UNIPI Team Leader: Vincenzo Ferrari, Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'informazione

The idea of integrating the surgeon’s perceptive efficiency with the aid of new augmented reality (AR) visualization modalities has become a dominant topic of academic and industrial research in the medical domain since the 90’s. AR technology appeared to represent a significant development in the context of image-guided surgery (IGS).

The quality of the AR experience affects the degree of acceptance among physicians and it depends on how well the virtual content is integrated into the real world spatially, photometrically and temporally. In this regard, wearable systems based on head-mounted displays (HMDs), offer the most ergonomic and easily translatable solution for many surgeries.

Most of the AR HMDs fall into two categories according to the see-through paradigm they implement: video see-through (VST) and optical see-through (OST) HMDs. In OST systems, the user’s direct view of the real world is augmented with the projection of virtual information into the user’s line of sight. Differently, in VST systems the virtual content is merged with images captured by two external cameras anchored to the visor. With respect to technological and human-factor issues, both the approaches have their own strengths and shortcomings. In this project, we identified in a hybrid OST/VST HMD, a disruptive solution for improving surgical outcomes.

The application driven device will be developed from existing systems and exploiting the knowhow acquired within the consortium on photonics KET technologies. The resulting device will undergo three clinical trials whose results will be fundamental towards a straight industrial exploitation comprising economic viability analysis.

Video-Optical See Through AR surgical System (VOSTARS) will be the first hybrid see-through HMD surgical navigator. Further, albeit VOSTARS will be specifically designed for medical procedures, its design is aimed to evolve into a multi-purpose AR platform for HMDs.

Coordinator
UNIVERSITA DI PISA Italy

Participants

• SCOPIS GMBH Germany
• ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA Italy
• CHARITE - UNIVERSITAETSMEDIZIN BERLIN Germany
• SANKT GERTRAUDEN KRANKENHAUS GMBH Germany
• OPTINVENT France
• TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET MUENCHEN Germany
• VREO Innovation United Kingdom
• COMMISSARIAT A L ENERGIE ATOMIQUE ET AUX ENERGIES ALTERNATIVES France
• PILOTFISH GMBH Germany
• SCUOLA SUPERIORE DI STUDI UNIVERSITARI E DI PERFEZIONAMENTO SANT'ANNA Pisa

Start date 01/12/2016
End date 30/11/2019
Duration 36 months
Project cost 4.428.800 €
Project funding 3.816.440 €
UNIPI quota 1.087.586,25 €
Call title H2020-ICT-2016-1
Funding scheme IA - Innovation action
UNIPI role Coordinator

Project website http://www.vostars.eu/

UNIPI Team Leader: Prof.ssa Arti Ahluwalia, CENTRO PIAGGIO

The project aims at creating an EU-Africa e-Infrastructure, UBORA, for open source co-design of new solutions to face the current and future healthcare challenges of both continents, by exploiting networking, knowledge on rapid prototyping of new ideas and sharing of safety criteria and performance data. The e-infrastructure will foster advances in education and the development of innovative solutions in Biomedical Engineering (BME), both of which are flywheels for European and African economies. It is conceived as a virtual platform for generating, exchanging, improving and implementing creative ideas in BME underpinned by a solid safety assessment framework. Besides the provision of resources with designs, blueprints and support on safety assessment and harmonisation, specific sections for needs identification, project management, repositories and fund raising are also foreseen.

UBORA (“excellence” in Swahili) brings together European and African Universities and their associated technological hubs (supporting biomedical prototyping laboratories and incubators), national and international policymakers and committed and credible stakeholders propelled by a series of Summer Schools and Competitions. In a nutshell, UBORA couples the open design philosophy with Europe’s leadership in quality control and safety assurance, guaranteeing better health and new opportunities for growth and innovation.

Coordinatore
UNIVERSITA DI PISA Italy

Partner

• KUNGLIGA TEKNISKA HOEGSKOLAN Sweden
• UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA DE MADRID Spain
• UGANDA INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE Uganda
• KENYATTA UNIVERSITY Kenya
• TARTU ULIKOOL Estonia
• AGILEWORKS OU Estonia

Start date 01/01/2017
End date 30/06/2019
Duration 30 months
Project cost 992.250 €
Project funding 992.250 €
UNIPI quota 404.500 €
Call title H2020-INFRASUPP-2016-1
Funding scheme CSA - Coordination and support action
UNIPI role Coordinatore

Project website: http://ubora-biomedical.org/

UNIPI Team Leader: Monica Pratesi
Dipartimento di Economia e Management

Referring to the increasingly challenging EU2020-ambitions of Inclusive Growth, the objectives of the InGRID-2 project are to advance the integration and innovation of distributed social sciences research infrastructures (RI) on ‘povety, living conditions and social policies’ as well as ‘working conditions, vulnerability and labour policies’.

