science

Italy and African Countries scientific cooperation

Cristina Da RoldLascia un commento

Reblogged from Science on the net

A specific call of Horizon 2020 promotes cooperation between Europe and Africa for scientific research, funding project for €80 billion between 2014 and 2020: €24.5 billion for strengthening research in science, €22.6 billion for strengthening industrial leadership in innovation and €31 billion addressed to societal challenges, like global warming, sustainable transport, food or renewal energy. Actually, Italy has been active in this field for years, especially in South Africa and Egypt, through programs of bilateral scientific and technological cooperation under the authority of the Unit for Scientific and Technological Cooperation of the Directorate General for the Promotion of the Country System.

SOUTH AFRICA

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under the Programme for Scientific and Technological Cooperation between Italy and South Africa for the years 2014 – 2016, has launched a call for the collection of joint research projects to develop between the two countries, which closed on 28 February. The call was open to researchers, universities and research centers, and included physics, astrophysics and radio astronomy, information and communication technologies, biotechnology, nanotechnology and advanced materials, medicine, health environment, and renewable energy.

Furthermore, since the Europe-Africa cooperation is also one of the objectives of Horizon 2020, preference will be given to projects that are part of multilateral research programs of the European Call. More in detail, the initiative aims at two types of projects: the first group concerning the mobility of researchers, with support for up to three years 2014-2016 and a loan in annual installments, while the last category is about bilateral projects of great importance.

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EU funding for robotics research

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Reblogged from Science on the Net

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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INFN goes overseas

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Reblogged from Science on the Net

Between 5 and 6th February, INFN met the delegations from the American Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in order to establish a new scientific cooperation among Italy and USA. We talked about this meeting with Antonio Masiero, the INFN Deputy Director. “The collaboration between these two countries is excellent,” says Masiero, “and at the moment it involves four research projects, which are the topics we have discussed two weeks ago in Washington.”

The first project concerns the neutrino physics and takes place at Fermilab. It is composed by two experiments involving Italian physicists: a short baseline experiment and a long baseline experiment, which are respectively the first and the second phase of the project. The American interest in a collaboration with INFN is due to the Italian knowledge around liquid argon and its use as a target for particle detectors. “In Italy we have worked largely with liquid argon at Gran Sasso Laboratories, under the guide of Carlo Rubbia,” explains Masiero. “Our experiment is called ICARUS and it represents the best example of using liquid argon as a target for particle detectors. Thus, Americans need our know-how.”

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CIVIS project: cities as drivers of social change

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Reblogged from Science on the Net

The University of Trento is leading the CIVIS project, with the aim of raising awareness on energy saving through the active participation of the community. CIVIS has received a grant of 2.9 million Euros for three years under the call “ICT-Smartcities” of the 7th European Framework Programme. The aim of the project is to reduce CO2 emissions by focusing on citizen empowerment and the involvement of non-economical values such as collaboration and sharing, in order to communicate with the traditional providers and to build a new form of participated energy service.

Three pilot sites in Italy – Trento city and the nearby municipalities of Storo and Stenico – and other two in Europe – Stockholm, Sweden, and at the Otaniemi University Campus in Helsinki, Finland – will be the first to test CIVIS. In these pilot sites, the various districts involved will be an active part of the research project and the project itself will be developed depending on the context in which it is placed.

“Until now,” says Matteo Bonifacio, the project’s creator at University of Trento, “the way of producing energy has led to the evolution of our society. The big question we must answer is therefore how society will look like, now that we are heading towards distributed and complex energy systems. The first response comes from the web. Today’s society does not coexist with the web; it is the web. A form of participated energy use must therefore draw inspiration from the web to achieve social objectives. Energy is our currency, thus, a social revolution of technology is necessary.”

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