ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Membranes are key materials in our life. Nature offers high performance membranes relying on a parallel local regulation of nanopore structure, functional placement, membrane composition and architecture. Existing technological membranes are key materials in separation, recycling, sensing, energy conversion, being essential components for a sustainable future. But their performance is far away from their natural counterparts. One reason for this performance gap is the lack of 3D nanolocal control in membrane design. This applies to each individual nanopore but as well to the membrane architecture. This proposal aims to implement 3D printing (additive manufacturing, top down) and complex near-field and total internal reflection (TIR) high resolution microscopy induced polymer writing (bottom up) to nanolocally control in hierarchical nanoporous membranes spatially and independent of each other: porosity, pore functionalization, membrane architecture, composition. This disruptive technology platform will make accessible to date unachieved, highly accurate asymmetric nanopores and multifunctional, hierarchical membrane architecture/ composition and thus highly selective, directed, transport with tuneable rates. 3D-FNPWriting will demonstrate this for the increasing class of metal nanoparticle/ salt pollutants aiming for tuneable, selective, directed transport based monitoring and recycling instead of size-based filtration, accumulation into sewerage and distribution into nature. Specifically, the potential of this disruptive technology with respect to transport design will be demonstrated for a) a 3D-printed in-situ functionalized nanoporous fiber architecture and b) a printed, nanolocally near-field and TIR-microscopy polymer functionalized membrane representing a thin separation layer. This will open systematic understanding of nanolocal functional control on transport and new perspectives in water/ energy management for future smart industry/ homes.

1 499 844 €

Start date: 2019-04-01, End date: 2024-03-31

Goal of the 4DPHOTON project is the development and construction of a photon imaging detector with unprecedented performance. The proposed device will be capable of detecting fluxes of single-photons up to one billion photons per second, over areas of several square centimetres, and will measure - for each photon - position and time simultaneously with resolutions better than ten microns and few tens of picoseconds, respectively. These figures of merit will open many important applications allowing significant advances in particle physics, life sciences or other emerging fields where excellent timing and position resolutions are simultaneously required. Our goal will be achieved thanks to the use of an application-specific integrated circuit in 65 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, that will deliver a timing resolution of few tens of picoseconds at the pixel level, over few hundred thousand individually-active pixel channels, allowing very high rates of photons to be detected, and the corresponding information digitized and transferred to a processing unit. As a result of the 4DPHOTON project we will remove the constraints that many light imaging applications have due to the lack of precise single-photon information on four dimensions (4D): the three spatial coordinates and time simultaneously. In particular, we will prove the performance of this detector in the field of particle physics, performing the reconstruction of Cherenkov photon rings with a timing resolution of ten picoseconds. With its excellent granularity, timing resolution, rate capability and compactness, this detector will represent a new paradigm for the realisation of future Ring Imaging Cherenkov detectors, capable of achieving high efficiency particle identification in environments with very high particle multiplicities, exploiting time-association of the photon hits.

1 975 000 €

Start date: 2019-12-01, End date: 2024-11-30

The cell cortex is a highly dynamic layer of crosslinked actin filaments and myosin molecular motors beneath the cell membrane. It plays a central role in large scale rearrangements that occur inside cells. Many molecular mechanisms contribute to cortex structure and dynamics. However, cell scale physical properties of the cortex are difficult to grasp. This is problematic because for large scale rearrangements inside a cell, such as coherent flow of the cell cortex, it is the cell scale emergent properties that are important for the realization of such events. I will investigate how the actomyosin cytoskeleton behaves at a coarse grained and cellular scale, and will study how this emergent active behaviour is influenced by molecular mechanisms. We will study the cell cortex in the one cell stage C. elegans embryo, which undergoes large scale cortical flow during polarization and cytokinesis. We will combine theory and experiment. We will characterize cortex structure and dynamics with biophysical techniques such as cortical laser ablation and quantitative photobleaching experiments. We will develop and employ novel theoretical approaches to describe the cell scale mechanical behaviour in terms of an active complex fluid. We will utilize genetic approaches to understand how these emergent mechanical properties are influenced by molecular activities. A central goal is to arrive at a coarse grained description of the cortex that can predict future dynamic behaviour from the past structure, which is conceptually similar to how weather forecasting is accomplished. To date, systematic approaches to link molecular scale physical mechanisms to those on cellular scales are missing. This work will open new opportunities for cell biological and cell biophysical research, by providing a methodological approach for bridging scales, for studying emergent and large-scale active mechanical behaviours and linking them to molecular mechanisms.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2011-12-01, End date: 2017-08-31

Even after three decades of research on human-computer interaction (HCI), current general-purpose user interfaces (UI) still lack the ability to attribute mental states to their users, i.e. they fail to understand users' intentions and needs and to anticipate their actions. This drastically restricts their interactive capabilities. ANTICIPATE aims to establish the scientific foundations for a new generation of user interfaces that pro-actively adapt to users' future input actions by monitoring their attention and predicting their interaction intentions - thereby significantly improving the naturalness, efficiency, and user experience of the interactions. Realising this vision of anticipatory human-computer interaction requires groundbreaking advances in everyday sensing of user attention from eye and brain activity. We will further pioneer methods to predict entangled user intentions and forecast interactive behaviour with fine temporal granularity during interactions in everyday stationary and mobile settings. Finally, we will develop fundamental interaction paradigms that enable anticipatory UIs to pro-actively adapt to users' attention and intentions in a mindful way. The new capabilities will be demonstrated in four challenging cases: 1) mobile information retrieval, 2) intelligent notification management, 3) Autism diagnosis and monitoring, and 4) computer-based training. Anticipatory human-computer interaction offers a strong complement to existing UI paradigms that only react to user input post-hoc. If successful, ANTICIPATE will deliver the first important building blocks for implementing Theory of Mind in general-purpose UIs. As such, the project has the potential to drastically improve the billions of interactions we perform with computers every day, to trigger a wide range of follow-up research in HCI as well as adjacent areas within and outside computer science, and to act as a key technical enabler for new applications, e.g. in healthcare and education.

1 499 625 €

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