Source: EURLEX
Language: en
Format: md

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| 21.3.2023 | EN | Official Journal of the European Union | C 105/15 |

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Call for proposals

GR/002/23

EUIPO Academic Research Programme

(2023/C 105/09)

1.   Objectives and description

The EUIPO through the second edition of the ARP has an ambition to further develop the ties with academia in order to foster research not only in IP-related areas of interest to the Office but also in innovation in the field of information technologies.

The EUIPO ARP will target research in economics, law, technology, and management through two custom designed lots in the scope of the 2023 call for proposals, namely on IP and information technologies.

The concept of the programme aims to ensure that:

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| — | the programme produces research of relevance to the EUIPO and its stakeholders; |

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| — | academics perceive the programme as focused on high-quality projects and based on fair and transparent selection rules; |

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| — | the programme is expected to foster the creation, around the EUIPO, of a vibrant community of high-level scholars (of IP but also of different disciplines) across Europe; |

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| — | the program should raise the interest of the academic community in topics relevant to the Office; |

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| — | the programme is highly visible in the academic community and beyond. |

The result of a project supported by this call for proposals will be a study of the relevant subject (as defined in the call), within the timeline and budget specified in the proposal.

A control mechanism, consisting of interim online meetings, will be set up to monitor the progress of the research and to ensure that is in line with the project description submitted at the call for proposals. At least one meeting will be held during the first 3 (three) months after the signature of the grant agreement. Depending on the results of the initial progress meeting and the duration of the research project additional meetings may be summoned.

An ARP workshop will be organised at the EUIPO not later than 11 months from the signature of the grant agreement. The cost for the travel and accommodation of the participants will be covered by the EUIPO.

All awarded projects must present the results of their research at the workshop.

A period of no less then 1 (one) month, from the end of the workshop until the deadline to submit the final research paper will be established to allow the researches to incorporate any suggested feedback or adjustments resulting from the discussions during the workshop.

The final payment of the grant will be conditional on the validation of the final research paper.

The EUIPO ARP targets research in economics, law, technology and management.

The 2023 call for proposals focuses on topics related to IP (Lot 1) and information technologies (Lot 2) as set out below.

Lot 1 – IP

Proposals are invited in the following areas/themes:

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| 1. | trade marks as an indicator of innovation and other economic activity; |

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| 2. | designs as an indicator of innovation and other economic activity; |

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| 3. | the use of IPRs by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to overcome barriers to growth. |

Preferences will be given to research proposals aiming at showing economic, societal or political implications of findings. The studies should preferably focus on subjects related to trade marks and designs, although other topics, like geographical indications, SMEs, customer approaches or IP training and education, could also be in scope.

Lot 2 – Information technologies

Proposals are invited in the following areas/themes.

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| 1. | Natural language processing (NLP). In this field, projects related to the following areas will be appreciated.   |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research focus on Question and Answering (Q&A) systems. The system may have a model feed with a corpus of legal text. This model should be able to extract a concise answer to the users queries from the texts the model has been fed. |  |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research in text summarisation. Given a long or complex piece of text, the system should be able to return a summary of this. |  |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research in text adaptation. Given a piece of technical/legal/financial text, the system should be able to adapt this into plain language, which every non-technical person could understand. |  |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research in information extraction. Given a document, for instance a PDF, it should be able to extract the relevant required information (name of the user, trade mark denomination, goods and services, opposed goods and services, etc.). |  |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research in text similarity. Given two pieces of (short) text (perhaps questions), the model should be able to tell us if they have a very similar meaning, that is, they are duplicated but worded in a different way. |  |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research on the assembly of search engines focused on small pieces of text (goods and services). The final system should be able to assemble and retrieve texts found by semantic and syntactic search engines. | |

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| 2. | Image processing. In this field, projects related to the following areas will be appreciated.   |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research in building an optical character recognition (OCR) program able to identify non-standard font of characters. |  |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research in detecting anomalies in industrial designs. Given an image or set of images of an industrial design, it should detect whether there is an anomaly in this/these picture/s according to EUIPO Guidelines for examination of registered Community designs. |  |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research in image captioning. Given a picture (a company logotype), it should be able to create either a caption or a set of tags that describes that image. |  |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research in image segmentation. Given an image, it should be able to identify the different objects that appear in it. |  |  |  | | --- | --- | | — | Research in image search engines. Given a set of images, real or drawn, and a new image that a user introduces, the model should be able to retrieve a set of images shorted by visual similarity to the one introduced by the user. | |

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| 3. | Reinforcement learning. In this field, all research that can apply a reinforcement learning system to the ones described in the two previous fields. |

Preference will be given to research proposals on new technologies such as artificial intelligence (i.e. machine learning, data analytics, etc.) applied to IP, including demonstration of the technology in the relevant environment, prototyping and system level demonstration. The studies should preferably focus on subjects related to trade marks and designs, although other topics, like geographical indications, SMEs, customer approaches or IP training and education, could also be in scope.

