Project List

The already established consortium of Aston University (UK), University College London (UK), Ruralis University (Norway), University of Turin (Italy), and University Institute of Lisbon (Portugal) will seek funding from the EU's ‘100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030’ initiative. Our proposal includes developing a scalable tool to evaluate and guide urban mobility policies, supporting sustainable development and the 15-minute city concept, especially post-COVID-19. This tool will analyze mobility's complex nature, integrating environmental sustainability and regional urban system characteristics like geography and demographics. AIenhanced, it will assess impacts on affordability and accessibility, providing localized insights. We seek pumpprimingfunds for two residential workshops at Aston University to solidify collaboration, complete application writing, and establish a proof of concept

Nowadays, digital health devices play an active role in our healthcare and even let us cooperate with our physicians to improve our health, preventing health deterioration and real-time response to decrease health costs and increase general health quality for individuals. Patients can have greater access to specialized care if equipped with sensing devices that effectively monitor health status and acknowledge alterations or abnormal events. More and more people are effectively using digital health devices, many of which are classified as medical devices (according to the European Union Regulation (EU) 2017/745 and Regulation (EU) 2017/746), equipped with or sending data to AI systems. Shortly, most clinicians, including speciality doctors, paramedics, and nursing staff, will be using some AI technology. These digitally empowered healthcare solutions provide accelerated case detection, constant surveillance, access, and advanced decision-making while improving the quality of services and personalizing health.However, for digital health technology to be effective, reusable, and universal, not only are there insufficient standards yet that allow for the validation of many of these services but also the digital connection with the medical aid and AI processing of health-related data is lacking standardization. While digital health can be underpinned via common standards (like HL7 FHIR) to facilitate communication between devices and systems, we also need standards allowing for the establishment of uniform, transparent, and trustworthy AI processes to be performed on health data, ensuring the compliance of those processes with the existent regulatory framework, well-established Data Privacy safeguards and AI Act compliance. Personal health devices can positively change individual patient outcomes and help make progress in reducing health disparity. However, the data you collect from the devices needs to work with other devices, apps, and platform to communicate with pla...

OVER-SEES is a multi-stakeholder consortium gathering four diverse EU insular territories (The Azores, Portugal; West Region, Ireland; Aegean Islands, Greece; Sicily, Italy) to establish a model of VET excellence in EU islands to accelerate Smart Specialization (S3) activities associated with the twin transition.

This study seeks to examine the representations of individuals from the portuguese working class regarding post-productivist logics of social protection, at the Welfare-state level, considering the impacts of the automation of productive processes in Portugal, being estimated a net job loss of 300.000 jobs until 2030 in a cenario of 50% of the automation potential (Duarte et al, 2019, p. 19). Part of the labour force characterized by lower qualifications, relative advanced age and integration in the sectors with the highest automation potential (industry, retail and public administration) may find themselves in a vulnerable situation, namely in a context of active labour market policies (PAE). It becomes relevant to understand in close connection with working class people what they think relative to post productivist forms of social protection, focusing on three public policy propositions: 1) Participation Income (Atkinson, 1996, pp. 68-69), 2) Job Guarantee (Tcherneva, 2020) and 3) Basic Income. Supervisor: Renato Miguel do Carmo

Facial recognition technologies collect billions of faces that are stored for multiple uses spanning individual identification and tracking, to training of deep neural networks, the mainstay of modern artificial intelligence (AI). From tagging a photo on social media or unlocking a computer, to controversial applications of facial recognition in public spaces, schools, workplaces, and law enforcement activities, facial processing technologies have entered almost every aspect of our lives. While expected benefits relate to security and safety, critics highlight that these technologies normalize surveillance and erode privacy, exacerbate discrimination, and contain insurmountable flaws and inaccuracy. The fAIces project asks: What matters in facial recognition technologies, and why? How politics of mattering enact diverse ways of being implicated? Which forms of citizenship and public engagement are affected? How multiple and complex ethical choices emerge? This study develops a novel methodology by which the perspectives of social groups that have never been studied together, which are jointly but antagonistically implicated in facial recognition technologies, are taken into consideration: scientists who conduct research on facial recognition; professionals working in start-ups and technology companies; members of advocacy groups and activists; black communities; and artists who incorporate facial recognition in their work. The fAIces project will produce an innovative social theory of the face through the combination of a new conceptual approach – “etho-assemblages”, which transgresses the idea of pre-given fixed and dichotomic ethical principles – and the generation of original empirical data. Major outcomes are based on expanding ethics and imagining alternative futures, fueling citizenship and public engagement, and fostering opportunities for academic thinking to be inspired by activism, underrepresented groups, and artistic practices.