EU project targets better food risk information for Europeans

Information about food, and especially its risks, flash before our eyes on a daily basis. But how effective and balanced is the information we get? EU-funded researchers believe that enhancing the delivery of information and advice on emerging food risks could help fuel consumer confidence in foods, curb economic losses related to food scares and reduce the number of illnesses linked to foods. The FOODRISC ('Food Risk Communication. Perceptions and communication of food risks/benefits across Europe: development of effective communication strategies') project is working to offer consumers the right information they need about food/risk benefit relationships. Funded under the 'Food, agriculture and fisheries, and biotechnology' (KBBE) Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to the tune of EUR 2.97 million, FOODRISC is filling the gaps along the food information chain.

FOODRISC, which is coordinated by Professor Patrick Wall of University College Dublin's School of Public Health, Physiotherapy and Population Science in Ireland, has pooled the resources of experts in key fields relevant to food risk and benefit communication, namely industry, academia, research institutes. 'Some of the recent "food scares", such as BSE [Bovine spongiform encephalopathy], Dioxin contamination in Belgium and Ireland and the case where milk was contaminated with melamine in China, have undermined consumer confidence in food,' explains Dr Áine McConnon of University College Dublin, FoodRisC project manager. 'With the food industry now being a global manufacturing and distribution business all possible forms of public communication need to be understood and used.'

The FOODRISC consortium is comparing how traditional and social media for news and information is disseminated in the EU, which in turn will lead to the creation of the effective tools the project seeks to give communication on food risks a huge boost. The new FOODRISC website is a step in this direction. More specifically, social media use has ballooned in just a year, with numbers up by 50% in many countries. Facebook, which has taken the world by storm, has more than 570 million registered users, and the number of users of all types of social media currently tops the 1.25 billion mark. Europe has surpassed the US in the personal use of social media.

One of the objectives of the project is to establish a communication toolkit and best practice recommendations that will support organisations across the EU to offer better communication, information and education services to the public. The project partners say the toolkit will help policymakers, food authorities and other end users who seek to develop common approaches to disseminating information to European consumers. Also on the FOODRISC agenda, say the partners, is the description of key configurations of food risk and benefit relationships and the implications for communicators. The consortium will assess how new social media, like Facebook, Twitter and blogs, can be used to provide guidance on how risk communicators can use these media to their advantage. And the partners will illustrate how consumers can attain, interpret and use information to support the target populations. Kicked off earlier this year and scheduled to end in 2013, FOODRISC brings together experts from Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK.

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An EU research programme that is made to measure

Metrology refers to the science and application of measurement, and it impacts on our lives in countless ways. Today, Europe's metrologists are working together in the European Metrology Research Programme (EMRP), which receives 50% of its funding through the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Through the EMRP, they are helping to address the grand challenges facing the world today in diverse fields such as the environment, energy and health. According to EMRP chair Dr Jörn Stenger of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Germany, metrology is all about 'good, reliable and correct measurements'. Furthermore, measurements must be comparable all over the world and at different periods in time.

'Metrology affects all areas of our lives,' Dr Stenger insists. For example, if we go to hospital for a CT (computer tomography) scan, it is thanks to metrology that we can rest assured that the dose of radiation we receive will be enough to generate the scan while remaining within safe limits. Similarly, if different parts of a car are built in different companies and countries, metrology ensures that the parts fit together in the assembly plant. National metrology institutes exist throughout Europe, and they have a long history of international cooperation, as the mutual acceptance of standards and measures across borders is essential. For many years, this cooperation was fairly informal. However, that all changed when the institutes recognised what Dr Stenger calls a 'metrological dilemma'.

In short, advances in technology meant research was becoming increasingly expensive, yet national metrology institutes' budgets were at best stable and at worst declining. Since primary measurement standards must be at the forefront of technology to be able to serve all stakeholder needs, metrology is very research intensive. 'We agreed that only a joint approach in metrology research could help us out of this dilemma,' Dr Stenger tells CORDIS News. The seeds of the EMRP had been sown. The group obtained funding from the EU for a project called IMERA ('Implementing metrology in the European research area'). This project, financed under the 'ERA-NET' scheme, allowed Europe's metrology community to formulate a joint, coordinated research programme and determine the procedures and structures needed to implement it.

When the first IMERA project ended, the metrologists carried on working through the EU's ERA-NET Plus scheme. During this period, the group issued calls for proposals in four key areas: health, the international system of units (SI units), electromagnetism and dimensional industrial applications. Projects funded in the SI units field address the challenges of measuring constants of nature to redefine SI units such as the kilogram and the Kelvin. The medical projects focus on, among other things, ensuring that diagnostic tests are precise and reliable enough for a doctor to decide confidently whether treatment is needed or not.

