SIXTHSENSE Kick-off Meeting

Lifesaving technology for those charged with saving lives

The European Project SIXTHSENSE on health monitoring with sensory feedback for enhanced situational awareness was launched in Donostia-San Sebastián on May 19-20, 2020

On May 19 and 20, the kick-off meeting of the EU-funded project SIXTHSENSE – “Smart Integrated eXtreme environmenT Health monitor with Sensory feedback for ENhanced Situation awarEness” took place in the virtual space shared between nine participating countries. The project is a multidisciplinary innovation and research action with the overall aim of developing a wearable health monitoring system with closed loop tactile biofeedback, that allows first responders in hazardous situations to sense their current health status. It will allow early detection of risk factors that could lead to rapid deterioration of health or operation capabilities of first responders, by leveraging predictive models based on multimodal biosensor data (e.g., lactate, Na, K, HR, temperature). As a team management tool, it will enable real-time monitoring of all deployed operatives, helping increase team effectiveness and operational safety.

To help accelerate the pace of technological advancements aimed at first responders, beyond the scope of the project, SIXTHSENSE will establish a novel research methodology for sustainable inclusion of first responders in a co-development process.

SIXTHSENSE is funded withing the EU Horizon 2020 programe as a 36 months  project, with the overall funding of €7.242.442,5. The project consortium comprises 21 organisations from nine European countries, coordinated by TECNALIA Research & Innovation (Spain). The project consortium comprises three universities: Aalborg Universitet (Denmark), Universidad de León (Spain) and Technische Universitaet Chemnitz (Germany); five European Research and Technology Organisations: TECNALIA (Spain), Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft (Austria), BioNanoNet Forschungsgesellschaft (Austria), Eucentre Foundation (Italy) and Tecnalia Serbia (Serbia); two large industry representatives: Jobst Technologies (Germany) and Methrom DropSens (Spain); and five SME partners: Senetics healthcare group (Germany), TeleGroup (Germany), Smartex (Italy), Global Electronic Solutions (Serbia), BiFlow Systems (Germany) with different areas of expertise. The project also counts active participation from first responders organisations, as Serbian Mountain Rescue Service, Association of Mountain Rescue Organizations of B&H and four fire fighter companies with different profiles from Gumpoldskirchen (Austria), Postojna (Slovenia), Rijeka (Croatia) and Pavia (Italy), and a fire rescue training and risk management experts -  IFR (Austria).

The principal researcher from AAU is Cedomir Stefanovic, Assoc. Prof., from the CMI section, Department of Electronic Systems.  He will be leading the team in charge of designing and implementing a mission-critical wireless system supporting the health monitoring solution. The participation in SIXTHSENSE project, funded within a prestigeous H2020 program, provides an excellent framework to apply the expertise of the CMI’s team on mission-critical communications in the wider context of 5G systems.

For further information see the project website .

Project Coordinator: Goran.Bijelic@Tecnalia.com

International Business Development Manager

TECNALIA RESEARCH & INNOVATION

 Parque Científico y Tecnológico de Gipuzkoa

Mikeletegi Pasealekua, 2

E-20009 DONOSTIA-SAN SEBASTIÁN - Gipuzkoa (SPAIN)

Institutional contact: Cedomir Stefanovic, Assoc. Prof. cs@es.aau.dk

Frederikskaj 12B

2450 København SV

Denmark

Intercultural Communication and Neighbourness Learning

CMI is part of a consortium that has successfully applied for an ERASMUS+ project titled, “Intercultural Communication and Neighbourness Learning”.

The project period is October 2019 - October 2022.

The aim of the project is to enable foreign students adapt and integrate into the learning environment and pedagogy of their host institutions. Within the project, toolkits and applications that will support teachers in facilitating such learning processes will be developed. 

The project partners are:

·         TAMPEREEN KORKEAKOULUSAATIO SR, Finland

·         RIGAS TEHNISKA UNIVERSITATE, Latvia

·         UNIVERSITA CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE, Italy

·         Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Germany

·         SULEYMAN DEMIREL UNIVERSITY, Turkey

·         AALBORG UNIVERSITET, Denmark

CMI staff members Morten Falch, Idongesit Williams and Jannick Sørensen are involved in the project.
Grant number: 2019-1-FI01-KA203-060811

European Web Privacy Measurement 2018-19

It is well-known that webpages collect personal information about the user, but little is known about the European-wide patterns in this collection. Over a period of one year, this project examines the activity of so-called third-party servers during the user's visit to a webpage, using the OpenWPM platform. For the purpose +1300 websites from 41 European countries (both within and outside the EU) has been selected. 

As Englehardt & Narayanan (2016) have shown, the number of third-party servers varies for different categories of webpages. News webpages are among those with the highest number, while webpages belonging to NGOs, universities and governments are among the those with the lowest number. 

This research test that finding on a selection of European sites. Particularly, it examines webpages from public service media, as they could fall into both categories. The research furthermore aims to map the production ecology of the media and advertising websites, continuing research by Lindskow (2016). 

Finally, as the EU privacy regulation "GDPR" comes into force in the project period, the research aims to detect possible changes in the behaviour of the third-party servers that can be correlated to GDPR.

In a series of measurements, we visit the selected +1300 websites from four locations: Denmark, Germany, Italy and Hong Kong. 

The project is conducted in collaboration between Center for Communication, Media and Information technologies (CMI.aau.dk) at Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark and Department Informatik at Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, Hamburg, Germany (haw-hamburg.de)

Project Web Page: https://www.researchgate.net/project/European-Web-Privacy-Measurement

Researchers:

Jannick Kirk Sørensen, Sokol Kosta

References:

Englehardt, S., & Narayanan, A. (2016). Online Tracking. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security - CCS’16 (pp. 1388–1401). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978313

Lindskow, K. (2016). Exploring Digital News Publishing Business Models - A Production Network Approach. Copenhagen Business School. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9284

DIGINNO

The ADLES Project

CMI is involved in the ADLES project (Active Digital Learning Environments in Schools) an Erasmus+ project that runs from September 2017 to August 2019.

