ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The “Concurrency Made Easy” project is an attempt to achieve a conceptual breakthrough on the most daunting challenge in information technology today: mastering concurrency. Concurrency, once a specialized technique for experts, is forcing itself onto the entire IT community because of a disruptive phenomenon: the “end of Moore’s law as we know it”. Increases in performance can no longer happen through raw hardware speed, but only through concurrency, as in multicore architectures. Concurrency is also critical for networking, cloud computing and the progress of natural sciences. Software support for these advances lags, mired in concepts from the 1960s such as semaphores. Existing formal models are hard to apply in practice. Incremental progress is not sufficient; neither are techniques that place the burden on programmers, who cannot all be expected to become concurrency experts. The CME project attempts a major shift on the side of the supporting technology: languages, formal models, verification techniques. The core idea of the CME project is to make concurrency easy for programmers, by building on established ideas of modern programming methodology (object technology, Design by Contract) shifting the concurrency difficulties to the internals of the model and implementation. The project includes the following elements. 1. Sound conceptual model for concurrency. The starting point is the influential previous work of the PI: concepts of object-oriented design, particularly Design by Contract, and the SCOOP concurrency model. 2. Reference implementation, integrated into an IDE. 3. Performance analysis. 4. Theory and formal basis, including full semantics. 5. Proof techniques, compatible with proof techniques for the sequential part. 6. Complementary verification techniques such as concurrent testing. 7. Library of concurrency components and examples. 8. Publication, including a major textbook on concurrency.

2 482 957 €

Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2018-09-30

Over the centuries, Sicily has known an unequalled variety of building experiences. Strategically located, the largest Mediterranean island has served as a centre for the dissemination of innovative solutions, as well as a collector of ideas from multiple sources. This intellectual interchange is clearly evident in the long history of stereotomy or stone construction. A rich tradition of advanced stone cutting (domes, cross vaults and complex stair solutions), evolved through experimentation and importation. Initially solutions from the Byzantine world and North Africa were influential. A wider experimentation occurred during the Renaissance. In this era new technologies often related to seismic concerns and involving the use of lighter structures stimulated innovation. The multiple earthquakes that struck the island initiated a fascinating and, in some ways, effective series of experiments in the field of anti-seismic construction technology. This project aims to investigate building criteria applied between the Middle Ages and the Modern era in the Mediterranean basin, with a particular attention to Sicily and other big islands, southern Italy, eastern Spain, North Africa and near East. Measurements, surveys, and the material knowledge of the building techniques will be intertwined with the tools of the historical investigation. Research will study geometric, constructive and formal models and chart their origins and routes of development. A most challenging aspect of the project is the verification of the flow of ideas in the Mediterranean, in order to show a less simplistic image of the history and of the civilizations that here faced. It is expected to have a relevant scientific and social impact, modifying scholars' attitude on the investigated topics and laying the foundations for a new strategy of conservation and management of the Mediterranean cultural heritage, thought as a whole, stimulating the rising of new study interests and fruition circuits.

1 203 960 €

Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2016-09-30

Linkage systems between citizens and the state have been transformed dramatically in previous decades. Structural linkages, like party membership, partisan identities and institutionalized forms of participation (e.g., voting) are in decline, while in a number of countries, political trust too has eroded. Research has shown, however, that this decline does not amount to an alienation of citizens from the political system, as non-institutionalized forms of participation and levels of political interest clearly are not caught in this downward spiral. This project starts from the concept ‘linkage’, to summarize the attitudinal and behavioral network of relations between citizens and the state, and the interaction between these components. Based on the insights of the traditional ‘civic culture’ literature, it is ascertained what consequences these emerging linkage mechanisms might have on the future stability of liberal democracy in Western societies. In the various work packages of the project we investigate the behavioral and electoral consequences of political trust, the stratification and the effectiveness of non-institutionalized forms of political participation and the interrelation between participation and attitudinal orientations toward the political system. The project culminates in a comprehensive volume, based on the question of what are the most likely consequences of changing value patterns and expanding participation repertoires for the functioning of liberal democracy. To a large extent, the empirical work packages are built on survey methods, fully exploiting the availability of recent comparative datasets. In addition we rely on case studies, interviews, content analysis and experimental methods. This project strongly builds on previous research efforts of our research unit, with the aim to arrive a theoretically founded synthesis of empirical findings.

2 476 800 €

Start date: 2012-09-01, End date: 2017-08-31

As computing platforms evolve into heterogeneous, 3D-integrated many-cores, increasing performance per unit area (or volume) comes unavoidably with growing power density, which becomes heat, leading to degradation, acceleration of chip aging and increase in cooling costs. Thermal dissipation is difficult to control at the micro-scale, where typically spatial and temporal power gradients are orders-of-magnitude higher than at the macro-scale. MultiThermMan will move beyond the unsustainable worst-case design practices adopted in traditional thermal planning and reactive thermal management. We propose to integrate thermal-aware platform design, thermal control with workload management and shaping in a distributed, multi-scale strategy. This would enable to dynamically adjust the operating mode and active cooling control of each component in complex computing platforms to achieve the highest performance compatible with temperature constraints. The development of a synergistic performance, power and thermal management strategy requires major breakthroughs in several areas, namely architectures, run-time systems, resource management middleware, code optimization tools and programming models. To meet this challenge, MultiThermMan will bring together concepts and techniques from several disciplines: computer architecture and circuits, control theory, combinatorial and continuous optimization. statistical model-building and artificial intelligence. Results will be demonstrated on physical and virtual prototypes, proving practical applicability and relevance for industrial applications.

2 483 397 €

Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2018-03-31

"Although many advances have been made in the mechatronics and computational hardware of artificial hands, the state of the art appears to be only marginally closer to a satisfactory functional approximation of the human hand than it was twenty years ago. In my analysis, the main reasons for this are not merely techni-cal, but invest some fundamental issues in the understanding of the organization and control of hands, and ultimately the lack of a theory to guide us in the search for a principled approach to taming the complexity of hands. In this project, I propose to contribute to the development of the fundamental elements of such a theory, and bring them to fruition in functional engineered devices. I expect to be able to break through the rather slowly moving front of the state of the art because of the combination of two crucial, recent innovations. The first pillar, and the prime theoretical enabler for this program, is an approach to the description of the organi-zation of the hand sensorimotor system in terms of geometric constraints, or synergies: correlations in redun-dant hand mobility (motor synergies), correlations in redundant cutaneous and kinaesthetic receptor readings (multi-cue integration), and overall sensorimotor control synergies. Elements of such theories have emerged recently in neurosciences, but their exploitation in the sciences of the artificial is an enormous potential barely touched upon till now. The second pillar, providing the new technology needed to build simpler and more effective artificial hands, is the understanding of the role of variable impedance actuation in embodying intelligent grasping and manipulation behaviours in humans, and the availability of a new generation of “robot muscles”, i.e. actuators capable of tuning their impedance to adapt to the environment and the task. These ideas will be pursued in close collaboration with specialists in related domains of neuroscience and robotics."

2 279 600 €

Start date: 2012-06-01, End date: 2017-05-31