The vision of UNICA4EU is to pave the foundation of the ecosystem that will facilitate the upscaling and wide-scale application of Artificial Intelligence to Paediatric Cancer in the next ten years, positioning Europe as the worldwide benchmark in the field.… Leggi tutto The initiative will bring together the multi-disciplinary networks of stakeholders required to strengthen the reference knowledge base for the Paediatric Cancer investigation and promotion. This ambition resonates with the European Beating Cancer Plan Flagship ‘Helping Children with Cancer Initiative’, focussed on ensuring that children have access to rapid and optimal detection, diagnosis, treatment and care and build cancer centre networks that extend and complement the European Reference Network for Paediatric Cancer (ERN Paed-Can). The advantage rooted in UNICA4EU comes from the collaboration between the key actors in this consortium required to accomplish such ambition, including the members from the pilot project PPPA-AIPC-2020 (EU4CHILD), reinforced with the leadership of SIOPE. The collaboration with the patient, parent and survivor advocacy network CCI-Europe, with the survivorship care and research network PanCare and the central role of the ERN Paed-Can. The mission will be oriented to bridge today’s dichotomy: 1) Endorse the technical research and innovation in trustworthy and reliable AI, addressing the inherent challenges related to handle multiple data models, homogenisation, interoperability, processing and federated models; 2) Advocate best practices and road-mapping strategic policy to boost the adoption among the healthcare sector, caregivers, children and adolescents living with cancer and survivors. This will require a complete identification of the end-users needs, built upon the existing standards and policy guidelines.

MEETmeTONIGHT (MEET) – “Face to face with the research” is the proposal for the European Researchers’ Night in 2020, happening in the major Italian cities of Milan, Naples, Caserta and Padua, complemented by Brescia, Castellanza, Cremona, Edolo, Lecco, Lodi, Mantova,… Leggi tutto Monza, Sondrio (Lombardy region), Avellino, Portici, Procida (Campania region), Cassino, Frosinone, Gaeta, Ventotene (Lazio region) and Asiago (Veneto region). The goal is to realize a special occasion of meeting and interaction between the public at large and the world of research, where researchers – at the forefront of all the proposed activities – can show themselves and what they do, in a simple, spontaneous, informal and entertaining way, actively involving the public. People, by doing, find themselves learning, getting amused, and becoming aware of how much research is for everyone and all around us. All MEET activities aim at promoting research and its outcomes, researchers and their profession, with a special attention to the youngest generations on one side, and to the recognition of the role of Europe on the other. With one common macro-theme, detailed in five thematic areas and five slogans, MEET proposes interactive stands, hands-on experiments and live demos that reconstruct the research environment; conferences, video projections, interactive games; guided visits to scientific museums; meeting occasions with researchers; European Corners; live broadcast moments. A special attention is given to schools’ pupils, for which a number of dedicated activities are foreseen, at the goal of encouraging them to consider research career as a concrete option for their life, and to sustainability, one of the most important topics to be considered to achieve a better future.

DoSSIER (Domain Specific Systems for Information Extraction and Retrieval) will elucidate, model, and address the different information needs of professional users. It mobilizes an excellent and highly synergistic team of world-leading Information Retrieval (IR) experts from 5 EU States who,… Leggi tutto together with 3 academic partners (universities in US, Japan, and Australia), and 11 industrial partners (dynamic SMEs and large corporations) will produce fundamental insights into how users comprehend, formulate, and access information in professional environments. For this, DoSSIER takes a highly innovative intersectorial and multidisciplinary approach, addresses fundamental questions about the nature and representation of information needs, engages in novel qualitative and quantitative evaluation, and provides training towards a structured, rigorous, and practical approach to search systems. It connects premier universities and outstanding industrial partners to provide unique opportunities to young researchers. The research is structured in three areas: 1. fundamental models of users and domain specificity, 2. contextual and personalized search, and 3. workflow, task and the interface. Each area individually and in cross-field fertilisation, will produce breakthroughs in our understanding of computer-supported human information search workflows. The result will be a new generation of information access systems, which will accelerate innovation cycles in EU academia and industry, as well as in society as a whole. To be both concrete and generic, DoSSIER consists of 8 projects identifying a target domain and 7 projects acting horizontally across domains. Three vital domains are used: science & technology innovation, law, and healthcare. Questions currently unanswerable (e.g. What is the key innovation difference between these two patents?) will be answerable either directly by a system, or by the development of cognition-enhancing instruments for interacting with information.

Instand-NGS4P is a 54-month PCP project federating 7 leading medical centers (two are coordinating ERNs) as buyers’ group with major experience in using different NGS platforms in research and routine diagnostics. The consortium is further strengthened by European patient advocacy… Leggi tutto groups, a standardization organization and partners participating in the European infrastructures BBMRI-ERIC, ELIXIR as well as several NGS-related EU programs to cover all technical aspects and transversal needs & requirements. Driven by patient and clinical needs, innovative NGS workflows from sample-preanalytics to medical decision making will be developed. The modular design of the workflow will particularly enable SEMs to contribute, and provides flexibility to adopt emerging user needs and technologies. Specifications will address regulatory requirements for IVDs and refer to international standards and requests development of reference materials and implementation of EQA schemes covering the whole workflow. R&D suppliers will be selected based on a public tender all along this PCP process in 3 phases according to the best-value for money solution. The 3 phases foresee the leverage of 4 technical modules (pre-analytics, sequencing, bioinformatics, e-reporting/e-medication) and their standardized interfaces – from design (Phase 1) to prototypes (Phase 2), and full integration in Phase 3. At the end, this PCP will provide 2 fully integrated, standardized NGS workflows for routine diagnostics of common and rare cancers from adults to children. In order to enable broad implementation in healthcare systems throughout Europe and beyond and to increase benefit to patients a series of support activities are planned including communication and dissemination activities targeting a broad stakeholder community, development of training and education material for healthcare professionals and patients, health economic assessment and engagement with healthcare payers and policy makers.

Genomes are strings over the letters A,C,G,T, which represent nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA. In view of ultra-large amounts of genome sequence data emerging from ever more and technologically rapidly advancing genome sequencing devices—in the meantime, amounts of sequencing… Leggi tutto data accrued are reaching into the exabyte scale—the driving, urgent question is: how can we arrange and analyze these data masses in a formally rigorous, computationally efficient and biomedically rewarding manner? Graph based data structures have been pointed out to have disruptive benefits over traditional sequence based structures when representing pan-genomes, sufficiently large, evolutionarily coherent collections of genomes. This idea has its immediate justification in the laws of genetics: evolutionarily closely related genomes vary only in relatively little amounts of letters, while sharing the majority of their sequence content. Graph-based pan-genome representations that allow to remove redundancies without having to discard individual differences, make utmost sense. In this project, we will put this shift of paradigms—from sequence to graph based representations of genomes—into full effect. As a result, we can expect a wealth of practically relevant advantages, among which arrangement, analysis, compression, integration and exploitation of genome data are the most fundamental points. In addition, we will also open up a significant source of inspiration for computer science itself.