The topic of dimensional matters covers everything from what constitutes a nanoparticle to measuring the larger distances involved e.g. in manufacturing an aeroplane, where all components must be precisely fabricated. Finally, the electricity projects address various issues including the safe dose for electromagnetic radiation. In 2009, the EMRP obtained Article 169/185 status, securing the future of the joint research programme between the participating Member States and the European Union for a further seven years. Article 185 initiatives (which were formerly known as Article 169 initiatives) intend that countries integrate their national research programmes more deeply into a single European programme.

Meanwhile the EMRP is already having a huge impact on the European Research Area (ERA), as roughly 50% of metrology research and development carried out in the countries that have signed up to it is carried out through the EMRP. 'The EMRP is not some nice-to-have, add-on programme, but is really impacting our core mission we have in our institutions,' emphasises Dr Stenger. The EMRP is also generating interest beyond Europe's borders; countries that are particularly interested in the EMRP's work include Australia, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan and the US. In addition, a number of researchers from outside Europe are involved in EMRP-funded projects. 

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Scientists piece together EU media structure

How influential is the media in shaping the news agenda in EU Member States? Very, say EU-funded researchers, who evaluated more than 1 million news articles in 22 languages to identify the factors that make this impact felt. The study, the first mega content analysis of cross-linguistic text using artificial intelligence tools, is presented in the journal PLoS ONE. The research was funded in part by the PASCAL2 ('Pattern analysis, statistical modelling and computational learning 2') project, which received EUR 6 million under the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Theme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

In addition, the software used in the study was developed by the SMART ('Statistical multilingual analysis for retrieval and translation') project. SMART clinched EUR 2.34 million under the 'Information society technologies' (IST) Thematic area of EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) and created a statistical machine translation pipeline for EU news - called 'Found in Translation' - that could demonstrate machine translation technology. Europe-based news outlets cover myriad stories chosen from an extensive repository every day. One may assume that the outlets base their selection on specific criteria, but the researchers found that patterns materialise when all of these choices are assessed over both an extended period and a set of outlets.

The computer scientists, led by Professor Nello Cristianini of the University of Bristol in the UK, in collaboration with Professor Justin Lewis of Cardiff University in the UK, found that the news content selected by outlets reflects national bias, and cultural, geographic and economic links between nations. A case in point, say the researchers, is outlets swapping information with one another about common interests, whether it is news about the euro area or who is singing what in the annual Eurovision song contest. They point out that deviation from 'normal content' is evident in outlets of countries that do not share the euro currency, for instance.

Research on this topic was relatively non-existent in the past because no tools had been developed to evaluate the vast amount of data available. But thanks to the creation of machine translation and text analysis, the scientists used automated methods from artificial intelligence in their study with fruitful results. 'Automating the analysis of news content could have significant applications, due to the central role played by the news media in providing the information that people use to make sense of the world,' explains Professor Cristianini from Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory.

For their study, the researchers pulled articles from the online news feeds of the top 10 news outlets (by volume of web traffic) for each EU Member State. They collected 1,370,874 news items in total over a 6-month period (between August 2009 and January 2010). The number of non-English language news items amounted to 1.2 million; these were translated automatically into English. The team found various links between Greece-Cyprus; Czech Republic-Slovakia; Latvia-Estonia, Belgium-France; and Ireland-UK.

'This approach has the potential to revolutionise the way we understand our media and information systems,' Professor Lewis points out. 'It opens up the possibility of analysing the mediasphere on a global scale, using huge samples that traditional analytical techniques simply couldn't countenance. It also allows us to use automated means to identify clusters and patterns of content, allowing us to reach a new level of objectivity in our analysis.' Professor Cristianini says the tool developed by the SMART project is now used as part of the main pipeline that assesses EU news content. The Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), one of the seven institutes of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), made a strong contribution to this study.

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Students tackle tricky topics in 2WAYS project

Youngsters across Europe have been grappling with some of the life sciences' trickiest ethical dilemmas thanks to the EU-funded 2WAYS ('Two ways for communicating European research about life sciences with science festivals and science centres/museums, science parliaments impact survey') project. 2WAYS received almost EUR 1 million from the Science in Society programme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Over the past two years, the 2WAYS team has organised 29 'science parliaments' in 29 cities in 17 countries. Each event lasted up to 2 days and attracted between 50 and 100 students aged from 17 to 19. So how did these events work?

