Environment – Multimodal Data Fusion and Analytics Group

IDEATION

IDEATION InlanD watErs in the digitAl Twin OceaN IDEATION (InlanD watErs in the digitAl Twin OceaN) aims to develop a digital twin of inland waters (rivers, lakes, reservoirs, wetlands, snow, and ice). The project focuses on activities to ensure this digital twin is integrated and interoperable with the Digital Twin Ocean (DTO), creating a unified digital twin of the ocean and waters, thereby addressing the hydrosphere as a whole. IDEATION will rely on cross-border cooperation and the involvement and commitment of stakeholders at the European level by following the Water-oriented Living Labs (WoLLs) approach. Stakeholders will be engaged via Multi-Stakeholder Forums (MSF) using various engagement methodologies, such as focus groups, workshops, interviews, and questionnaires, tailored to the goals of the engagement and the context specificities. A comprehensive review will be…

DATAWiSE

DATAWiSE Intelligent and Sustainable Building Management powered by Cross-Sectoral Lifecycle The overall objective of DATAWiSE is to develop and test building and building portfolio management tools, leveraging cross-sectoral lifecycle data, on the basis of an open, secure, interoperable, and scalable framework, to maximize both energy efficiency and stakeholder value. Utilizing cutting-edge artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, the methodology integrates data from a variety of sources to provide a holistic understanding of building operations. Besides technological innovation, the project also incorporates a supportive market and policy framework designed to offer evidence-based pathways for widespread adoption and commercialization. DATAWiSE aims to provide a standardized approach for managing and exploiting building-related big data. M4D is the coordinator of DATAWise project. It is also responsible for the scientific and technical management of the project,…

W2W

W2W A Wood-to-Wood Cascade Upcycling Valorisation Approach The W2W project will produce and validate a comprehensive framework for multi-dimensional cascade valorisation of wood from C&D and furniture waste, consisting of four core components: 1) Advanced separation & sorting technologies: Adaptive Separation and Sorting system based on cascade valorisation thresholds, making use of human-robot collaboration and mixed reality technologies 2) Upcycling Processes and Technologies: mechanical, chemical, and bioremediation processes to recover wood or resources from waste and use them in new products which have the same quality as the ones produced by primary resources3) Digital Tools for Improving Circular Flows of Secondary Materials: LCA-based tool to predict and assess the impact of different cascade paths, Supply Chain Management Tool for the optimisation of upcycling of secondary materials, Digital Product Passport, and…

ThinkingEarth

ThinkingEarth Copernicus Foundation Models for a Thinking Earth ThinkingEarth views the Earth as a complex unified and interconnected system. To harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cutting-edge techniques such as deep learning, causality, eXplainable AI, and physics-aware Machine Learning are used. Predictive abilities of Self-Supervised Learning and Graph Neural Networks to develop task-agnostic Copernicus Foundation Models and a Graph representation model of the Earth are leveraged. The potential of these assets are demonstrated through small-scale downstream Spotlight Applications, as well as large-scale use cases that integrate distributed industrial and user non-EO datasets. These use cases address ambitious problems with high socio-environmental impact and new business growth opportunities, such as accelerating Europe’s clean energy transition and independence from volatile fossil fuels, understanding Earth’s processes by modelling causal Earth system teleconnections,…

SINCERE

SINCERE The second life of modern period architecture: Resilient and adaptive renovation towards net-zero carbon heritage buildings Today, 19th and 20th c. modern period buildings are the trademark of numerous European cities, forming a great part of EU Built Heritage, reflecting and shaping the identity of our local, national and multinational societies. Considering that historic buildings are ineffective in terms of energy consumption for heating and cooling, among the biggest restoration and renovation challenges is to enhance the energy performance of historic buildings. SINCERE aims to elucidate the values of Built Heritage and provide the tools for optimizing the carbon footprint and energy performance of historic buildings, towards the requirements of net-zero-carbon-buildings, by utilizing innovative, sustainable, and cost-effective restoration materials and practices, energy harvesting technologies, ICT tools and socially innovative…

