PIONEER is an Alliance of European Universities dedicated to SDG 11 'Sustainable Cities and Communities', addressing the need for cities to become inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The alliance brings together 10 impact-driven universities, including an associated Swiss partner, and covers 32 cities and 16 regions across Europe. By bringing together academics, public institutions, private organisations and citizens in our orchestration framework, we will develop joint challenge-based education, impact-driven research and innovation co-creation initiatives that contribute to many European, regional and urban agendas, such as the EU Green Deal and the 'Fit for 55' package. To this end, PIONEER will also be a facilitator of inter-institutional learning and a tool for institutional change. We will achieve this ambition through strategic integration at the institutional level: gradually aligning our individual strategies and institutional trajectories, building a common development strategy to become truly international institutions integrated in a federal framework.This framework will be inspired by the European Union, with a strong strategic centre that draws on and supports the diversity and autonomy of our partners to build a flexible and complementary academic ecosystem, while working together on a common strategy and development path. Committed to spreading European values and promoting inclusion and diversity, the PIONEER Open Campus will offer seamless mobility for students and unique leadership development opportunities for staff. Our Knowledge Hub will enable member universities and over 40 associated partners from regional ecosystems to work together on matters concerning SDG11.

The RETIME project (Horizon Europe Innovation Action) aims to address impactful changes at both the contextual district level and individual homes of natural and human-caused disasters. It will introduce a data-driven tool that aggregates existing data from weather stations, sensor networks, and satellite images, automated on-site surveys to simulate the impacts of current phenomena and future projections. The innovative aspect lies in an advanced computational analysis that generates prospective scenarios based on socio-architectural and environmental studies, combined with local, territorial remote and on-site surveys.  

Blockchain is a key technology for economy and society digital transition. According to  the World Economic Forum, 10% of global GDP will be stored in blockchains by 2027 and the World Trade Organization, citing a study by Gartner, estimates that by 2030 the use of blockchain technology could add $3 trillion to international trade. According to PwC "blockchain technologies can boost the global economy by $1.76 trillion by 2030" with the sectors that will benefit most being public administration, education, and health. Despite this huge opportunity, Portugal has yet to take advantage of it: according to the EU Blockchain Ecosystem Development report, in 2020 Portugal holds an average maturity at European level.  This Agenda brought together several blockchain organizations, creating a cluster of 24 Portuguese blockchain companies, 15 Research and Technology Organisations (RTO), 5 Public Entities, 2 Associations and 10 other Associated Partners, connected by business and technology, aiming to become global players and, thus, contributing  to a significant change in the specialization profile of the Portuguese economy, by investing on cutting-edge technology and hiring highly qualified personnel. 

The InCITIES project aims to achieve the transformations of HEIs and their surrounding ecosystem centred around on cities’ needs of inclusion, sustainability and resilience. Its specific focus on widening countries (Portugal and Slovakia) will allow to overcome structural, sociocultural, economic, political and institutional barriers to transformation fostering. Addressing the European-global challenges of cities, InCITIES has 4 objectives: 1) Map institutional transformation strategies towards research-based sustainable universities including open science and career opportunities. 2) Build a long-term network of participating HEIs and surrounding ecosystems based on integrated knowledge HUBs. 3) Increase scientific, technological and staff capacity by sharing the best pedagogical, research, management and administrative practices in the consortium, and piloting leverages to widening HEIs. 4) Promote digitally driven universities by creating an open and innovative education and training platform in synergy with the project research and innovation agenda on inclusive, sustainable and resilient cities. The 5 methods jointly developed will set the foundation for the consortium role model: 1) Method for a common research map, 2) Capacity building actions based on the Learning by Developing pedagogical model, 3) Capacity building in talent scout and career opportunity strategy (attractiveness of research careers, including open science incentives), 4) Capacity building on equality, diversity and inclusion, 5) Methods to address enablers and barriers to integration of the InCITIES Alliance. From knowledge co-creation to joint production between European HEIs, surrounding ecosystems and citizens’ involvement, integrated actions play a key-role in achieving the consortium objectives. Capacity building actions implemented are a step towards the submission to the European Universities Initiative; it will strengthen the ERA, the EEA, and Europe’s approach to coope...

Digital society and AI are posing new challenges to cities through opportunities to improve the performance and democratization of local and regional public administrations in their relationship with citizens and companies. Digital and AI’s impacts on the structure of inequality have not yet been sufficiently studied within and between countries and at the city levels. We aim to analyse environmental data and inequalities, by simultaneously advancing the social science problem of sustainable development, and improving the digital tools for city problem-solving, together with social stakeholders and municipalities. Through data science and the application of machine learning, statistical data, and place-based knowledge concerning climate problems, the project intends to produce a digital toolkit of geographical-interactive maps of sustainable footprint, supported by a system of multidimensional indicators of environmental inequalities and urban lifestyles, mobility patterns and transport usage.    

Blockchains (BC) and Decentralised Ledger Technologies (DLT) are being included in several real-world scenarios, not only in the financial context but also in several others, such as healthcare and supply chains. The characteristics of these technologies that encourage exchanges and transactions between participants without the need for a third party (central authority) have raised increasing interest in the application of technology to a wide range of organizational, inter-organizational and societal problems. However, even if important digital, organizational and economic transformations can be anticipated, the impact of the introduction of these disruptive technologies is not yet well studied. This project intends to analyze the organizational and social impact of the inclusion and use of Blockchain (BC), Decentralised Ledger Technologies (DLT) and smart contracts in information systems. Interviews, surveys, analysis and testing of a set of BC and DLT tools will be conducted in order to justifiably position them in the context of existing Technology Adoption Models (TAM). This project is in line with the Thematic Line 5 - Digital Transformation of the SocioDigital Associated Lab.

Based on the experience of the previous editions of summer and winter schools at ISCTE: http://istar.iscte-iul.pt/summerschool2019/ and https://istar.iscte-iul.pt/winterschool2020/ the  summer 2020 edition focus on new challenges on Smart Anything, like Smart {Cities, Buildings, Health, and Education}. Using IoT laboratory we will develop in a short time a set of research projects where students will have a strong participation. The summer school will bring knowledge on IoT systems, and research challenges will go prompt through a set of applied use cases. Simoultaneously, the PhD and master students of the Master in Integrated Business Intelligence Systems (MIBIS) will have the opportunity to continue their running projects. The group of PhD students will share their research data and knowledge, supporting data analytics and artificial intelligence approaches in the following fields : 1) Smart Budings, IoT, 3D data representation and user interaction to save energy on shared space at buildings. Associated to the running project Social IoT .  2) Smart Health, with remote sensing for COVID. The aim of this research is to identify knowledge from sensors and available information. 3) Smart Education. The aim is to extract knowledge from social media data, integrating both qualitative analysis and large-scale data mining techniques, to explore students’ informal conversations and statements on social networks. 4) Smart Cities, with connection to open data laboratory of CMLisboa (https://lisboainteligente.cm-lisboa.pt/lxdatalab/). The goal is to use Lisbon mobility data towards knowledge extraction for the challengers provided by CMLisboa. The Summer School will last for 13 weeks (W) beginning at July 27, with full time classes in the W1 & W13. The projects will run in the IoT Laboratory facilities from W2-W12, with weekly meetings and 3 evaluations periods (W2, W7 and W12).