Ever since the cloud-centric service provision started becoming incapable for efficiently supporting the emerging end-user needs, compute functionality has been shifted from the cloud, closer to the edge, or delegated to the user equipment at the far-edge. The resources and computing capabilities residing at those locations have been lately considered to collectively make-up a ‘compute continuum’, albeit its unproven assurance to securely accommodate end-to-end information sharing. The continuum-deployed workloads generate traffic that steers through untrusted HW and SW infrastructure (domains) of continuously changing trust-states. CASTOR develops and evaluates technologies to enable trustworthy continuum-wide communications. It departs from the processing of user-expressed high-level requirements for a continuum service, which are turned-to combinations of security needs and network resource requirements, referred to as CASTOR policies. The policies are subsequently enforced on the continuum HW and SW infrastructure to realise an optimised, trusted communication path delivering innovation-breakthroughs to the so-far unsatisfied need: a) for distributed (composable) attestation of the continuum nodes and subsequent elevation of individual outcomes to an adaptive (to changes) continuum trust quantification; b) for the derivation of the optimal path as a joint computation of the continuum trust properties and resources; c) for continuum infrastructure vendor-agnostic trusted path establishment, seamlessly crossing different administrative domains. The CASTOR will be evaluated in operational environments of 4 use-cases whereby varying types of security/safety-critical information is shared. Project innovations will be exhaustively assessed in 3 diverse application domains utilising the carefully-designed CASTOR testbed core for each case. Our results will provide experimental evidence for the CASTOR's efficiency and feed the incomplete trust-relevant (IETF) standards.

The textile industry is the second largest industrial sector in Tunisia accounting for 161k jobs. However, the sector lacks innovation and competitiveness which caused a negative loss of employment of over 4k jobs a year during the last few years. The main barrier for the Tunisian textile industry is the low-value-added products that drives an intense competition in addition to the lack of own product. In this context, WINTEX project is oriented to the creation of innovation textiles centers to address the lack of competitiveness of the Tunisian textile sector with the support from Erasmus+ program by bringing EU expertise, idea and experience exchange, financial support and capacity building at Tunisian institutions oriented towards increasing the latent innovation capacity available in the country. In addition, WINTEX also aims to create an Academy Textile Industry council as a point of interaction and networking among HEIs and industrial partners. The main objective WINTEX project is to foster innovation and cooperation in Tunisian textile sector with transfer of knowledge from EU. The specific objectives will be the cration of 3 innovation textiles’ centers in the three Tunisian HEIs (ISMMM, USF and ISET), to build capacity program addressed to the centers operators and the creation of the Academia Textile Industry Council as a platform for collaboration among Tunisian stakeholders. The project will boost participation of students and staff in the textile centers by means of traineeships in order to set in place a collaborative and innovative mindset to the future generation of the textile industry technicians and managers. Ultimately, the goal is to weave innovation among academia and industry to support the development of innovations and entrepreneurship in the textile sector in Tunisia providing students, researchers and professionals in textile field with competencies and skills needed by the market.

Science plays a major role in the development of a society. Despite this, the general population of Romania has little knowledge about the impact of research on all aspects of life. In this context, events that advertise science among the general public are very welcome. Another strong argument in favor of organizing the science popularization event is that this kind of events usually take place in major cities, while in small and medium towns they are very rare, so their population is missing the opportunity to discover science from a different perspective; in turn, this lack of information facilitates the occurrence of stereotypes about scientists and their work and about the usefulness of scientific research, which ultimately discourages young people to pursue a career in R&D. The main concept proposed for 2022/2023 is to reduce the passive presentation of what means to be a researcher, by involving the people directly in different interactive activities (workshops, games, competition, debates etc.). The project is constructed around three basic ideas: Future through past; Health and wealth through a clean environment; Economic development through technology and innovation. An important objective is also the future utilization of information gathered during the event, in order to enable cooperation between relevant actors that are committed to support scientific collaboration that may generate new opportunities for research and industry and new knowledge and know how that can be shared by confronting new ideas and viewpoints. Regarding the audience, the Dissemination Strategy will be directed towards various user groups, such as: the general public, especially young people, the scientific community, public institutions, NGOs, policy-makers, various associations, businesses etc. The partners have the complementary skills to assure the achievement of the project objectives and the future exploitation of the results.

Knowledge 4Foot (K4F) project has contributed at fostering the excellence in training for footwear manufacturing by linking the three areas of education, research, and business-oriented innovation and has demonstrated good practices of cooperation and has bridged the worlds of education and work.To this purpose, the project has achieved the following objectives: 1) set-up a new Knowledge Platform for transferring research and innovation for footwear manufacturing where the HE students have received project-based training into a virtual environment by simulating all developing stages of the research projects, having as starting point the real identified needs in leather and footwear companies; 2) developed active collaboration among education, business community and research and had assessed the skills needs on innovation, research, development, and technological transfer; 3) designed a common curriculum and related e-learning content which incorporated creative thinking, problem-solving approach and project-based learning for virtual internship in the Knowledge Platform for transferring research and innovation.Based on the authentic and adequate needs of both actual business environment and learning and training programs for managers, engineers/technicians and designers in footwear sector, the K4F project has contributed at developing sustainable solutions to attuning curricula for placement/internship and has developed skills and competencies in area of project-based work focused on research, innovation and technological transfer. Thus, the K4F project had a significant impact on the development of education and training and has brought added value at EU level.K4F project has proposed, created, tested and evaluated contents and methodological solutions by developing synergies between different fields of higher education and training for educating and training the next generation of managers/ engineers/ technicians/ product and process developers/ high skilled workers that will be able to understand innovation, to perform applied research activities and to transfer the newest technological inputs from research to leather and footwear companies from partner countries and elsewhere in Europe.The online training courses, the virtual internship, as well as the Intensive Learning Activities, undertaken by the target group within the framework of the Knowledge Platform for transferring research and innovation in footwear manufacturing have stimulated innovative and creative mindsets of students, and have allowed the application of their knowledge and research insights.In terms of further sustainability, the universities running courses for managers, designers and engineers/technicians and the training centres running courses for the industry could adopt the virtual internship as a preparatory stage for learners’ placements into a real company. Moreover, the business community (SMEs and research centres) could be in contact with future employees in the early stages of the learning/training process.