FUELPHORIA

FUELPHORIA Accelerating the sustainable production of advanced biofuels and RFNBOs – from feedstock to end-use FUELPHORIA will set-up and test value chains for advanced biofuels and renewable non-biological fuels in Europe, establishing sustainable, competitive and secure value chains for advanced biofuels. The project contributes to the objectives of the European Commission’s 2022 REPower EU Plan “to scale-up renewables, achieve electrification, and replace fossil-based heat and fuel in industry, buildings, and the transport sector”. A versatile range of processes including but not limited to chemical, biological, and photo-biological processes will serve as the scaffold to convert different feedstocks into an array of renewable fuels of quality specifications defined by end-users in the transport (e.g. maritime and road) and in the power (e.g. gas or oil-fired thermal plants) production sector. Four demonstrators…

UP2030

UP2030 Urban Planning and design ready for 2030 UP2030 aims to support cities in driving the socio-technical transitions required to meet their climate neutrality targets by leveraging urban planning and design. Within the project city stakeholders and local authorities will be supported and guided to put neutrality on the map of their communities in day-to-day actions and strategic decisions. An innovative methodology (5UP-approach) will be developed and applied through the co-development and implementation of science-based - yet practical - tools, and methods. Inclusive participation is key throughout the project’s full cycle of activities so that real needs of communities are reflected in the city-specific visions, and co-designed interventions maximise delivery of co-benefits. As such, UP2030 will have a measured positive impact on spatial justice in the pilots and give the…

BeOpen

BeOpen BeOpen an Open framework for boosting EU High ValueDatasets from Public Sector In the last decade, open data production related to Public Sector is quickly increased due to different factors, in particular: EU Open Data Directive fostered the openness of specific typology of datasets from the Public Sector (i.e. High Value Datasets); the improvement of the smart city paradigms (e.g. IoT deployments, digital twins) has dramatically improved the production of city-related data accessible by citizens; private companies are more and more contributing to public sector/utilities data availability used by citizens in their everyday life. Anyway, actual data use by third-party services still remains a challenge; a lot of data produced by public authorities, even “officially open”, is still not discoverable or is accessible only by humans, in a heterogeneous…

ICARIA

ICARIA Improving ClimAte Resilience of crItical Assets The frequency of natural disasters has steadily increased over the past two decades. It is far from irrational to assume that this trend could be significantly worsened in a short and long-time period according to reported climate change projections. With the help of a multidisciplinary team and a firm foundation, ICARIA aims to advance the use of asset-level modeling to better understand the direct and indirect effects of climate change caused by complex, cascading and compound disasters as well as the related risk reduction provided by suitable, sustainable, and affordable adaptation solutions. ICARIA focuses on both critical assets and infrastructures taking into account potential climate changes that can increase unexpected outages and failures, including but not limited to housing, natural, and land areas.…

SILVANUS

SILVANUS Integrated Technological and Information Platform for wildfire Management SILVANUS envisages to deliver an environmentally sustainable and climate resilient forest management platform through innovative capabilities to prevent and combat against the ignition and spread of forest fires. The platform will cater to the demands of efficient resource utilisation and provide protection against threats of wildfires encountered globally. The project will establish synergies between (i) environmental; (ii) technology and (iii) social science experts for enhancing the ability of regional and national authorities to monitor forest resources, evaluate biodiversity, generate more accurate fire risk indicators and promote safety regulations among citizens through awareness campaigns. The novelty of SILVANUS lies in the development and integration of advanced semantic technologies to systematically formalise the knowledge of forest administration and resource utilisation. Additionally, the platform…

