With an average funding of more than two million each, the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) and the Department of Translation and Language Science (DTCL) of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) are planning to perform these research projects, which have from three to five years duration, with the grant funds of the European Seventh Frame Programme (7FP).

Nine of them are collaborative projects that belong to the "Cooperation" scheme and the other one (INDIREA) belongs to the "People" funding scheme.

From all ten projects, three of them have just started in October. These are the following: HBP (The Human Brain Project), INDIREA (Individualised Diagnostics and Rehabilitation of Attention) and the VP2HF project (Computer model derived indices for optimal patient-specific treatment selection and planning in Heart Failure).

HBP has a particular funding scheme that allows more number of partners to participate (82 in this particular case) and as a consequence a bigger amount of funds than the other cooperation projects (45 M€ for all HBP partners) are received.

Gustavo Deco, ICREA researcher from DTIC and director of the Brain Cognitive Center, will lead the technical performance of the first phase of the project. Over two years and a half, the main objective of the HBP is to design and develop six research platforms of collaborative consortia to be dedicated to study the brain from different scientific approaches, such as neuroinformatics, brain stimulation or neurorobotics.

INDIREA belongs to the 7FP "People" funding scheme and it has just started at the DTIC. The partners of this consortium are from Germany, Denmark, Spain, Ireland and the United Kingdom. Gustavo Deco is one of its main researchers and the project works on the diagnosis and rehabilitation of patients with attention disorders.

VP2F has nine partners in the research consortium, with the company Philips among them, 3,5 M€ of total funding and it will be technically directed at the DTIC by Oscar Cámara, principal researcher of the PHYSENSE team. The main goal of the research project is to develop new tools, imaging and data processing tools, which allow a better diagnosis of the most frequent diseases related to heart failure.

Four more projects are starting in November and December

The projects EASEL (Expressive Agents for Symbiotic Education and Learning), MULTISENSOR (Mining and Understanding of multilinguaL contenT for Intelligent Sentiment Enriched coNtext and Social Oriented inteRpretation), and the GiantSteps project (Seven League Boots for Music Creation and Performance) will start in November.

Five institutions participate in the EASEL project. UPF is the coordinator of the project, that has a funding of 2,9 M€, and it will represent an step forward in the theoretical study of human cognition through the human-robot symbiotic interaction. The project will be executed over three years and it will be scientifically directed by Paul Verschure, ICREA researcher from DTIC and group leader of the SPECS research team.

With three years duration, the project MULTISENSOR has a total funding closed to 2,9 M€ and nine partners in the consortium. The overall objective of the project is offer solutions to mine the consumption of multimedia information which is no reliable or biased and that is massively spread in all sort of communication media. MULTISENSOR proposes a content integration framework that builds upon multimedia mining, knowledge extraction as well as hybrid reasoning. Leo Wanner, ICREA researcher from DTIC and group leader of the TALN research team, will scientifically lead the project at DTIC.

GiantSteps has already started. It is scientifically coordinated by Sergi Jordà, researcher from the MTG and specialized in advanced interaction, and its main idea is explore new tools for the production of digital music which allow unlocking the user's creativity. With 2,9 M€ of total funding, this consortium has seven partners, from academia, industry and other relevant institutions of creative industries. Reactable Systems, S.L., spin-off related to UPF and created in 2009, participates in the project performance.

The project EUMSSI (Event Understanding through Multimodal Social Stream Interpretation) has planned to start in December. This is also a coordinated project by UPF and it will be scientifically supervised by Antoni Badia, group leader of the GLiCom research team from the DTCL. It has a proposed duration of three years, a total of seven partners and an overall funding of 2,5 M€. The main objective of EUMSSI is developing technologies for identifying and aggregating data presented as unstructured in sources of very different nature.

Projects that will start during the first trimester of 2014

The UPF will also coordinate the project WYSIWYD (What You Say Is What You Did). From January next year Paul Verschure will supervise the technical accomplishment of this project that will basically go in depth in the human-robot cognitive interactions.

Moreover, Dr. Inventor (Promoting Scientific Creativity by Utilising Web-based Research Objects) and AThEME (Advancing the European Multilingual Experience) are the two other DTIC projects that will start in January and March 2014 respectively.

The idea of Dr. Inventor is develop a personal research assistant by overcoming the limitations that people suffer in pursuing scientific discovery. With a total duration of three years and a 2,6 M€ funding, it has a consortia of 8 partners. In that case, Horacio Saggion, researcher from the TALN group, will be the scientific leader at DTIC.

AThEME has an expected duration of five years, a total funding of almost 5 M€ and 17 consortium members. The project will be lead by Albert Costa, ICREA researcher from DTIC and group leader of the SPB research team and it will focus on multilingualism in Europe using three approaching levels, the individual multilingual citizen, the multilingual group, and the multilingual society. AThEME aims to raise societal awareness of multilingualism through building on the successful model of academic public engagement provided by the program Bilingualism Matters.