Università Degli Studi di Milano Bicocca

About us

This University is characterised by an intellectual environment where independent research and teaching can be pursued. Our University celebrated now its 20^th Anniversary; during these years the University's multidisciplinary campus has become a focal point for 36,000 students and 1550 researchers and lectures. It currently hosts 8 Faculties (Economics, Education, Law, “Mathematics, Physics and Natural Sciences”, Medicine, Psychology, Sociology, Statistics) and 19 departments. It offers 36 Bachelor's degrees, 30 Master's degrees, 30 Doctorates, 19 Professional Masters, and 34 Specialisation Courses. Moreover, there are 4 Research Centers, 27 Research Pools, and it is home to the 'Research Area Number 3' of the CNR (government owned National Research Council), and the Pirelli Lab with its 150 researchers and 13,000 square metres of laboratory space.

The project involves two departments: The Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (DISAT), and the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication (DISCo). DISAT is focused on a multidisciplinary approach to Earth Sciences with a special emphasis on natural hazard assessment and mitigation, both on land and offshore. Among the topics and related lines of research developed within DISAT, the most relevant connected with the proposed project is represented by a huge amount of data already collected on active seismic zones, comprising onshore areas of Greece, as well as on volcanoes of several regions of the world. We are also expert on the development and use of special software dedicated to the “navigation” of Virtual Reality geological environments obtained by processing drone images. Finally, we have also a group of marine geologists who can collaborate with the oceanographic community of the project. The Department has at disposal 29 laboratories of all Earth science disciplines.

DISCo, was founded on January 1, 1999 with a teaching staff and technical administration staff who transferred from the Computer Science department of the Università degli Studi di Milano to the new University. Since then, the department has grown with a research and teaching staff of more than thirty professors and more than forty doctoral students and researchers. The members of the administrative staff and “Research office” of UNIMIB and DISCo have a long experience in managing multi-partners projects at national and international levels (members of the department are currently principal investigators of ERC and Horizon 2020 projects). 

Know more about as at https://www.disat.unimib.it/en.

Main role in the project

The DISAT participates with the role of scientific community, being represented by a group of researchers skilled especially on geohazards. They will put at disposal of the project the relevant huge amount of data related to recent and active faults, and active volcanoes, which can be used in synergy with the atmospheric group. The data comprises seismological information and field geological structural characteristics of faults located in areas prone to seismic hazard in Greece and elsewhere, and data on key-examples of active volcanoes.

The DISCo team of UNIMIB will contribute to the effort of the Astro-Planet group by supporting the identification, selection and application of relevant recent approaches and techniques to the semantic annotation and support to the retrieval of digital contents and to the analysis of images for the detection of relevant entities by means of state of the art deep learning tools.

About us

The Faculty of Geosciences at the University of Bremen covers the full width of modern geosciences, but emphasizes in climate and ocean dynamics, coastal and marine sedimentary systems and marine geology-(bio-)geochemistry-biology. The MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences has evolved from the faculty of Geosciences and is an independent research faculty within the university funded by the German Excellence Initiative. As of 2011 MARUM is the first and only research faculty at the University of Bremen and coordinates the university's high-profile area in "Marine, Polar and Climate Research" across all disciplines and faculties. Through MARUM, the University of Bremen closely collaborates with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven (AWI), the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen (MPI), the Senckenberg Institute by the Sea in Wilhelmshaven (SGN), the Leibniz Center for Marine Tropical Ecology in Bremen (ZMT), the University of Oldenburg, and the private Jacobs University in Bremen. Furthermore, MARUM operates one of the three IODP core repositories in the world and together with AWI the World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (PANGAEA). In MARUM, the DFG Research Center and the Cluster of Excellence "The Ocean Floor - Earth's Un-charted In-ter-face" are key elements among many additional national and international research projects. MARUM is one of the few research institutions worldwide that operates deep-sea technologies, including two remotely operated vehicles, two underwater drill rigs and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV, HROV). Furthermore, a state-of-the-art seafloor mapping & imaging group is established since 2008 to support processing and analysis of large datasets of bathymetry, backscatter, subbottom and side-scan data.

