CY Cergy Paris University

Do only foolish people drown and only compulsive gamblers suffer flood losses? Conventional wisdom is based on flawed underlying assumptions and the EU vision of a disaster- and climate-resilient society cannot be achieved by relying on “behaviour-blind” assessments and policy. Whilst the behaviour of individuals, businesses and public services before, during and after a crisis has a significant impact on damages, recovery and resilience, current assessments fail to include such critical factors because they are hardly understood. Floods and weather hazards are affecting 2bn people and exposure is expected to grow due to climate change. Despite trillions of public funds invested, current flood reduction and planning policies are failing to reduce risks and losses of lives. This is due to a mismatch between the rising application of risk, vulnerability and resilience assessments and the understanding of their empirical validity. The overreaching goal of this proposal is to move from “behaviour-blind” to “behaviour-aware” assessments, indicators and policies to save lives and public money. Lifting the current barriers to predicting and simulating risk perception and behaviour will create forefront knowledge and open new horizons. Social and technological changes have widened the gaps in our knowledge making new empirical research essential to refine or replace existing theories. This project will provide four demonstrators representative of the European and Mediterranean context, graded in size, wealth and exposure to reach general considerations: Paris, Barcelona, Bucharest and Algiers. It is aiming at cross-validation on floods and transferability to other emergencies (technological disasters, epidemics, terrorism, etc). It will launch a new line of research by providing “behaviour-aware” participatory assessments and indicators, spatially-explicit interactive short- and long-term simulation tools enabling decision-makers to refine their strategies and policies.

In the past years, quantum non-equilibrium emerged as a new principal research arena, promising to assist the current development of new quantum technologies and to shine a new light on disparate fields of theoretical and experimental physics, from black holes to condensed matter and statistical physics. As quantum dynamics represents a major challenge for modern computational methods, relevant developments have come from devising new generalised and extended forms of classical hydrodynamic theory to effectively describe its macroscopic features. This effort is nowadays constituting an essential part of contemporary theoretical physics, contributing to a deeper understanding of dynamical phenomena and providing new directions in different experimental areas. This proposal focuses on the interplay between classical non-linear dynamics and quantum evolution, promising to a) unveil a new deep comprehension of how the non-equilibrium dynamics in many-body quantum systems can dissipate or either recover quantum information and how effective non-linear classical behaviour emerges, b) release new efficient theoretical tools to access quantum many-body quantum systems which are strongly interacting and in non-equilibrium settings beyond linear response, far away from known regimes of low-energy, low-temperatures or weak interactions. The outcomes will provide new reliable and much needed theoretical methods as well as a new dictionary to catalogue and relate different non-equilibrium phenomena in quantum and classical physics and deepen our understanding of out-of-equilibrium matter.

The EUTOPIA Science and Innovation Fellowships program is an ambitious initiative to train young research leaders. This strategic program is launched by the EUTOPIA Alliance, a network of six universities that has recently been awarded an Erasmus+ ‘European Universities’ pilot project. It brings together Université Paris Seine, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Goeteborgs Universitet, Univerza v Ljubljani and University of Warwick, who have joined forces to provide fellows with an innovation-driven world-class research eco-system. The program focuses on 5 interdisciplinary Key Research Areas: 1- Materials engineering; 2- Data & Intelligence; 3- Health; 4- Sustainability; 5- Welfare & Inclusion. The program offers 76 two-years post-doctoral fellowships over five years and aims to promote the research potential and career perspective of outstanding, innovative young researchers. Fellows are offered full freedom to pursue their research project whilst benefiting from expert academic supervision, state-of-the art research infrastructure and being part of an interdisciplinary research community. The program offers career mentoring; and promotes transferable skills, innovation and entrepreneurship awareness and secondment with partners. While letting fellows choose their hosting university, the program will create a transnational community of researchers through joint initiatives such as yearly symposia, a strong network, etc. International mobility, both among EUTOPIA members and towards international academic institutions will be encouraged. Université Paris Seine will manage the program on behalf of the EUTOPIA Alliance. The program will rest on a unified governance, a joint, high standard, selection procedure, and resource sharing. In addition, more than 45 companies, local authorities and non-profit organizations who are ready to train or host some researchers on secondments already support the program.

EUTOPIA-TRAIN is an ambitious research initiative launched by the EUTOPIA Alliance, a network of six universities that has been awarded an Erasmus+ ‘European Universities’ pilot project. It brings together Goeteborgs Universitet, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, CY Cergy Paris Université, Univerza v Ljubljani, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and University of Warwick, in fostering the emergence of a challenge-driven knowledge-creation community and capitalizing on their joint potential to promote innovation and societal impact. EUTOPIA-TRAIN aims to extend its challenge-led educational model to the development of its research and innovation (R&I) activities and tackle two main challenges: (1) to integrate pan-EUTOPIA research and innovation communities and (2) to open up EUTOPIA research communities and structures to society, business, students and policy-makers. Three cross-cutting objectives will be targeted: • Developing R&I Synergies and Delivering a joint Research Strategy • Mutualizing Resources and Tools • Defining a shared R&I Policy. These objectives will drive the activities in six key areas: • Developing a strategy for delivering the EUTOPIA R&I agenda and sharing knowledge with stakeholders • Developing a cross-institution innovation strategy and supporting engagement with business • Mainstreaming Open Science and engaging with citizens and society • Developing a joint Human Resources strategy, and supporting the skill development and mobility of researchers • Setting up a EUTOPIA grants, legal and innovation office • Setting up joint research governance and management structures. Combining top-down and bottom-up approaches, the initiative will support the institutional transformation of the EUTOPIA Alliance in synergy with its education dimension. It will also build up EUTOPIA research capacity in both human and technical resources, disseminate and co-create policies for European Universities and contribute to the development of the EU R&I performance.

WEAFING will develop innovative garments with integrated textile actuators, sensors, and electronics for haptic stimulation. We will advance the technology and manufacturability of electroactive fabrics resulting in lightweight and flexible textile actuators. Integration of the actuators in wearables takes into account different textile morphologies, soft mechatronics, producibility, and human perception. The garments developed will have a high level of wearability as the actuator is the garment itself and the technology is silent. These wearables are based on a new kind of textile muscles that are also enhanced within the project. In wearable technology, most R&D comprises sensors and only very little concerns wearable actuator technology. There is a limited set of actuators for wearables and 95% of the applications for haptic feedback are based on vibration motors. Textile muscles offer a completely novel and different quality of haptic sensation. Furthermore, being textiles they offer a new way of designing and fabricating wearable haptics and can be seamlessly integrated into garments. They are silent, use low driving voltages, lightweight, soft and pliable, in contrast to other solutions that most often are hard, bulky and noisy. For these novel form of textile muscles we foresee a huge range of possible applications in haptics: for ergonomics, wellness, gaming, inclusion, or social communication. Electromechanically active polymers form a basis for the textile muscles. When low voltage is applied to the coated yarns, they contract. Processing the yarns into textiles multiplies the effect of the contraction and/or delivered force, depending on the textile construction. In a co-design approach involving end-users we will develop demonstrator garments for haptic stimulation and investigate their properties in a multidisciplinary team with members from chemistry, physics, soft mechatronics, textile technology, human perception and cognition, and wearable design.