Transportation sector undergoes a considerable transformation as it enters a new landscape where connectivity is seamless and mobility options and related business models are constantly increasing. Modern transportation systems and services have to mitigate problems emerging from complex mobility environments and intensive use of transport networks including excessive CO2 emissions, high congestion levels and reduced quality of life. Due to the saturation of most urban networks, innovative solutions to the above problems need to be underpinned by collecting, processing and broadcasting an abundance of data from various sensors, systems and service providers. Furthermore, such novel transport systems have to foresee situations in near real time and provide the means for proactive decisions, which in turn will deter problems before they even emerge. Our vision is to provide the required interoperability, adaptability and dynamicity in modern transport systems for a proactive and problem-free transportation system. OPTIMUM will establish a largely scalable, distributed architecture for the management and processing of multisource big-data, enabling continuous monitoring of transportation systems needs and proposing proactive decisions and actions in an (semi-) automatic way. OPTIMUM follows a cognitive approach based on the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act loop of the big data supply chain for continuous situational awareness. OPTIMUM's goals will be achieved by incorporating and advancing state of the art in transport and traffic modeling, travel behavior analysis, sentiment analysis, big data processing, predictive analysis and real-time event-based processing, persuasive technologies and proactive recommenders. The proposed solution will be deployed in real-life pilots in order to realise challenging use cases in the domains of proactive improvement of transport systems quality and efficiency, proactive charging for freight transport and Car2X communication integration.

EMPHASIS is a participatory research project addressing native and alien pests threats (insect pests, pathogens, weeds) for a range of both natural ecosystems and farming systems (field crops, protected crops, forestry, orchards and amenity plants). The overall goal is to ensure a European food security system and the protection of biodiversity and of ecosystems services while developing integrated mechanisms of response measures (practical solutions) to predict, to prevent and to protect agriculture and forestry systems from native and alien pests threats. The specific objectives are the following: 1.Predict, Prioritize and Planning: pest management challenges and opportunities will be evaluated according to stakeholder-focused criteria and through pathway analysis; 2.Prevent: practical solutions for surveillance in different pathways to enhance preparedness will be provided to end-users, and monitoring tools following outbreaks and eradication will be developed; 3.Protect: practical solutions for managing native and alien pests in agriculture, horticulture and forestry will be developed, their technical and economic feasibility will be demonstrated and their market uptake will be enhanced. 4.Promote: a mutual learning process with end-users will be developed, and the solutions identified by the project will be promoted through training and dissemination. The project is in line with EU policy framework (Plant Health Dir. 2000/29/EC, EU Biodiversity strategy to 2020, Dir. 2009/128/EC on sustainable use of pesticides, Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe) and its future developments (Reg. on protective measures against pests of plants, Reg. on Invasive Alien Species). The project is not focused on a single management systems but the plant/pest ecosystems dealt with are treated with a multi-method approach to design true IPM methodology that will be developed for key systems with portability to other similar systems, thereby having a large impact.