Ukraine funding

The Estonian Research Council, in cooperation with the U.S. National Science Foundation, announces a new support measure – International Multilateral Partnerships for Resilient Education and Science System in Ukraine (IMPRESS-U)

The goal of this jointly funded initiative is to support excellence in science and engineering research, education and innovation through international collaboration and promote the integration of Ukrainian scientists into the international research community.

Funders are:

Each proposal must engage researchers from 3 countries: the U.S., Ukraine and at least one other country involved in this initiative.

Applications can be submitted from all scientific fields, but priority will be given to projects that propose:

  • creative ways for enhancing efficiency and resiliency of international partnerships;
  • efficient concepts to prepare research workforce;
  • efficient and significant contributions to build a modern, state-of-the-art research/education/innovation ecosystem in Ukraine.

Types of projects:

  1. Supplements: international supplements to existing awards
  2. EAGERs: EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research to support exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches.

The duration of the projects is 24 months, at the end of the project it is possible to request an extension of the project by one year (without additional funding). The application is continuous and will continue until the necessary parties have enough funding.

NSF is responsible for the application environment, evaluation organisation and reporting. All documents submitted to NSF are shared with other funders, and funding decisions are made jointly by all funders.

U.S. researchers submit international collaborative (full) proposals to NSF first. The rules of both NSF and other funders (related to the given project) must be followed when preparing the application.

ETAG requirements for Estonian participants:

  • ETAG support in this initiative is a total of 400,000 euros, from which up to 4 grants can be allocated (maximum 100,000 EUR each).
  • The beneficiary (host institution) must be a positively evaluated research and development institution that is a legal entity registered in Estonia.
  • The ETAG grant covers research costs (personnel, travel and other project-related costs), subcontracting (up to 15% of the requested total budget) and indirect costs (up to 15% of the requested personnel costs). NB! Scholarships and infrastructure costs are not eligible.
  • Within 1 week after submitting a full proposal to NSF, Estonian applicants (Principal Investigators of the Estonian sub-project) must submit an overview of their proposed budget to ETAG (vtk@etag.ee) on the corresponding budget form, attaching a copy of the full application.
  • In case of a positive funding decision, ETAG concludes a trilateral grant agreement with the Estonian host institution and the Principal Investigator of the Estonian sub-project.
  • ETAG finances the Estonian sub-project in the form of 2 advance payments, to be made to the host institution (after signing the grant agreement and after approving the 1st year activity and financial report).

ETAG Budget Form for Estonian participants
National Eligibility Criteria for Estonian participants

It is expected that joint funding will be provided in such a way that each country funds their own researchers. Researchers affiliated exclusively with Ukrainian institutions may be supported by private donors and foundations through the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (in accordance with National Research Foundation of Ukraine eligibility rules). (It is mandatory that a researcher working in a Ukrainian research institution and residing in Ukraine must also participate in each project.)

Weekly office hours (optional) to ask your questions directly Program Directors will be offered, see below details.
Time
: Every Thursday, 17:30-18:30 (EEST) / 10:30 – 11:30 (AM Eastern)
Zoom linkhttps://nsf.zoomgov.com/j/1619512224?pwd=Zi9aNTJsK1ZlUzNsbDlQUzBlR05UUT09
Meeting ID: 161 951 2224, Passcode: 829361

The IMPRESS-U partner search can be found here: https://www2.ncn.gov.pl/partners/impressu/

IMPRESS-U Webinar for Estonian Participants, 5 October 2023: https://youtu.be/KI9G3oVxmJM

More information can be found at the NSF website: https://www.nsf.gov/od/oise/IntlCollaborations/Ukraine.jsp

Contact person at NSF: Dr. Maija M. Kukla, Program Director – IMPRESS-U@nsf.gov

U.S. coordinator: Carnegie Mellon University
U.S. Principal Investigator: Samuel Pagliarini
Estonian partner: Tallinn University of Technology, Department of Computer Systems
Estonian Principal Investigator: Levent Aksoy
Ukrainian partner: V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University

Ukraine has its standardized cryptographic algorithms, namely Kalyna and Kupyna, which are significantly dissimilar to other standardized solutions adopted by NIST in the US. For several reasons, including performance and security, hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms are sought. In this project, the partners based in US, Estonia, and Ukraine will jointly investigate how to implement these algorithms in an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) while disseminating knowledge in both directions.

The Estonian partner is responsible for accomplishing three tasks: (i) security-aware design exploration of cryptographic primitives in Kalyna and Kupyna, such as substitution and linear transformation operations; (ii) realization of design architectures targeting high performance and low power dissipation; (iii) secure design of Kalyna and Kupyna against well-known attacks, such as side-channel analysis and fault injection.

Ukraine does not enjoy access to trusted chip fabrication technology. It is imperative that any hardware implementation of the national cryptographic standards should withstand tampering at fabrication and deployment time. This project addresses this gap by sharing ASIC design skills with Ukrainian researchers while sharing best practices related to security closure.

We strive to have Ukrainian universities teaching, in the near future, both software and hardware cryptographic engineering. The latter is not adequately covered by any university in the country as today. To achieve this goal, the chip design tasks executed in this project will be highly reproducible. Design resources will be openly shared on public repositories, including Verilog source files. Synthesis scripts for state-of-the-art commercial chip design tools will also be shared. Finally, the entire design process will be documented through a series of tutorial-style videos that will showcase the entire chip design step by step, from RTL to layout.

