Graphene CA
Graphene, a new substance from the world of atomic and molecular scale manipulation of matter, could be the wonder material of the 21st century. Discovering just how important this material will be for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is the long term focus of the Flagship Initiative, simply called, GRAPHENE.
It is also the earliest of the flagships to have issued a detailed release.

This aims to explore revolutionary potentials, in terms of both conventional as well as radically new fields of ICT applications. Bringing together multiple disciplines and addressing research across a whole range of issues, from fundamental understandings of material properties to Graphene production, the Flagship will provide a platform for establishing European scientific and technological leadership in the application of Graphene to ICT.

The proposed research includes coverage of electronics, spintronics, photonics, plasmonics and mechanics, all based on Graphene.

Coordinator: Prof Jari Kinaret, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
The Universities of Manchester, Lancaster, and Cambridge in the UK,  Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology in Spain, Italian National Research Council, European Science Foundation, AMO GmbH, Germany, and Nokia Corp.
Webpage under construction

FutureICT:
What if global scale computing facilities were available that could analyse most of the data available in the world? What insights could scientists gain about the way society functions? What new laws of nature would be revealed? Could society discover a more sustainable way of living?

Developing planetary scale computing facilities that could deliver answers to such questions is the long term goal of FuturICT. This initiative seeks to develop ICT that will provide scientists, governmental officials and citizens with a planetary scale computer - a Living Earth Platform.

The Living Earth Platform will provide means of analysing data and managing complex events. It could provide a basis for predicting natural disasters, or managing and responding to man-made disasters that cross national borders or even continents.

The intention is to undertake interdisciplinary research, involving domains such as complexity, computer, social sciences, to address  scientific challenges associated with the realisation of this goal and  needed advances in ICT.

Prof. Steven Bishop
University College London, UK
Web.

Guardian Angels
Providing ICT to assist people in all sorts of complex situations is the long term goal of Guardian Angels.
These will be like personal assistants and envisioned as intelligent (thinking), autonomous systems (even systems-of-systems). They  featuring sensing, computation, communication, and delivering features  & characteristics that go well beyond human capabilities.

It is intended that these will provide assistance from infancy right through to old age. Key feature of Guardian Angels will be zero power requirements as they scavenge for energy.

Foreseen are individual health support tools, local monitoring of ambient conditions for dangers, emotional applications. Research will address scientific challenges such as energy-efficient computing and communication; low-power sensing, bio-inspired energy scavenging, and zero-power human-machine interfaces.

Mrs Karin Jaymes
 Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Webpage under construction

HBP-PS
 The Human Brain Project
Understanding the way the human brain works could be key to enabling a whole range of brain related or inspired developments in ICT, as well as having transformational implications for neuroscience and medicine.

The long term goal of the Human Brain Project is to build the informatics, modelling, and supercomputing technologiesneeded to simulate and understand the human brain. Biologically detailed simulations of the brain will make it possible, for the first time, to identify the multi-level chain of interactions leading from genes to cognition and behaviour.

Also to be researched, using supercomputer-based simulation technology, are new diagnostic tools and treatments for brain disease, new interfaces to the brain, new types of low-energy technologies with brain-like intelligence, and a new generation of brain-enabled robots.
  Richard Walker,
 Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland 

Webpage under construction

ITFoM  IT Future of Medicine
Data-rich, individualised medicine poses unprecedented challenges for IT, in hardware, storage & communication. ITFoM proposes a data-driven, individualised medicine of the future, based on the molecular/physiological/anatomical data from individual patients.

ITFoM shall make general models of human pathways, tissues, diseases and ultimately of the human as a whole. Patient individualised versions of the models will be used to identify personalised prevention/therapy schedules and side effects of drugs.

This is the first time that huge IT implications of worldwide individualised patient care will be addressed combined with genomics and medical requirements. Project outcomes will enable calculation of health, disease, therapy and its effects for individual patients.

These may revolutionize our health care with enormous (i) benefits for health (prevention, diagnosis and therapy), (ii) reduction in cost by individualising combinations of a limited number of drugs, and (iii) new commercial opportunities in IT, analytics and health care.

This entails the transformation of biomedical science from empirical and stochastic to fact based, knowledge driven ie. based on an ICT paradigm.

Prof. Hans Lehrach
,
Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics,
DE 
Webpage under construction: www.itfom.eu

CA-RoboCom

Robot Companions for Citizens are soft skinned, sentient machines designed to deliver assistance to people. This assistance is defined in the broadest possible sense and covers all sorts of different settings.

Based on multidisciplinary science and engineering, CA-RoboCom aims to develop a radically new approach towards machines and how these are deployed in society. Robot Companions for Citizens will be based on the novel solid articulated structures with flexible properties displaying soft behaviour.

Companions will also have new levels of perceptual, cognitive and emotive capabilities and  be aware of their physical and social surroundings, responding accordingly. Such sentient characteristics will be achieved by understanding sentient living creature behaviour.

In undertaking the research into the ICT that will need to be developed, research will also validate understandings of general design principles underlying biological bodies and brains, supporting a symbiotic relationship between science and engineering.

Prof. Paolo Dario

Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Web