Our coasts and seas have the potential to deliver growth and jobs in the coming years. In order to achieve Blue Growth, the European Commission's long term strategy to further harness the potential of Europe's oceans, seas and coasts, for sustainable growth in the marine and maritime sectors, highly qualified and skilled professionals are needed. Yet many Blue Economy sectors are experiencing difficulties in finding the right employees for highly qualified technical positions – and most sectors expect these difficulties to continue throughout the foreseeable future. The proposed project brings 5 key partners from different countries (located in the Mediterranean Sea, Iberian Sea, Baltic and Black Sea) which cover all EU seas and are dealing with Blue Economy and Education, providing coherent response to the challenges facing the sector by complementing and adding value to existing initiatives by Member States, regions and other stakeholders. The main target group the project is addressing professionals working in blue economy sectors, (such as coastal, cruise tourism, Maritime Safety and Security and Greening Maritime Transport and Fisheries Monitoring and Aquaculture) wishing to develop their competences, VET Participants, unemployed people, as well as students searching for education in the areas of blue economy field. The overall objective of the BLUES is to promote the development of blue economy in the partners countries, strengthening cooperation between industry and education, to fill the skills gap in this sector (Training Course on Maritime Safety and Security and Greening Maritime Transport (IO1), Training Course on Coastal and Cruise Tourism (IO2), Training Course on Fisheries Monitoring and Aquaculture (IO3) and to raise awareness of Blue Careers and tools through the creation of a dedicated One Stop Shop Portal, which will also accommodate among other the e-learning component of the project (IO4). This project will also include four transnational project meetings that will contribute to the preparation, implementation and evaluation phase of the project. All the information gathered through this project and the promotion of the project itself will then be uploaded on the One Stop Shop Portal. Multiplier events are foreseen in Greece, Cyprus, Latvia, Spain and Bulgaria. Furthermore, one joint staff training activity in Spain for 10 participants in order to be trained as regards to testing and operating the BLUES One Stop Shop Portal as well as delivering the Training Courses will take place. Through the implementation of this project the partners aim at contributing significantly in enhancing the opportunities for up-skilling VET learners and professionals working in the field of blue economy sectors (such as coastal, cruise tourism, Maritime Safety and Security and Greening Maritime Transport and Fisheries Monitoring and Aquaculture) both nationally and at EU level, as well as for other members of the target group. The project will aim to boost opportunities for people in these areas by bringing them together with experienced entrepreneurs and stakeholders thus creating new partnerships for business and business support providers. The total number of people, who will directly benefit and indirectly benefit from or will be targeted through the project activities during its duration, is moderately estimated at approximately 3000 people. Partners in each country will aim to achieve, as much as possible, the number of such indirect beneficiaries and, in general, of people informed about the project, its objectives and results attained. It is expected that this will contribute towards greater awareness of the issues with opportunities to develop the needed competences for supporting the up skilling of professionals working in the field of blue economy sectors. The project aims at supporting professionals, students and unemployed in the Blue Economy industry to: • Acquiring new tools and knowledges upon Blue Economy sector; • Improve the professional skills and competences; • Enable a full understanding of possibilities and barriers associated with combining blue economy sectors (such as coastal, cruise tourism, Maritime Safety and Security and Greening Maritime Transport and Fisheries Monitoring and Aquaculture). •Improve professional’s income; • Increasing opportunities for professional development; • Improve the position of the target group in the labour market; • Strengthening of occupational/career profiles of job seekers and young professionals; • Better understanding and recognition of skills and qualifications in Europe and beyond.

Maritime shipping industry is one of the most dynamic economic sectors throughout Europe due to the constant changes of its development needs. It is also closely linked to the changes in Marine Sciences and IT Technologies. Consequently, education and training in marine sciences has to follow closely the industry's trends in order to keep pace with the new competencies required by the development of maritime transportation technologies. Project MINE-EMI is focused at elaboration of Joint Master Program (JMPs) that facilitate developing skills and competences to raise awareness on emerging maritime issues in the wider Black Sea Basin in order to promote sustainable management of the maritime sector in the Black Sea basin. It involves representatives from the business sector and local administrations in order to fill the gap between the requirements in the maritime sector (management, transport operations, logistic) and the current lacking offer of updated courses in that matter. In the longer term, the objective is to establish a “Black Sea Community of MET (Maritime Education and Training) Institutions ” to contribute for boosting sustainable European maritime economy, Blue Growth, and Integrated Maritime Policy implementation by providing modern and adequate E&T.In line with the main objectives of the EU Integrated Maritime Policy - more coherent approach to maritime issues, with increased coordination between different policy areas - the project contributes to achieving efficient, safe, secure and environmentally shipping and logistic operations and the overall efficiency of tackling the maritime issues, through:- promotion of the quality of education and training in the MET sector to address the specific maritime challenges and prepare the future managers and experts applying innovative methods, practical oriented approach and e-learning model;- Facilitation the European mobility for students and teachers, involving educational and training institutions that wish to contribute to overcoming these challenges, in line with the “Maritime Erasmus” concept;- Cooperation between European MET organizations and industry in the field of education and training for managing the issues in maritime sector for upgrading competences and adapting to the requirements of the maritime industry.PARTNERS: 1 Piri Reis University - Lead Partner, PRU2 Constanta Maritime University, CMU3 Nikola Vaptsarov Naval Academy, NVNA4 University of the Aegean, UAEGEAN5 Marine Cluster Bulgaria, MCB6 Municipality of Piraeus, MP7 Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions, CPMRAll the partners have a consolidate experience based on its scientific/ academic and professional background, direct management of maritime scientific and vocational education and close links with stakeholders. The HEIs have been previously involved in similar projects and have experience not only to lead the IOs development, but to contribute best to the internationalization of the work.The project implementation is based on the progressive model, including preparatory activities, development, testing and finalization of JMPs. The preparatory activities consist of a need analysis involving industrial and governmental stakeholders in order to design a syllabus that corresponds to the contemporary needs and requirements and specific case studies at European level to identify, select and analyze accordingly the specific subject areas of maritime issues.In the development phase, educational material will be elaborated, collected, evaluated and selected, satisfying the criteria set by the stakeholders. While PRU, NVNA and UAEGEAN will work on theoretical part of the teaching materials, CMU will mainly work on practical side, creating scenarios for maritime simulators on the specific topics of the subject. The both parts will be developed on coordinated way in order to synchronize all the elements. A unified assessment system will be set up and implemented.PRU will led the integration of the developed modules in the JMPs. The lead partner will develop JMPs course catalogue together with the partner's HEIs for better adaptation to institutions specificities and to offer the courses outside the partnership framework.The produced material will be tested and evaluated during the mobility events. For the evaluation of the content, the teaching style, predefined assessment methods will be used, so to get measurable and comparable results. The feedback received will be then used to finalize the courses. The project derives from the experiences and needs of the participating institutions to raise awareness on emerging maritime issues. The beneficiaries of the project will be equipped with innovative tools for MET in master degree higher education that can be directly exploited and applied to the every-day life of the HEIs in practical, concrete level.The novelty of the project is determined by the innovative multi-dimensional approach, depending on objectives.