InGRID-2 will extend transnational on-site and virtual access, organize mutual learning and discussions of innovations, and improve data services and facilities of comparative research. The focus areas are a) integrated and harmonized data, (b) links between policy and practice, and (c) indicator-building tools.

Lead users are social scientist involved in comparative research to provide new evidence for European policy innovations. Key science actors and their stakeholders are coupled in the consortium to provide expert services to users of comparative research infrastructures by investing in collaborative efforts to better integrate micro-data, identify new ways of collecting data, establish and improve harmonized classification tools, extend available policy databases, optimize statistical quality, and set-up microsimulation environments and indicator-building tools as important means of valorization. Helping scientists to enhance their expertise from data to policy is the advanced mission of InGRID-2.

A research portal will be the gateway to this IRI. Networking activities will provide initiation (summer schools), in-depth discussions (expert workshops), and help to promote necessary innovations for sustainable inclusive growth. Extending the RI to all EU countries is an important mission on the agenda for InGRID-2.

Based on surveyed users’ needs, joint research activities are conducted in the focus areas and concentrate on extending data integrations, exploring new data linkage and sources, innovating microsimulation tools, improving comparative policy data, and investigating new high-quality indicators.

Coordinatore
KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN Belgium

Partecipanti

• TARKI Tarsadalomkutatasi Intezet Zrt Hungary
• UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM Netherlands
• STOCKHOLMS UNIVERSITET Sweden
• UNIVERSITAET TRIER Germany
• CENTRO DE ESTUDIOS DEMOGRAFICOS Spain
• LISER - LUXEMBOURG INSTITUTE OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC RESEARCH Luxembourg
• UNIVERSITEIT ANTWERPEN Belgium
• UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX United Kingdom
• DEUTSCHES INSTITUT FUR WIRTSCHAFTSFORSCHUNG DIW (INSTITUT FUR KONJUNKTURFORSCHUNG) EV Germany
• CONSERVATOIRE NATIONAL DES ARTS ET METIERS France
• CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN POLICY STUDIES Belgium
• UNIVERSITA DI PISA Italy
• UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON United Kingdom
• Luxembourg Income Study, asbl Luxembourg
• THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER United Kingdom
• STREDOEUROPSKY INSTITUT PRE VYSKUMPRACE ZDRUZENIE Slovakia
• PANTEIO PANEPISTIMIO KOINONIKON KAIPOLITIKON EPISTIMON Greece
• CENTRALNY INSTYTUT OCHRONY PRACY - PANSTWOWY INSTYTUT BADAWCZY Poland

Start date 01/05/2017
End date 30/04/2021
Duration 48 months
Project cost 9.345.420,50 €
Project funding 9.345.420,50 €
UNIPI quota 232.000 €
Call title H2020-INFRAIA-2016-1
Funding scheme RIA - Research and Innovation action
UNIPI role Partner

Project website: http://www.inclusivegrowth.eu/

UNIPI Team Leader: Prof. Francesco Pineider, Dipartimento di Chimica e Chimica Industriale

We will develop the conceptually new paradigm for ultra-dense and ultrafast magnetic storage that will exceed the current technology by two orders of magnitude in storage density (going from terabit/inch2 to tens of terabytes/inch2) and by about four orders of magnitude in operation speed (going from low GHz to THz for read/write). This will be achieved in an all-optical platform that allows deterministic, non-thermal, low-energy, ultrafast magnetization switching at few nanometers and potentially down to a molecular length-scale. The main building block of the envisioned memory unit in this new paradigm is the spinoptical nanoplasmonic antenna that concentrates pulsed polarized light at the nanometer length-scale and enables non-thermal spin-orbit mediated transfer of the light’s angular momentum (orbital and/or spin) to the nanoscale magnetic architectures. In this way fs-pulsed light, assisted by the plasmonic optical spin-selective antenna and the local electromagnetic field enhancement, allows for the precise control of the magnetic state of nanometer sized / molecular magnetic structures.

The project aims to elucidate the fundamentals of the emergence and manipulation of light’s orbital and spin angular momenta to achieve non-thermal momentum-transfer-driven ultrafast switching process, to demonstrate its practical realization, and will map its suitability for future upscaling towards industrial implementation in devices.

