ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

AncientAdhesives addresses the most crucial problem in Palaeolithic archaeology: How to reliably infer cognitively complex behaviour in the deep past. To study the evolution of Neandertal and modern human cognitive capacities, certain find categories are taken to reflect behavioural and thus cognitive complexitye.g. Among these are art objects, personal ornaments and complex technology. Of these technology is best-suited to trace changing behavioural complexity, because 1) it is the least vulnerable to differential preservation, and 2) technological behaviours are present throughout the history of our genus. Adhesives are the oldest examples of highly complex technology. They are also known earlier from Neandertal than from modern human contexts. Understanding their technological complexity is thus essential to resolve debates on differences in cognitive complexity of both species. However, currently, there is no agreed-upon method to measure technological complexity. The aim of AncientAdhesives is to create the first reliable method to compare the complexity of Neandertal and modern human technologies. This is achieved through three main objectives: 1. Collate the first comprehensive body of knowledge on adhesives, including ethnography, archaeology and (experimental) material properties (e.g. preservation, production). 2. Develop a new archaeological methodology by modifying industrial process modelling for archaeological applications. 3. Evaluate the development of adhesive technological complexity through time and across species using a range of explicit complexity measures. By analysing adhesives, it is possible to measure technological complexity, to identify idiosyncratic behaviours and to track adoption and loss of complex technological know-how. This represents a step-change in debates about the development of behavioural complexity and differences/similarities between Neanderthals and modern humans.

1 499 926 €

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

"Our digital society critically relies on protection of data and communication against espionage and cyber crime. Underlying all protection mechanisms is cryptography, which we are using daily to protect, for example, internet communication or e-banking. This protection is threatened by the dawn of universal quantum computers, which will break large parts of the cryptography in use today. Transitioning current cryptographic algorithms to crypto that resist attacks by large quantum computers, so called ""post-quantum cryptography"", is possibly the largest challenge applied cryptography is facing since becoming a domain of public research in the second half of the last century. Large standardization bodies, most prominently ETSI and NIST, have started efforts to evaluate concrete proposals of post-quantum crypto for standardization and deployment. NIST's effort follows in the tradition of successful public ""crypto competitions"" with strong involvement by the academic cryptographic community. It is expected to run through the next 5 years. This project will tackle the engineering challenges of post-quantum cryptography following two main research directions. The first direction investigates implementation characteristics of submissions to NIST for standardization. These include speed on various platforms, code size, and RAM usage. Furthermore we will study so-called side-channel attacks and propose suitable countermeasures. Side-channel attacks use information such as timing or power consumption of cryptographic devices to obtain secret information. The second direction is about protocol integration. We will examine how different real-world cryptographic protocols can accommodate the drastically different performance characteristics of post-quantum cryptography, explore what algorithms suit best the requirements of common usage scenarios of these protocols, and investigate if changes to the high-level protocol layer are advisable to improve overall system performance."

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30

For European historiography, it is self-evident that diaries, correspondences, and other personal documents provide crucial insights not only into how individuals thought about certain issues, but also in how the authors expressed their individuality, and how they saw their active role in history. This holds true both for prominent and ordinary persons, and for a whole variety of genres. In the historiography of Muslim societies, expressions of individuality are rarely ever problematized; the individual is often seen merely as part of a faith community, and the writings of individuals are more often than not just treated as a source for factual information on Islam, politics, or broader social phenomena, not as an effort of personal self-reflection. By analyzing practices of individualization in the personal archives of Muslims in Russia, this program places the Muslim subject at the center. How does a person engage with the Islamic tradition, with the demands of the state and the non-Muslim majority society, but also with other individuals, to design his or her conception of the self (Ar., shakhsiyya)? How is this individuality communicated to others, in letters about love, friendship, or a plethora of other personal matters (SP1)? What is the role of aesthetics in the narratives of the Muslim subject – how does a self-concept obtain a literary form, for instance when experiences are turned into poetry (SP2)? How do Muslims characterize other Muslims when they produce biographies (SP3), and how do they portray themselves in autobiographies (SP4)? And finally, how do Muslims employ photography for expressing their individuality, their belonging to tradition or to the contrary their difference; and how did visual self-conceptions develop, according to personal tastes, values, attitudes, and by mobilizing certain historical heritages (SP5)? Designed according to archival genres, the subprojects contribute to the central hypothesis of a Muslim culture of individuality.

1 499 148 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31

Integer programming (IP), i.e. linear optimization with integrality constraints on variables, is one of the most successful methods for solving large scale optimization problems in practice. While many of the base IP problems such as the traveling salesman problem (TSP) or satisfiability (SAT) are NP-Complete, IPs with tens of thousands of variables are routinely solved in just a few hours by current state of the art IP solvers. The main goal of this proposal is to develop a quantitative theory capable of explaining when and how well different IP solver techniques will work on a wide range of instances. Here we will study many of the principal tools used to solve IPs including branch & bound, the simplex method, cutting planes and rounding heuristics. Our first direction of study will be to develop parametrized classes of instances, inspired by the structure of realistic models, on which branch & bound and the simplex method are provably efficient. The second research direction will be to develop alternatives to ad hoc rounding heuristics and cutting plane selection strategies with provable guarantees and provide their applications to important classes of IPs. Lastly, we will explore the power and limitations of IP techniques in the context of algorithm design by comparing them to powerful techniques in theoretical computer science and analyzing their worst-case performance for solving general integer programs. While the main thrust of this proposal is theoretical, it will be complimented by an experimental component performed in collaboration with well-known experts in computational IP, both to gain valuable insights on the structure of real-world instances and to validate the effectiveness newly suggested approaches. The proposed research is designed to make breakthroughs in our quantitative understanding of IP techniques, many of which have long resisted theoretical analysis.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31