Main role in the project

MARUM will contribute to the Underwater Environment branch of this proposal. With the development and integration of the service for “Bathymetry Mapping from Hydroacoustic Data” (WP2), MARUM is utilizing its HR & knowledge in data management, open source software development, hydroacoustic acquisition and postprocessing, as well as in visualization and GIS. The institute has a vast experience in H2020, EASME and national wide R&D projects in underwater technologies. MARUM will also contribute to service delivery, capacity building, dissemination, communication and exploitation activities.

Universite d'aix Marseille

About us

Aix-Marseille University is ranked as the first Euro- Mediterranean University. Born in 2012, as well as being one of the youngest universities in France, it is also the largest in terms of its student body, its faculty and staff, and its budget in the whole of the French speaking world (http://www.univ-amu.fr/en). These factors combined with the remarkable results already achieved in teaching and research, contribute to rank Aix-Marseille University as a top class higher education and research institution. At the last international Shanghai ranking published in August 2017, AMU is ranked 102 (+ 10 places) over the world's 500 ranked universities.

All the academic fields that may be studied in France are represented at Aix-Marseille University, which has five major divisions, structured into 19 faculties, schools, and institutes. Aix-Marseille University has more than 78,000 students including 10,000 international students, 8,000 faculty and staff members, 12 doctoral schools and around 3,300 PhD students. Aix-Marseille University is home to 132 research facilities – 119 research units and 14 federative research structures – linked to France’s biggest research institutions (CNRS, INSERM, IRD, INRA, CEA).

The Department of Archaeology, is part of three Research laboratories working jointly with the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Ministry of Culture. Each of these units are specialized in different chronological periods, from the early Palaeolithic period and prehistory to medieval and modern archaeology. Their members are also specialized in a large range of research fields, while there is a wide interdisciplinary approach. Aix-Marseille is the only University in France specialising in research and education in Underwater Archaeology. The Department offers undergraduate diplomas, 4 different Research Master Degrees, and runs the only Master Program in France dedicated to maritime and underwater archaeology in France (MoMArch- MA in Maritime and Coastal Archaeology).

NEANIAS will exploit the wide international network of the UNESCO Chair of Aix-Marseille University, as well as the UNESCO Unitwin Network in Underwater Archaeology (see below) for the activities of WP2 and WP10 (dissemination and outreach). This network comprises public and private research Institutions in Europe, Africa and Asia, as well as small and medium enterprises that are active in the maritime domain (implementation of aeolian parks, fishing industries, oil and gas activities, among others). Moreover, the University has over 700 partnerships all over the world, and the Department of Archaeology is leading international research programs in different countries, in cooperation with Research Institutions from the western and eastern Mediterranean, such as Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Malta, Spain as well as North African countries, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt among others.

As a result, the Project will also profit from the research activities and international projects in underwater archaeology past and active (see below), the scientific results of which will contribute to WP2.

Main role in the project

The role of Centre Camille Jullian team (CNRS-AMU) from Aix-Marseille University will be two-folded:

• Be an active end-user providing a wide range of interdisciplinary data produced by national, international and European projects, in order to evaluate the NEANIAS services.
• Organise communication and dissemination activities in underwater archaeology, under the auspices of the UNESCO Chair in Maritime and Coastal Archaeology of AMU. The scientific team, beyond its established network of partners, benefits also by its official participation to the UNESCO Unitwin network of Underwater archaeology. This network and existent collaborations will allow:

We are also in charge of the coordination of the network of end-users in underwater archaeology in order to evaluate the produced services, providing continuous feedback to the IT teams during the duration of the project and the wide dissemination and implementation of the project's results to the international community of underwater archaeology.

About us 

The University of Portsmouth (UoP) is a leading modern university with a strong reputation for teaching, training and research. UoP was created from the Portsmouth Polytechnic which was founded on the Portsmouth and Gosport School of Science and Arts established in 1869. The University was ranked in the top 2% in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2016 and is one of the world's top 150 universities under the age of 50 years, employing 2,500 staff and delivering 174 undergraduate and postgraduate programmes across five faculties to over 23,000 students, 4,000 of whom are international and EU students from over 150 different countries. Research excellence and innovation are integral to the educational programmes taught - UoP holds since 2012 the European Commission Human Resources Excellence in Research Award and is a signatory to ‘The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers’. Many of our courses are accredited by professional bodies and over 70% of graduates are employed within six months of graduation in professional and managerial occupations.

