Two EPFL projects make it to the second round

Both of the EPFL projects that applied for the European Commission’s FET Flagship programme have successfully cleared the first hurdle. These projects are the Time Machine, headed by Frédéric Kaplan at the Digital Humanities Laboratory, and Health EU, run by Adrian Ionescu at the Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory (Nanolab). If selected, they will receive one billion euros over ten years as part of the European Commission’s ambitious funding programme.

With Health EU, everyone will one day have their own medical avatar – a virtual replica of themselves featuring their own personal data – that could improve the way their health is managed and the treatments they are given. This international project, led by a consortium headed by EPFL and the University of Twente, aims to achieve enhanced disease prevention, early diagnosis, more accurate monitoring and customized, targeted administration of medicines and treatments, especially for increasingly common diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular, chronic and neurodegenerative disorders.

The Time Machine is based on the Venice Time Machine (VTM), a project that started in 2012 and served as a proof of concept. The VTM aimed to build a multidimensional model of the city that spans the past millennium, using millions of historical documents stored in a variety of formats. After five years, the project team has scanned 190,000 records from the Venice State Archive along with 720,000 photographs and 3,000 books on Venice’s history. The objective of the Time Machine is to replicate the VTM across Europe. It will create a large-scale simulator for mapping 2,000 years of European history and turning the huge archives and sizeable museum collections into one big digital information system.

A total of 33 projects from universities across Europe have applied for the programme, which is intended to support future and emerging technologies (FET). Only 17 of them – just over half – were selected for the second round, scheduled to end on 18 September 2018.EPFL also plays a key role in a third project in the running for a FET Flagship, Robotics Flagship, which made it through to the second round as well.

The full EPFL press release including more information about the proposals you can find here.