UniversidaddeCádiz

This in-house tool translates UCA’s scientific output into concrete European funding opportunities and strengthens the institution’s position within Horizon Europe

The University of Cádiz has launched ‘Horizonte UCA’, a web platform designed to facilitate the connection between the scientific output of its research staff and the funding opportunities available under the Horizon Europe framework programme. This initiative has been promoted by the Vice-Rectorate for Research and Knowledge Transfer as part of an institutional strategy aimed at improving the University’s positioning in European calls for proposals.

The platform, developed within the framework of the project ‘GPE2025-001711-P’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the State Research Agency, incorporates Artificial Intelligence models capable of analysing the semantic content of scientific publications. Based on this analysis, the system identifies the degree of alignment between research outputs and current European Commission calls, enabling researchers to quickly identify funding opportunities that best match their research profiles.

‘Horizonte UCA’ is the result of the work carried out by the technical team of the Vice-Rectorate for Research and Knowledge Transfer, which has designed a tool aimed both at improving the identification of funding opportunities and at fostering the participation of the University of Cádiz in international research consortia.

The platform operates using data from public sources of scientific production and UCA’s institutional repositories, ensuring full compliance with current data protection regulations. In this regard, it includes a dedicated transparency and privacy section that provides detailed information on the methodology applied and allows users to exercise their data protection rights.

At its current stage of deployment, ‘Horizonte UCA’ focuses on scientific output from the period 2015–2025 and displays only those researcher profiles that show alignment with active Horizon Europe calls. This limitation is intended to ensure the relevance of the results and forms part of a progressive development process.

The system is conceived as an evolving tool, as the technical team is already working on expanding the catalogue of publications, improving the accuracy of the algorithms and enriching the available data, with the aim of strengthening its usefulness as a decision-support tool in the field of research.

‘Horizonte UCA’ is available to the research community through the corresponding online platform and includes a dedicated support channel for resolving issues, gathering suggestions for improvement and managing data.