ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Digital identity management concerns the control of digitized information pertaining to a person. This type of information is usually referred to as `personal data’, or ‘personally identifiable information’. With digitisation and automation processes pervading virtually all aspects and domains of society, the routine registration of personal identifiable data is increasing exponentially. The implied risks and challenges to fundamental rights like privacy and non-discrimination are recognized on the highest policy levels, but as of today still poorly understood or analyzed. In view of the fact that ‘identity’ is also a key concept in contemporary social theory, and conceptualisations of the relation between technology and society, ethics and normativity, a field of enquiry emerges at the crossroads of contemporary theoretical, technological and societal developments representing opportunities for frontier research. The overall aims of the project are to increase understanding of the social and ethical aspects of digital identity management (IDM), to further theorising the concept of identity, and to contribute to the quality and social/ethical acceptability of technological developments. The project will achieve these goals by bringing recent insights gained from several disciplines (science and technology studies, surveillance studies, social and technology philosophy, computer ethics) to bear on actual developments in digital identity management, thus exploring novel ways to identify and articulate the issues concerned. With a series of interdisciplinary studies focussing on different application areas of IDM, we intend to produce more fine-grained knowledge of the ways IDM is implicated in contemporary transformations of identity. The programme will involve three complementary PhD projects, and one integrative postdoc project, thus achieving a strong concentration of groundbreaking knowledge on a set of fast emerging intellectual and societal problems.

1 833 000 €

Start date: 2008-10-01, End date: 2014-05-31

Irrespective of whether the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe or a Reform Treaty enters into force, the EU already has a constitution by all but name. But what does it rest on? Both the current treaties and the European Court of Justice often make reference to the national constitutions, either of one Member State individually, or as common constitutional principles and traditions. Yet, whilst the influence of EU law on national constitutional law is well documented, no thorough comprehensive comparative legal research has ever been done into these common constitutional principles. The very foundations of the European constitution have thus remained uncharted. Trans-national comparative constitutional law has been neglected in the scientific research on the European Constitution, while it should be an essential component of the analysis. This project aims to contribute to the scientific debate by going back to the fundamentals of national constitutional law. Its purpose is to analyse and structure common legal constitutional principles across EU Member States and identify constitutional diversity. To that end a team of PI and four post-docs will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the „constitutional law in action” of selected Member States, as expounded in constitutional case law, practice and texts. The functional method of comparative law will be used, analysing constitutional law as it functions in practice. Also, these themes will be analysed in an interdisciplinary fashion, taking account of other disciplines. It is this method which makes this research innovative: the national lines will be crossed, and system-neutral themes be used as a starting point, in order to formulate common principles as well as identify national diversity. It will thus advance the scientific debate on constitutionalism in the EU, and contribute to embedding it in common constitutional traditions, leaving room, where necessary, for national constitutional diversity.

1 645 056 €

Start date: 2008-09-01, End date: 2013-02-28

This project examines the governance of financial services in the European Union (EU). This research is both academically interesting and policy relevant. Academic research has not kept pace with new developments in this field, and interdisciplinary research is very much needed, as financial services governance is at the cross road between politics, economics and law. At the practical level, the financial sector is a core part of national economies and one of the most active areas of EU policy making. Moreover, this research will contribute to informing the public discussion in a policy area that is often perceived as 'technical', which tends to limit the public scrutiny of it. For the purposes of this research, the governance of financial services in the EU includes: i) the institutional framework through which policies are made; ii) regulation, which is comprised of market-making and market-framing measures; and iii) supervision, that is: the monitoring and enforcement of regulation as well as the practical cooperation between supervisory authorities. First, the project will map the complex institutional framework underpinning financial services governance in the EU, explaining how such framework interplays with regulatory and supervisory arrangements in international arenas and in selected countries. Second, through competitive hypotheses testing, the project will analyse the EU policy-making processes in the financial sector: the main policy-makers and stakeholders involved; their resources, relationships and influence on the policy process; and the outcome. Besides contributing to the policy-oriented debate on financial services regulation and supervision in the EU, the ultimate theoretical goal of the research is to devise an integrated analytical framework that by combining various theoretical approaches and identifying their scope conditions could account for financial services governance in the EU, advancing theories of EU policy making.

377 464 €

Start date: 2008-10-01, End date: 2012-03-31

Observations have shown that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. At present, there is no physically motivated model to explain this, directly demonstrating that current theories of fundamental particles and gravity are either incorrect or incomplete. Understanding this phenomenon is consequently one of the most important outstanding problems in the whole of science. Perhaps the simplest solution is to postulate a new component of energy density with an effective negative pressure that forms 75\% of the present energy density of the Universe. There are many other theoretical ideas for explaining this phenomenon, which are often collectively referred to as ``dark energy''. The research in this proposal is designed to help to understand dark energy by setting constraints on the cosmological expansion. The spatial distribution of matter and its evolution are sensitive probes of the matter/energy content of the Universe. Consequently galaxy surveys, which trace this distribution, provide key avenues for understanding dark energy through a number of different techniques. One technique, which is the focus of the research proposed here, uses ``Baryon Acoustic Oscillations'' to constrain dark energy. Baryon Acoustic Oscillations are patterns of galaxies, initiated by sound waves in the early Universe, that form a fixed scale in the Universe whose true size we know. The apparent scale of these ``standard rulers'', when observed in galaxy surveys, constrains the distance--redshift relation and consequently how dark energy is driving the acceleration of the Universe. In this proposal, I request funding to set up a team to develop the novel techniques required to extract these distance measurements from the next generation of galaxy surveys, and apply them to measure dark energy properties. This will develop European leadership in a key future field of observational cosmology.

880 000 €

Start date: 2008-10-01, End date: 2014-03-31