In today’s Morning Brief:

Info and Consultation session: Cluster 4 (Digital, Industry and Space) and testing and experimentation facilities

Don’t miss this event by the INESC Brussels Hub this morning, 10 February at 11h00 GMT where we will be presenting Horizon Europe’s Cluster 4’s (Digital, Industry and Space) Work Programme for 2023-2024.

This will be an opportunity to hear first-hand from R&I managers across all INESCs and will give researchers an opportunity to influence and contribute to the next version of the Cluster 4 Work Programme.

Although it is open for INESC researchers only, no registration is needed, just access through this link.

AI for Industry and Society: Trust and Frugality

The large scale deployment of AI has highlighted the importance of a strategic positioning of Europe anchored on its values, particularly in terms of ethics, trust and regulation. Its emergence, beyond consumer services, in the market of everyday objects and industrial systems underlines the essential challenge of building answers for the safe and secure development of all AI-based systems including the most critical ones.

Don’t miss this event organised by the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union on Friday 25 February. You can register and find more information here.

Horizon Europe: The first assessment: Initial feedback

The INESC Brussels Hub was present at Science|Business’ yearly network conference taking place between 8 and 9 February.

With a mix of speakers from the industry, European institutions and private stakeholders, we managed to gather important information on how the programme is going and how it can be improved. One of the main takeaways, stressed in most panels, was the need to build bridges and collaboration between scientists and policymakers and the need for open science in Europe.

The Hub will be releasing more information on these takeaways soon so stay tuned to our Morning Brief.

Quantum Ambitions: Strengthening Europe’s leadership

In its Digital Compass 2030, presented last March, the Commission presented a vision and avenues for Europe’s digital transformation by 2030, with very ambitious objectives to be achieved jointly by the Union and its Member States.

Quantum technology features prominently in these goals, with the intention that  “by 2025, Europe will have its first computer with quantum acceleration paving the way for Europe to be at the cutting edge of quantum capabilities by 2030”.

Don’t miss this event organised by the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union on  Monday 21 February. You can register and find more information here.

“The Insider” – new episode is out now

The seventh episode in the Deep Tech series features Ben Glocker, reader in machine learning at Imperial College and working in fascinating areas related to medical technologies, leading the HeartFlow-Imperial Research Team and work as scientific adviser for Kheiron Medical Technologies.

This is also the first episode of the third part of the Deep Tech series of podcasts produced by the INESC Brussels HUB in partnership with Science Business.

The series is divided in 3 parts (3 podcasts in each part):

• In Part 1 we explored how can Deep tech reshape the future of R&I.
• Part 2 is dedicated to the Green Transition
• Part 3 is dedicated to Digital Transformation.

Listen and subscribe to get a notification when new episodes are out directly in our podcast page or in any of your favourite platforms!

EU Datathon 2022

The sixth edition of the EU Datathon was officially launched this week.

To take part, you should propose the development of an application that links and uses open datasets. Your application should showcase opportunities for concrete business models or social enterprises. It is also expected to find suitable new approaches and solutions to help Europe achieve important goals set by the European Commission through the use of open data.

The deadline for the submission of ideas is 31 March 2022. For more information and the rules of this competition click here.

EIC Work Programme 2022 finally published

The European Commission adopted the 2022 work programme of the European Innovation Council. It opens funding opportunities worth over €1.7 billion in 2022 including:

EIC Pathfinder – for multi-disciplinary research teams, worth €350 million, to undertake visionary research with the potential to lead to technology breakthroughs. The Pathfinder calls includes a set of specific challenges, namely:

1 – Carbon Dioxide & Nitrogen management and valorization

2 – Mid-long term, systems-integrated energy storage

3 – Cardiogenomics

4 – Healthcare Continuum technologies

5 – DNA-based digital data storage

6 – Alternative Quantum Information Processing, Communication, and Sensing

EIC Transition – funding to turn research results into innovation opportunities, worth €131 million.

EIC Accelerator – worth €1,16 billion, for start-ups and SMEs to develop and scale up high impact innovations with the potential to create new markets or disrupt existing ones.

See the full details and download the 2022 EIC Work Programme here. Also, check the summary of the complete details in a “cheat sheet” done by EU consultants Lira, with the summary of all details for the three types of calls, in the HUB Private Area in:

EU R&I document repository > EU R&I funding > Horizon Europe > EIC – European Innovatio Council

EU’s energy import dependency decreased in 2020

In 2020, the European Union imported 58% of the energy it consumed, a decrease of almost 3 percentage points when compared with 2019.

This decrease was the result of changes in the main components of this indicator, net imports dropped and gross available energy changed, the latter being affected mainly by reductions in primary production.

If you want to read more and go through Eurostat’s interactive charts detailing this decrease make sure to click here.

Food biotechnology and food safety: finding answers

Food biotechnologies may raise a number of questions whose answers may not always be easy to find. In fact, national food safety competent authorities are often asked by consumers and other stakeholders to provide science-based information in a way that is quick and easy for non-experts to understand, which requires technical knowledge, dissemination outlets, diverse skillsets and time.

Upon member’s requests, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has published the “Information toolkit on food biotechnologies with a focus on food safety”, which serves as a basis to assist countries in addressing the general public’s concerns on food biotechnology and food safety, to support them in raising awareness of the science of food biotechnologies and food safety and to inform discussions and decisions.

Make sure to check it out here.

Fusion energy breakthrough at the world-leading Joint European Torus facility

Scientists and engineers working at the Joint European Torus (JET) have achieved a record performance for sustained fusion energy. It is the clearest demonstration of the potential for fusion energy to deliver safe and sustainable low-carbon energy in almost 25 years.

Researchers from the EUROfusion consortium completed the fusion experimental campaign with the same fuel mixture to be used by future commercial fusion energy power plants.

JET is key to the European Research Roadmap to the Realisation of Fusion Energy. Results from crucial experiments conducted in the tokamak are a major boost for ITER. ITER is a large-scale experiment designed to prove the scientific and technical viability of fusion as a new energy source, and to take fusion energy to the threshold of industrial exploitation. It is supported by the EU and other major international partners.

Read more here.

We need to speak the language of companies, not Eurocrats

In this Science|Business article, Nina Kopola, Director General and CEO of Business Finland notes that with the first year of Horizon Europe behind us, it is important to take stock of what works and what does not.

Highlighting the many strengths of the programme such as its fairly balanced package of well-tested instruments and new ideas, Kopola delves into the importance of industry and private companies being included from the beginning to improve competitiveness and for solutions to have impact.