EJEA – European Japan Experts Association

For Europeans (including Turkey and Russia) and Japanese nationals. Applicants should hold at least a Master’s Degree obtained in the last 10 years. All research fields are eligible – there are no restrictions.

Fellowships are for 3 months to 1 year maximum with start dates from September 2021 to December 2022. Europeans are expected to do their research in Japan and Japanese to do their research within Europe.

Further information and the online application form can be found on our website at www.canonfoundation.org.

For questions about any of our programmes,
including our Japan-Africa Exchange Programme with Kyoto University, please contact us at foundation@canon-europe.com

The European Commission and Japan launched their cooperation on Smart Ageing as part of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation action scheme.

With demographically ageing societies in the EU and Japan, virtual coaching can play an important role in Active and Healthy Ageing through early risk detection and tailored intervention in smart living environments. Technologies need to be developed, adapted and designed in a user-centric manner to be fit for the intended purpose.

For 36 months and with a budget of around € 4 million from the EU and corresponding public funding from Japan, the project e-VITA represents the international cooperation between Europe and Japan. It will apply an innovative approach to virtual coaching to address the crucial domains of Active and Healthy Ageing empowering older citizens to better manage their own health and daily activities by addressing cognition, physical activity, mobility, social interaction, leisure and spirituality. The e-VITA virtual coach will provide individualised profiling and personalised recommendations based on big data analytics and social-emotional computing beyond the state-of-the-art. This will result in improved wellbeing, such as by detecting preventative potentials and risks in the user’s daily living environment. By collecting data from external sources and non-intrusive sensors, the virtual coach will provide support through natural interactions with 3D-holograms, emotional objects, or robotic technologies using multimodal and spoken dialogue technology, advanced knowledge graph representations and data fusion.

In a first step, the virtual coach will be deployed and evaluated in the living environments of healthy older adults in France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to assess its feasibility and efficacy, with the aim to use the results to establish common standards and policies across Europe, Japan and worldwide.

More information in the newsitem of the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (in Japanese language)

Source: The European Commission New Article

The EU-Japan Technology Transfer Helpdesk takes immense pleasure in inviting you to attend the webinar on “EU-Japan collaborative industrial innovation”, co-organized by the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation, the EU-Japan Technology Transfer Helpdesk, and the EU Delegation to Japan, also in cooperation with EURAXESS, to be held on December 1st, 2020,from 5pm JST to 7pm JST.

When: December 1^st, 2020
Where: Zoom webinar. Direct link will be sent to the attendees after the registration. Please make sure to have the Zoom app installed to have access to the webinar if you want to have access to the interpretation feature.
Cost: free participation
Language: English/Japanese (with interpretation channel on Zoom)

Background

1. Innovation can sustainably contribute to economic growth in two primary ways: first, by expanding the number and value of new products and services that people are willing to buy; and second, by commercializing productivity-enhancing inventions and processes that make better use of labour and capital.
2. The EU and Japan have an increasingly vibrant set of entrepreneurship hubs, but young firms face a range of barriers when it comes to scaling up their ideas. The EU and Japan are therefore investing in both the framework conditions for commercialization and as well as in collaborative links that enable firms, research centres and universities to better work together and take advantage of markets and assets.
3. The Incremental models of innovation may not be sufficient to deliver the growth that is needed in the future. We have seen for example in the digital revolutions the need for innovation process to create disruptive products and entirely new markets.
4. Collaborative innovation between young, dynamic firms and large, established businesses, leveraging the resources of both is a great opportunity to create value that spills over from firms to customers to entire economies and societies.

Objectives

1. Highlight the drivers, challenges and opportunities of EU-Japan collaborative innovation cooperation (i) between large and SMEs/start-ups and (ii) between SMES / start-ups.
2. Present concrete cases of such collaborative industrial innovation in particular in the digital, circular and space sectors to fully exploit the potential to translate new ideas into valuable products and services.
3. Discuss ways to further improve the EU and Japan business environment and research & innovation programmes towards increasing the number and success rate of innovation-focused collaborations between young, dynamic firms and large, established companies.

