Project acronym Feel your Reach
Project Non-invasive decoding of cortical patterns induced by goal directed movement intentions and artificial sensory feedback in humans
Researcher (PI) Gernot Rudolf Mueller-Putz
Host Institution (HI) TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET GRAZ
Country Austria
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE7, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary In Europe estimated 300.000 people are suffering from a spinal cord injury (SCI) with 11.000 new injuries per year. The consequences of spinal cord injury are tremendous for these individuals. The loss of motor functions especially of the arm and grasping function – 40% are tetraplegics – leads to a life-long dependency on care givers and therefore to a dramatic decrease in quality of life in these often young individuals. With the help of neuroprostheses, grasp and elbow function can be substantially improved. However, remaining body movements often do not provide enough degrees of freedom to control the neuroprosthesis.
The ideal solution for voluntary control of an upper extremity neuroprosthesis would be to directly record motor commands from the corresponding cortical areas and convert them into control signals. This would realize a technical bypass around the interrupted nerve fiber tracts in the spinal cord.
A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) transform mentally induced changes of brain signals into control signals and serve as an alternative human-machine interface. We showed first results in EEG-based control of a neuroprosthesis in several persons with SCI in the last decade, however, the control is still unnatural and cumbersome.
The objective of FEEL YOUR REACH is to develop a novel control framework that incorporates goal directed movement intention, movement decoding, error processing, processing of sensory feedback to allow a more natural control of a neuroprosthesis. To achieve this aim a goal directed movement decoder will be realized, and continuous error potential decoding will be included. Both will be finally joined together with an artificial kinesthetic sensory feedback display attached to the user. We hypothesize that with these mechanisms a user will be able to naturally control an neuroprosthesis with his/ her mind only.
Summary
In Europe estimated 300.000 people are suffering from a spinal cord injury (SCI) with 11.000 new injuries per year. The consequences of spinal cord injury are tremendous for these individuals. The loss of motor functions especially of the arm and grasping function – 40% are tetraplegics – leads to a life-long dependency on care givers and therefore to a dramatic decrease in quality of life in these often young individuals. With the help of neuroprostheses, grasp and elbow function can be substantially improved. However, remaining body movements often do not provide enough degrees of freedom to control the neuroprosthesis.
The ideal solution for voluntary control of an upper extremity neuroprosthesis would be to directly record motor commands from the corresponding cortical areas and convert them into control signals. This would realize a technical bypass around the interrupted nerve fiber tracts in the spinal cord.
A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) transform mentally induced changes of brain signals into control signals and serve as an alternative human-machine interface. We showed first results in EEG-based control of a neuroprosthesis in several persons with SCI in the last decade, however, the control is still unnatural and cumbersome.
The objective of FEEL YOUR REACH is to develop a novel control framework that incorporates goal directed movement intention, movement decoding, error processing, processing of sensory feedback to allow a more natural control of a neuroprosthesis. To achieve this aim a goal directed movement decoder will be realized, and continuous error potential decoding will be included. Both will be finally joined together with an artificial kinesthetic sensory feedback display attached to the user. We hypothesize that with these mechanisms a user will be able to naturally control an neuroprosthesis with his/ her mind only.
