Yesterday, 7 November, the young European research universities network (YERUN) held its first meeting of the academic year at the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels. Some twenty representatives of the different network member universities, including Enric Vallduví, vice-rector for research at UPF, met with representatives of the Parliament, of the European Commission and numerous people interested in the world of higher education and research.

The meeting has served to present the association’s key demands in relation to the European Commission’s 9^th Framework Programme (FP9), which will replace the current Horizon 2020 research programme when it finishes.

YERUN is asking that the general aim of FP9 should be to create and implement a European Agenda of Research and Innovation inspired by global challenges and missions. In this line, six main elements to be taken into account have been highlighted:

1. Sustainable funding in research and innovation to maintain Europe’s ambition to progress.
2. To involve the society in the creation of knowledge and innovation.
3. To promote and reward the full implementation of the open access to science.
4. To establish a more understandable definition of the concept of “impact”.
5. To improve support to young researchers starting their research careers.
6. To review the processes of the presentation and evaluation of projects to improve efficiency, transparency, equity and impact.

Presentation of research projects

During the meeting, research projects funded by the European Commission that have been coordinated by a member of YERUN were presented. This is the case of the project KRISTINA, coordinated by UPF, which was presented by Mónica Domínguez, a PhD student with the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC).

It is a three-year project (until 2018) that belongs to the Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies initiative of the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme. KRISTINA is coordinated by Leo Wanner, ICREA researcher of the DTIC and director of the Natural Language Processing research group (TALN).

Its main aim is to study and develop technologies that help immigrants to become socially competent and be communicative in the language of their country of residence by means of mobile communication devices. The idea was especially designed so that these people can overcome the language and cultural barriers of their host country, especially with regard to issues related to basic and health-related information.

The project especially affects the research into dialogue management, the analysis of spoken, facial and gestural communication, and multi-modal communication.