to meet the needs of the growing European biometrics industry.

We Think Human First, we are the European University of Technology. As eight European partners targeting full integration, we empower our complementarities within a single home institution. We enable all people and places to fulfil their potential in campuses throughout Europe. We create futures.As a University of Technology, our mission is first and foremost to serve society. Europe requires top-quality education for diverse groups, where talents translate into ability to act and react, experiment and invent, anticipate and transform. We empower our 120 000 students to become technologically literate professionals and European citizens. We ensure they are well-qualified to play a fruitful role in society, aware of the broader implications of technological development and of their responsibility towards global challenges. Everybody should be able to study and succeed in our university. Europe calls for universities deeply integrated in the socio-economic fabric of our continent. By working in close connection with public and private, local and multinational institutions and companies, we share our knowledge and know-how to generate value, products and services for everybody. We create knowledge directly connected with the economic, scientific, and political priorities of our respective regions, and in synergy with one another. We are a European university, locally anchored in each of our regions and globally connected. We are proud to make direct, measurable impacts.Our vision is translated into a streamlined concrete implementation plan of 8 Work Packages coordinated in 40 tasks and aiming at the production of more than 120 deliverables within the first three years. Results include common laboratories and curricula, high student and staff mobility rates, integrated infrastructure, financial and institutional sustainability, overall quality processes, full inclusiveness and embeddedness, and more.

<< Background >>There is an urgent need for 21st century education to be able to address the complex entangled problems of climate crisis and its relation to technological development with radical new multi-faceted transdisciplinary approaches. We believe that teaching an Aesthetics of Care with Ecology in Technological Education will provide students with the transformative set of skills and competences needed to redefine sustainable technological development for the 21st century. Following the third and fourth industrial revolutions , technology mediates ever-more aspects of everyday life to an unprecedented respect. Central to these technological shifts are transglobal computational networks (Bratton) , data assemblages (Kitchin), organised inorganic systems (Stiegler) of unprecedented scale and scope, and regimes of algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy and Berns) that govern the ways humans interrelate with themselves (Foucault), others, the natural environment, and civil society.Accordingly, the shaping of those technologies will significantly impact how we both mediate and act upon our environment and one another. From consumer electronics to facial recognition and autonomous vehicles, technical innovations are wrought by human ingenuity and are thus inherently cultural, bounded by human ethical and aesthetic considerations (Amoore 2020, Noble 2018,) . Therefore, it follows that an aesthetic-ethical education in technology is needed to address the wicked problems of our age: climate crisis; data extractivism and digital colonialism; surveillance and privacy; cycles of techno obsolescence and e-waste, fostering of digital inclusion and ecologically sustainable technological innovation. We believe that a radical new transdisciplinary approach is required for 21st century education to be able to address these complex entangled problems. We maintain that teaching an Aesthetics of Care with Ecology in Technological Education is needed to provide students with the transformative set of skills and competences needed to redefine sustainable technological development. In this approach aesthetics and ecological principles are built-in and essential to technological education so that ethical uses of the latter are guaranteed. An Aesthetics of Care means that concrete ways of caring for one-another, for human societies, and for the environment are encoded in how we design, build, interact with, employ, or aestheticise technology, so that future technologists have concrete ethical contexts to address, and tackle, societal and ecological affairs. Aesthetics of Care in this context needs to be understood as a form of praxis, an individual practice with collective implications, that permeates all social, economic and technical relationships in the anthropocene. Aesthetics of Care is informed by an understanding of Aesthetics as the “distribution of the sensible” (Ranciere 2004) that is inherently ethical and political in conjunction with our sense experience of everyday life (Saito 2017). We bring aesthetics together with an ethics of care that understands the self as constituted by relations with others, human and non human, (Nussbaum 1996) and with our planet (Robinson 2011). From this we propose hermeneutics of care that considers the role of interpretation as restorative (Paul Ricœur), reparative (see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) and creative (see Ralph Waldo Emerson). Interpretation thus is an aesthetic act that opens up the potential for new forms of reasoning in relation to justice and democracy in society. This proposes an aesthetic-technological education that focuses on a curriculum design where education is seen as more than an ‘economic act’ of agency. Care, reparation and restoration are modes of ethical ‘reception’ and aesthetic ‘beholding’ that invoke and entail new ways of thinking technology beyond economic extraction. in relation to justice and democracy in society.