The University has extensive experience of running a variety of European Commission-funded projects. Our constitutional framework operates within its Instrument of Government and Articles of Government and within the Higher Education Funding Council of England Memorandum of Assurance and Accountability. In recognition of UoP’s excellence in research and innovation, since 2007 it has hosted 12 Collaborative FP7/H2020 projects, 4 European Research Council Grants, 13 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowships and 3 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Training Networks. Currently, the University is hosting three Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellows (STUSOCSTA, COSMOVOID and FRACSEIS), two European Research Council Consolidator Grants (Dark Survey and CosTesGrav) and is involved in three Collaborative FP7/H2020 projects (PERCIEVE, LEANWIND and DREAM).

UoP is participating in NEANIAS with two of its Schools, the School of Creative Technologies (CT) and the School of Computing (SoC), facilitating the integration of a variety of separate areas of expertise to produce customised intelligent visual computing solutions, including high performance scientific visualisation, virtual reality, computer vision, computational intelligence and robotics.

Main role in the project

UoP’s role in the NEANIAS project is as a specialised technology partner offering integrated software solutions in the area of visual computing and computational intelligence, including high-performance scientific visualisation, user interfaces and advanced interaction widgets (especially in the context of virtual and augmented reality) as well as machine learning for object detection, classification and robotics. This contribution is expected to be given as an involvement mainly within the tasks outlined in WP4 for thematic services within the space user community of NEANIAS but also under tasks for cross-cutting services in WP6 and services delivery and operation in WP7. UoP is also expected to contribute to communication and dissemination and outreach activities in WP10 through its research and innovation themes strategy which supports intensive programmes bringing together large interdisciplinary teams of scientists and technologists to address cutting-edge challenges, reaching several large research communities relevant to NEANIAS and beyond.

About us

CITE is a SME, activating in the domain of ICT systems engineering, research and consulting. The main commercial activities of the company include large scale systems design and implementation, techno-economic analysis of ICT systems and services and systems’ quality assurance and testing. In the area of research and innovation CITE designs and implements cutting edge solutions for cloud and distributed infrastructures, information retrieval and data management systems, specialized simulation and modelling tools etc, bringing beyond-state-of-the-art concepts into systems’ production lines. CITE activities powered by and established on the competences of its highly skilled workforce, of over 30 permanent employees and consultants, which in the majority consists of postgraduate degree holders with a large multiproject / multiyear experience in research and innovation projects, both at European and National level. CITE has 2 IT departments, one located in it head offices in Kessariani, in the wider area of Athens and one located in Sparta. In the context of this proposal the head IT department will be engaged.

CITE record has strong reference on big data (with special interest on geo temporal ones) management, analysis and visualization that consists of (a) participation to H2020 projects on the field of geospatial data management, analysis and visualization (EarthServer 2, BlueBRIDGE) (b) leading role in 2 national innovation projects (under execution, launched June/July 2018) with focus on geospatial data management analysis and visualization and participation to others and (c) investment on in house platforms and technologies in the domain.

Know more about us at  https://www.cite.gr/.

Main role in the project

CITE’s role in the project is multi-fold: (a) technology partner providing solutions in integration of specific services, esp. ones dealing with data discovery, data management, authn/authz and migration to the cloud [WP5-WP6] (b) provider of commercially usable infrastructure [WP7] (c) contribution to the techno-economic analysis and business modelling as an actor with experience on the field both from the economic and the technical standpoints and assessment [WP9] (d) contribution to setting innovative business plan as a stakeholder, targeting commercial exploitation of project’s results (e) contribution to project’s activities including outreach activities, management [WP10], (f) contribution and support to the implementation of Open Innovation Calls (g) coordinator of service activities and leader of WP7. Finally, CITE’s personnel has vast experience in H2020, RTD projects and technologies in general, and will undertake the technical leadership of the project and has long experience in quality processes and risk management and will lead Quality Assurance tasks [WP1].

About us

Ubiwhere is a Research and Innovation SME, based in Portugal, developing innovative and user-centred software solutions. Since 2007, Ubiwhere has fostered a culture of innovation and creativity by delivering the solutions that their clients need to succeed. The main objective of the company is to research and develop bleeding edge technologies, design state-of-the-art solutions and create valuable intellectual property (using rich intangible assets) internally and to its clients – to achieve its vision of being an international reference in Smart Cities and Future Internet. To that end, they rely on a multi-faceted, dynamic, passionate and highly qualified team composed by Senior Executives, Researchers, Consultants, Project Managers, Creative Designers, Programmers and Quality Assurance Technicians. Ubiwhere’s activity focuses on the research and development of technologies across several markets, namely: Telecom and Future Internet; Smart Cities; Sustainable and Efficient Resource Management (Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources); Transportation, Travel, and Tourism.

