WeNet New Funding Opportunity – webinar highlights

On 22 July 2021, WeNet hosted an info webinar to present the newly launched Open Call and its specifics.

The WeNet Project Coordinator, Prof. Fausto Giunchiglia from the University of Trento, kicked off the event with a presentation of the project’s vision and its main objective: the development of an online platform empowering machine-mediated diversity-aware people’s interactions. “The WeNet consortium has already run several pilots across the world in Italy, Denmark, Paraguay, United Kingdom, China and Mongolia; with the Open Call we would like to maximize the project’s impact with a larger community.” said Fausto.

Daniele Miorandi from U-Hopper, gave an overview of the WeNet Open Call in particular regarding its objectives, available financial support and expected type of applications. The Open Call, as Daniele pointed out, is organized around 3 tracks, each of which targets a set of objectives and has a different budget and duration.

Track type	Objective	Max funding per application	Max project duration
Track A (App)	Develop a new use case, a new app and run an experiment (collect data)	€ 50k	6 months
Track B (Data)	Re-use an existing WeNet app and run an experiment (collect data)	€ 25k	4 months
Track C (Open)	This is a free track, where proposals that do not fit Track A or B, but are relevant for the Open Call scope, can be submitted.	€ 50k	6 months

Daniele’s presentation continued with a thorough explanation of the WeNet technology, the main technological outputs for the various users’ communities, and relative funded tracks. More details about the WeNet technology are available in the  WeNet platform report and the WeNet online course, Track 3.  

The last speaker, Giulia Tosato from U-Hopper, concluded the info webinar providing more insights into the submission requirements, application, and evaluation process. The submission deadline is set for 30 September 2021 while the work of the selected projects is expected to start in February 2022.

Further information about the Open Call can be found in the “Open Call” section of the WeNet website that includes also a FAQ page.  Interested to apply? Submit your application here.

The speakers’ presentations can be found here:

• Webinar intro | Klaudia Dos Santos, Martel Innovate (download the pdf)
• WeNet Project overview | Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento (WeNet Project Coordinator – download the pdf)
• Objectives of the Open Call, tracks and phases | Daniele Miorandi, U-Hopper (download the pdf)
• How to apply? | Giulia Tosato, U-Hopper (download the pdf)

In case you have missed the info webinar, you can watch the video recording here below and on our YouTube channel.