Present time: the Horizon 2020 work programmes are published, but what’s in them for you?

With the first calls for Horizon 2020 now launched, and a holiday season approaching, researchers across Europe are faced with digesting hundreds of pages of detailed work programmes, and pulling together consortia in accordance with the Commission’s preferences for multi-disciplinary, transnational collaboration. To make life a little easier, Science|Business has a look at what’s on offer in the various programmes, beginning with Future and Emerging Technologies (FET), which will receive €2.696 billion over seven years to fund high-risk, collaborative research exploring novel ideas for emerging technologies.

Details of other areas of research, including nanotechnology, food, space and climate appear in the News Highlights Section.

FET programme will operate through three different calls: FET Open, FET Proactive and FET Flagships. The aim is to identify and realise new opportunities for technology to make an impact, by providing support to goal-orientated interdisciplinary research and by adopting innovative research practices.

FET was previously housed in the ICT part of the EU R&D Framework Programmes, but this will change under Horizon 2020, said Ales Fiala, Head of Unit, FET, DG Connect, “There will be raised ambitions for FET in Horizon 2020,” he said, “which will now be part of the excellent science pillar.”

But the relevance of the programme, which will now be open to more sectors, extends beyond just one pillar of Horizon 2020, Fiala said, “The mission of FET is to achieve leadership in future technologies to improve Europe’s industrial leadership and tackle social challenges. It is thus a natural bridge between the three pillars of Horizon 2020.” 

The programme kicked-off last week (December 11), with a budget of €200 million in 2014, and the launch of the first four calls, which include interdisciplinary research into global system science, quantum simulation and research on new concepts and paradigms in cognitive systems, as well as research on developing the next generation of high performance computing. 

The next stage of FET will put a special emphasis on issues such as gender, age and culture, in the research topics and teams it promotes. Collaborations involving women, young researchers, and high-tech SMEs will be a priority. 

FET Open – no longer just for ICT

While the FET Flagship programmes on the supermaterial graphene and the Human Brain Project, which aims to develop a full computer model of a functioning brain, receive much of the limelight, forty per cent of the FET budget in Horizon 2020 will go to FET open – a bottom-up scheme that supports early-stage joint science and technology research around new ideas for future technologies.

While proposals are welcome from any research area, “Those looking to submit a proposal to FET Open need to consult the so-called FET gatekeepers,” said Fiala. These six key-words describe characteristics which each submitted proposal should satisfy:

Long-term vision: the research must be new and beyond state-of-the-art; the idea must not be anticipated by existing technology roadmaps;

Breakthrough science and technology: the project must target scientifically ambitious and technologically concrete breakthroughs;

Foundation-laying: breakthroughs must establish a basis for a new line of technology, which is not currently anticipated;

Novelty: the research must be based on new ideas and concepts – not an incremental refinement of existing ideas and research;

High-risk: countered by an interdisciplinary research approach;

Interdisciplinary: proposals must go beyond current mainstream collaboration configurations and aim to advance different disciplines together towards a breakthrough

There will be regular deadlines for collecting proposals, with the first taking place on 30 September 2014. “ This is an end-to-end, fast and light scheme,”  said Fiala. The Commission has committed to inform applicants of the outcome of their proposals within five months after the deadline, and to sign the grant agreement within another three months. 

Projects will be expected to either establish proof-of-principle for a new technological opportunity and its scientific underpinning, or kick-start an emerging innovation eco-system of high-potential actors around a solid baseline of feasibility and potential for a new technological option, ready for early take-up. 

The Commission anticipates spending between €2 million and €4 million on each project, with an overall budget for the programme of €80 million in 2014.

Building critical mass – FET Proactive

The second pillar of the FET programme, FET Proactive, is concerned with gaining momentum in promising research areas that are not yet ready for inclusion in industry research roadmaps. Emerging research themes, such as quantum simulation, will be supported by working towards structuring emerging communities and designing and developing coordinated research themes. 

The 2014-2015 work programme has identified three such promising research areas: 

Global Systems Science: aims to improve the way in which scientific knowledge can stimulate, guide, and help evaluate policy and societal responses to global challenges, such as climate change, urbanisation and the financial crisis

Knowing, doing and being, cognition beyond problem solving: aims to renew ties between the different disciplines studying knowledge and cognition from various perspectives, such as neural, physical, social, to artificial cognitive systems. It is hoped this project will stimulate new interdisciplinary configurations and boost future innovation in robotics, materials and cyber-physical systems

Quantum Simulation: aims to use quantum technologies to address problems beyond the reach of classical computing

These topics were selected from a wide bottom-up consultation, said Fiala. “The Commission undertook an online consultation last year, because it wanted to look beyond the traditional FET communities and scope,” he said.

These three initiatives will have budgets of €35 million in the first two years of Horizon 2020.

FET Proactive will also include a special action on exascale high performance computers to support the development of new architectures, new algorithmic approaches and the interdisciplinary co-design of software and applications.  

The show-stoppers – FET Flagships

“Flagships are ambitious, science-driven, goal-orientated research initiatives, which require long-term commitments from all stakeholders,” said Fiala. Under Framework Programme Seven, two projects were chosen for this significant funding: the Graphene flagship and the Human Brain Project. 

“The aim is to move graphene from academic labs to industry and towards applications,” said Fiala, “and to better understand the human brain by reconstructing it in supercomputer-based models and simulations with a prospect of learning how we can combat brain diseases and build completely new computing technologies.”