Today, in the digital era society is evolving at a rapid pace and investing in education have vast social and economic advantages for it. It is the education that allows people to have access to SDGs 4. It is not argued that a better educated people break away from poverty more easily, help to reduce inequalities and achieve gender equality; they are more tolerant, they contribute to reduce crime, to increase political and civic participation and generally to have more peaceful societies with reduced inequalities and imbalances. Within this context the project brings together European, Asia and African academic and non-academic organizations in a staff exchange program, with the goal to explore, design and deploy innovative and context sensitive solutions for transforming higher education systems. This international and multi-sector consortium is created as a platform for collaboration and is united by the principles of innovation, partnership and solidarity with the purpose to research and identify successful contemporary models and modern instruments that can help higher education transformation and support the sustainable and effective adaptation of the higher education systems of the consortium members to the digital age. The aim of the project is study the process of digitalisation in different organisations and offer solutions concerning the improvement of the digitalisation practices. The project consortium comprises both academic and non-academic partners as well as experts in diverse fields such as, but not limited to, economics, law, management, linguistics. This allows a broad and an indepth approach to digitalisation. On the basis of the identified gaps in the digitalisation process, the project will propose approaches and methodologies which will be realised as different disciplines for the academic institutions’ partners in order to build sustainable competences for the transfer of knowledge and skills

SYNCLUSIVE is an innovative, integral, and interdisciplinary systems’ approach to stimulate inclusion of vulnerable groups in the labor market. To achieve this, our six central objectives are: 1) developing and consolidating a coalition of stakeholders in 4 regional Living Labs across Europe along the lines of the Community Coalition Action Theory, using the ENGINE approach. This approach includes an integrated package of interventions that stimulates upward and sideward mobility of vulnerable employees, hereby creating vacancies for inflow of vulnerable job seekers; 2) testing the usefulness and applicability of the ENGINE approach for different vulnerable groups identified as being discriminated against; 3) identifying drivers and barriers for mobility and inflow including discrimination; 4) assessing the impact of the implemented ENGINE approach on the labor market mobility and inclusion of vulnerable groups; 5) identifying transition pathways from the regional to the national and EU policy level; and 6) identifying interoperable and comparative indicators and standards that are relevant for the labor market inclusion of vulnerable groups taking into account the regional, national (legislative, social security) and cultural context.

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...

Despite the Union’s effort to fight against online hate speech (OHS), several reports showed an increase in OHS during 2020-21. The current pandemic provided a context for increased scapegoating and stigmatization, and minority groups are disproportionally targets of hatred discourse. OHS is a persistent threat to the Union’s values and there is a need for more knowledge on its content, detection and countering, as highlighted in the current Call. Portugal, as other member states, has seen an escalation of hate speech against immigrants, racial/ethnic groups, and LGBTIQ communities. However, there is no systematized knowledge nor tools designed to detect, monitor and prevent OHS against these communities. Our project aims at addressing this need, offering a comprehensive, participatory and culturally sensitive approach to analyse, detect, and counter, direct and indirect OHS in Portuguese language. 

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.    

Athena Project aims to develop the digital skills of university professors, reinforcing their response to the challenges that universities face today and in the future. The project seeks to foster cooperative learning environments, making them transformative and inclusive through the adoption of new technologies, such as e-learning, gaming platforms, virtual and augmented reality, systematically modeled to activate key competences in digital learning. The project will create models that teachers can adopt and adapt to their classes, using different pedagogical approaches.

The FCT project DSAIPA/AI/0122/2020 AIMHealth – AI-based Mobile Applications for Public Health Response, is being promoted by the Information Sciences, Technologies and Architecture Research Center (ISTAR-Iscte), in collaboration with the Center for Psychological Research and Social Intervention (CIS-Iscte), both from Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon, and as well with the Institute of Telecommunications (IT), the Association for Research and Development of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon (AIDFM) and the Cardiovascular Center of the University of Lisbon (CCUL). This project is funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), according to the FCT contract DSAIPA/AI/0122/2020 under the contest “AI 4 COVID-19: Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Public Administration to strengthen the fight against COVID-19 and future pandemics – 2020″. Framework Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, personal contacts were limited, and new solutions had to be developed to prevent the spread of the virus. Some of the technological solutions presented were contact tracing applications, which inform users and authorities about the potential or current risk of spreading the virus. However, among its users, this approach has raised concerns about security and privacy. Objective Encompassing such concerns, this project proposes the creation and availability of a smartphone application and a safe and reliable service distribution platform based on Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence technologies, to identify symptomatic and asymptomatic patients as well as the risk exposure, providing a preventive approach to Public Health strategies.