U.S. coordinator: Rochester Institute of Technology
U.S. Principal Investigator: Sergey E Lyshevski
Estonian partner: Tallinn University of Technology, Department of Computer Systems
Estonian Principal Investigator: Gert Jervan
Estonian Co-Principal Investigator: Mairo Leier
Ukrainian partner: The National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute"

The overall objective of the project is to design and implement a content-aware concept of object recognition for nefarious conditions, low data quality and uncertain conditions. Different mathematical, signal processing and image processing methods with integrated Machine Learning are combined to increase an object detection and classification accuracy, as well as to improve the robustness and speed.

The role of Tallinn University of Technology is to reduce the complexity of the existing Machine Learning, implement these models on a special accelerator hardware to ensure high accuracy data acquisition with near real-time capabilities on edge computing devices.

Developed methods can be validated in Ukraine on the real devices that usually operate in harsh environments, under physical impacts, line-of-sight scene obstructions, as well as electromagnetic spectrum and interference.

U.S. coordinator: University of Florida
U.S. Principal Investigator: Rafael Munoz-Carpena
Estonian partner: Tallinn University of Technology, Department of Electrical Power Engineering and Mechatronics
Estonian Principal Investigator: Andrii Chub
Ukrainian partners: G.E. Pukhov Institute for Modelling in Energy Engineering (PIMEE), Cyber Diia Platform, National University of Life and Environmental Science of Ukraine jt
Polish partner: Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics of Polish Academy of Science
Lithuanian partner: Mykolas Romeris University

Assessing resilience of critical systems is becoming a standard practice to better understand how they perform in critical situations, like pandemics, abnormal climate conditions, or war. This project will develop a new framework of stress-testing based on quantitative analysis of how systems recover under shocks. This project unites researchers from USA, Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia to apply novel analysis methods to critical digital and power infrastructure systems of Ukraine. This project will provide Ukraine with tools for enhancing resiliency of its critical infrastructure systems and catalyze the integration of Ukrainian researchers into the global research community. The Estonian partner will develop highly-resilient last-mile electrification tools allowing uninterrupted electricity supply to critical, sometimes life-sustaining, consumers, like hospitals, command centers, etc.

U.S. coordinator: University of California
U.S. Principal Investigator: Ilya Zaslavsky
U.S. partner: New Mexico State University
Estonian partner: University of Tartu, Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences (involving Geological Survey of Estonia)
Estonian Principal Investigator: Argo Jõeleht
Ukrainian partners: Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Polish partners: Polish Geological Institute, Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Lithuanian partner: Vilnius University
Latvian partner: University of Latvia

The project aims to develop solutions to the persistent problem of accurately assessing groundwater, which is the main source of drinking water in many regions, including transboundary areas. Our hypothesis is that integrating hydrogeologic models with satellite and ground-based data to increase the resolution of remote sensing information will allow us to create highly detailed predictions of changes in GW storage and flows across borders. The challenge is that satellite gravity data from GRACE-FO have coarse spatial and temporal resolution and often inaccurate to separate the groundwater signal from other water balance components such as precipitation, runoff, evapotranspiration, snow storage etc. and may limit its utility for analysis of aquifer depletion and resilience at finer scales. The highest quality data typically comes from expensive, sparsely distributed in-situ monitoring. The project combines comprehensive AI-assisted modeling of surface water and groundwater interactions to assess groundwater storage, flows, and aquifer resilience under different scenarios, to support decision-making given incomplete, imprecise, and differently structured in-situ data. There are partners from six countries: the United States, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Estonian partners (University of Tartu and Geological Survey of Estonia) are mainly involved with collection of observational data and provide hydrogeological modelling expertise that are needed for ground truthing of developed models, but contribute also to other tasks. The project results will be especially useful to Ukraine, where limitations of the ground observation network require more efficient assessment techniques based on remote sensing.

U.S. coordinator: University of Massachusetts
U.S. Principal Investigator: Friederike C. Jentoft
Estonian partner: National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics
Estonian Principal Investigator: Ivo Heinmaa
Ukrainian partner: National Academy of the Sciences of Ukraine

Contrary to the notion that a catalyst emerges unchanged from a catalytic reaction, most catalyst deactivate over time and require replacement or regeneration. Among the many known causes for deactivation of solid catalysts, the deposition of coke, i.e. the carbon-containing compounds from organic molecules in the feed and active surfaces of the catalyst is a common and often severe problem in industrial operations.

The main method to reactivate the catalyst is to remove coke by heating the catalyst to the temperature T > 600 - 700 ºC in the environment of oxygen or hydrogen. Unfortunately, this regeneration procedure causes partial degradation of the catalyst activity.

In the current project we investigate the possibilities to use a companion catalyst for mild regeneration of the main catalyst, where the coke deposition takes place preferentially in the companion catalyst, which would extend the life of the amin catalyst.

The project requires synthesis of catalyst materials, adequate characterization of the materials, and investigation of both the target catalytic process and the regeneration process.

The proposed team with researchers from the USA, Ukraine and Estonia brings together the competence and equipment to test the hypotheses and answer the underlying fundamental research questions.

The tasks of the workgroups are given in Scheme 1.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scheme 1. The duties of the partners in the current project

 

Contact persons at ETAG:
Margit Suuroja (margit.suuroja@etag.ee)
Katrin Piller (katrin.piller@etag.ee)