Coordinatore
GOETEBORGS UNIVERSITET Sweden

Partecipanti

• UPPSALA UNIVERSITET Sweden
• Asociacion - Centro de Investigacion Cooperativa en Nanociencias - CIC NANOGUNE Spain
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI FIRENZE Italy
• UNIVERSITY OF YORK United Kingdom
• STICHTING KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT Netherlands
• PAUL SCHERRER INSTITUT Switzerland
• NANOSC AB Sweden
• UNIVERSITA DI PISA Italy
• THALES SA France

Start date 01/01/2017
End date 31/12/2020
Duration 42 months
Project cost 3.712.832,50 €
Project funding 3.712.832,50 €
UNIPI quota 135.870,04 €
Call title H2020-FETOPEN-1-2016-2017
Funding scheme RIA - Research and Innovation action
UNIPI role Partner

Project website:  https://www.physics.gu.se/english/research/femtoterabyte

UNIPI Team Leader: Alessandro Tredicucci , Dipartimento di Fisica

Optoelectronic devices typically operate in the weak coupling regime between light and matter, for example in conventional lasers relying on population inversion to achieve optical gain. Recently there has been a surge of interest in quantum systems operating instead in the strong coupling regime, when the coupling strength of the light-matter interaction is so strong that new states – cavity polaritons – are created, that are partially light, partially material excitation. In semiconductors, exciton-polaritons have been the most widely studied type of strongly coupled system. Recently a new phenomenon has been realized exploiting intersubband transitions.

The resulting excitations are called intersubband polaritons, and they have two remarkable properties: (i) a bosonic character that is maintained up to high carrier densities since they are not restricted by the Mott transition limit; (ii) large Rabi splittings. Although the scientific community has explored the basic science of intersubband polaritons, their potential for future and innovative optoelectronic devices has been entirely untapped.

The MIR-BOSE project will realize this potential, and demonstrate disruptive optoelectronic devices operating in the strong coupling regime between light and matter. We will demonstrate the first bosonic lasers operating in the mid-IR and THz ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. Laser action here does not rely on population inversion, so we will achieve temperature independent operation and high powers. We will demonstrate a new concept of inverse-Q-switching leading to the generation of high power pulses in the mid-IR, overcoming severe bottlenecks in current technology. Finally, we will demonstrate non-classical/quantum light sources and devices, generating squeezed states of light in the mid-IR/THz spectral range for quantum optics. These new sources will have a major impact on several technologies and applications, being advantageous compared to current solutions.

Coordinatore
UNIVERSITE PARIS-SUD France

Partecipanti

• CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS France
• UNIVERSITAET REGENSBURG Germany
• FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY HELLAS Greece
• UNIVERSITA DI PISA Italy
• CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE Italy
• University of Leeds United Kingdom
• TEMATYS France

Start date 01/01/2017
End date 31/12/2020
Duration 42 months
Project cost 3.786.160 €
Project funding 3.786.160 €
UNIPI quota 303.375 €
Call title H2020-FETOPEN-1-2016-2017
Funding scheme RIA - Research and Innovation action
UNIPI role Partner

Project website: https://mir-bose.eu/

UNIPI Team Leader: Massimiliano Razzano, Dipartimento di Fisica

NEWS promotes the collaboration between European, US and Japanese research institutions in some key areas of fundamental physics. LIGO and Virgo collaborations have built the largest gravitational wave observatories and exploit the propagation of light and spacetime to detect gravitational waves and probe their sources. The first observation of a signal from a merging black hole system has inaugurated the era of gravitational wave astronomy.

The Large Area Telescope collaboration operates a gamma-ray telescope onboard the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope mission and has revolutionized our view of the gamma-ray Universe, by increasing the number of known sources, unveiling new classes of gamma-ray emitters, and probing particle acceleration and electromagnetic emission in space with unprecedented detail. Fermi is the reference all-sky gamma-ray monitor for the follow-up searches for electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave sources.

The multimessenger astronomical observations will soon be enriched by X-ray polarization detectors. New-generation space telescopes will measure the polarization of X-rays from the cosmic sources and probe the laws of physics under extreme conditions of gravitational and electromagnetic fields. A complementary approach to probe the Universe is provided by particle accelerators built in laboratories. FNAL will provide the cleanest probes for physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. The Muon (g-2) experiment will measure the muon anomalous magnetic moment with unprecedented precision. Mu2e will search for the neutrinoless coherent muon conversion to an electron in the Coulomb field of a nucleus, which would be the unambiguous evidence of new, unknown, physics.

