IMPETUS will support and give recognition to citizen science (CS) in Europe. It aims to: * enable more diverse citizen science initiatives (CSIs) to access funding; * bring CS closer to society and policy makers; * acknowledge CS? role in tackling the greatest challenges of our times; and * enable CSIs to contribute to Green Deal (GD) and UN SDG commitments. We will achieve this by: * funding CSIs through 3 open calls, selected on expected impacts, volunteer engagement, EDI, openness and quality data. We will offer 20k? to kickstart 100 CSIs and 10k? to sustain 25 CSIs addressing pressing needs of the European society. Each call will have 2 challenges; we will convene a citizen panel to define one and provide feedback on our work. * setting up an accelerator to provide the funded CSIs with an integrated programme of support, training, mentoring, and resources. The accelerator will facilitate peer learning, enable CSIs to contribute to SDG and GD targets and forge connections with quadruple helix stakeholders. * launching the EU Prize for Citizen Science, awarded to CSIs for outstanding achievements, allowing them to continue and expand their work and showcase it to a wider audience. We will award 3 prize categories for 3 years: outstanding achievements, diversity and innovative grassroots projects. Each time, we will reach out to advisors to identify exceptional nominations and to the citizen panel to vote in the grassroots category. * shaping EU policy in and with CS, through horizon scanning, anticipatory policy and action research, informing policy briefs, webinars and workshops with key policy stakeholders. The aim is to foster more CS data to inform evidence-based policies and identify future directions in CS policy. * developing impact assessment tools and assessing the impact of CSIs and our own framework, especially on GD and SDG targets. Insights will be presented within the wider CS ecosystem and feed into recommendations for national and EU policies.

Flying High Phase 2 Abstract and Public Summary for IUK Nesta’s Flying High is the first programme of its kind to convene city leaders, regulators, public services, central government and industry around the future of drones in cities. Flying High seeks to position the UK to become a global leader in shaping drone systems that place people’s needs first. In the first phase of Flying High, Nesta engaged five UK cities over six months in 2018 to explore the potential uses of drones/aerial robotics in urban environments, capture public sentiment, propose guidelines on drone use in the public realm and analyse the technical and economic feasibility of five socially beneficial use cases in real-world scenarios - transporting medical supplies among hospitals, responding to emergencies and supporting infrastructure development. Flying High Phase 2 builds on the findings from Phase 1 by designing the testing capabilities and challenge prize specifications for socially beneficial, city-based use cases in the categories of medical transport, emergency response and infrastructure maintenance. Nesta will map urban drone use scenarios based on unique place-based circumstances and regulatory conditions relevant to UK cities; and design and specify the infrastructure requirements for virtual and physical testbed environments for integrated drone services in a complex city environment, based on city demand and CAA requirements. These activities will inform design of an innovation challenge to accelerate development of urban drone services that bring public benefit to UK cities. The project will bring together city stakeholders with national policymakers and regulators, industry, service users and the public to design testing scenarios. Flying High Phase 2 will create the necessary groundwork to launch the innovation challenge and accelerator programme in Phase 3, anticipated to take place over two years beginning Summer 2019. The innovation challenge will consist of a series of stage-gate, outcome-based funding opportunities to prove the viability of real-world urban drone applications. Industry will have the opportunity to develop and prove place-based drone use cases demonstrating technological capabilities based on a viable business case in a UK city. Teams will be required to demonstrate safe, reliable integration of these services in urban airspace, with a particular focus on issues related to extreme environments, like operation in complex airspace near to buildings, safely and seamlessly with other traffic/airspace users, with beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations. The innovation challenge will offer competitive, outcome-based funding; specialised controlled testing environments and public trials; and a collaborative platform to enable technology design, business case development, public engagement and regulatory evolution.

HACID develops a novel hybrid collective intelligence for decision support to professionals facing complex open-ended problems, promoting engagement, fairness and trust. A decision support system (HACID-DSS) is proposed that is based on structured domain knowledge, semi-automatically assembled in a domain knowledge graph (DKG) from available data sources, such as scientific and gray literature. Given a specific case within the addressed domain, a pool of experts is consulted to (i) extract supporting evidence and enrich it, generating a case knowledge graph (CKG) as a subset of the DKG, and (ii) provide one or more solutions to the problem. Exploiting the CKG, the HACID-DSS gathers the expert advice in a collective solution that aggregates the individual opinions and expands them with machine-generated suggestions. In this way, HACID harnesses the wisdom of the crowd in open-ended problems, relying on a traceable process based on supporting evidence for better explainability. A set of evaluation methods is proposed to deal with domains where ground truth is not available, demonstrating the suitability of the proposed approach in a wide range of application domains. Demonstrations are provided in two compelling case studies contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals: crowd-sourcing medical diagnostics and climate services for urban adaptation.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

The Flying High programme will address three major hurdles to the development of integrated drone technologies, support the realisation of the industry’s potential in challenging environments and unlock a latent market opportunity in the UK by: 1) Integrating a wide range of drone technologies and systems; 2) Catalysing public engagement and enthusiasm; 3) Enabling the market and shaping the regulatory environment.