DISCLAIMER: for both Lot 1 and Lot 2, any research/topic request needs to be connected to at least one of the three general areas mentioned above. The selection of the final topics by the EUIPO will be on the topics of the major interest for the Office (even if they are connected to only one of the three areas).

The assessment of each proposal will be based on objective, transparent and standard predefined criteria (e.g. quality of the proposal, capacity of the candidates, expected impact, credibility of the budget proposal) as defined in Chapter II down below.

Projects that present the highest relevance for the Office will be considered. This includes, for example, projects that generate relevant empirical evidence for decision makers in policy and business, different relevant IP-focused projects, or data-related initiatives, as well as the SME programme.

For more details please refer to Chapter I of the Guidelines for applicants.

2.   Eligibility

2.1.   Eligible applicants

This call is opened only to academic researchers affiliated to universities or research institutions (public or private) located in one of the 27 EU Member States. They are eligible for the programme, regardless of their nationality (being however resident in the EU).

The researchers can be PhD candidates, postdoc researchers, faculty members or any other type of researchers in the academic field.

An application may be submitted by one applicant or by several applicants. Only one proposal per researcher per call will be evaluated.

Public entities that receive funds or support from the EUIPO by means of other financing measures such as cooperation programmes, and which aim to pursue the same objectives as this call, are not eligible (e.g. national and regional IP offices or international organisations).

2.2.   Eligible activities

Research studies on topics related to IP and information technologies, as defined in the topic description of the call for proposals.

The maximum duration of projects is 12 months from the signature of the grant agreement.

For more details please refer to Chapter II of the Guidelines for applicants.

3.   Exclusion & selection criteria

Applicants must not be in a situation that will exclude them from participation and/or from award as defined by the Financial Regulation applicable to the general budget of the Union.

Applicants must have the financial and operational capacity to complete the proposed activities.

Please refer to Chapter II of the Guidelines for applicants for further details on the supporting documents to be provided.

4.   Award criteria

The award criteria for assessing eligible proposals are allocated out of a total of 100 on the basis of the following weighting:

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| Award criteria | Minimum score | Maximum score |
| Excellence | 20 | 40 |
| Impact | 15 | 30 |
| Quality and efficiently of the implementation | 15 | 30 |
| Overall (pass) scores | 50 | 100 |

To be considered for funding, proposals must score:

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| — | at least 50 points overall  and |

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| — | at least the minimum points in each of the criteria |

For more details please refer to Chapter II of the Guidelines for applicants.

5.   Budget

The total budget available for the co-financing of actions under this call for proposals is estimated at EUR 80 000 (Lot 1: EUR 60 000 and Lot 2: EUR 20 000). This amount will be spread over two budget annuities and the availability of funds corresponding to the budget 2024 will be subject to the adoption of the budget by the Office’s budgetary authority.

The minimum and maximum grant per project and per lot will be EUR 10 000 to 20 000. The EUIPO reserves the right not to award all available funds or to redistribute them between the call priorities, depending on the proposals received and the results of the evaluation.

The Office expects to fund up to three proposals under Lot 1 and up to two proposals in Lot 2.

The Office reserves the right not to distribute all available funds.

6.   Deadline for submission of applications

The application package is available on the internet at the following address: https://euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/grants

Applications must be submitted to the EUIPO using the online application form (e-Form) no later than May 2nd 2023 at 13:00 (local time).

No other method of submission of an application will be accepted.

Applicants shall ensure that all the documents requested and mentioned in the e-Form are provided.

Applications which do not include all the stipulated annexes and which are not submitted before the deadline will not be considered.

For more details please refer to Chapter IV of the Guidelines for applicants.

7.   Full details

The detailed conditions of this call for proposals can be found in the guidelines for applicants at the following internet address: https://euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/grants

Applications must comply with all the terms of the guidelines and be submitted on the forms provided.

8.   Contact

For any further information please contact the following mailbox: grants@euipo.europa.eu

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