ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Uncertainty is everywhere, as the saying goes, but rarely considered in ethical reflections. This project aims to reinterpret ethical discussions on current advances in biomedicine: instead of understanding bioethical positions as extensions of classical normative views in ethics (consequentialism, deontologism, contractualism etc.), my project interprets them more accurately as involving various normative approaches to decision making under uncertainty. The following hard cases in bioethics provide the motivation for research: 1) Regulating scientific research under uncertainty about the ontological/moral status (e.g. parthenogenetic stem cells derived from human parthenotes) in the context of meta-reasoning under normative uncertainty. 2) The value of preventive medicine in healthcare (e.g. vaccinations) in the context of decision-making under metaphysical indeterminacy. 3) Population or reproductive decisions (e.g. preimplantation genetic diagnosis) in the context of valuing mere existence. The main drive behind this project is the rapid progress in biomedical research combined with new kinds of uncertainties. These new and “deep” uncertainties trigger specific forms of emotions and cognitions that influence normative judgments and decisions. The main research questions that will be addressed by conceptual analysis, new psychological experiments, and case studies are the following: how do the heuristics and biases (H&B) documented by behavioral scientists influence the formation of normative judgments in bioethical contexts; how to demarcate between distorted and undistorted value judgments; to what extent is it permissible for individuals or policy makers to yield to H&B. The hypothesis is that many existing bioethical rules, regulations, practices seem to have emerged from unreliable reactions, rather than by means of deliberation on the possible justifications for alternative ways to decide about them under several layers and types of uncertainty.

1 499 625 €

Start date: 2019-02-01, End date: 2024-01-31

The main goal of the project is to radically expand our understanding of decomposition methods for discrete problems, with a particular focus on the design of parameterized and approximation algorithms on graphs. We will concentrate on four topics where we see a potential for either establishing new directions, or reaching far beyond the current state of the art. (Beyond) Sparsity: The field of Sparsity is a rapidly developing area of graph theory that studies abstract notions of uniform sparseness in graphs and provides a wealth of tools for algorithm design. While there are still many unknowns within this field, we would like to reach beyond sparse graphs by developing a theory of well-structured dense graphs, inspired by the advances in Sparsity. Parameterized dynamic algorithms: The idea of parameterization has so far received little attention in the field of dynamic algorithms. Our goal is to establish solid foundations for the direction of parameterized dynamic algorithms by providing dynamic variants of basic decomposition tools used in parameterized complexity. Parameterization and approximation on planar graphs: The areas of parameterized algorithms and of approximation schemes on planar graphs share a core set of decomposition techniques and benefit from extensive cross-inspiration. We will approach several intriguing questions in this area while focusing on the idea of parameterized approximation schemes, where parameterization and approximation is explicitly combined. Forbidding induced subgraphs: Structural graph theory offers a wealth of tools for understanding structure in graph classes characterized by forbidding induced subgraphs. This structure, while elusive and difficult to exploit, often leads to surprising tractability results. Motivated by recent advances, we propose to focus on finding general-use techniques for designing subexponential-time, approximation, and parameterized algorithms in this setting.

1 355 688 €

Start date: 2021-04-01, End date: 2026-03-31

This project is about the design of cryptographic schemes that are secure even if implemented on not-secure devices. The motivation for this problem comes from an observation that most of the real-life attacks on cryptographic devices do not break their mathematical foundations, but exploit vulnerabilities of their implementations. This concerns both the cryptographic software executed on PCs (that can be attacked by viruses), and the implementations on hardware (that can be subject to the side-channel attacks). Traditionally fixing this problem was left to the practitioners, since it was a common belief that theory cannot be of any help here. However, new exciting results in cryptography suggest that this view was too pessimistic: there exist methods to design cryptographic protocols in such a way that they are secure even if the hardware on which they are executed cannot be fully trusted. The goal of this project is to investigate these methods further, unify them in a solid mathematical theory (many of them were developed independently), and propose new ideas in this area. The project will be mostly theoretical (although some practical experiments may be performed). Our main interest lies within the theory of private circuits, bounded-retrieval model, physically-observable cryptography, and human-assisted cryptography. We view these theories just as the departing points, since the area is very fresh and we expect to soon witness completely new ideas in this field.

872 550 €

Start date: 2008-11-01, End date: 2013-10-31

"At the core of this research proposal is the aim of reconstructing and understanding the nature, exact trajectories, mechanisms and implications of cross-cultural contact and transfers between Europeans and the native people of the Americas, focusing on, but not limited to, the Nahuatl-speaking zone of central Mexico. A major innovation of this project is to study this process of cross-cultural communication in its full historical depth, through the colonial and postcolonial eras up to the present day and encompassing different stages and types of contact. The meticulous and cross-disciplinary study of an extensive body of texts in Nahuatl (“Aztec”) and Spanish, complemented by present-day ethnolinguistic data, will make it possible to deduce and understand patterns across time and space in ways novel to existing scholarship, embracing both micro- and macroregional trends. The proposed research starts with identifying transfers in language, studied systematically through the creation of extensive databases, but leads to exploring the substance of cross-cultural transfer and the essence of developments, becoming a fundamental way of studying culture and its transformations. Thus, an important aim is the correlation of language phenomena with more general contact-induced culture change, including especially evolving forms of political, social and municipal organization in the native world, where the change is more salient. Breaking existing disciplinary boundaries in the humanities, the project embraces both indigenous and European perspectives, assuming that the innovation of studying both sides in a single framework and in the proposed time span is particularly promising in dealing with a notably two-sided, prolonged historical process. The complementary lines of research, native and Spanish, are expected to highlight and make understandable factors underlying and facilitating cultural convergence between them in different aspects of colonial life and beyond."

1 318 840 €

Start date: 2012-12-01, End date: 2017-11-30