'All these science parliaments had four committees,' explains project coordinator Peter Rebernik of the European Science Events Association (EUSCEA) in Austria. 'These committees were like in a normal parliament - they invited experts, discussed their issues and voted on resolutions. These resolutions came to the plenary session and the plenary session then finalised these resolutions.' In early December, delegates from these events gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, for the first-ever young European Science Parliament. There, a summary of the resolutions from the earlier events was handed over to European Parliament Vice-President and German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Silvana Koch-Mehrin, who is also involved in the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA).

The resolutions summarise the youngsters' thinking on four major issues in the life sciences: the use of embryonic stem cells, the use of the results of genetic tests, the implications of the discovery of a gene for aggressiveness, and the threats and opportunities of DNA analysis. On stem cells, most parliaments came out in favour of using stem cells derived from in vitro fertilisation (IVF), albeit with certain restrictions. Meanwhile, youngsters also want more research on adult stem cells to replace embryonic stem cells and do away with the need to destroy embryos. The discussions, which forced the students to debate when human life begins, were often lively.

'There was a nice discussion in the European Parliament when one committee said, "these 50 cells in the beginning, it's not really a human life, you can do anything with them",' recalls Dr Rebernik. 'Then somebody else stood up and said: "Hey, this is human life already, you can't do anything".'
Today, genetic tests exist to determine an individual's risk of developing over 500 diseases. Most youngsters recognised that these tests could ultimately prove useful as part of efforts to prevent and treat diseases, but expressed concern that if the results are not fully confidential, they could be abused by insurance companies and employers. The resolutions also express concern regarding the psychological impacts of knowing that one faces a greater risk of a potentially deadly disease.

The discussions on the so-called 'aggressiveness gene', which lowers an individual's threshold for violence, were also interesting. Most resolutions recognise that an individual's personality is a combination of both genes and the environment. Many note that individuals with this gene could face discrimination. Others fear that the gene could be used as an excuse by criminals seeking a lower sentence. However, others suggest that it could be used not to reduce the level of punishment but to tailor rehabilitation efforts. An impact study of the parliaments revealed that the youngsters learnt a lot from their experience and that they felt more encouraged to ask questions and engage in discussions.

The 2WAYS project is now drawing to a close. However, many of the cities involved plan to organise further science parliaments themselves. Furthermore, Dr Rebernik reports that he hopes to have a young European science parliament at the European Parliament every two years. 'It looks like we can do this,' he tells CORDIS News. 

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Europe in the right MODE for future internet

We live in a fast-paced world, where information hits us from left and right. The transmission of data is made possible via diverse channels, including wireless communication, optical fibres and storage media. But as changes emerge, so do the needs in this field. The MODE-GAP ('Multi-mode capacity enhancement with PBG [photonic band gap] fibre multi-mode capacity enhancement with PBG fibre') project is developing the next generation internet infrastructure to improve the capacity of broadband core networks, making bandwidth 100 times larger than the current capacity. MODE-GAP is funded under the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to the tune of EUR 8.33 million.

Under the plan, MODE-GAP is working on transmission technologies based on specialist long-haul transmission fibres and associated enabling technologies. Some of these technologies include transmitter and receiver components, rare-earth doped optical amplifiers and data processing tools. The four-year project will effectively enable 'future proof networks and systems of increasing information throughput', according to the project members. Failure to do so will significantly impact the future of the Internet, they say.

'We are close to realising the fundamental data carrying capacity limits of current fibre technology in the laboratory and although there is plenty of headroom for capacity scaling of commercial systems for the next 10 to 15 years, we need to be looking now at developing a new generation of transmission techniques, based on novel fibres and amplifiers, if we are to keep pace with society's ever increasing data transport demands in the longer term,' explains Professor David Richardson from the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton, the MODE-GAP coordinator. 'The MODE-GAP project has the potential to revolutionise the way we build and operate future generations of optical network. Success will require substantial innovation and major technological developments in a number of fields. The consortium partners believe that they are ideally equipped to undertake the work and are looking forward to the many challenges ahead.'

The MODE-GAP consortium consists of academic and industry experts from Phoenix Photonics Ltd (UK), ESPCI ParisTech (France), the Brondy-based OFS Fitel Denmark APS, the COBRA Institute at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Netherlands), Eblana Photonics Ltd (Ireland), Nokia Siemens Networks GMBH & Co. KG (Germany), and the Tyndall National Institute of University College Cork (Ireland). Commenting on the project, Bart Van Caenegem, Project Officer at the European Commission, said: 'A European consortium of highly qualified and talented researchers has teamed up and has adopted a groundbreaking approach in R&D [research and development] to advance the transmission technologies that will enable the networks of the future. This EU-funded project contributes to the Digital Agenda objectives, namely it aims to improve the competitiveness of the European industry and it aims to enable Europe to master and shape future developments in information communication technology (ICT) so that it can meet the demands of its society and economy.' Ultimately, the Digital Agenda will deliver sustainable economic and social benefits from a digital single market based on accelerated interoperable applications. 

