FinCEAL Plus started in January 2015 as an expansion and continuation of the FinCEAL Project (2012-2014), both funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture. The aims of the FinCEAL Plus project were to: 1. Increase and consolidate the Finnish bi-regional cooperation towards Africa, Asia, and the LAC region, with special emphasis on supporting Finnish researchers’ involvement in European bi-regional networks; 2. Support and consolidate the participation of Finnish experts in EU-Africa, EU-CELAC and EU- Asia bi-regional research and science policy dialogues; 3. Increase the knowledge about and visibility of Finnish cooperation towards the target regions within Finland; 4. Expand the awareness of Finnish expertise in the regions; and 5. Expand and consolidate the Finnish research communities’ awareness of cooperation possibilities with the EU, Africa, Asia and LAC region. 6. Throughout all the project activities, strengthening the Finnish universities’ global responsibility and making it more systematic and measurable.

The doctoral research project targets to understand the relevance of frugal and affordable energy innovations in sustainable energy transitions among low-income communities in emerging economies. The target technology is solar micro-grids in India. The various related sustainability challenges are studied as well as the role of distributed energy in the country's energy mix among rural energy users. Key methods include field trials, interviews, data analysis and sustainability and reliability assessments.

The overall aim of the INDOPED project is to raise the teaching capacity of Indonesian University teachers that they will be enabled to bring the Higher Education to the European standard. The benefit of the INDOPED project for the Indonesian partners is to bring added value to their educational system, to introduce Indonesian lecturers to interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches that innovation becomes an integrated term in all of their doings. It will allow to prepare their students for the challenges on the labour market and to increase interfaculty and interuniversity cooperation possibilities that are not widely used in Indonesia.

The widely-recognized essential features of the emerging 5G network compared with 4G networks include: 1000 times larger system capacity, 1/1000 power consumption, 10 Gbps peak rate and 1 ms end-to-end delay, while the innovation in transmission technologies is the basis in achieving this goal. The research carried out in this project can be divided into three areas: 1) New transmission architecture and protocol design for 5G networks 2) Green-transmission enabled 5G network technologies, 3) Advanced spectrum-sharing and smart transmission strategies in 5G networks. The proposed architectures, protocols, algorithms, techniques, and schemes are validated and evaluated through simulation platform and demonstration systems. Through this project, we expect to not only build theoretical foundations for 5G networks, but also to provide high-quality training opportunities for graduate students and engineers both in Finnish and Chinese Universities/Research Institutes.