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.
In its 2021-2027 period, the Erasmus program is expected to move 10 million European students. These students however will have significantly larger carbon footprints during their stay abroad than when studying back at home. On the other hand, most international students will make intensive use of public transportation, bike sharing systems (BSS) or other sustainable travel options on their day-to-day activities during their stays, offsetting some of their carbon emissions.
Our consortium aims to develop cost-efficient HTMs and investigate the fundamental and applied aspects of perovskite/HTM/metal interfaces in relation to device stability. The overall aim of T-i-PSCer project is to boost the scientific excellence and innovation capacity of three ECIU universities and their non-academic partner in developing interface-friendly HTMs for stable PSCs with the commercial potential.
This project brings together academic and societal partners from 4 ECIU institutes, building on established collaboration with focus on societal transformation, citizen engagement, viable and smart cities. ECIU-UTC is drawing on a palette of local and regional challenges that are jointly defined with societal partners in Norrköping/Linköping, Stavanger, Enschede, and Barcelona, aiming to achieve SDG11 – sustainable cities and communities, and to the ECIU ‘SuperBlock of Covadonga’ challenge.
The RESILIENT project aims at building a Research Network on Resilient Communities through i) the development of a collaborative net of researchers for knowledge exchange and capacity building between network partners; ii) forge new multi- and interdisciplinary research and training initiatives on critical aspects of resilient communities undertaken by the network members in collaboration; iii) encourage the dialogue between academia and civil society through citizen science approaches, which is needed to enhance the resilience of local communities in practice.
Peter Drucker (1909-2005) once stated that “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” The circular economy is a concept that has been shown to have great merits in mobilizing many different actors and professional groups to contribute to a more effective and resource-efficient, sustainable and circular society. Thus, the vision of this project is to create an interdisciplinary network for a sustainable and circular economy focusing on effective solutions and how to make them efficient from a societal perspective.
Departing from Internet of Things (IoT) approaches, our work aims at narrowing down this gap, leveraging Machine Learning (ML) for pattern recognition and data analytics, towards more informed decision-making on buildings’ energy optimization. Our goal is to join expertise and expand availability of infrastructure, enabling case studies in both Lithuania and Sweden where we will demonstrate the effective application of our tools.
To reduce environmental impact of flue gases, efficient purification technologies are widely adopted and some of them transfer the pollutants to water phase. The liquid effluents from gas cleaning may thus result in water pollution requiring new management processes. This research aims at developing a specific process for the purification of these effluents, focusing on the removal of nitrogen originated by NOx removal via optimized biological denitrification.
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.
SMART-ER aims to integrate public engagement in all the activities led by the VRI and to facilitate processes related to engaging all the different stakeholders of society in the research process.
We define public engagement as participatory multi actor dialogues and exchanges to foster mutual understanding, co-create research and innovation outcomes, and provide input to policy agendas.
Engaging with its various publics is of increasing importance to higher education in Europe and globally. It allows the sector to strengthen relevance, responsiveness and accountability in a sustainable manner.
The areas of intervention include:
You are a researcher or staff member of an ECIU university and you have first-hand experience or interest in engagement methods and in developing further methods for doing research? Join the community and participate to our future events by filling this registration form.
These are examples of activities that you can engage in by participating in this ECIUPublic Engagement Community of Practice:
