Project acronym COMPMUSIC
Project Computational models for the discovery of the world's music
Researcher (PI) Francesc Xavier Serra Casals
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), PE6, ERC-2010-AdG_20100224
Summary Current IT research does not respond to the world's multi-cultural reality. It could be argued that we are imposing the paradigms of our market-driven western culture also on IT and that current IT research results will only facilitate the access of a small part of the world’s information to a small part of the world's population. Most IT research is being carried out with a western centred approach and as a result, our data models, cognition models, user models, interaction models, ontologies, … are all culturally biased. This fact is quite evident in music information research, since, despite the world's richness in musical cultures, most of the research is centred on CDs and metadata of our western commercial music. CompMusic wants to break this huge research bias. By approaching musical information modelling from a multicultural perspective it aims at advancing our state of the art while facilitating the discovery and reuse of the music produced outside the western commercial context. But the development of computational models to address the world’s music information richness cannot be done from the West looking out; we have to involve researchers and musical experts immersed in the different cultures. Their contribution is fundamental to develop the appropriate multicultural musicological and cognitive frameworks from which we should then carry our research on finding appropriate musical features, ontologies, data representations, user interfaces and user centred approaches. CompMusic will investigate some of the most consolidated non-western classical music traditions, Indian (hindustani, carnatic), Turkish-Arab (ottoman, andalusian), and Chinese (han), developing the needed computational models to bring their music into the current globalized information framework. Using these music cultures as case studies, cultures that are alive and have a strong influence in current society, we can develop rich information models that can take advantage of the existing information coming from musicological and cultural studies, from mature performance practice traditions and from active social contexts. With this approach we aim at challenging the current western centred information paradigms, advance our IT research, and contribute to our rich multicultural society.
Summary
Current IT research does not respond to the world's multi-cultural reality. It could be argued that we are imposing the paradigms of our market-driven western culture also on IT and that current IT research results will only facilitate the access of a small part of the world’s information to a small part of the world's population. Most IT research is being carried out with a western centred approach and as a result, our data models, cognition models, user models, interaction models, ontologies, … are all culturally biased. This fact is quite evident in music information research, since, despite the world's richness in musical cultures, most of the research is centred on CDs and metadata of our western commercial music. CompMusic wants to break this huge research bias. By approaching musical information modelling from a multicultural perspective it aims at advancing our state of the art while facilitating the discovery and reuse of the music produced outside the western commercial context. But the development of computational models to address the world’s music information richness cannot be done from the West looking out; we have to involve researchers and musical experts immersed in the different cultures. Their contribution is fundamental to develop the appropriate multicultural musicological and cognitive frameworks from which we should then carry our research on finding appropriate musical features, ontologies, data representations, user interfaces and user centred approaches. CompMusic will investigate some of the most consolidated non-western classical music traditions, Indian (hindustani, carnatic), Turkish-Arab (ottoman, andalusian), and Chinese (han), developing the needed computational models to bring their music into the current globalized information framework. Using these music cultures as case studies, cultures that are alive and have a strong influence in current society, we can develop rich information models that can take advantage of the existing information coming from musicological and cultural studies, from mature performance practice traditions and from active social contexts. With this approach we aim at challenging the current western centred information paradigms, advance our IT research, and contribute to our rich multicultural society.
Max ERC Funding
2 443 200 €
Duration
Start date: 2011-07-01, End date: 2017-06-30
Project acronym DYNURBAN
Project Urban dynamics: learning from integrated models and big data
Researcher (PI) Diego PUGA
Host Institution (HI) FUNDACION CENTRO DE ESTUDIOS MONETARIOS Y FINANCIEROS
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH1, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary City growth is driven by a combination of systematic determinants and shocks. Random growth models predict realistic city size distributions but ignore, for instance, the strong empirical association between human capital and city growth. Models with systematic determinants predict degenerate size distributions. We will develop an integrated model that combines systematic and random determinants to explain the link between human capital, entrepreneurship and growth, while generating relevant city size distributions. We will calibrate the model to quantify the contribution of cities to aggregate growth.
Urban growth also has a poorly understood spatial component. Combining gridded data of land use, population, businesses and roads for 3 decennial periods we will track the evolution of land use in the US with an unprecedented level of spatial detail. We will pay particular attention to the magnitude and causes of “slash-and-burn” development: instances when built-up land stops meeting needs in terms of use and intensity and, instead of being redeveloped, it is abandoned while previously open space is built up.
Job-to-job flows across cities matter for efficiency and during the recent crisis they have plummeted. We will study them with individual social security data. Even if there have only been small changes in mismatch between unemployed workers and vacancies during the crisis, if workers shy away from moving to take a job in another city, misallocation can increase substantially.
We will also study commuting flows for Spain and the UK based on anonymized cell phone location records. We will identify urban areas by iteratively aggregating municipalities if more than a given share of transit flows end in the rest of the urban area. We will also measure the extent to which people cross paths with others opening the possibility of personal interactions, and assess the extent to which this generates productivity-enhancing agglomeration economies.
Summary
City growth is driven by a combination of systematic determinants and shocks. Random growth models predict realistic city size distributions but ignore, for instance, the strong empirical association between human capital and city growth. Models with systematic determinants predict degenerate size distributions. We will develop an integrated model that combines systematic and random determinants to explain the link between human capital, entrepreneurship and growth, while generating relevant city size distributions. We will calibrate the model to quantify the contribution of cities to aggregate growth.
Urban growth also has a poorly understood spatial component. Combining gridded data of land use, population, businesses and roads for 3 decennial periods we will track the evolution of land use in the US with an unprecedented level of spatial detail. We will pay particular attention to the magnitude and causes of “slash-and-burn” development: instances when built-up land stops meeting needs in terms of use and intensity and, instead of being redeveloped, it is abandoned while previously open space is built up.
Job-to-job flows across cities matter for efficiency and during the recent crisis they have plummeted. We will study them with individual social security data. Even if there have only been small changes in mismatch between unemployed workers and vacancies during the crisis, if workers shy away from moving to take a job in another city, misallocation can increase substantially.
We will also study commuting flows for Spain and the UK based on anonymized cell phone location records. We will identify urban areas by iteratively aggregating municipalities if more than a given share of transit flows end in the rest of the urban area. We will also measure the extent to which people cross paths with others opening the possibility of personal interactions, and assess the extent to which this generates productivity-enhancing agglomeration economies.
Max ERC Funding
1 292 586 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-08-01, End date: 2021-07-31
Project acronym GEPPS
Project Globalization, Economic Policy and Political Structure
Researcher (PI) Jaume VENTURA FONTANET
Host Institution (HI) Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI)
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH1, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary Globalization is expanding economic borders rapidly. Barriers to trade are now lower than ever and this has led to the creation of many truly global goods and asset markets. And yet globalization is changing political borders only slowly. The second wave of globalization that started after WWII found the world organized into a set of states or centralized
jurisdictions that often go beyond cultural borders but that clearly fall short of economic borders. These centralized jurisdictions still hold most of the political and decision-making power.
This growing mismatch between markets and states lowers the quality of economic policymaking. Since constituencies are located inside the state, governments tend to disregard effects of economic policies that are felt beyond the political border.
The result is a worsening in policymaking that could seriously mitigate the gains from globalization and even turn them into losses. The goal of this project is to improve our understanding of how this growing mismatch between economic and political borders affects economic policy and political structure. In particular, it focuses on the inefficiencies this mismatch creates and on how should we (“the citizens of the world”) handle them.
The project is organized around two themes. The first one is the handling of enforcement externalities. One of the key roles of governments is to enforce contracts. When these contracts involve domestic and foreign residents, governments have the temptation to enforce selectively so as to shift income to domestic residents at the expense of foreigners. The second theme is the evolution of political structure. The world is currently organized into state or centralized jurisdictions. This project studies the hypothesis that globalization leads to an alternative political structure based on a set of overlapping jurisdictions.
Summary
Globalization is expanding economic borders rapidly. Barriers to trade are now lower than ever and this has led to the creation of many truly global goods and asset markets. And yet globalization is changing political borders only slowly. The second wave of globalization that started after WWII found the world organized into a set of states or centralized
jurisdictions that often go beyond cultural borders but that clearly fall short of economic borders. These centralized jurisdictions still hold most of the political and decision-making power.
