European Union News - Research & Innovation

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 has been jointly awarded to Professor Konstantin Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim of the University of Manchester in the UK. Novoselov and Geim have been awarded this Prize for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.

The Second Knowledge for Innovation Forum of the European Parliament (K4I) is taking place between 11 and 14 October. During these days, the role of innovation in tackling the grand challenges will be at the centre of discussion with stakeholders and policy makers from all over Europe and beyond.

European Union initiative "Innovation Union" has been put forward with the aim to turn ideas into jobs, green growth and social progress. The strategy will tackle burdens faced by innovation in Europe in sectors such as lack of finance, fragmented research systems and markets, under-use of public procurement for innovation and slow standard setting.

Experts meeting in this Open Days workshop "Building synergies from research and development to deployment" on 5 October examined how different EU policy and funding instruments such as the 7th Research Framework Programme, the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP) and European cohesion policy can be used for deployment. Finding the missing link between ideas and market is a process which has to be boosted and managed in order to create benefits for all stakeholders at all levels.

Young scientists from Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary have been acclaimed as 1st prize winners of the 22nd EU Contest for Young Scientists. Their projects have been selected from 85 projects coming from 37 countries. Second and third prizes as well as the International prize were awarded to 7 other projects, from Poland, Germany, Portugal, Latvia, Italy and Brazil.

The networking session on Governmental Linked Data held on 28 September at the “ICT 2010: Digitally Driven” event in Brussels, gathered around 150 European experts from administrations, industry, academia and civil society organizations in order to discuss how public access to government data can be improved, as a key issue for an open and transparent society.

EU-funded researchers led by the University of Southampton in the UK have developed a new data transmission system that could significantly improve the transmission capacity and energy efficiency of the world's optical communication networks.

The European Commission launched on 28 September 2010 one of the biggest calls for proposals ever for information and communications technology (ICT) research. The launch of this call, with a contribution of almost 780 million Euro, was made during the celebration in Brussels of the event ICT 2010-Digitally Driven.