The world population living in urban settlements is expected to increase to 70% of 9.7 billion by 2050. Historically, as cities grew, new water infrastructures followed as needed. However, these developments had less to do with real planning than with reacting to crisis situations and urgent needs, due to the inability of urban water planners to consider long-term, deeply uncertain and ambiguous factors affecting urban development and water demand. These, coupled with increasingly uncertain climate conditions, indicate the need for a more holistic and intelligent decision-making framework for managing water infrastructures in the cities of the future. This project aims to develop a new theoretical framework for the allocation and development decisions on drinking water infrastructure systems, so that they are socially equitable, economically efficient and environmentally resilient, as advocated by the UN Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goals. The framework will integrate real-time monitoring and control with long-term robustness and flexibility-based pathway methods, and incorporate economic, social, ethical and environmental considerations for sustainable transitioning of urban water systems under deep uncertainty with multiple possible futures. The Water-Futures team will build on synergies from the four research groups, transcending methodologies from water science, systems and control theory, economics and decision science, and machine learning, into an integrated decision and control framework, to be implemented as an open-source research toolbox. The new science outcomes will be applied to three case studies exemplifying different types of urban water systems: a mature, relatively stable system; a mature and rapidly expanding system; and a relatively recent supply system in a developing country with high growth and special challenges, including limited resources, intermittent supply and high water losses.

Five leading European supercomputing centres are committed to develop, within their respective national programs and service portfolios, a set of services that will be federated across a consortium. The work will be undertaken by the following supercomputing centres, which form the High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform of the Human Brain Project (HBP): ▪ Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) in Spain, ▪ The Italian supercomputing centre CINECA, ▪ The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS, ▪ The Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, and ▪ Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), France (joining in April 2018). The new consortium will be called Fenix and it aims at providing scalable compute and data services in a federated manner. The neuroscience community is of particular interest in this context and the HBP represents a prioritised driver for the Fenix infrastructure design and implementation. The Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the HBP (ICEI) project will realise key elements of this Fenix infrastructure that are targeted to meet the needs of the neuroscience community. The participating sites plan for cloud-like services that are compatible with the work cultures of scientific computing and data science. Specifically, this entails developing interactive supercomputing capabilities on the available extreme computing and data systems. Key features of the ICEI infrastructure are: ▪ Scalable compute resources; ▪ A federated data infrastructure; and ▪ Interactive Compute Services providing access to the federated data infrastructure as well as elastic access to the scalable compute resources. The ICEI e-infrastructure will be realised through a coordinated procurement of equipment and R&D services. Furthermore, significant additional parts of the infrastructure and R&D services will be realised within the ICEI project through in-kind contributions from the participating supercomputing centres.

IMAJINE aims to formulate new integrative policy mechanisms to enable European, national and regional government agencies to more effectively address territorial inequalities within the European Union. It responds to evidence that spatial inequalities within the EU are increasing, contrary to the principle of territorial cohesion embedded as a third dimension of the European Social Model in the Treaty of Lisbon, and is particularly timely in examining the geographically differentiated impacts of the post-2008 economic crisis and the adoption of austerity policies. IMAJINE uniquely proposes to address the problem of territorial inequalities through an inter-disciplinary and multi-scalar approach that integrates perspectives from economics, human geography, political science and sociology and combines macro-scale econometric analysis and the generation and analysis of new quantitative survey data with regionally-focused qualitative empirical case study research in 11 EU member states; delivered by a multi-disciplinary and multi-national consortium. As such the research builds on the conceptual and methodological state of the art in several disciplines and advances conceptual understanding and the empirical knowledge base by producing new primary data, applying new analytical tests to secondary data and integrating the results along with insights from relational geographical theory and the concept of spatial justice. In particular, the centrality of spatial justice emphasizes the political as well as economic dimensions of territorial inequalities, and IMAJINE will move beyond existing knowledge by considering relationships between measured and perceived inequalities, models of multi-level policy-making and public service delivery, and support for territorial autonomy movements. IMAJINE will further translate these scientific insights into policy applications through participatory scenario building exercises with governance and civil society stakeholders.

Recent advances in mobile devices and video streaming services have motivated large-scale media consumption both in fixed and mobile environments. In this context, the main objective of network operators and service providers is to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) of the end-users by providing high quality services and mechanisms for seamless adaptation to the specific network conditions of each user. However, the initial design of the Internet as a best-effort network makes it inappropriate for high-volume and bandwidth-intensive applications, like video streaming, and the centralised architectures employed by the network operators lead to long, non-optimal communication paths between clients and servers, waste of network resources and increased delays. The improvement of the QoE of multimedia communication services require novel network architectures and cross-layer adaptation mechanisms. Specifically, at the network layer, Software Defined Networking (SDN) enables the virtualisation of the network functions so that the network operators implement their own rules and policies in software and deploy them in an abstracted and virtualised network infrastructure. At the application layer, the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) approach enables the seamless adaptation of the video client to the specific network conditions of each user. The understanding of how the network parameters affect the human perception is a key factor in optimizing the functions in the end-to-end delivery chain. The V-SDN project aims at developing a QoE-driven media delivery platform based on network virtualisation functionalities, which takes into account the service utility functions, network topology, link capacities and the specific QoE requirements of each application. The developed QoE-driven media delivery platform will be implemented and demonstrated with an innovative media delivery system employing a novel DASH client, a further key development of the project.

AquaSPICE aims at materializing circular water use in the European Process Industries, fostering awareness in resource-efficiency and delivering compact solutions for industrial applications. That challenging aim necessitates (i) multiple state-of-the-art water treatment and re-use technologies, (ii) diverse closer-loop practices regarding water, energy and substances, (iii) a cyber-physical-system controller in the form of a system for real-time monitoring, assessment and optimization of water (re-)use at different interconnected levels and (iv) an effective methodological, regulatory and business framework. AquaSPICE not only offers these but claims their sufficiency, as also supported by the breadth of European process industries who are here to evaluate (i)-(iv). AquaSPICE’s innovations emanate from the requirements of the Case Studies, involving industrial actors (Dow, BASF, Water-Link, Solvay, ARETUSA, Agricola, and TUPRAS) in 5 EU countries (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Romania) and 1 associated country (Turkey). AquaSPICE follows a systemic approach in water management where optimal efficiency can be achieved through an adaptation of appropriate technologies and practices in different levels, from a single industrial process (unit operation), to an entire factory, to other collaborating industries (industrial symbiosis) or other sectors (e.g. domestic and/or agriculture). AquaSPICE enables and facilitates the immediate uptake, replication and up-scaling of innovations, by providing comprehensive strategic, business and organizational plans that offer a range of well-defined and pre-packaged solutions, suitable for various cases with quite different characteristics.