This project investigates the question of the resilience of university instruction following the shock of physical and mental isolation into which trainers and learners were thrust during the COVID-19 pandemic. It constitutes a central issue insofar as everything suggests that digital interactions and hybrid teaching are here to stay. We defend the idea that the resilience of university environments, and of society, depends on a new balance between the inevitable use of digital tools and the place for sensitive experience and embodiment. The final goal is to empower teachers in higher education to face the new situations in various contexts. We seek to participate in the restoration of the synergy between the cognitive and the sensitive by: 1) Provide an overall picture of distance training practices implemented during the pandemic, in each of the partner institutions, in the disciplines concerned by the project; 2) Explore hybrid experiential support as a space for in-action dialogue between teachers, learners, and knowledge, with a view to reducing inequalities in learning; 3) Investigate the place of sensitive experience within a given context as a space for learning by taking into account embodied knowledge in a hybrid model; 4) Provide material for the renewal of training practices, toward greater equality and inclusion, in various modalities, including distance learning. Through a partnership between Canada, France and Switzerland, we anticipate the following results: 1) A better understanding of the role of sensitive experience, effect of context and embodiment in pedagogical relationships and learning; 2) Instructional schemes easier to adapt to differing modalities, in person and at a distance, and within different field realities; 3) The development of new knowledge in the research fields of sensitive experience and contextualization. Scientific writings from this project will be a source of inspiration for decision makers in charge of support university trainers.

The focus of the ANR proposal is to launch a network joining European and non-European teams working on local development in the highlands, in order to submit a proposal to RISE (Research and Innovation Staff Exchange) Marie Curie Program/H2020 early 2017. The objectives of the RISE proposal will be (i) share and debate the diverse initiatives and innovations of local development in the highlands, (ii) develop specific capacity building focused on different types of stakeholders and local people, (iii) participate in policymaking through relevant suggestions, monitoring and assessment of actions and (iv) strengthen a recognized European competence on the local development in the highlands. The partnership for the ANR proposal, and consequently for the RISE proposal, is based four countries of European Union (Austria, France, Portugal and United Kingdom), two other European countries (Norway and Switzerland) and non-European countries in Mediterranean (Morocco and Lebanon), the Americas (Argentina, Canada, Equator, Peru, the United States) and Eastern Asia (China and Vietnam). Research question is adaptation process and resilience of high mountain societies to global change, especially initiatives and innovations focused on local development. Several initiatives of local development in the highlands were implemented in the countries of the European Union, although the concepts have sometimes been built in other areas, as for example natural parks, reserves of biodiversity, reserves of biosphere, “regional” parks, winter and summer slow tourism, many small agribusiness factories for cheeses, liquors, fruits, etc. Diverse reasons justified these implementations in the European Union, especially the specific policies made at national and European level, which strongly incentivized and supported these initiatives, in order to reduce the disadvantages of these regions, mainly due to their weak access and their long distance to decisions centers. Indeed, focused on the sustainable development, the specific national and European policies significantly impacted local development in European highlands, compared with non-European highlands where economic issues and national interest usually lead their development, especially in developing countries. Moreover, the supportive context for local development initiatives lead to new initiatives and also innovations focused on the improvement of these initiatives and the building of new initiatives, including in policymaking. In other words, based on the European Union experience, the implementation of local development could lead to new steps of local development. It is a research hypothesis to be verified in European Union and tested in the other zones. A priori, for the method of the RISE proposal, we suggest using the concept of co-viability, which includes both viability and its regulation, to analyze resilience factors at different scales, representations and local knowledge, access to resources and policymaking in global change context. This point has to be debate with the partner in the next months. In terms of activity to be developed in 2016 in order to build the RISE proposal, firstly there are five visits to each of the European partners in order to better share the common objectives of the RISE proposal, select the local development initiatives for the compare analysis and draft a concept note of the RISE proposal. Secondly, a workshop joining the leaders of European partners with 3-4 leaders of non-European teams will allow to better define the contents of the proposal and to draft a first version.