The focus of the ADLES project is to analyse, design, implement and evaluate new active learning methodologies (PBL-based) for schools, give teachers the confidence to apply them and thereby promote the acquisition of skills and competences of the teachers and students.

The methodology will be supported by innovative ICT based content and tools so that it benefits from the positive effect that ICT enhanced learning can have in terms of motivation, success and knowledge acquisition. Therefore, it is expected that the success of the project can lead teachers into adopting new and innovative pedagogical approaches reinforcing their skills and strengthening the profile of the teaching profession.

The kick-off meeting was held in the beginning of March in Porto, where the partners met and planned the first steps. As part of the project dissemination a brochure is available and can be sent to anyone interested.

Refer to the ADLES website.

Master in Digital Communication Leadership - DC lead

In cooperation with University of Salzburg and Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, CMI at AAU offers a new international master education in Digital Communication Leadership (DCLead) as from autumn 2016.

DCLead is an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree co-funded by the European Union. The programme approaches the field of digital communication from an interdisciplinary and international point of view bringing together advanced academic discussion with practical knowledge and skills. The leadership-approach of this curriculum encompasses economic-managerial, technological and media and communication knowledge with social responsibility and ethical-cultural dimensions of digital communication. Students will gain knowledge, competencies and skills in several of the following fields: (new) media policies, business and economics of (new) media, media management, service design, network and service development, innovation studies, political economy and a European perspective on those fields.

The students of DCLead will spend a semester in Salzburg (Austria) and depending on their choice of specialization, two semesters in either Brussels (Belgium) or Copenhagen (Denmark). In the fourth semester and in order to prepare their thesis, students have the opportunity to receive additional training from one of the associated partners. All courses are held in English.

Thanks to the funding of the European Union, each year the DCLead Selection Board will allocate 14 scholarships to EU and non-EU citizens. The scholarship includes participation fees, insurance, travel costs (1,000-3,000 euro, depending on the place of residence of the candidate), installation costs (1,000 euro for non-EU students), and a stipend of 1,000 euro per month for a maximum of 24 months.

The Master in Digital Communication Leadership is offered by:

• University of Salzburg, Austria
• Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark

in collaboration with the following associated partners:

• University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), United States
• Ghana Telecom University College (GTUC), Ghana
• Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia, Bresil
• Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia
• Journalism School at Fudan University, China
• Association of Commercial Television in Europe (ACT), Belgium
• Red Bull Media House GmbH, Austria
• Sky Deutschland Fernsehen GMBH & COKG, Germany
• Teracom A/S, Denmark

For information, please visit www.dclead.eu

OnCreate ERAMUS+ strategic partnership

OnCreate is a 3-year ERASMUS+ strategic partnership project started September 2014. The aim is to improve online creative processes among students at the ten involved European universities, hereunder AAU Copenhagen. Today’s tools for online collaboration mainly support the exchange of creative ideas emanating from physcial meetings.

This project is about exploring the potential in online-based creative processes and tools for these processes. In the project, experiments are carried at and among the project’s ten partner-universities in terms of the creation, implementation and testing of online creative collaboration courses and projects. In this way, the project addresses frequent problems in online collaboration:

• How do we increase the frequency and intensity of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration?
• How can we utter constructive reviews openly in an emotionally restricted environment without risking serious and discouraging misunderstandings?
• How do we communicate ideas visually and in realtime?
• How can we communicate visual, auditive and haptic qualities through a remote digital interface?
• How can we improve the perception of presence and the feeling of sociability to increase student commitment?

The participating universities and Universities for applied science ("Fachhochschulen - FH") are:

• HOCHSCHULE MAGDEBURG-STENDAL FH, Germany (coordinator)
• TAMPERE UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES, Finland
• UNIVERSITY OF LINCOLN, UK
• UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE, Finland
• UNIVERSITY OF AALBORG, Denmark
• FH-POTSDAM, Germany
• SULEYMAN DEMIREL UNIVERSITY, Turkey
• UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI, Slovenia
• LAPLAND UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES, Finland
• CVJM-Hochschule - International University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Contact person: Jannick Kirk Sørensen Project number: 2014-1-DE01-KA203-000706

VOICE - Virtual Open Incubation Ecosystem

CMI participates in VOICE - Virtual Open Incubation Ecosystem:

"VOICE is a virtual business incubator for startups. Its uniqueness is that it is globally accessible around the clock, open to anyone with an interesting idea, unlimited in space, open and practically boundless in providing services, information and practical guidance, in contrast to the traditional – physical – incubators.

Based on the very core idea and possibilities of the “crowd” and crowd-based services, VOICE builds upon the knowledge and expertise of its global community: users, entrepreneurs, companies and policy stakeholders that share their ideas, experience and innovations with entrepreneurs from all around the world. Capitalizing on this community-driven approach, the VOICE incubator hosts, attracts, involves and engages a truly active global entrepreneurial community.

Stay tuned! VOICE will design, create, set-up and offer you all the tools and features you need to turn your innovative ideas and prototypes into reality, create new businesses, play an active role in the economy and contribute to the creation of new jobs."

VOICE is supported by the EU commission.

Partners:

• Aalborg University
• Athens Information Technology (AIT)
• INNOVA S.p.A
• INTRASOFT International S.A.
• Mazovia Cluster ICT
• Militos Consulting S.A.
• Sapienza Università di Roma
• University of Southampton
• University of Technology, Sydney

See more: http://www.voice-project.eu