Max ERC Funding
1 994 161 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-05-01, End date: 2021-07-31
Project acronym FINEPRINT
Project Spatially explicit material footprints: fine-scale assessment of Europe’s global environmental and social impacts
Researcher (PI) Stefan Giljum
Host Institution (HI) WIRTSCHAFTSUNIVERSITAT WIEN
Country Austria
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH2, ERC-2016-COG
Summary In the era of globalisation, supply chains are increasingly organised on the international level, thus disconnecting final consumption from the location of material extraction and related environmental and social impacts. Reducing these global impacts – or footprints – of European consumption is a major societal and scientific challenge. Methods to assess teleconnections between distant places of raw material extraction and consumption along global supply chains have improved significantly, with multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis being the most prominent method applied. However, the limited spatial resolution of MRIO models distorts footprint calculations, as specific properties of raw materials as well as impacts of extraction can vary significantly within production countries. I therefore propose a new method for the calculation of fine-scale material consumption footprints. It will encompass (1) a spatial assessment of global material extraction on a high-resolution grid and (2) a detailed physical model that tracks raw materials from the location of extraction via international transport facilities to processing industries in importing countries. Integrating this very detailed spatial information with a MRIO model will enable the first fine-scale assessment of European countries’ material footprints, overcoming prevailing aggregation errors in footprint indicators. Furthermore, I will investigate environmental and social impacts related to material footprints through linking the spatially explicit multi-regional material flow model with datasets on impacts related to raw material extraction, such as increasing water scarcity, deforestation and mining conflicts. This project will not only lift the accuracy of footprint models to a new level, but will also open up a range of options for sustainability assessments of specific commodity flows. Building on this knowledge, targeted policy instruments for sustainable product supply chains can be designed.
Summary
In the era of globalisation, supply chains are increasingly organised on the international level, thus disconnecting final consumption from the location of material extraction and related environmental and social impacts. Reducing these global impacts – or footprints – of European consumption is a major societal and scientific challenge. Methods to assess teleconnections between distant places of raw material extraction and consumption along global supply chains have improved significantly, with multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis being the most prominent method applied. However, the limited spatial resolution of MRIO models distorts footprint calculations, as specific properties of raw materials as well as impacts of extraction can vary significantly within production countries. I therefore propose a new method for the calculation of fine-scale material consumption footprints. It will encompass (1) a spatial assessment of global material extraction on a high-resolution grid and (2) a detailed physical model that tracks raw materials from the location of extraction via international transport facilities to processing industries in importing countries. Integrating this very detailed spatial information with a MRIO model will enable the first fine-scale assessment of European countries’ material footprints, overcoming prevailing aggregation errors in footprint indicators. Furthermore, I will investigate environmental and social impacts related to material footprints through linking the spatially explicit multi-regional material flow model with datasets on impacts related to raw material extraction, such as increasing water scarcity, deforestation and mining conflicts. This project will not only lift the accuracy of footprint models to a new level, but will also open up a range of options for sustainability assessments of specific commodity flows. Building on this knowledge, targeted policy instruments for sustainable product supply chains can be designed.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 909 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-07-01, End date: 2022-06-30
Project acronym LETHE
Project Levels and Trends of Health Expectancy: Understanding its Measurement and Estimation Sensitivity
Researcher (PI) Marc Anton Luy
Host Institution (HI) OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
Country Austria
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2016-COG
Summary Better health is central to human happiness and wellbeing. It also contributes substantially to economic progress, as healthy populations live longer and are more productive. Accordingly, the EU defined the improvement of health as a fundamental element of its “Europe 2020” strategy. The corresponding public health policies are assessed on the basis of a structural indicator for “Health Expectancy” (HE). Unfortunately, HE estimates are extremely sensitive to certain methodological issues of which many are widely ignored. First, the common measurement of population health by the responses to specific survey questions is ambiguous. As a consequence, statistics on levels and trends of HE vary significantly depending on the underlying survey data and health indicators. Almost completely unrecognized is a second problem: HE estimates are also highly sensitive to particular technical features, e.g. the age range and partitioning selected for analysis and the technique chosen to add the health dimension to the life table. The efforts that have been hitherto undertaken to improve the estimation of HE focus primarily on the measurement of health with surveys, whereas the effects of the chosen HE indicator, data and method remain largely unexplored. The central aim of LETHE is to fill these gaps through a systematic exploration of the HE indicator’s sensitivity to these issues. To emphasize the empirical significance of the proposed research, the effects will be investigated in the context of some major actual research questions, in particular the “compression versus expansion of morbidity” debate and the differences in HE between European populations and subpopulations. Finally, the project aims to identify the particular health measure that is most strongly associated with people’s actual happiness. These innovative approaches feature the potential to provide not only new insights into the levels and trends of HE, but also about its main drivers and causation mechanisms.
