Preventing and fighting illicit material and dangerous substances postal and courier services flows in EU areas is of top priority. However, ensuring efficiency, speed and continuity in screening and detection tasks remains yet a challenge. Currently, custom, police and courier authorities involve a range of screening systems in place but there is still much to do in terms of detection efficacy and creation of intelligence towards risk and threat identification. On top of that, criminals or smugglers exploit the multitude of flows and easily spot security gaps that allow parcels or letters to be transported within or across EU with relative ease. To overcome these constraints, iFLOWS proposes a unique approach to assist customs, police and postal/courier services in preventing and detecting such crimes by improving operational readiness, enhancing situation awareness, reducing detection time, providing operational efficiency and achieving superior mission performance. iFLOWS will design, develop, integrate, test and validate a novel multi-tier synergistic Toolkit in enhancing intelligence extraction, screening and detection operations of illicit material and hazardous substances within courier and postal flows moving across and within EU borders. iFLOWS works upon these 3 building blocks to deliver a) a tailored to such operations C4I that boosts preparedness and cooperation be-tween police, customs and courier/postal services, b) enhanced Intelligence in terms of threats, risks and suspicious flows and c) novel detection technologies (i.e. THz Scanning system and UWB Scanner) featuring enhanced detection capabilities over a large span of illicit material and substances, which, coupled with advanced image-based feature extraction in combination to legacy systems (e.g. X-Ray and Raman) optimise the detection process without interrupting the postal/courier flows.

Pharmaceuticals have undoubtably made our world a better place, ensuring longer and healthier lives. However, pharmaceuticals and their active metabolites are rapidly emerging environmental toxicants. It is thus critical that we fully understand, and mitigate where nec-essary, the environmental impact resulting from their production, use and disposal. In this direction, ENVIROMED addresses two aspects of the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals, a) impact of the processes in manufacturing the compound, and b) impact of the compound itself, during its lifecycle. The project narrows the knowledge gap when it comes to the effect of pharmaceutical compounds, and their derivatives, in the environment as it enables the better understanding the environmental impact of such compounds, throughout their lifecycle. It aims to offer (via extensive monitoring campaigns & scientific studies) information regarding occurrence of pharmaceuticals in the environment, their persistence, environmental fate, and toxicity (via in-vitro & in-vivo models) as well as application of in-silico methods to provide information about the basic risk management and fate prediction in the environment. Brief ideas about toxicity endpoints, available ecotoxicity databases, and expert systems employed for rapid toxicity predictions of ecotoxicity of pharmaceuticals will also be taken into account, in order to have a comprehensive approach to pharmaceuticals' Lifecycle Assessment (LCA). Moreover, the project aims at developing a set of technologies that enable greener and overall, more efficient pharmaceuticals production, which include: a) Green-by-design in-silico drug development; b) Novel sensing to allow reduction of rinsing chemicals and cycles; c) a robust Continuous Biomanufacturing line (CBM), which makes use of AI-enabled process optimisation and prediction, using data assimilation based on chemical sensing and energy disaggregation/monitoring. Training activities and a robust exploitation

MILADO will provide a robust and universal technology platform for low-cost and large volume fabrication of mid infrared (MIR) lasers enabling novel sensors in medicine and production. Key innovation is the technology upscale of the epitaxy of Quantum-Cascade-Lasers (QCLs) on large area substrates and the development of concepts for direct III-V-epitaxy on silicon. Merging III-V and Si-photonics by integrating QCLs and Si-based MIR photonics using CMOS-based technology well-established but very costly III/V-technology-based manufacturing of QCL light sources for spectroscopic applications will be replaced by a cost-effective and scalable manufacturing technology on CEA’s CMOS Pilot Line bringing MIR technology out of its niche. Another building block of MILADO towards a general platform that can be extended for further integration of sensors and actuators in MEMS technology are MIR-PICs made from Ge/SiGe-structures for the definition of waveguides, combiners and any other passive devices required to handle the optical connection of QCLs. MILADO’s technology will open up new markets by enabling novel sensors for personal medical diagnostics or edge-sensors in chemical production. The versatility of the approach will be demonstrated in use cases covering process control and medical diagnostics reaching from the hospital to the patient covering waste anaesthetic gas detection, histopathology to biomarker monitoring.

By applying a circularity-by-design approach, the AMBIANCE project aims to develop new and advanced bio-based products, characterized by a high or total bio-based material content and taking into account the different alternatives for recirculation such as the different types of reuses, remanufacturing, recycling, biodegradation or energy recovery to enhance sustainable models. Such approach will be coupled to the optimization of the mechanical properties for particular applications, e.g. durability for outdoors urban furniture or sports and leisure products, taking into consideration the whole lifecycle. Special attention will be paid to the optimization of product manufacturing of bio-based materials, which will require tuning of material composition and processes (extrusion, large-scale additive manufacturing, compression moulding) for different bio-based materials. Besides, the use of Digital Twin technologies will enhance the development of materials and products and the remanufacturing of such bio-based goods, and it will optimize manufacturing processes and enhance production quality of such novel applications by leveraging IoT and Artificial Intelligence technologies. AMBIANCE's impact will be two-fold: firstly we will showcase disruptively innovative bio-based products in different sectors and manufacturing processes, while we will demonstrate applicability in daily-life products, starring green urban areas that will lead the transition to sustainability. The setting proposed by AMBIANCE will directly result in the creation of new jobs, based on new technical competences that will require specific training and upskilling, while the technical developments and findings will be used to contributing to the standardization of bio-based products and materials, which will guarantee an effective and wide adoption for making such products the new baseline of our lives.