The European Commission have chosen the six FET contenders at the FET11 conference and exhibition which will receive around €1.5 million each to refine their proposal for one year, after which only two will be selected. FET Flagship contenders will have to look beyond traditional ICT research and link up with specialists in other fields like health, material and neuro-sciences and neuro-robotics.

The two initiatives selected for long-term funding will run for ten years, each with a total budget of up to €100 million per year. The aim of these flagship initiatives will be to deliver major breakthroughs in information and communication technologies (ICT), with the potential to provide solutions to some of society's biggest challenges.

FET 11 held in Budapest is a conference and exhibition on visionary, high risk and long-term research in information science and technology will seed new ideas across disciplines that will reshape the future. The European Commission is increasing the FP7 budget for FET research by 20% per year up from €100 million and Member States are invited to match this effort with similar increases. The Commission funds FET research with a total budget of €500 million for 2010-2013.

With regard to the flagship competition, in 2010 the Commission invited Europe's scientists to identify challenges and propose projects. From the 21 proposals received, an expert panel selected the six initiatives with the strongest potential for realising scientific breakthroughs, and with the greatest impact on Europe's social and industrial challenges.

The finalists are (in alphabetical order):

• FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator and Crisis-Relief System: ICT can analyse vast amounts of data and complex situations so as to better predict natural disasters, or manage and respond to man-made disasters that cross national borders or continents.
• Graphene Science and technology for ICT and beyond: Graphene is a new substance developed by atomic and molecular scale manipulation that could replace silicon as the wonder material of the 21st century.
• Guardian Angels for a Smarter Life: tiny devices without batteries that act like autonomous personal assistants, and which can sense, compute and communicate potentially even while travelling through your bloodstream.
• The Human Brain Project: understanding the way in which the human brain works can bring the benefits of brain-related or brain-inspired developments to computing architectures, neuroscience and medicine.
• IT Future of Medicine: digital technology has the power to deliver individualised medicine, based on molecular, physiological and anatomical data collected from individual patients and processed on the basis of globally integrated medical knowledge.
• Robot Companions for Citizens: soft skinned and intelligent robots have highly developed perceptive, cognitive and emotional skills, and can help people, radically changing the way humans interact with machines.

Successfully tackling such fundamental research challenges will only be possible through the combined efforts of top scientists from all over Europe and iniciatives as those mentioned before.