ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The rise of atmospheric O2 ~2,500 million years ago is one of the most profound transitions in Earth's history. Yet, despite its central role in shaping Earth's surface environment, the cause for the rise of O2 remains poorly understood. Tight coupling between the O2 cycle and the biogeochemical cycles of redox-active elements, such as C, Fe and S, implies radical changes in these cycles before, during and after the rise of O2. These changes, too, are incompletely understood, but have left valuable information encoded in the geological record. This information has been qualitatively interpreted, leaving many aspects of the rise of O2, including its causes and constraints on ocean chemistry before and after it, topics of ongoing research and debate. Here, I outline a research program to address this fundamental question in geochemical Earth systems evolution. The inherently interdisciplinary program uniquely integrates laboratory experiments, numerical models, geological observations, and geochemical analyses. Laboratory experiments and geological observations will constrain unknown parameters of the early biogeochemical cycles, and, in combination with field studies, will validate and refine the use of paleoenvironmental proxies. The insight gained will be used to develop detailed models of the coupled biogeochemical cycles, which will themselves be used to quantitatively understand the events surrounding the rise of O2, and to illuminate the dynamics of elemental cycles in the early oceans. This program is expected to yield novel, quantitative insight into these important events in Earth history and to have a major impact on our understanding of early ocean chemistry and the rise of O2. An ERC Starting Grant will enable me to use the excellent experimental and computational facilities at my disposal, to access the outstanding human resource at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and to address one of the major open questions in modern geochemistry.

1 472 690 €

Start date: 2013-09-01, End date: 2018-08-31

"The first decade of Algorithmic Mechanism Design (AMD) concentrated, very successfully, on the design of truthful mechanisms for the allocation of resources among agents with private preferences. Truthful mechanisms are ones that incentivize rational users to report their preferences truthfully. Truthfulness, however, for all its theoretical appeal, suffers from several inherent limitations, mainly its high communication and computation complexities. It is not surprising, therefore, that practical applications forego truthfulness and use simpler mechanisms instead. Simplicity in itself, however, is not sufficient, as any meaningful mechanism should also have some notion of fairness; otherwise agents will stop using it over time. In this project I plan to develop an innovative AMD theoretical framework that will go beyond truthfulness and focus instead on the natural themes of simplicity and fairness, in addition to computational tractability. One of my primary goals will be the design of simple and fair poly-time mechanisms that perform at near optimal levels with respect to important economic objectives such as social welfare and revenue. To this end, I will work toward providing precise definitions of simplicity and fairness and quantifying the effects of these restrictions on the performance levels that can be obtained. A major challenge in the evaluation of non-truthful mechanisms is defining a reasonable behavior model that will enable their evaluation. The success of this project could have a broad impact on Europe and beyond, as it would guide the design of natural mechanisms for markets of tens of billions of dollars in revenue, such as online advertising, or sales of wireless frequencies. The timing of this project is ideal, as the AMD field is now sufficiently mature to lead to a breakthrough and at the same time young enough to be receptive to new approaches and themes."

1 394 600 €

Start date: 2013-11-01, End date: 2018-10-31

Quantum Chaos is an emerging discipline which is crossing over from Physics into Pure Mathematics. The recent crossover is driven in part by a connection with Number Theory. This project explores several aspects of this interrelationship and is composed of a number of sub-projects. The sub-projects deal with: statistics of energy levels and wave functions of pseudo-integrable systems, a hitherto unexplored subject in the mathematical community which is not well understood in the physics community; with statistics of zeros of zeta functions over function fields, a purely number theoretic topic which is linked to the subproject on Quantum Chaos through the mysterious connections to Random Matrix Theory and an analogy between energy levels and zeta zeros; and with spatial statistics in arithmetic.