In NENIAS, Ubiwhere will develop new innovative services to extend and improve current Air Quality estimation, monitoring and forecasting, in order to ensure accurate and relevant services for user communities which cover many sectors, such as industry, transport, health, urban environment, among many others. Ubiwehere will have a relevant role in development, validation and integration of such cutting-edge services in EOSC. Aligned with its vision of becoming an international reference in Smart Cities and its mission of improving people’s lives by developing usable technologies, Ubiwhere has a relevant experience in Air Quality services under the Smart Cities context. In its portfolio of commercial products, Ubiwhere provides a Smart Air Quality solution which includes both air quality stations and a SaaS (Software-as-a-service) web platform.

Know more at https://www.ubiwhere.com/

Main role in the project

UBIWHERE will be strongly involved in the development and validation of cutting-edge services in EOSC related to Air Quality estimation, monitoring and forecasting, as well as the assessment and evaluation of the economic viability of the approach on resources offered via EOSC hub. UBIWHERE will also engage throughout the project in activities of dissemination and communication and also community engagement exercising the experience in different EU initiatives.

About us

Coronis Computing SL is a spin-off company of the Computer Vision and Robotics group (VICOROB) of the University of Girona, in Spain. It is mainly focused on research, development and technology transfer activities, specialized in computer vision and machine learning technologies. In particular, Coronis Computing has strong experience in the design and development of solutions for high-resolution underwater mapping, including data processing and visualization. During the last years the company has worked on the development of advanced image processing techniques for seafloor characterization using multiple imaging sources, including multibeam, side-scan sonar, forward-looking sonar and optical imaging. Coronis has expertise in sensor fusion and global optimization techniques to create high resolution large scale maps. The know-how of Coronis includes the image preprocessing of underwater images (geometry and colour corrections, dehazing, …), 2D and 2.5D mosaicking and 3D reconstruction. At the moment Coronis is engaged in three EU H2020 projects in the domain of underwater mapping (projects ROBUST, EMODNET and EUROFLEETS+).

Main role in the project

Coronis will contribute by providing software and test datasets for underwater image preprocessing, underwater mosaicking and underwater 3D model creation. The software that Coronis will provide to the EOSC portal will allow the processing of these data and other underwater image sequences.

About us

MTA SZTAKI is one of the largest IT research institutes in the Central European region with 250+ employees. Among its other achievements, the institute plays a key role in cyber-physical systems related research, development, and training as an EU Centre of Excellence in Information Technology and Automation, as the leader of the Ipar 4.0 (Industry 4.0) National Technology Platform, and as the founding member of the national Artificial Intelligence Coalition. The Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS) in MTA SZTAKI has been working as a project member in all phases of the European Grid infrastructure project (EGEE/EGI) serving as a regional training/application porting centre and Virtual Team leader. With the organized international trainings and summer schools in several project (EGEE, ICEAGE, CoreGrid, SEE-GRID, DEGISCO, SCI-BUS, EOSC-hub, CloudiFacturing) the laboratory provides knowledge transfer, and targets new user communities from science and industry. LPDS has long running experience in development of workflow-oriented, interoperability and orchestration software methods/tools, and also in establishing and operating production-level Grid and Cloud infrastructures for different purposes and partners.

Know more about us at http://sztaki.hu.

Main role in the project

The main role of SZTAKI is mostly technical:

• Provide expertise to and manage the implementation of common core services in WP6 for the underwater, atmospheric and astro/planetary research communities.
• Provide expertise for cloud-based platforms in the areas of complex analytics/visualisation and AI including machine/deep learning.
• Provide open-source tools and operate services that enable the efficient orchestration and delivery of the new NEANIAS services on EOSC.

Provide expertise concerning EOSC-hub SZTAKI is to provide training, dissemination and exploitation related efforts for the above listed technical activities.