BUILDSPACE aims to couple terrestrial data from buildings (collected by IoT platforms, BIM solutions and other) with aerial imaging from drones equipped with thermal cameras and location annotated data from satellite services (i.e., EGNSS and Copernicus) to deliver innovative services for the building and urban stakeholders and support informed decision making towards energy-efficient buildings and climate resilient cities. The platform will allow integration of these heterogeneous data and will offer services at building scale, enabling the generation of high fidelity multi-modal digital twins and at city scale providing decision support services for energy demand prediction, urban heat and urban flood analysis. The services will enable the identification of environmental hotspots that increase pressure to local city ecosystems and raise probability for natural disasters (such as flooding) and will issue alerts and recommendations for action to local governments and regions (such as the support of policies for building renovation in specific vulnerable areas). BUILDSPACE services will be validated and assessed in four European cities with different climate profiles. The digital twin services at building level will be tested during the construction of a new building in Poland, and the city services validating the link to digital twin of buildings will be tested in 3 cities (Piraeus, Riga, Ljubljana) across EU. BUILDSPACE will create a set of replication guidelines and blueprints for the adoption of the proposed applications in building resilient cities at large.

A strong data economy is emerging in Europe, where both large companies and SMEs acknowledge the fundamental value of Big Data to cause disruptive change in markets and business models . Nevertheless, the growth of the data economy is hampered by the lack of trusted, secure and ethical-driven personal data platforms and privacy-aware analytics methods capable of, on the one hand, securing the sharing of personal data and proprietary/commercial/industrial data and, on the other hand, of strictly and fairly defining how value can be captured, produced, released and cashed out for the benefit of all the stakeholders involved. Addressing this kind of concerns on privacy, ethics and IPR ownership over the DataVaults value chain is one of the cornerstones of the project. Its goal to set, sustain and mobilize an ever-growing ecosystem for personal data and insights sharing and for enhanced collaboration between stakeholders (data owners and data seekers) relies exactly on DataVaults personal data platform’s extra functionalities and methods for retaining data ownership, safeguarding security and privacy, notifying individuals of their risk exposure, as well as on securing value flow based on smart contract. DataVaults aims to deliver a framework and a platform that has personal data, coming from diverse sources in its centre and that defines secure, trusted and privacy preserving mechanisms allowing individuals to take ownership and control of their data and share them at will, through flexible data sharing and fair compensation schemes with other entities (companies or not). The overall approach will rejuvenate the personal data value chain, which could from now on be seen as a multi-sided and multi-tier ecosystem governed and regulated by smart contracts which safeguard personal data ownership, privacy and usage and attributes value to the ones who produce it.

HARMONIA will leverage existing tools, services and novel technologies to deliver an integrated resilience assessment platform working on top of GEOSS, seeing the current lack of a dedicated process of understanding and quantifying Climate Change (CC) effects on urban areas using Satellite and auxiliary data available on GEOSS, DIAS, urban TEP, GEP etc. platforms. HARMONIA will focus on a solution for climate applications supporting adaptation and mitigation measures of the Paris Agreement. HARMONIA will test modern Remote Sensing tools and 3D-4D monitoring, Machine Learning/Deep Learning techniques and develop a modular scalable data-driven multi-layer urban areas observation information knowledge base, using Satellite data time series, spatial information and auxiliary data, in-situ observing systems, which will integrate detailed information on local level of neighborhoods/building blocks. HARMONIA focuses on two pillars: a) Natural and manmade hazards intensified by CC: urban flooding, soil degradation and geo-hazards (landslides, earthquake, ground deformation) and b) Manmade hazards: heat islands, urban heat fluxes, Air Quality, Gas emissions. Sustainable reconstruction of urban areas and the health of humans and ecosystems, are top priorities. HARMONIA will take into account the local ecosystems of European urban areas, following an integrated and sustainable approach by incorporating the active communities’ participation initiative, which will involve the use of a social platform. Paying extra attention to Sustainable Urban Development, one of the Societal Benefit Areas posits that use of EO is a crucial tool towards resilient cities and the assessment of urban footprints, to promote equity, welfare and shared prosperity for all, feed new indicators for the monitoring of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals in an EU context.