These endeavors require innovative detectors and cutting-edge technologies that NEWS will develop to open new “windows” in fundamental physics.

Coordinator
ISTITUTO NAZIONALE DI FISICA NUCLEARE Italy

Participants

• HELMHOLTZ-ZENTRUM DRESDEN-ROSSENDORF EV Germany
• Prisma Electronics ABEE Greece
• POLITECNICO DI MILANO Italy
• CLEVER OPERATION France
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI GENOVA Italy
• UNIVERSITA DI PISA Italy
• STOCKHOLMS UNIVERSITET Sweden
• KUNGLIGA TEKNISKA HOEGSKOLAN Sweden
• CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS France
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PERUGIA Italy
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA LA SAPIENZA Italy
• IMPEX HIGHTECH GMBH Germany
• EUROPEAN GRAVITATIONAL OBSERVATORY(EGO) (OSSERVATORIO GRAVITAZIO NALEEUROPEO) Italy
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI FEDERICO II Italy

Start date 01/07/2017
End date 30/06/2021
Duration 48 months
Project cost 1.566.000 €
Project funding 1.566.000 €
UNIPI quota 121.500 €
Call title H2020-MSCA-RISE-2016
Funding scheme MSCA-RISE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE)
UNIPI role Partner

Project website: http://risenews.df.unipi.it/

UNIPI Team Leader: Lisandro Benedetti-Cecchi

The BRIGHT project aims at enhancing the visibility and perception of researchers among the general population in the Tuscany Region, simultaneously with all the European Researchers’ Night (ERN) initiatives.

BRIGHT acronym means “Brilliant Researchers Impact on Growth Health and Trust in research”, wishing to underline the positive aspect of the research activity in order to convey a positive message to the general public.

BRIGHT is planned in for two years - i.e. two events, one in 2016 and another in 2017 - and livens up not only two “nights” with entertaining and exciting events spread across the main Tuscany cities, but it also creates a lot of initiatives aiming at building permanent “Research Urban Trekking” paths leading towards the complete awareness of the researcher’s role in society. “Researchers make your life better!” is the guiding principle stemming from the passion, the enthusiasm and hard intellectual work of researchers’ daily work and how this contributes to the well-being of the general population. BRIGHT focuses on creating awareness on the important role played by researchers in addressing the great challenges ahead, such as health and wellbeing, new technologies, sustainable development, physical and biological challenges, cultural heritage.

BRIGHT will be successful if it will be able to convince the population of the IMPACT of the researchers and the research's products for the development of the society, and to make people TRUST the researchers instead of being driven away by hoaxes with no scientific basis.

Coordinator
UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI DI SIENA Italy

Participants

• UNIVERSITA DI PISA Italy
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI FIRENZE Italy
• UNIVERSITA PER STRANIERI DI SIENA Italy
• SCUOLA SUPERIORE DI STUDI UNIVERSITARI E DI PERFEZIONAMENTO SANT'ANNA Italy
• SCUOLA NORMALE SUPERIORE Italy
• SCUOLA IMT (ISTITUZIONI, MERCATI, TECNOLOGIE) ALTI STUDI DI LUCCA Italy

Start date 01/06/2016
End date 31/01/2018
Duration 20 months
Project cost 160.000 €
Project funding 160.000 €
UNIPI quota 38.000 €
Call title H2020-MSCA-NIGHT-2016
Funding scheme CSA - Coordination and support action
UNIPI role Partner

Project description in Italian: https://www.unipi.it/index.php/risultati-e-prodotti/item/11987-bright

Project website: http://www.bright-toscana.it/

UNIPI Team Leader: Prof. Enzo Pasquale Scilingo, CENTRO PIAGGIO 

Personalized health is a European priority and one of the strategic research areas for Horizon 2020. This project advances the state-of-the-art of personal health technologies for affective disorders, estimated to be the highest ranking cause of disease by 2020. It marks a significant shift from the current wearable technologies capturing emotional responses whose understanding usually requires physicians’ input, to low-cost self-help technologies for visualizing, exploring and regulating emotions.

AffecTech integrates the latest Human-Computer Interaction and Biomedical Engineering findings in designing and developing personal health systems for mental health, with the most influential outcomes and models of emotion regulation from Clinical Psychology.