Since the emergence of Cloud Computing and the associated Over-The-Top (OTT) value-added service providers more than a decade ago, the architecture of the communication infrastructure - namely the Internet and the (mobile) telecommunication infrastructure - keep improving with computing, caching and networking services becoming more coupled. OTTs are moving from being purely cloud-based to being more distributed and residing close to the edge, a concept known to be “Fog Computing”. Network operators and telecom vendors advertise the “Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)” capabilities they may offer within their 5G Radio-Access and Core Networks. Lately, the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) came into the play as well offering what is known as Smart Speakers (Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod and Google Home), which can also serve as IoT hubs with “Mist/Skin Computing” capabilities. While these have an important influence on the underlying network performances, such computing paradigms are still loosely coupled with each other and with the underlying communication and data storage infrastructures, e.g., even for the forthcoming 5G systems. It is expected that a tight coupling of computing platforms with the networking infrastructure will be required in post-5G networks, so that a large number of distributed and heterogeneous devices belonging to different stakeholders communicate and cooperate with each other in order to execute services or store data in exchange for a reward. This is what we call here the smart collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm. The objective of SCORING project is to develop and analyse this new paradigm by targeting the following research challenges, which are split into five different strata: - At the computing stratum: Proactive placement of computing services, while taking into account users mobility as well as per-computing-node battery status and computing load; - At the storage stratum: Proactive placement of stores and optimal caching of contents/functions, while taking into account the joint networking and computing constraints; - At the software stratum: Efficient management of micro-services in such a multi-tenant distributed realm, by exploiting the Information-Centric Networking principles to support both name and compute function resolution; - At the networking stratum: Enforcement of dynamic routing policies, using Software Defined Networking (SDN), to satisfy the distributed end-user computation requirements and their Quality of Experience (QoE); - At the resource management stratum: Design of new network-economic models to support service offering in an optimal way, while considering the multi-stakeholder feature of the collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm proposed in this project. Smartness will be brought here by using adequate mathematical tools used in combination for the design of each of the five strata: machine learning (proactive placement problems), multi-objective optimization, graph theory and complex networks (information-centric design of content and micro-services caching) and game theory (network-economics model). Demonstration of the feasibility of the proposed strata on a realistic and integrated test-bed as well as on an integrated simulation platform (based on available open-source network-simulation toolkits), will be one of the main goals of the project. The test-bed will be built by exploiting different virtualization (VM/Containers) technologies to deploy compute and storage functions within a genuine networking architecture. Last but not least, all building blocks forming the realistic and integrated test-bed, on the one hand, and the integrated simulation platform, on the other hand, will be made available to the research community at the end of the project as open source software.

This project addresses the point 4.2 of the call for proposal, dedicated to electrochemical capacitors (ECs) so called supercapacitors or ultracapacitors. This point mentions that : « A major effort of research must focus on improving the energy density, including implementation of new organic electrolytes to increase the electrochemical window and security. Asymmetric or hybrid systems are other avenues to explore.”.Our goal is to double the energy density of nowadays symmetrical carbon ECs, i.e from 5 to 10 Wh/kg or 7 to 15 Wh/L. Unlike most of todays research efforts which aim at replacing carbon by other materials (oxides, nitrides, etc...), thus leading to drastic changes in fabrication process, we propose to keep the carbon electrode and simply add electroactive molecules that will be anchored at the surface of carbon, thus adding a faradic component to the double layer capacitance of carbon. This concept is not new since it has been developed for more than 5 years by the partners of this consortium as well as by other teams. However, most of the work has been done in aqueous based electrolytes. The Technology Readiness Level (TRL) is at stage 2 (Invention begins, practical applications can be invented, applications are speculative). Our goal is to apply the current knowledge to the development of devices in organic based electrolytes, and to push TRL level to stage 4 (Basic technological components are integrated to establish that they will work together), being able at the end of the project to give prototype cells to companies for initiating stage 5 of TRL (Component validation in relevant environment). Subsequently the present project is dedicated to technological developments. We want to improve the energy density of carbon-based devices in organic electrolyte