<< Objectives >>Therefore, from this analysis it follows that an aesthetico-ethical education in technology is integral in considering the wicked problems of our age and that a radical new transdisciplinary approach is required for technological education to to address these complex entangled problems. We believe that teaching an Aesthetics of Care with Ecology in Technological Education will provide students with the transformative set of skills and competences needed to redefine sustainable technological development so that future technologists have concrete ethical contexts to address, and tackle, societal and ecological affairs. The project’s objective is to develop this framework and to make it available to teachers as a modular toolkit for educators to deploy in a variety of pedagogical settings. This will be achieved through the following four interconnected Project Results (PRs) designed to establish this framework: • Mapping Aesthetics in Technological Education (PR1), develops the theoretical and historical positions mapped in PR1 resulting in the online knowledge base and the working definition of an aesthetics of care through testing them against real world scenarios to produce a systematic mapping and inventory of the role of aesthetics in technological project-based education and to summarise this complex information into meaningful and accessible presentations in an online knowledge base • Circular Economies of Design (PR2), will concretise the understanding of an aesthetics of care, as it relates to technological education, into transdisciplinary scenarios that can be transferred into curricula. Intended as a crash course into different ways to explore circular economy within a series of different technological and theoretical frameworks. This will produce a series of public seminars, design a Repair-a-thon (repair hackathon) to be tested in the ISP C2 and incorporated into PR4 the Student Programme, and the design of a re-use workshop pivoting on ways to creative re-use obsolete artefacts, technologies, algorithms, and processes - to be enacted in the Student Programme. • Teacher Training Module (PR3), will prepare teachers to teach an aesthetics of care framework to a heterogeneous group of participants within a technological education context. The primary function of the teacher programme is to bring the twin approaches of theoretical work in PR1 and the practice focus of PR2 into a programme that can be taught in a technological education contest.with a training developed to train teachers in how to teach the new Aesthetics of Care framework, to be tested in ISP C1. • Student Module (PR4) will prepare a modular student programme of 30 ECTS for teaching the Aesthetics of Care framework within transdisciplinary settings.. This modular toolkit will allow teachers to apply the approach in a range of pedagogical and disciplinary (and trans-disciplinary ) settings. It will prepare the intensive student programme C2, building on work from PR2 - Circular Economies of Design and feedback received from C1 the Teacher Programme. The results and findings of intensive student programme C2 will feedback into the design and preparation of the final toolkit.<< Implementation >>We will organise eight transnational Project Meetings, each hosted by a different partner; two. Intensive Study Programmes, C1 Teacher Training Programme, and C2 Student Intensive Study Programme; two Multiplier events, an exhibition and an international conference.<< Results >>The project is structured into four Project Results: PR1 – Mapping Aesthetics in Technological Education; PR2 - Circular Economies of Design; PR3 - Teacher Training Module; PR4 - Student Module with the following outputs PR1 – Mapping Aesthetics in Technological Education will produce a systematic mapping and inventory of the role of aesthetics in technological project-based education. It will summarise this complex information into meaningful and accessible presentations in an online knowledge base. The knowledge base will act as open resource to inform thinking on the connection between design of technological artefacts and processes and sustainability, and provide evidence of why an enhanced aesthetics is necessary in technological education. This PR’s findings will input into all subsequent PRs. PR2 - Circular Economies of Design This PR is intended as a crash-course into the different ways to explore circular economy within a series of different technological frameworks, and is expected to significantly feed PR4. Its outputs will be structured into three tasks Task 1: Development of a series of seminars on the circular economy. transdisciplinary public seminars to expand understanding of Circular and contributory economies from a range of disciplinary perspectives (engineering, design, philosophy, sociology) Task 2: Design of a repair hackathon (repair-thon) for intensive study programme C2 to be later incorporated into the Student Programme. Task 3: Design of a re-use workshop pivoting on ways to creative re-use obsolete artefacts, technologies, algorithms, and processes - to be enacted in the Student Programme. This hackathon will develop methods for understanding the ecolological and ethical dimensions of design decisions through the repurposing of obsolete technologies in a collaborative art-design-engineering workshop - following existing models from new media art such as the ‘Refunct Media’ series of workshops pioneered by artist/educator Benjamin Gaulon PR3 - Teacher Training Module This PR will prepare teachers to teach an aesthetic-ethical framework to a heterogeneous group of participants. This entails building transdisciplinary knowledge and capability through teaching of transdisciplinary methods in the context of aesthetics and technological education. The pedagogical approach needs to be established using a student-centered approach, enabling the teacher/participant to bring their experience and disciplinary knowledge to the development of their integration of aesthetic, ethical and ecological values into their practice and curriculum design. The integrated aesthetic-ethical-ecological approach will be further developed into a toolkit which can be used by HEIs and teachers and will be tested in the Student Programme PR4 PR4 - Student Module This PR will prepare a student module for teaching the aesthetic-ecological design approach. This will be a modular toolkit that allows teachers to apply the approach in a range of pedagogical and disciplinary (and trans-disciplinary )settings. It will prepare the intensive student programme C2, building on work from PR2 - Circular Economies of Design. The results and findings of which will feedback into the design and preparation of the final toolkit.