The overall aim is to support self-understanding and successful adoption of adaptive emotion regulation strategies in daily life. AffecTech will contribute towards four significant outcomes:

1. wearable systems for capturing emotion regulation,
2. applications for understanding emotions and their regulatory processes,
3. interactive tools for training adaptive emotion regulation strategies, and
4. theoretical contributions to emotion regulation research in real life.

AffecTech builds on exceptional European and North American expertise from both academic and private sector to provide personalized health research with a timely and much needed momentum to address the pressing social challenge of emotional wellbeing and health.

Coordinator
LANCASTER UNIVERSITY United Kingdom

Other participants

• KUNGLIGA TEKNISKA HOEGSKOLAN Sweden
• THE PROVOST, FELLOWS, FOUNDATION SCHOLARS & THE OTHER MEMBERS OF BOARD OF THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY & UNDIVIDED TRINITY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH NEAR DUBLIN Ireland
• THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD United Kingdom
• UNIVERSITA DI PISA Italy
• UNIVERSITAT JAUME I DE CASTELLON Spain
• UNIVERSITA CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE Italy
• BOGAZICI UNIVERSITESI Turkey
• PHILIPS ELECTRONICS NEDERLAND B.V. Netherlands
• THE LEEDS TEACHING HOSPITALS NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE TRUST United Kingdom
• PLUX - WIRELESS BIOSIGNALS S.A. Portugal

Start date 01/01/2017
End date 31/12/2020
Duration 48 months
Project cost 3.888.273,60 €
Project funding 3.888.273,60 €
UNIPI quota 258 061,32 €
Call title H2020-MSCA-ITN-2016
Funding scheme MSCA-ITN-ETN - European Training Networks
UNIPI role Partner

Project website: http://www.affectech.org/

UNIPI Team Leader: Prof. Umberto Desideri, Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'energia, dei Sistemi, del Territorio e delle Costruzioni

Energy provision is a big challenge for our Society, being the present production/consumption paradigm not sustainable. To change current trends, a large increase in the share of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) is crucial. The effectiveness of Thermal Energy Storage (TES) poses Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) systems at the forefront, as the first dispatchable option among all intermittent RESs. In order to realize the CSP potential, the efficiency of the adopted Power Conversion Units (PCUs) must grow over 50%, entailing temperature levels of the order of 1000 °C: promising solutions are based on Brayton thermodynamic cycles.

This project stems from the observation that no existing TES option can be coupled to such PCUs and/or work at these temperatures, and aims at filling this gap.

Three interrelated research objectives are proposed, to prove the feasibility and assess the potential of:

1. an innovative CSP concept whereby (i) the receiver is co-located with the TES vessel, (ii) the solar radiation is directly absorbed by the liquid storage medium, and (iii) the thermal power is withdrawn from the TES by bubbling a gas through it, which can thus be used as working fluid in a Brayton cycle. An efficient and simple system results, without irradiated metal tubes, secondary fluid loops, heat exchangers, valves, nor pumps;
2. the adoption of common glass-forming compounds as novel TES materials. These are nontoxic and inexpensive (mainly sand), and the related know-how is already available from the glass manufacturing field, whose deep synergies with the CSP sector will be explored in a multi-disciplinary perspective;
3. the CSP systems resulting from the integration between receiver–TES and PCUs.

The envisaged approach combines advanced theoretical and experimental research activities to achieve these goals. The final scope is to inaugurate a new branch in the field of solar systems, with the potential of enabling the CSP plants we need to ensure a bright Future.

Start date 01/05/2016

End date 30/04/2019

Duration 36 months

Project cost 259.558,20 €

Project funding 259.558,20 €

UNIPI quota 259.558,20 €

Call title H2020-MSCA-IF-2014

Funding scheme: MSCA-IF-GF - Global Fellowships

UNIPI role Coordinator

Project website: https://www.glasuntes.eu/

ACRI - Associazione di fondazioni e Casse di Risparmio spa, intende promuovere la ricerca scientifica e le collaborazioni internazionali tra Centri di ricerca, favorendo la mobilità dei giovani ricercatori.

In particolare, il bando in questione promuove la partecipazione di giovani ricercatori, impegnati in strutture di ricerca all'estero, a congressi di rilevanza internazionale organizzati da enti di ricerca italiani. In stretta connessione a tale partecipazione, il bando intende sostenere l’attività di ricerca, della durata di almeno 1 mese, dei giovani ricercatori presso una rete di centri di ricerca italiani.

Le domande possono essere presentate fino al 31 ottobre 2017, mentre a questa pagina è possibile scaricare il bando con formulario di presentazione annesso http://www.acri.it/PublicFondazioniOnline/Detail/4394