Floods are an increasingly acute problem. Floods endanger lives and cause human tragedy as well as heavy economic losses. In addition to economic and social damage, floods can have severe environmental consequences, for example when installations holding large quantities of toxic chemicals are inundated or wetland areas destroyed. Intense precipitation has become more frequent and more intense, growing manmade pressure has increased the magnitude of floods that result from any level of precipitation, and flawed decisions about the location of human infrastructure have increased the flood loss potential. Flooding cannot be wholly prevented. Flood risk increases with ongoing climate change. Risk reduction in large international basins can only be achieved through transnational, interdisciplinary and stakeholder oriented approaches within the framework of a joint transnational research project. The overall objective of FLOOD-serv is to develop and to provide a pro-active and personalised citizen-centric public service application that will enhance the involvement of the citizen and will harness the collaborative power of ICT networks (networks of people, of knowledge, of sensors) to raise awareness on flood risks and to enable collective risk mitigation solutions and response actions. Other general objectives are: 1. Empowering local communities to directly participate in the design of emergency services dealing with floods mitigation actions. 2. Harness the power of new technologies, such as social media, and mobile technologies to increase the efficiency of public administrations in raising public awareness and education regarding floods risks, effects and impact. 3. Encourage the development and implementation of long-term, cost-effective and environmentally sound mitigation actions related to floods though an ICT-enabled cooperation and collaboration of all stakeholders: government, private sector, NGOs and other civil society organizations as well as citizens.

Big Data will have a profound economic and societal impact in the mobility and logistics sector, which is one of the most-used industries in the world contributing to approximately 15% of GDP. Big Data is expected to lead to 500 billion USD in value worldwide in the form of time and fuel savings, and savings of 380 megatons CO2 in mobility and logistics. With freight transport activities projected to increase by 40% in 2030, transforming the current mobility and logistics processes to become significantly more efficient, will have a profound impact. A 10% efficiency improvement may lead to EU cost savings of 100 BEUR. Despite these promises, interestingly only 19 % of EU mobility and logistics companies employ Big Data solutions as part of value creation and business processes. The TransformingTransport project will demonstrate, in a realistic, measurable, and replicable way the transformations that Big Data will bring to the mobility and logistics market. To this end, TransformingTransport, validates the technical and economic viability of Big Data to reshape transport processes and services to significantly increase operational efficiency, deliver improved customer experience, and foster new business models. TransformingTransport will address seven pilot domains of major importance for the mobility and logistics sector in Europe: (1) Smart High-ways, (2) Sustainable Vehicle Fleets, (3) Proactive Rail Infrastructures, (4) Ports as Intelligent Logistics Hubs, (5) Efficient Air Transport, (6) Multi-modal Urban Mobility, (7) Dynamic Supply Chains. The TransformingTransport consortium combines knowledge and solutions of major European ICT and Big Data technology providers together with the competence and experience of key European industry players in the mobility and logistics domain.

This project is inspired by the following sentence from a professor of computer graphics at UC Berkeley : “Why is there no cloud button?” He outlined how his students simply wish they could easily “push a button” and have their code – existing, optimized, single-machine code – running on the cloud. The main goal is to create CloudButton: a Serverless Data Analytics Platform. CloudButton will “democratize big data” by overly simplifying the overall life cycle and programming model thanks to serverless technologies. To demonstrate the impact of the project, we target two settings with large data volumes: bioinformatics (genomics, metabolomics) and geospatial data (LiDAR, satellital). To achieve these ambitious objectives, CloudButton defines the following goals: 1. High Performance Serverless Run-time: We will create the first FaaS compute run-time for Big Data analytics leveraging Apache OpenWhisk. The proposed serverless big data analytics platform will be based on a mature open source code base (Apache OpenWhisk) augmented with Apache Open Whisk Composer. 2. Mutable Shared Data Middleware for Serverless Computing: We will create Distributed Mutable Data Structures leveraging RedHat Infinispan In-Memory Data Grid. Our middleware will provide language-level constructs for data persistence, dependability and concurrency control to serverless functions. 3. CloudButton Toolkit: Serverless Data Analytics Platform: The toolkit will implement on top of [1] and [2] the Serverless Cloud Programming Abstractions that can express a wide range of existing data-intensive applications with minimal changes. We will develop new tools and methodologies to port existing data-intensive applications from the HPC, data analytics and machine learning domains to the CloudButton toolkit.

Assistant for Quality Check during Construction Execution Processes for Energy-efficienT buildings Problem: What the consortium sees as a major problem today is the potential loss of benefits of energy-efficient building components because of the lack of knowledge or bad implementation during the construction processes. Solution: During the project ACCEPT will be created – An assistant for quality check during construction execution processes for energy-efficienT buildings. The assistant will run on Smart Glasses and unobtrusively guide workers during the construction on site. This provides a standardized and coordinated process for all workers, ensuring that all benefits of energy-efficient building components are maintained. From a user perspective ACCEPT is focused on the following very clear main results: 1. The Construction Operator Assistant App (CoOpApp) running on Smart Glasses, which passively collects data and actively provides guidance to the worker on site during the building process. (Pillar I: Advanced Knowledge Transfer for Energy-efficient Construction) 2. A Site Manager App (SiMaApp) running on a mobile device, which allows to remotely coordinate the working process as well as collect additional data on site by different sensors. (Pillar II: Agile Project Coordination for Bridging Heterogeneity) 3. An interactive web-based Dashboard as a monitoring and quality assurance solution. The Dashboard will use self-inspection methods to determine important characteristics such as U-Values. (Pillar III: Adaptive Quality Assurance with Self-Inspection Features) The project is fully build around achieving a maximum of impaxt: The three results will be accompanied by 7 real-world pilots grouped into 3 piloting areas within the project. Pilots are located in 4 different EU countries.