The ECIU University has developed a joint long-term research strategy on smart regions, building on the rapid development of digital infrastructures across Europe to address common research challenges related to SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) topics.
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1. Climate-resilient energy sector
2. Encouragement to the producers to decrease the virgin raw materials consumption
3. Renewable sources of energy & integration of renewables in the energy system
4. Decarbonization of the power sector toward net-zero emission by 2020
5. Whole life cycle analysis.
6. The role of civil society and social movements in energy transitions
7. Social sustainability in the logistic sector and resource depletion for manufacturing processes
8. Citizen engagement targeting bringing the public on as a champion of research in this area to help "motivate" political policy
9. Embodied energy of products
10. Smart design of optimal and reliable energy systems
11. Reliability and Safety Study of Energy Systems
12. International provision chains for renewable energies
13. Energy storage
14. Transformative innovation perspectives
15. Resilient any-scenario communication networks
1. Reuse (and recycling) of challenging waste fractions, such as multimaterials/composites and critical materials in the European context
2. Development of biological, thermal, physical and chemical technologies for resource recovery.
3. Investigate the impact of consumer behavioural change on the environmental, economic, and social aspects of a product's life-cycle.
4. Circular oriented innovation
5. Disassembling of product at end of life for component reusage
6. Development of products for circular economy
7. Effects of legislation and business models on circular economy solutions and the drivers and barriers regarding legislation at national and EU level.
8. Materials, such as Polymers, Construction materials and critical raw materials
9. Acceptance of different solutions, e.g. markets for nutrient products recovered from waste streams.
10. Execution and implementation of circular economy principles within an organization
11. Recovery of resources, e.g. nutrients, metals, carbon and/or energy, from industrial, municipal and agricultural waste streams
12. How to integrate CE-thinking into the development work (for example C2C innovation and stage-gate innovation work)
13. Circular construction
14. Sustainable exploitation of mineral raw materials (no more mining wastes; integral use of low-grades)
15. Food waste recycling and food waste valorization
1. Autonomous Driving and Smart Mobility. Create Methods for Multi-Sensors based Road Scene Analysis.
2. Artificial intelligence to mobility and transport prediction
3. Artificial Intelligence for Logistics Management
4. Urban transport in post covid era
5. Zero-emission public transportation
6. Smart design of optimal and reliable systems
7. Shareconomy in logistics (uberization of trucking, car sharing, crowdsourced logistics, platform, etc.).
8. Fully integrated multi-modal mobility options with transportation delay predictions and mobility apps from public administrations
9. Electric vehicles
10. Better use of travel card data for optimization
11. Sharing and utilization of real-time data in supply chains
12. Development and evaluation of integrated concepts in mobility and land use planning
13. Digitalisation of urban transport (shared mobility, mobility as a service), and its societal impacts
14. Walkability and emotions in urban environments
15. Bikeability – from car-dependency to soft mobility
1. Trade-offs between resilience and equity/justice
2. Co-creation of practices facilitating resilient communities
3. Social health of communities & social capital (social networks, social trust, reciprocity norms)
4. Citizen participation
5. Employ scenario-building to stimulate community engagement in community engagement in co-creating sustainable and smart communities.
6. Renewable energy production balanced with consumption in a localised community-focused manner
7. Power relations in a resilient community: between members, between community and authorities, between community and society more in general
8. Urban infrastructures risks due to extreme events => nature-based solutions
9. Building on a broad range of stakeholder/community/professional experiences to ensure dealing with the most difficult problem for sustainability
10. How to promote the reuse and adaptation of the built stock to both climate change and social change
11. Analysis of how city-regions are emerging as key contexts for building resilient urban futures
12. Collective action problems associated with community adaptation and resilience
13. Hybrid governance solutions that involve communities, governments and market-based arrangements
14. Multimodality in urban resilient transport systems (car, cycling, shared mobility, public transport)
15. Citizen science/crowd-sourced science
Contact your local ambassador to learn moreThe SMART-ER Academy aims to offer a novel approach of training-capacity programmes that goes beyond the conventional praxis and comfort zone. This will involve researchers from all their professional stages (from R1 to R4) in stimulating training, based on the ECIU University challenge-based learning approach (CBL), focusing the activities on relevant topics and addressing genuine local and regional challenges.
Under this framework, the task aims at generating a knowledge cloud, equipping researchers and other research staff with a combination of training skills, forward-looking competencies, Open Science skills, research integrity, interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial competencies. It also includes further development in non-academic settings with the collaboration of non-academic experts.
Click on a research area to get more information on the topics and the contact person for each.
The SMART-ER Seed Programme supports research career development and the implementation of a shared R&I agenda through the training, mobility and engagement in international, cross-disciplinary and intersectoral collaboration of ECIU University researchers focused on the UN SDG11.
The ECIU University is committed to ensuring that its researchers are connected across all member institutions.
A researcher at any member institution of the ECIU University may apply a grant for travels and associated costs to visit researchers at other member institutions to establish and extend scientific collaboration.
Citizen Science, together with the integration of the stakeholders in the different processes of the research cycle, is a fundamental pillar of the SMART-ER project.
Particularly, SMART-ER devotes a whole work package (WP5), which defines specific actions to develop a strong community of Citizen Science in the ECIU University. These actions are distributed in 3 tasks:
In order to help consolidating a strong Community of Citizen Science, the ECIU Consortium will organize a number of open webinars from September 2021. These webinars will showcase the state-of-the-art of Citizen Science projects in the different Universities of the ECIU Consortium, and it well contribute to approach common challenges and topics of interest with the view on the identification of potential joint efforts for the pilots.
In addition, with the aim of co-designing the pilots with the ECIU's Community of Citizen Science, we will run a CO-CREATION WORKSHOP which will take place online on FEBRUARY 3rd 2022, from 10.00h to 13.30h CET.
We welcome all the ECIU researchers to register and participate in this action. YOU CAN FIND ALL THE INFORMATION BY DOWNLOADING THIS SAVE THE DATE PDF.
SAVE THE DATE AND REGISTER THROUGH THIS LINK PRIOR TO 3rd FEBRUARY 2022!!
You will receive further details and instructions by email.
