The I3 Impact Innovation Invest is a 33 months CSA that addresses the topic ICT 19 -2015 Technologies for creative industries topic c) Coordination and Support Actions on Convergence and Social Media. I3 will support research results from lab to market making innovation happen. I3 will promote a closer relation between researchers and entrepreneur providing mentorship and tutorship support to researchers and providing access to business angels and investors. The objective is to identify the emerging promising solutions and their feasibility in the Convergence and social media sector within the European research ecosystem. I3 aims to connect them with investors, corporates, institutions and media and with Startup Europe Initiative, in order to help them in accessing the market through selected events and exploitation activities. Living Lab approach will be used to allow business ideas and new technologies to be validated with users and community. I3 will implement a systematic policy review and analysis, applying methods that can effectively be used to solve issues in the domain addressed by the specific ICT19 topic, applying data and evidence methods. A Policy dialogue will be run to identify areas in need of further exploration, in order to advance consensus and bring together key stakeholders from public and private sector, civil society, academia and the media to discuss key policy issues. The dialogues will provide a forum for multi-directional dialogue, strategic coordination for the development of new research agendas, issues on regulatory framework and coordination of policies in Convergence and Social media. I3 will be dedicated to increase the projects outreach and impact bridging the gap between the technologies developed and the access to the market, increasing cooperation within the convergence social media ecosystem and liaising with related Innovation and R&D programmes both at the European international and national levels.

Brain disorders are the most invalidating condition, exceeding HIV, cancer and heart ischemia, with significant impact on society and public health. Regenerative medicine is a promising branch of health science that aims at restoring brain function by rebuilding brain tissue. However, repairing the brain is one of the hardest challenges and we are still unable to effectively rebuild brain matter. Epilepsy is particularly challenging due to its dynamic nature caused by the relentless brain damage and aberrant rearrangements of brain rewiring. To overcome the biological uncertainty of canonical regenerative approaches, we propose an innovative solution based on intelligent biohybrids, made by the symbiotic integration of bioengineered brain tissue, neuromorphic microelectronics and artificial intelligence, to effectively drive self-repair of dysfunctional brain circuits and we validate it against animal models of epilepsy. HERMES fosters the emergence of a novel biomedical paradigm, rooted in the use of biohybrid neuronics (neural electronics), which we name enhanced regenerative medicine. To this end, HERMES will promote interdisciplinary cross-fertilization within and outside the consortium; it will extend the concepts of enhanced brain regeneration to philosophy, ethics, policy and society to foster the emergence of a new innovation eco-system. Intelligent biohybrids will represent a major breakthrough to advance brain repair research beyond regenerative medicine and neurotechnology alone; it will bring new knowledge in neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience and philosophy, and new neuromorphic technology and AI algorithms. HERMES will bring a giant conceptual leap that will shift the concept of biomedical interventions from treating to healing. In turn, it will potentially generate major returns on health care and society at large by bringing previously unimaginable possibilities to defeat disorders that represent today a global major burden of disease.

The media market is currently undergoing a major change as its traditional business models are shifting to digital products and services rapidly. Besides the prevalent digitisation, this change is also driven by network advances and consumer behaviour. The introduction of non-linear content (OTT, VOD) has given consumers more control of their screen and the content they consume, placing them in the driving seat and leaving the commercial broadcasters competing for their attention. Thus, a migration toward as subscription VOD services is observed with OTT services emerging and becoming very competitive by acquiring a large share of the media market. Hyper360 aims to use ICT technology and innovation exploiting the ongoing Virtual Reality revolution. The goal is to offer a complete end-to-end production toolset for enriched 360o video, with novel 3D storytelling elements, while also leveraging the powerful implicit preference extraction means that omnidirectional viewing offers, i.e. the viewing direction, to build a personalisation framework on top of the consumption of this new hybrid format. 360o content is well posed to provide feelings of presence and immersion and is now starting to be utilized in the media industry. Sky, BBC, NY Times are just some of the media players already starting to experiment with it, while big ICT players like Facebook, Google and Intel are investing in it. Hyper 360 aims to exploit this 360 hype and offer to it extensions for directrs, by allowing them to insert 3D appearances of narrators to appropriately navigate and immerse the viewers. The production toolset will be deployed and validated with the help of 2 large broadcasters and OTT providers, in the contexts of Immersive Journalism (free viewpoint) and Targeted Advertising (personalisation), as 360o video is seeing increased usage in both marketing and journalism. Finally, Hyper360 will greatly contribute in the emerging standards for free viewpoint video.