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EU targets open access to FP7-funded research

Creating and maintaining a strong network for European research cooperation is high on the EU agenda. Helping drive this effort is OPENAIRE ('Open access infrastructure for research in Europe'), a project encouraging and supporting free online access to knowledge generated by researchers with grants from the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and the European Research Council (ERC). The European Commission launched OPENAIRE in Ghent, Belgium, on 2 December. Coordinated by the University of Athens in Greece, OPENAIRE has clinched EUR 4.17 million to build support structures for researchers, set up and run an electronic infrastructure for handling peer-reviewed articles, and cooperate with communities to deposit, access and manage research datasets.

The 38 OPENAIRE partners will contribute significantly to advancing the Digital Agenda objectives, which include strengthening the ERA through knowledge sharing and increasing competitiveness in Europe. Research areas receiving particular attention within the Agenda include energy, environment, health, social sciences and humanities, and information and communication technologies (ICT). One of the most critical components of the OPENAIRE project is to give researchers, businesses and citizens free and open access to EU-funded research papers. For example, scientists will be able to follow up on the latest developments in their field, and patients with rare illnesses will have a carte blanche to review up-to-the-minute research results.

'The launch of OPENAIRE marks a very concrete step towards sharing the results of EU-funded research to our mutual benefit,' explains European Commission Vice-President, and Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes. 'Scientific information has the power to transform our lives for the better - it is too valuable to be locked away. In addition, every EU citizen has the right to access and benefit from knowledge produced using public funds.' Each year, more than 2 million research articles are published in 25,000 peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings worldwide. But only around 17.5% of these articles are available in Open Access repositories or Open Access journals. In order to access the rest of the articles, readers must either subscribe to a publication or pay via a 'pay per read' plan.

Under FP7, around 10,000 projects have been funded in the last 3 years. Researchers supported by these grants must deposit the full text of their research publications in an open access repository within 6 or 12 months, making it permanently available across the globe. The OPENAIRE infrastructure is also helping devise new methods of indexing, annotating, ordering and linking research results, as well as automating processes. With these activities in mind, OPENAIRE will contribute to the development of fresh services on top of the information infrastructure which it offers.

OPENAIRE is operating a helpdesk in 27 countries across Europe to give researchers the support they need to make their articles available online. Commenting on the OPENAIRE and its role in research, Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn said: 'Scientists need access to research results if they are to maximise the potential of further work in the same areas. Industry, not least SMEs, need to know where to find research results if they are to build on them to create jobs and improve the quality of life. OPENAIRE will be an important contribution to improving the circulation of scientific knowledge in Europe and thus to developing a true Innovation Union.'

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EU-funded mathematicians piece together radio frequency design puzzle

Scientists in Europe have pooled their knowledge and ideas to develop and deploy integrated simulation algorithms and prototype tools to overcome the barriers in both existing and future radio frequency design flows. The result is part of the ICESTARS ('Integrated circuit/EM simulation and design technologies for advanced radio systems-on-chip') project, which is funded under the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to the tune of EUR 2.8 million. RFIC (integrated circuits for radio frequency) design is currently integrated with digital and analogue modules on the same die, posing severe challenges to existing simulation tools. Driven by the market demand for higher bandwidth and more end-product capability, radio frequency designs are moving into higher frequency ranges and growing in complexity.

The processes to develop both electronic design automation (EDA) and computer aided design (CAD) - indispensable to design integrated circuits for radio frequency design - and their underlying mathematics are themselves complex. Solutions to these problems therefore need new modelling approaches, new mathematical solution procedures and numerical simulations with mixed analogue and digital signals. That is where ICESTARS, a consortium of five leading European mathematical institutes, two semiconductor companies and two software providers, stepped in. 'Advancing radio frequency design in super high and extremely high frequencies necessitates new transceiver architectures and CAD tools as today's EDA tools are functionally not adequately addressing the simulation challenges of high-frequency designs,' said Jan ter Maten from NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch semiconductor company and ICESTARS partner.