About us

INAF (National Institute for Astrophysics) is the Italian Research Institution that realizes and coordinates researches in the specific fields of Astronomy, Radio- Astronomy, Spatial researches and Cosmology in collaboration with Universities and other research Institutions. More than 1,200 people are involved in the institution. INAF has twenty research institutes in Italy and two National facilities: “Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG)” in La Palma, Canary Islands and the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Mount Graham, Arizona. The main research activities of INAF are in the following areas: Solar Physics, Stellar Physics, Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology, High Energy Physics, Astroparticles, Virtual Observatory, HPC and HTC technologies. For astrophysics roadmap, ESFRI indicates that the absolute priority for the next decade are the following ground-based infrastructures: E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope), SKA (Square Kilometer Array), CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array), and KM3NeT (Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope). Regarding the science from space, Astronet competes with the priorities identified in the ESA Cosmic Vision document: IXO, Europa Jupiter System Mission / Laplace Missions LISA, EUCLID, PLATO, Solar Orbiter, GAIA.

Know more about us at http://www.inaf.it/.

Main role in the project

INAF is leading the Space environment and the development of the Space services (WP4) and is also mainly involved in the core services implementation (WP6) and delivery (WP7). Within the NEANIAS project 3 main INAF research groups are involved, all of them having international and large experience in: a) Galactic Plane. INAF IAPS-Rome has more than a decade-long experience in handling, reducing and analyzing data from infrared to submillimetre gained by leading large observing programs with recent space telescopes, i.e. Herschel, and projects dedicated to the analysis and the scientific exploitation of all the most recent surveys of the Galactic plane both in multi-band continuum imaging and the multi-line gas. b) Radio Astronomy. INAF OA-Catania has acquired high level capabilities in dealing with radio data focusing in the last years especially on the Galactic Astronomy frame, which allowed to face different and difficult challenges not only regarding the data reduction itself, but also in the automatic source extraction and classification in the context of SKA and precursors (ASKAP, LOFAR, MEERKAT). c) Information Technology. INAF OA-Catania ICT group has developed services at TRL6 level for data discovery, visual analytic, virtual reality and machine learning on EOSC. The main activity within the project will be to port the services on the EOSC hub for the Space R&D but also contributing for all the consortium partners.

About us

INAF (National Institute for Astrophysics) is the Italian Research Institution that realizes and coordinates researches in the specific fields of Astronomy, Radio- Astronomy, Spatial researches and Cosmology in collaboration with Universities and other research Institutions. More than 1,200 people are involved in the institution. INAF has twenty research institutes in Italy and two National facilities: “Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG)” in La Palma, Canary Islands and the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Mount Graham, Arizona. The main research activities of INAF are in the following areas: Solar Physics, Stellar Physics, Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology, High Energy Physics, Astroparticles, Virtual Observatory, HPC and HTC technologies. For astrophysics roadmap, ESFRI indicates that the absolute priority for the next decade are the following ground-based infrastructures: E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope), SKA (Square Kilometer Array), CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array), and KM3NeT (Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope). Regarding the science from space, Astronet competes with the priorities identified in the ESA Cosmic Vision document: IXO, Europa Jupiter System Mission / Laplace Missions LISA, EUCLID, PLATO, Solar Orbiter, GAIA.

Main role in the project

INAF is leading the Space environment and the development of the Space services (WP4) and is also mainly involved in the core services implementation (WP6) and delivery (WP7). Within the NEANIAS project 3 main INAF research groups are involved, all of them having international and large experience in: a) Galactic Plane. INAF IAPS-Rome has more than a decade-long experience in handling, reducing and analyzing data from infrared to submillimetre gained by leading large observing programs with recent space telescopes, i.e. Herschel, and projects dedicated to the analysis and the scientific exploitation of all the most recent surveys of the Galactic plane both in multi-band continuum imaging and the multi-line gas. b) Radio Astronomy. INAF OA-Catania has acquired high level capabilities in dealing with radio data focusing in the last years especially on the Galactic Astronomy frame, which allowed to face different and difficult challenges not only regarding the data reduction itself, but also in the automatic source extraction and classification in the context of SKA and precursors (ASKAP, LOFAR, MEERKAT). c) Information Technology. INAF OA-Catania ICT group has developed services at TRL6 level for data discovery, visual analytic, virtual reality and machine learning on EOSC. The main activity within the project will be to port the services on the EOSC hub for the Space R&D but also contributing for all the consortium partners.