TREEADS

TREEADS A Holistic Fire Management Ecosystem for Prevention, Detection and Restoration of Environmental Disasters TREEADS aims to build upon state-of-the-art products and unite them in a holistic Fire Management platform that optimizes and reuses the available socio-technological resources in all three main phases of wildfire management. For the Prevention and Preparedness phases, TREEADS proposes the use of a real-time risk evaluation tool that receives multiple classification inputs and works with a newly proposed neural network-powered risk factor indicator. To create a model of Fire Adapted Communities (FAC), in parallel to insurance incentives, TREEADS will use Alkali-Activated Materials (AAM), integrating Post-wildfire Wood Ashes (PWA) for fire-resilient buildings and infrastructure. TREEADS also uses a variety of technological solutions such as the Copernicus infrastructure, and a swarm of small drones customized for accurate…

CALLISTO

CALLISTO Copernicus Artificial Intelligence Services and data fusion with other distributed data sources and processing at the edge to support DIAS and HPC infrastructures Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already part of our lives and is extensively entering the space sector to offer value-added Earth Observation (EO) products and services. CALLISTO project integrates Copernicus data, already indexed in DIAS platforms such as ONDA-DIAS, utilising High Performance Computing infrastructures for enhanced scalability when needed. Complementary distributed data sources involve Galileo positioning data, visual content from UAVs, Web and social media data linking them with open geospatial data, in-situ sensor data. On top of these data sources, AI methods are applied to extract meaningful knowledge such as concepts, changes, activities, events, 3D-models, videos and animations of the user community. AI methods are also…

WQeMS

WQeMS Copernicus Assisted Lake Water Quality Emergency Monitoring Service Monitoring the extent of the effluents in the lake provides a warning about the risk of water contamination and contributes to impact mitigation strategies, both for the drinking water production and the environmental sustainability. WQeMS focuses its activities on the monitoring of lakes with the aim to provide an operational Water Quality Emergency Monitoring Service, which enhances our ability to deliver drinking water in all EU member states. The project exploits Sentinel satellite data for quality monitoring at a finer spatial resolution level, following validated processes with in situ data. WQeMS provides extensive information about water quality by building a multi-temporal and high spatial resolution monitoring framework. The goal is the optimization of the use of resources by gaining access to…

SAFERS

SAFERS Enhancing our society's resilience against wildfires Forest fires are exacerbated by extreme weather conditions, which are increasing both in frequency and in magnitude due to climate change effects. This points to the need for improving the effectiveness of emergency management solutions aimed to help society in becoming more resilient to emergencies arising before, during and after forest fire events. Therefore, it is proposed to realize a comprehensive Emergency Management System (EMS) that we name SAFERS: Structured Approaches for Forest fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies. SAFERS will act along the key phases of the emergency management cycle, coupling information from EO data and services offered by Copernicus and GEOSS, crowdsourced data from social media and from specific applications that can be used by both citizens as well as from in-field…

SMART-WATER

SMART-WATER Smart infrastructure for remote metering of water consumption and management of water demand The Smart-Water project is a research collaboration between the Thessaloniki Water Supply and Sewerage Company (EYATH), Apifon Telecommunications, and the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) of the National Center For Research & Technology (CERTH) and focuses on the following objectives: 1) Designing an integrated prototype infrastructure for intelligent water system management that will use telemetry and remote control technologies to provide innovative services to the water company and the consumer. 2) Research and development of alternative technologies for the realization of the telemetering and remote control network with a real-life pilot test in the urban environment of Thessaloniki to evaluate the infrastructure’s reliability and efficiency. 3) Research, development and pilot testing of a management system for data…

EOPEN

EOPEN Open interoperable platform for unified access and analysis of Earth Observation data Earth Observation (EO) data access through the Copernicus data distributor systems has paved the way to monitor changes on Earth, using Sentinel data. One of the main objectives of EOPEN is to fuse Sentinel data with multiple, heterogeneous and big data sources, to improve the monitoring capabilities of the future EO downstream sector. Additionally, the involvement of mature ICT solutions in the Earth Observation sector shall address major challenges in effectively handling and disseminating Copernicus-related information to the wider user community, beyond the EU borders. EOPEN will fuse Copernicus big data content with observations from non-EO data, such as weather, environmental and social media information, aiming at interactive, real-time and user-friendly visualisations and decisions from early warning…