1 714 000 €

Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31

Next generation sequencing (NGS) is revolutionizing all fields of biological research but it fails to extract the full range of information associated with genetic material and is lacking in its ability to resolve variations between genomes. The high degree of genome variation exhibited both on the population level as well as between genetically “identical” cells (even in the same organ) makes genetic and epigenetic analysis on the single cell and single genome level a necessity. Chromosomes may be conceptually represented as a linear one-dimensional barcode. However, in contrast to a traditional binary barcode approach that considers only two possible bits of information (1 & 0), I will use colour and molecular structure to expand the variety of information represented in the barcode. Like colourful beads threaded on a string, where each bead represents a distinct type of observable, I will label each type of genomic information with a different chemical moiety thus expanding the repertoire of information that can be simultaneously measured. A major effort in this proposal is invested in the development of unique chemistries to enable this labelling. I specifically address three types of genomic variation: Variations in genomic layout (including DNA repeats, structural and copy number variations), variations in the patterns of chemical DNA modifications (such as methylation of cytosine bases) and variations in the chromatin composition (including nucleosome and transcription factor distributions). I will use physical extension of long DNA molecules on surfaces and in nanofluidic channels to reveal this information visually in the form of a linear, fluorescent “barcode” that is read-out by advanced imaging techniques. Similarly, DNA molecules will be threaded through a nanopore where the sequential position of “bulky” molecular groups attached to the DNA may be inferred from temporal modulation of an ionic current measured across the pore.

1 627 600 €

Start date: 2013-10-01, End date: 2018-09-30

We propose to establish a research group that will unveil the combinatorial nature of the second uncountable cardinal. This includes its Ramsey-theoretic, order-theoretic, graph-theoretic and topological features. Among others, we will be directly addressing fundamental problems due to Erdos, Rado, Galvin, and Shelah. While some of these problems are old and well-known, an unexpected series of breakthroughs from the last three years suggest that now is a promising point in time to carry out such a project. Indeed, through a short period, four previously unattainable problems concerning the second uncountable cardinal were successfully tackled: Aspero on a club-guessing problem of Shelah, Krueger on the club-isomorphism problem for Aronszajn trees, Neeman on the isomorphism problem for dense sets of reals, and the PI on the Souslin problem. Each of these results was obtained through the development of a completely new technical framework, and these frameworks could now pave the way for the solution of some major open questions. A goal of the highest risk in this project is the discovery of a consistent (possibly, parameterized) forcing axiom that will (preferably, simultaneously) provide structure theorems for stationary sets, linearly ordered sets, trees, graphs, and partition relations, as well as the refutation of various forms of club-guessing principles, all at the level of the second uncountable cardinal. In comparison, at the level of the first uncountable cardinal, a forcing axiom due to Foreman, Magidor and Shelah achieves exactly that. To approach our goals, the proposed project is divided into four core areas: Uncountable trees, Ramsey theory on ordinals, Club-guessing principles, and Forcing Axioms. There is a rich bilateral interaction between any pair of the four different cores, but the proposed division will allow an efficient allocation of manpower, and will increase the chances of parallel success.

1 362 500 €

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

"In the course of biomineralization, organisms produce a large variety of functional biogenic crystals that exhibit fascinating mechanical, optical, magnetic and other characteristics. More specifically, when living organisms grow crystals they can effectively control polymorph selection as well as the crystal morphology, shape, and even atomic structure. Materials existing in nature have extraordinary and specific functions, yet the materials employed in nature are quite different from those engineers would select. I propose to emulate specific strategies used by organisms in forming structural biogenic crystals, and to apply these strategies biomimetically so as to form new structural materials with new properties and characteristics. This bio-inspired approach will involve the adoption of three specific biological strategies. We believe that this procedure will open up new ways to control the structure and properties of smart materials. The three bio-inspired strategies that we will utilize are: (i) to control the short-range order of amorphous materials, making it possible to predetermine the polymorph obtained when they transform from the amorphous to the succeeding crystalline phase; (ii) to control the morphology of single crystals of various functional materials so that they can have intricate and curved surfaces and yet maintain their single-crystal nature; (iii) to entrap organic molecules into single crystals of functional materials so as to tailor and manipulate their electronic structure. The proposed research has significant potential for opening up new routes for the formation of novel functional materials. Specifically, it will make it possible for us (1) to produce single, intricately shaped crystals without the need to etch, drill or polish; (2) to control the short-range order of amorphous materials and hence the polymorph of the successive crystalline phase; (3) to tune the band gap of semiconductors via incorporation of tailored bio-molecules."

