MED-GOLD will demonstrate the proof-of-concept for climate services in the agriculture sector by developing case studies for three hallmarks of the Mediterranean food system: grapes, olives and durum wheat. Agriculture is primarily climate-driven and hence highly vulnerable to climate variability and change. Evidence suggests that the Mediterranean region is under immediate threat of shifting climate patterns and the associated ecological, economic and social effects. Developing a capacity to turn the increasingly big climate-related data into tailored climate services that can inform decision-making in agriculture, is therefore a priority both in Europe and worldwide. The long-term goal of this project is to make European agriculture and food systems more competitive, resilient, and efficient in the face of climate change, by using climate services to minimize climate-driven risks/costs and seize opportunities for added-value. The MED-GOLD project aims to develop climate services for olive, grape, and durum wheat crop systems that are the basis for producing olive oil, wine and pasta. This set of crops and related food products is of utmost climatic, ecological, economic, and cultural relevance to the Mediterranean region. Because olive oil, wine and pasta are not only hallmarks of the Mediterranean diet but also food commodities with a global market, there is considerable potential for developing climate services with high added-value for olive, grape, and durum wheat. A key challenge is to co-design prototype pilot service applications involving both suppliers and users in the three major traditional Mediterranean crop systems so as to demonstrate the added-value of data/information-driven responses to changes in the climate system. The operational decision-making of users will be reviewed to either identify key decisions or introduce new actions that can benefit from climate-related information at different timescales from months to decades.

Arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM) is a genetic disease characterized by progressive cardiomyocyte loss and fibrofatty replacement, which in turn lead to the occurrence of ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death (SCD), particularly in the young and athletes. At present, ACM is uncurable; with an incidence of 1:5000, it can be considered a major CVD disease. The subform involving only the right ventricle is the most common; the majority of its causative mutations are identified in just three desmosomal genes: PKP2, DSP, and DSG2. However, many of the identified variants in these disease genes are still of uncertain clinical significance (VUS) and thus of limited clinical utility. The overall aim of the project is to combine large-scale data from genomics, proteomics and instrumental analysis obtained from patients with data from structural and functional analyses of in vitro (3D microtissue) and in vivo (murine) models, to establish the genotype/cardiac phenotype relationship, potentially leading to a better understanding of the role and impact of known genes and epigenetic factors (ie, miRNAs) on susceptibility, clinical progression, and treatment of ACM. The project’s outcomes will pave the way towards novel therapies for ACM.

SPIRIT project takes up a holistic approach to identity resolution and will develop a semantically rich sense-making capability to facilitate cognitive tasks in the resolution of identity in full operational compliance with data and privacy protection as operationally assured through workflow-embedded data anonymisation and privacy filtering techniques as required, whilst retaining maximum possibly informativeness of data that can be legally used. Thus SPIRIT will provide capabilities to continuously initiate complex associative searches over all sources relevant to the current investigation, correlate information from multimedia data, reason over information with uncertainty, and structure and manipulate information into a unified view of the available evidence over a persisted, searchable knowledge base. The final goal is to empower the investigator to create a semantically rich picture over all the available evidence to be presented at court.