research – Pagina 2 – Cristina Da Rold

EU funding for robotics research

16 Apr 2014Cristina Da RoldLascia un commento

Nowadays, over two-thirds of European workers in manufacturing are employed in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This is a considerable percentage that UE must consider in its decision concerning funding for Research and Development. One of the most significant aim of SMEs is to offer a valid answer to changing production needs that are developing more and more quickly in our contemporary society, and robotics represents in this sense one of the major challenges.

Bringing cognitive robotics from vision to reality in a key segment of EU-manufacturing is the reason whySMEROBOTICS, The European Robotics Initiative for Strengthening the Competitiveness of SMEs in Manufacturing, has born.

The objective of the project is to propose a work system which covers all phases of the robot life-cycle and through which humans could operate together with robots into the field of manufacture. More in detail, the project aims to transfer the concept of cognitive robotics from vision to reality. This is based on a three-year initiative, which will end on 31 December 2015, for developing suitable robots for SMEs that are agile enough to allow companies to modify their productive processes without the intervention of specialists. There is also an Italian group involved in SMEROBOTICS: Comau spa, a company that works in the field of industrial applications and automation technology, based in Turin.

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Western Balkans get ready for Horizon 2020

26 Mar 2014Cristina Da RoldLascia un commento

Reblogged from Science on the Net

Although the scientific performance of the Western Balkan countries (WBC) has improved in recent years, the lack of human resources, research funding and facilities, as well as a weak regulatory regime, are the main obstacles to an improvement of the situation. At the same time, in 2012 the Western Balkans have required 38 patents in the United States, compared to an average of 25 patents for universities and leading research institutes in the U.S.

The conference “Towards 2020: New Horizons for RTD and Innovation in the Western Balkan Region”, which will take place on 27 and 28 March 2014 in Vienna, is the final step of a huge project named WBC – INCO.NET. This project is funded by the Seventh Framework Programme and supports international cooperation activities through bi-regional platforms, for instance providing a database of all the calls of proposals (400 calls in the database covering 2009-2014). Balkan countries involved are 10: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, FYR of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Slovenia and Turkey. The final cost of the project was EUR 3,496,584, with EUR 3,048,470 of UE contribution.

GLOBOCAN results: war against cancer is far from being won

3 Feb 2014Cristina Da RoldLascia un commento

Reblogged from Science on the Net

GLOBOCAN project is a comprehensive cancer surveillance database managed by the International Association of Cancer Registries (IARC), whose aim is to calculate incidence and cancer mortality worldwide and prevalence from major type of cancers for 184 countries of the world. GLOBOCAN collects data from every continent and about major types of cancer, and estimates are presented for 2012, separately for each sex. GLOBOCAN represents an enormous source for scientists. Last December, The Lancet dedicated a special editorial to these data and published a series of studies based on GLOBOCAN database, which analyzed the whole phenomenon of the incidence of cancer around the world and some aspects of the war against it, concluding that four decades after such war was declared, a strategic rethink is needed along all battle lines: prevention, therapeutic approaches, and cancer inequalities.