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2013-09-01, End date: 2018-08-31

Resolution of singularities is one of classical, central and difficult areas of algebraic geometry, with a centennial history of intensive research and contributions of such great names as Zariski, Hironaka and Abhyankar. Nowadays, desingularization of schemes of characteristic zero is very well understood, while semistable reduction of morphisms and desingularization in positive characteristic are still waiting for major breakthroughs. In addition to the classical techniques with their triumph in characteristic zero, modern resolution of singularities includes de Jong's method of alterations, toroidal methods, formal analytic and non-archimedean methods, etc. The aim of the proposed research is to study nearly all directions in resolution of singularities and semistable reduction, as well as the wild ramification phenomena, which are probably the main obstacle to transfer methods from characteristic zero to positive characteristic. The methods of algebraic and non-archimedean geometries are intertwined in the proposal, though algebraic geometry is somewhat dominating, especially due to the new stack-theoretic techniques. It seems very probable that increasing the symbiosis between birational and non-archimedean geometries will be one of by-products of this research.

1 365 600 €

Start date: 2018-05-01, End date: 2023-04-30

The study of synthetic molecular networks is of fundamental importance for understanding the organizational principles of biological systems and may well be the key to unraveling the origins of life. In addition, such systems may be useful for parallel synthesis of molecules, implementation of catalysis via multi-step pathways, and as media for various applications in nano-medicine and nano-electronics. We have been involved recently in developing peptide-based replicating networks and revealed their dynamic characteristics. We argue here that the structural information embedded in the polypeptide chains is sufficiently rich to allow the construction of peptide 'Systems Chemistry', namely, to facilitate the use of replicating networks as cell-mimetics, featuring complex dynamic behavior. To bring this novel idea to reality, we plan to take a unique holistic approach by studying such networks both experimentally and via simulations, for elucidating basic-principles and towards applications in adjacent fields, such as molecular electronics. Towards realizing these aims, we will study three separate but inter-related objectives: (i) design and characterization of networks that react and rewire in response to external triggers, such as light, (ii) design of networks that operate via new dynamic rules of product formation that lead to oscillations, and (iii) exploitation of the molecular information gathered from the networks as means to control switching and gating in molecular electronic devices. We believe that achieving the project's objectives will be highly significant for the development of the arising field of Systems Chemistry, and in addition will provide valuable tools for studying related scientific fields, such as systems biology and molecular electronics.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2015-09-30

An important form of negotiation is argumentation. This is the ability to argue and to persuade the other party to accept a desired agreement, to acquire or give information, to coordinate goals and actions, and to find and verify evidence. This is a key capability in negotiating with humans. While automated negotiations between software agents can often exchange offers and counteroffers, humans require persuasion. This challenges the design of agents arguing with people, with the objective that the outcome of the negotiation will meet the preferences of the arguer agent. CAP’s objective is to enable automated agents to argue and persuade humans. To achieve this, we intend to develop the following key components: 1) The extension of current game theory models of persuasion and bargaining to more realistic settings, 2) Algorithms and heuristics for generation and evaluation of arguments during negotiation with people, 3) Algorithms and heuristics for managing inconsistent views of the negotiation environment, and decision procedures for revelation, signalling, and requesting information, 4) The revision and update of the agent’s mental state and incorporation of social context, 5) Identifying strategies for expressing emotions in negotiations, 6) Technology for general opponent modelling from sparse and noisy data. To demonstrate the developed methods, we will implement two training systems for people to improve their interviewing capabilities, and for training negotiators in inter-culture negotiations. CAP will revolutionise the state of the art of automated systems negotiating with people. It will also create breakthroughs in the research of multi-agent systems in general, and will change paradigms by providing new directions for the way computers interact with people.

2 334 057 €

Start date: 2011-07-01, End date: 2016-06-30