This growing mismatch between markets and states lowers the quality of economic policymaking. Since constituencies are located inside the state, governments tend to disregard effects of economic policies that are felt beyond the political border.
The result is a worsening in policymaking that could seriously mitigate the gains from globalization and even turn them into losses. The goal of this project is to improve our understanding of how this growing mismatch between economic and political borders affects economic policy and political structure. In particular, it focuses on the inefficiencies this mismatch creates and on how should we (“the citizens of the world”) handle them.
The project is organized around two themes. The first one is the handling of enforcement externalities. One of the key roles of governments is to enforce contracts. When these contracts involve domestic and foreign residents, governments have the temptation to enforce selectively so as to shift income to domestic residents at the expense of foreigners. The second theme is the evolution of political structure. The world is currently organized into state or centralized jurisdictions. This project studies the hypothesis that globalization leads to an alternative political structure based on a set of overlapping jurisdictions.
Max ERC Funding
1 080 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
Project acronym MoTIVE
Project Moments in Time in Immersive Virtual Environments
Researcher (PI) Mel SLATER
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), PE6, ERC-2016-ADG
Summary This project investigates how virtual reality (VR) can be used to live through an historical event so that participants perceive themselves to be there (Place Illusion) and take the events that are happening as real (Plausibility). To provide an application focus the research will be constructed around recreating a famous rock concert from the 1980s. The specific elements of the research involve an Agent Based Model (ABM) that populates the environment with thousands of virtual characters with their behaviour driven by the music. This ABM will run in VR embedding participants as a type of agent. Agents will have personality and emotional state that can influence one another, and the actions and state of participants will also influence the unfolding of the model. Based on the predictive coding model of brain functioning a theory of Place Illusion will be developed that results in a universal measurement. Similarly, the Plausibility Illusion will be modelled and corresponding universal measure derived. Participants in VR will be embodied, so that they will have a first person perspective life-sized virtual body that moves as they do. We will exploit the concept of body ownership and its consequences for attitudinal, behavioural, cognitive and agency changes to give people unique experiences of the virtual events, and carry out a series of experiments to assess the influence of being transported back in time in a younger body has on ageing. Our recent discovery that illusory agency can be realised through virtual embodiment will be used for research on improved motor learning. To allow people to move through the environment we will investigate paradigms for virtual walking, and in particular whether the multisensory principles involved in body ownership illusions can be used to lessen simulator sickness. The long term goal of the project is to understand how to capture treasured past moments lost in time, through their reproduction in ABM inspired virtual reality.
Summary
This project investigates how virtual reality (VR) can be used to live through an historical event so that participants perceive themselves to be there (Place Illusion) and take the events that are happening as real (Plausibility). To provide an application focus the research will be constructed around recreating a famous rock concert from the 1980s. The specific elements of the research involve an Agent Based Model (ABM) that populates the environment with thousands of virtual characters with their behaviour driven by the music. This ABM will run in VR embedding participants as a type of agent. Agents will have personality and emotional state that can influence one another, and the actions and state of participants will also influence the unfolding of the model. Based on the predictive coding model of brain functioning a theory of Place Illusion will be developed that results in a universal measurement. Similarly, the Plausibility Illusion will be modelled and corresponding universal measure derived. Participants in VR will be embodied, so that they will have a first person perspective life-sized virtual body that moves as they do. We will exploit the concept of body ownership and its consequences for attitudinal, behavioural, cognitive and agency changes to give people unique experiences of the virtual events, and carry out a series of experiments to assess the influence of being transported back in time in a younger body has on ageing. Our recent discovery that illusory agency can be realised through virtual embodiment will be used for research on improved motor learning. To allow people to move through the environment we will investigate paradigms for virtual walking, and in particular whether the multisensory principles involved in body ownership illusions can be used to lessen simulator sickness. The long term goal of the project is to understand how to capture treasured past moments lost in time, through their reproduction in ABM inspired virtual reality.
Max ERC Funding
2 199 318 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31