Summary
Better health is central to human happiness and wellbeing. It also contributes substantially to economic progress, as healthy populations live longer and are more productive. Accordingly, the EU defined the improvement of health as a fundamental element of its “Europe 2020” strategy. The corresponding public health policies are assessed on the basis of a structural indicator for “Health Expectancy” (HE). Unfortunately, HE estimates are extremely sensitive to certain methodological issues of which many are widely ignored. First, the common measurement of population health by the responses to specific survey questions is ambiguous. As a consequence, statistics on levels and trends of HE vary significantly depending on the underlying survey data and health indicators. Almost completely unrecognized is a second problem: HE estimates are also highly sensitive to particular technical features, e.g. the age range and partitioning selected for analysis and the technique chosen to add the health dimension to the life table. The efforts that have been hitherto undertaken to improve the estimation of HE focus primarily on the measurement of health with surveys, whereas the effects of the chosen HE indicator, data and method remain largely unexplored. The central aim of LETHE is to fill these gaps through a systematic exploration of the HE indicator’s sensitivity to these issues. To emphasize the empirical significance of the proposed research, the effects will be investigated in the context of some major actual research questions, in particular the “compression versus expansion of morbidity” debate and the differences in HE between European populations and subpopulations. Finally, the project aims to identify the particular health measure that is most strongly associated with people’s actual happiness. These innovative approaches feature the potential to provide not only new insights into the levels and trends of HE, but also about its main drivers and causation mechanisms.
Max ERC Funding
1 713 353 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31
Project acronym PIWI-Chrom
Project Understanding small RNA-mediated transposon control at the level of chromatin in the animal germline
Researcher (PI) Julius Brennecke
Host Institution (HI) INSTITUT FUER MOLEKULARE BIOTECHNOLOGIE GMBH
Country Austria
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), LS2, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary Transposable elements—universal components of genomes—pose a major threat to genome integrity due to their mutagenic character. In all eukaryotic lineages small RNA pathways act as defense systems to protect the host genome against the activity of transposons. The central pathway in animals is the gonad-specific PIWI interacting RNA (piRNA) pathway, one of the most elaborate but also least understood small RNA silencing systems.
Here I propose to study the interplay between the piRNA pathway and chromatin biology in Drosophila with two aims: First, we will identify the factors and investigate the processes that underlie piRNA-guided silencing in the nucleus. Our objective is to understand how recruitment of an Argonaute protein to a nascent RNA mechanistically leads to the assembly of effector proteins that govern heterochromatin formation and transcriptional silencing. Second, we will study the biology of piRNA clusters, heterochromatic loci that encompass a library of transposon fragments and that act as the pathway’s memory system. Our goal is to uncover how a group of proteins—several of which are germline-specific variants of basic cellular factors—enable transcription within heterochromatin and control the downstream fate of the emerging non-coding RNAs.
Our work centers on the piRNA pathway in Drosophila ovaries, undeniably the model system at the forefront of the field. By combining the strength of fly genetics with the power of genome-wide approaches we will uncover how heterochromatin on the one hand governs silencing and how the piRNA pathway on the other hand exploits it to facilitate the transcription of piRNA precursors. This will reveal fundamental insights into the co-evolution of transposons and host genomes. At the same time, by studying the piRNA pathway’s intersection with chromatin biology and transcription, we expect to reveal new insights into basic principles of gene expression.
Summary
Transposable elements—universal components of genomes—pose a major threat to genome integrity due to their mutagenic character. In all eukaryotic lineages small RNA pathways act as defense systems to protect the host genome against the activity of transposons. The central pathway in animals is the gonad-specific PIWI interacting RNA (piRNA) pathway, one of the most elaborate but also least understood small RNA silencing systems.
