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What is CHIST-ERA? 

CHIST-ERA is a consortium of research funding organisations in Europe and beyond supporting use-inspired basic research in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) or at the interface between ICT and other domains. The CHIST-ERA consortium is itself supported by Horizon Europe within the European Innovation Council’s Pathfinder programme. CHIST-ERA promotes novel and multidisciplinary research with the potential to lead to significant technology breakthroughs in the long term. The funding organisations jointly support high risk and high impact research projects selected in the framework of CHIST-ERA, in order to reinforce European capabilities in promising new or emerging ICT or ICT related research topics. 

CHIST-ERA was launched in 2009 and the first call was published in 2010 (Call 2010). As of Call 2020, CHIST-ERA has selected more than 100 projects under 22 call topics for a funding support of approximately 100 M€. Over the same period, it has received about 12.5 M€ from the European Commission, partly to contribute to this investment and partly to cover the management costs of the network.

CHIST-ERA enables researchers to collaborate internationally through projects of intermediate size with a lean management building on the existing national granting schemes. The typical size of a project is about 0.8 - 1 M€ for 3-5 partners. Projects involving more partners are also common.

CHIST-ERA involves all four types of ERA-NET activities:

  1. Information exchange;
  2. Definition and preparation of joint activities;
  3. Implementation of joint activities;
  4. Last but not least, funding of joint transnational research actions.

CHIST-ERA Calls

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a key role in the European economy and for the society. In this context CHIST-ERA targets a domain covering the whole scope of transformative/exploratory research activities in ICST that through the initiatives and actions of the ERA-NET may initiate and lead to a range of exceptional and unprecedented outcomes. CHIST-ERA aims at leveraging/completing the national strategies and the Pathfinder programme of the European Innovation Council.

Within CHIST-ERA, the partner funding organisations identify emergent scientific fields allowing European researchers to engage in high risk, high impact projects that will bring some advance in science by launching each year a transnational call for proposals addressing two hot ICT topics. The text of the CHIST-ERA calls are defined and then published within six months after the topic selection based on the research community expertise and long-term vision to maintain a high level of relevance of the calls in very competitive evolving areas which need reactivity. The focus is long-term transformational research. In addition CHIST-ERA follow the funded projects in organising a yearly CHIST-ERA projects seminar where projects present their goals and achievements to the research community and CHIST-ERA partners.

The timeline from the selection of the topics of the call of year N to the follow-up of the funded projects is presented below.

Action Timeline
Call preparation 
Selection of topics and associated keywords/examples January of year N
Agreement on selection procedure & refinement of the scientific text of the call (CHIST-ERA Conference of year N) May of year N
Publication of the call September of year N
Project selection
Deadline for submitting proposals December of year N
Selection of proposals June of year N+1
Project follow-up
Follow-up: presentation of objectives and achievements at the CHIST-ERA conferences Spring of year N+2, N+3, N+4 and N+5