Agenda
 
17:00-17:10       Welcome and opening remarks by Dr. Philippe de Taxis du Poët, Managing Director, EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation, and Minister Counsellor, EU Delegation to Japan
 
Presentation Sessions of EU-Japan business cooperation cases
 
17:10-17:25       Title: Enabling the new space economy: the benefits of space logistics
                       
Topic: the exponentially growing new space market is facing severe bottlenecks preventing satellite operators to optimize their revenues and operational costs. D-Orbit provides the fastest delivery of satellites into the right operational slot in orbit, in one or more orbit. ION cargo services include small satellite transportation and delivery, in-orbit demonstration and validation of innovative technologies for startups and research institutions, advanced services for operating constellations. D-Orbit has recently signed an agreement with Marubeni Corporation and Interstellar Technologies Inc. to study the development of an agile satellite release system based on D-Orbit’s InOrbit NOW technologies.
 
Speaker:            Mr. Luca Rossettini, CEO, D-Orbit, Italy.
 
17:25-17:40       Title: Robot as a Service for inspection and maintenance of infrastructures
 
Topic:  Hibot, with its robotic solutions, is helping its customers with
obtaining their digital transformation, in particular for complete asset
data management and failure prediction. The new snake like robot, Float
Arm, developed for operations inside petrochemical plants, will be
introduced together with its first field deployments within a
collaboration with a major European chemical group.
 
 Speaker:           Mr. Michele Guarnieri, CEO, hibot, Japan.
 
17:40-17:55       Title: New health-creation system beyond treatment – preventative health tools for lifelong health
 
Topic: Nightingale Health’s preventative blood testing technology, backed by years of scientific research, provides unique health data otherwise invisible in standard tests. By combining pioneering technology and science, we are enabling a health system that predicts and prevents chronic illnesses and gives everyone the tools to live a healthy life. In collaboration with Japanese partners, Nightingale Health is now bringing it’s preventative health services also for the Japanese society and consumers.
 
Speaker:            Ms. Ida Tuononen, Business Manager, Nightingale Health, Finland
 
17:55-18:10       Title: Global business and collaboration on an eco-friendly foamed glass “Porous Alpha”
 
Topic: The innovative foamed glass “Porous Alpha”, recycled from waste glass developed by a Japanese company “Tottori Resource Recycling, Inc”, is introduced to EU countries in cooperation with a venture company in Portugal “Better to Earth Lda.”. The presentation covers their partnership not only to export the product from Japan to Europe but also to develop the new technology and manufacturing base covering the third region such as Africa and the Middle East.
 
Speaker:            Ms. Maki Sawada, International Business, Tottori Resource Recycling, Inc., Japan
 
18:10-18:50       Panel discussion
Panelists:           

Luca Rossettini (D-Orbit)
Michele Guarnieri (HiBot)
Ida Tuononen (Nightinghale Health)
Maki Sawada (Tottori Resource Recycling)
Judit Erika Magyar (Country representative, EURAXESS Japan: researcher mobility, career development and scientific collaboration between Europe and the world)
 
Moderator:       

Mr. Luca Escoffier, Project Manager, EU-Japan Technology Transfer Helpdesk
 
18:50-19:00       Closing Remarks by Dr. Gediminas Ramanauskas, First Counsellor, Head of the Science, Innovation, Digital and Other EU Policies Section, Delegation of the European Union to Japan.
 
To register, please click here

Thank you for your time and we very much look forward to your participation in this event.


Kind regards,
Your Technology Transfer Helpdesk Team

The M-Sec Project would like to invite you to its Webinar dedicated to EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI) and the regulatory challenges in modern smart cities regarding the protection of personal information.

M-Sec is a Research and Innovation EU-Japan Collaborative Project jointly funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 and by the Commissioned Research of National Institute of Information and Communications Technology of Japan (NICT). The main goal of this project is to develop an innovative solution that ensures a more secure (and less vulnerable) data transfer between stakeholders (such as citizens, researchers, companies, local municipalities) when using IoT devices and applications in hyper-connected smart cities. Building on the security problems of other similar IoT infrastructures, the M-Sec solution is expected to leverage the use of blockchain, big data, cloud and IoT technologies and be ready for replication by smart cities all over the world by next year.

The Webinar “GDPR & APPI: regulatory challenges in modern smart cities” will be held on the 25th of November at 9am CET (Brussels Time), through the following Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85840685614. Our experts will present the current status of EU’s GDPR and Japan’s APPI privacy laws and provide fact-based objective information on the regulatory challenges in modern smart city applications and how to overcome them, based on evidence gathered in the scope of the M-Sec project.

You will find more information on the Webinar and can register here: https://www.f6s.com/msec-gdprandappiprivacylaws

More information also in our blog article: https://www.msecproject.eu/gdpr-appi-regulatory-challenges-in-modern-smart-cities-on-the-spotlight-next-wednesday/