'The project's research areas have been the efficient connection between the frequency domain, where the radio frequency part of wireless transceiver systems is usually designed, and the time domain, where the digital signal processing and control logic are developed,' he explained, adding that 'in electromagnetic (EM) analysis and coupled EM circuit analysis we deal with the 'communication' of the physical layer (such as mapping of devices) and the mathematical one'. The team used modified algorithms to tackle these issues. Mathematical equations, such as ordinary differential equations (ODEs), differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) and partial differential-algebraic equations (PDAEs), are the basis of time- and frequency-domain analyses.

However, the researchers modified these to cover extended functionalities to develop new algorithms to meet the simulation demands of circuits operating in frequency beyond 3 Gigahertz (GHz). For example, when it comes to the mutual simulation of digital and analogue radio frequency parts, standard time-domain techniques alone are far from sufficient. Therefore, the ICESTARS partners developed and successfully tested a prototype of adaptive wavelet-based analysis, an entirely new circuit simulation algorithm. In circuit-envelope simulation, input waveforms are represented as radio frequency carriers with modulation envelopes. By embedding the system of DAEs into partial DAEs the project succeeded in formulating a general mathematical framework that can be adapted to different classes of radio frequency circuits. An optimal dynamic time splitting allows efficient simulation of frequency or amplitude modulated signals.

Adaptivity - the dynamic simulator adjustment to the frequency response of, for instance, amplifiers, filters or mixers, in terms of network parameters or frequency-dependent noise - was core to the frequency-domain research in the project. The researchers achieved reasonable estimates for the initial conditions for distortion analysis of free-running oscillators, and for the first time, in ICESTARS, a truly generic multi-device, a so-called VoHB algorithm, was coded and tested for circuits that are larger than plain single-transistor power amplifiers. To prove that these and other concepts dreamed up by the researchers worked, they have been put to the test successfully by the industrial partners and Upper Austria University.

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FP7 making 'significant contribution' to European science, experts say

'FP7 is on course and is clearly making a significant contribution to European science and the development of the European Research Area.' This is one of the key messages to emerge from the newly-published interim evaluation of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

The report, drawn up by a panel of 10 independent experts who spent 6 months analysing FP7, highlights the programme's many successes. Among other things, the experts praise FP7's breadth and scope, citing in particular the impressive numbers of researchers involved, the geographical spread of teams and the range of topics covered. The group also welcomes the fact that 'the principle of excellence in project selection is largely achieved'. In the Cooperation Programme, the quality of proposals is generally high and top researchers are receiving funding. The European Research Council (ERC) has also succeeded in attracting talented scientists to Europe. The Marie Curie schemes are also praised for their contribution to researcher mobility and training.

Finally, there is evidence that the EU's research programmes, and FP7 in particular, are having a positive 'leverage' effect in promoting research efforts at national level and in industry. Despite these successes, however, the experts find considerable room for improvement and set out 10 recommendations to guide the European Commission as it embarks on the second half of FP7 and lays the groundwork for the Eighth Framework Programme (FP8), which is due to start in 2014. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the recommendations concerns simplification. The experts acknowledge that there have been some improvements under FP7. Nevertheless, many procedures continue to be 'unwieldy or disproportionate to the very marginal benefits they provide in terms of control of public spending,' the experts write. Small businesses in particular are put off participating in FP7 due to the complexity of the procedures and the delays in contracts.

The experts call for a 'quantum leap' in simplification, and recommend that the European Commission implement the simplification measures set out in a recent Communication on the subject. The group also implores the European Commission to adopt a more trust-based and risk-tolerant approach to the issue. On the financial front, the experts state that the level of funding should be maintained at the very least. They point out that investing in research is essential if the EU is to achieve the Europe 2020 goals of turning Europe into a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. Further steps are also needed to overcome fragmentation in research, particularly in areas where cross-border cooperation is essential for success. In addition, the 'Grand Challenges' should increasingly be at the heart of EU research policy, starting with the second part of FP7 and continuing into FP8, the experts recommend.

The experts also call for more open calls in the Cooperation Programme for the remainder of FP7. However, they also suggest that to avoid confusion, there should be a moratorium on the introduction of new instruments until the existing ones have been properly evaluated. Some recommendations concern groups that are currently under-represented in FP7. Women remain in the minority in the research community, and the experts write that the European Commission should 'reinvigorate its approach to promoting female scientists' and 'galvanise Member States to address gender gaps'. Researchers in countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 as well as some other Member States are less successful at obtaining FP7 funding than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Boosting connections between the research framework programmes and the EU's structural funds could help here, as could the research infrastructures budget line and the People Programme, which aims to develop researchers' potential.

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