News & Events
- October 12, 2022
Promoting the One-Health Sustainable Partnership: the HORIZON Europe NESTLER Project Kicks-off!
On October 11, the project NESTLER ‘oNe hEalth SusTainabiLity partnership between EU-AFRICA for food sEcuRity’ held its physical kick off meeting in Athens, Greece. This 36-month EU-funded Research and Innovation Action funded under the HORIZON Europe programme, officially started on the 1st of October 2022.
Dr. Loizos Christofi, R&D Director and Mr. Philippos Philippou, R&D Senior Project Manager at eBOS, participated in the physical kick-off-meeting, which was chaired by Dr. Theodore Zahariadis representing SYNELIXIS, as the Coordinator of NESTLER. The meeting was attended by the project’s 14 partners and included partners’ presentations of the vision and objectives of the project as well as of an overview of the overall project expectations and guidelines by the European Commission’s project officer. Partners also discussed the project’s work plan, challenges and risks identified and implementation schedules.
NESTLER is a joint project between the EU and African member states designed to promote the One-Health sustainable partnership. The project aims to bring together interdisciplinary technological advances to effectively monitor the well-being of animals, plants, and humans in a holistic approach. The complementarity between the stakeholders will extend upon the ongoing initiatives from FARM2FORK strategies that have resulted in integrated software systems and solutions.
The novelty of the NESTLER project lies in the development and integration of advanced remote sensing technologies. The project platform will develop software interfaces for ingesting satellite data sources along with video streams captured from unmanned aerial vehicles and other IoT devices installed for monitoring the environmental and animal well-being. The large-volume of data ingested into the platform will be subjected to additional processing for the extraction of intuitive insights with the assistance of Machine Learning algorithms and deep-learning network architectures. The extracted insights will be translated into predictive models affecting the One-Health sustainability programme using machine automation.
Additionally, the NESTLER project will also undertake research activities to investigate the impact of insect protein on the circular economy for the well-being of animals. The project will develop methodologies for edible insect farming which will be in animal farming.
The project will also conduct research studies on the impact of animal waste in crop-based farming. In complementary to the analysis of health benefits, the project will also undertake efforts to evaluate the economic sustainability of such farming practices, which will lead to the setup of a joint EU-Africa joint task force on One-Health Sustainability. The outcome of the project will result in a transition from a linear economy to a circular economy delivering sustained growth and development.
In NESTLER, eBOS will lead the development of an economic risk assessment model building upon the publication of such models in the literature over the past three decades. Addressing this complex dynamic, the task will train algorithms using deep-learning architectures for predicting the risk index using approaches such as regression.
Moreover, eBOS will guide the work which aims at unifying the outcomes of the developed components and services in other project areas in order to release the integrated NESTLER platform in two major releases. The integration task will undertake the development of a solid continuous integration plan to guide the integration of the developed software components and services.
Lastly, eBOS will contribute towards the creation of an interactive toolkit for data visualization and standard interface for information exchange with external services and the platform architecture design and integration.