Here I propose to study the interplay between the piRNA pathway and chromatin biology in Drosophila with two aims: First, we will identify the factors and investigate the processes that underlie piRNA-guided silencing in the nucleus. Our objective is to understand how recruitment of an Argonaute protein to a nascent RNA mechanistically leads to the assembly of effector proteins that govern heterochromatin formation and transcriptional silencing. Second, we will study the biology of piRNA clusters, heterochromatic loci that encompass a library of transposon fragments and that act as the pathway’s memory system. Our goal is to uncover how a group of proteins—several of which are germline-specific variants of basic cellular factors—enable transcription within heterochromatin and control the downstream fate of the emerging non-coding RNAs.
Our work centers on the piRNA pathway in Drosophila ovaries, undeniably the model system at the forefront of the field. By combining the strength of fly genetics with the power of genome-wide approaches we will uncover how heterochromatin on the one hand governs silencing and how the piRNA pathway on the other hand exploits it to facilitate the transcription of piRNA precursors. This will reveal fundamental insights into the co-evolution of transposons and host genomes. At the same time, by studying the piRNA pathway’s intersection with chromatin biology and transcription, we expect to reveal new insights into basic principles of gene expression.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 530 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2021-06-30
Project acronym TRADEPOWER
Project Power in international trade negotiations
Researcher (PI) Andreas DUER
Host Institution (HI) PARIS-LODRON-UNIVERSITAT SALZBURG
Country Austria
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH2, ERC-2016-COG
Summary For the last twenty years, countries across the globe have negotiated a large number of preferential trade agreements. In parallel, trade negotiations have taken place in the framework of the World Trade Organization. These negotiations not only deal with tariffs, but also cover investments, competition policy, labour standards and much more. With much at stake, the extent to which different countries are able to achieve their preferred outcomes in these negotiations is of broad interest. In this project, I address this topic by asking: what makes some countries have more bargaining power than others in these negotiations? In other words, what explains variation in bargaining power in trade negotiations?
My approach to these questions is ground-breaking in terms of theory, empirical research and methodology:
1.) I develop an original theoretical argument that links the globalization of production to bargaining power in trade negotiations. Concretely, I argue that the offshoring of production reduces the importance of market size in trade negotiations. The argument leads to the expectation of systematic variation in bargaining power over time, and across pairs of countries and sectors.
2.) I will collect novel and systematic data to test this argument, going far beyond the empirical evidence currently used to assess bargaining power in trade negotiations. The empirical research will bring together qualitative evidence from case studies with quantitative evidence on both the perception of power and the actual outcomes of trade negotiations.
3.) I will innovate methodologically by combining and comparing three approaches to measuring bargaining power, namely process tracing, attributed influence and preference attainment.
The project will make a key contribution not only to the literature on bargaining power in international trade negotiations, but also to research on, e.g., international development, international institutions and the political economy of trade.
Summary
For the last twenty years, countries across the globe have negotiated a large number of preferential trade agreements. In parallel, trade negotiations have taken place in the framework of the World Trade Organization. These negotiations not only deal with tariffs, but also cover investments, competition policy, labour standards and much more. With much at stake, the extent to which different countries are able to achieve their preferred outcomes in these negotiations is of broad interest. In this project, I address this topic by asking: what makes some countries have more bargaining power than others in these negotiations? In other words, what explains variation in bargaining power in trade negotiations?
My approach to these questions is ground-breaking in terms of theory, empirical research and methodology:
1.) I develop an original theoretical argument that links the globalization of production to bargaining power in trade negotiations. Concretely, I argue that the offshoring of production reduces the importance of market size in trade negotiations. The argument leads to the expectation of systematic variation in bargaining power over time, and across pairs of countries and sectors.
2.) I will collect novel and systematic data to test this argument, going far beyond the empirical evidence currently used to assess bargaining power in trade negotiations. The empirical research will bring together qualitative evidence from case studies with quantitative evidence on both the perception of power and the actual outcomes of trade negotiations.
3.) I will innovate methodologically by combining and comparing three approaches to measuring bargaining power, namely process tracing, attributed influence and preference attainment.
The project will make a key contribution not only to the literature on bargaining power in international trade negotiations, but also to research on, e.g., international development, international institutions and the political economy of trade.
Max ERC Funding
1 705 833 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-07-01, End date: 2022-06-30