by two fold. This will be achieved by keeping the same cell voltage (or slightly increasing it), almost the same double layer capacitance (EDLC) of carbon electrodes but providing an extra Faradaic capacity (and not capacitance since it is purely Faradaic) to both carbon electrodes by functionalizing the surface of carbon with judiciously chosen electroactive molecules. This concept has been successfully applied to aqueous based electrolyte using quinone based functionalized carbons. The choice of the electroactive molecules (multi-electron processes are preferred to single electron process, low molecular weight is needed, adequate active electrochemical window…), the choice of the carbon (large surface area, adequate porosity not too much affected by molecular grafting on the surface, etc…), the interaction between the molecules and carbon powder (high grafting yield, etc..) and finally the behavior of modified carbon electrodes in different organic (or ionic liquid) based electrolytes are the key points that control the final performance of the modified carbon electrodes. These requirements correspond to the 5 tasks of the project. Doubling the energy density must be achieved while keeping high power capability and long term cycling efficiency which are the bottlenecks of the proposed technology. For this purpose, a consortium gathering 4 academic laboratories (including a Canadian partner) has been set up. The 4 labs have been working together for more than 12 years with more than 30 common papers and communications and already 5 common PhD and post-docs. The consortium will take benefit from the belonging of the French labs to the French Network on Energy Storage (RS2E - http://www.energie-rs2e.com/fr) to get access to prototyping facilities to lead the concept to 1000F cells.

Since the emergence of Cloud Computing and the associated Over-The-Top (OTT) valueadded service providers more than a decade ago, the architecture of the communication infrastructure − namely the Internet and the (mobile) telecommunication infrastructure – keep improving with computing, caching and networking services becoming more coupled. OTTs are moving from being purely cloud-based to being more distributed and residing close to the edge, a concept known to be “Fog Computing”. Network operators and telecom vendors advertise the “Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)” capabilities they may offer within their 5G Radio-Access and Core Networks. Lately, the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) came into the play as well offering what is known as Smart Speakers (Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod and Google Home), which can also serve as IoT hubs with “Mist/Skin Computing” capabilities. While these have an important influence on the underlying network performances, such computing paradigms are still loosely coupled with each other and with the underlying communication and data storage infrastructures, e.g., even for the forthcoming 5G systems. It is expected that a tight coupling of computing platforms with the networking infrastructure will be required in post-5G networks, so that a large number of distributed and heterogeneous devices belonging to different stakeholders communicate and cooperate with each other in order to execute services or store data in exchange for a reward. This is what we call here the smart collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm. The objective of SCORING project is to develop and analyse this new paradigm by targeting the following research challenges, which are split into five different strata: At the computing stratum: Proactive placement of computing services, while taking into account users mobility as well as per-computing-node battery status and computing load; At the storage stratum: Proactive placement of stores and optimal caching of contents/functions, while taking into account the joint networking and computing constraints; At the software stratum: Efficient management of micro-services in such a multi-tenant distributed realm, by exploiting the Information-Centric Networking principles to support both name and compute function resolution; At the networking stratum: Enforcement of dynamic routing policies, using Software Defined Networking (SDN), to satisfy the distributed end-user computation requirements and their Quality of Experience (QoE); At the resource management stratum: Design of new network-economic models to support service offering in an optimal way, while considering the multi-stakeholder feature of the collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm proposed in this project. Smartness will be brought here by using adequate mathematical tools used in combination for the design of each of the five strata: machine learning (proactive placement problems), multi-objective optimization, graph theory and complex networks (information-centric design of content and micro-services caching) and game theory (network-economics model). Demonstration of the feasibility of the proposed strata on a realistic and integrated testbed as well as on an integrated simulation platform (based on available open-source network-simulation toolkits), will be one of the main goals of the project. The test-bed will be built by exploiting different virtualization (VM/Containers) technologies to deploy compute and storage functions within a genuine networking architecture. Last but not least, all building blocks forming the realistic and integrated test-bed, on the one hand, and the integrated simulation platform, on the other hand, will be made available to the research community at the end of the project as open source software.