ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

With the prevalence of mobile computing devices and the increasing availability of pervasive services, ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp) is a reality for many people. This reality is generating opportunities for people to interact socially in new and richer ways, and to work more effectively in a variety of new environments. More generally, Ubicomp infrastructures – controlled by software – will determine users’ access to critical services. With these opportunities come higher risks of misuse by malicious agents. Therefore, the role and design of software for managing use and protecting against misuse is critical, and the engineering of software that is both functionally effective while safe guarding user assets from harm is a key challenge. Indeed the very nature of Ubicomp means that software must adapt to the changing needs of users and their environment, and, more critically, to the different threats to users’ security and privacy. ASAP proposes to radically re-conceptualise software engineering for Ubicomp in ways that are cognisant of the changing functional needs of users, of the changing threats to user assets, and of the changing relationships between them. We propose to deliver adaptive software capabilities for supporting users in managing their privacy requirements, and adaptive software capabilities to deliver secure software that underpin those requirements. A key novelty of our approach is its holistic treatment of security and human behaviour. To achieve this, it draws upon contributions from requirements engineering, security & privacy engineering, and human-computer interaction. Our aim is to contribute to software engineering that empowers and protects Ubicomp users. Underpinning our approach will be the development of representations of security and privacy problem structures that capture user requirements, the context in which those requirements arise, and the adaptive software that aims to meet those requirements.

2 499 041 €

Start date: 2012-10-01, End date: 2018-09-30

This proposal outlines a cutting-edge five year project which will push the frontiers of colour category research, and will resonate throughout the cognitive and social sciences. Humans can discriminate millions of colours (Zeki, 1993), yet language refers to colour using a number of discrete categories (e.g., red, green, blue). These colour categories are also present in ‘thought’ (e.g., in colour judgements / memory). There has been considerable multidisciplinary research into the origin of colour categories and how colour categories in thought and language relate. However, major theoretical challenges remain. The ‘CATEGORIES’ project, led by Franklin, will tackle these crucial challenges with the aim of establishing a new theoretical framework for the field. So far, Franklin has made a major contribution to the field by providing converging evidence that infants categorise colour. The ‘CATEGORIES’ project will investigate new ground-breaking questions on the relationship of these ‘pre-linguistic’ colour categories to the world’s colour lexicons, using a diverse range of methods (e.g., infant testing, computational simulations, psychophysics). The project also aims to resolve the long standing debate about the impact of colour terms on perception (e.g., Whorf, 1956), pioneering a ‘Neuro-Whorfian’ approach to the debate. This approach will use neuro-physiological methods to firmly establish the extent to which speakers of different languages ‘see’ colour differently. The new questions, approaches, data and theory provided by the ‘CATEGORIES’ project, will lead to major advances in colour category research. The project will also lead to major advances on issues that are fundamental to understanding the complexity of the human mind (e.g., the interaction of language and thought; how the brain categorises the visual world), having impact across multiple disciplines (e.g., cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, psychology), as well as practical application.

1 480 265 €

Start date: 2012-05-01, End date: 2018-01-31

The cost of software quality assurance (QA) dominates the cost of IT development and maintenance projects. QA is frequently on the critical path to market. Effective software QA is therefore decisive for the competitiveness of numerous industries that rely on IT, and essential for government tasks that rely heavily on IT. This research programme will provide a pragmatic solution to the most pressing issue in software QA in mainstream software engineering: the use of concurrency. Programmers make use of numerous favors of concurrency in order to achieve better scalability, savings in power, increase reliability, and to boost performance. The need for software that makes diligent use of concurrent computational resources has been exacerbated by power-efficient multi-core CPUs, which are now widely deployed, but still unfertilized due to the lack of appropriate software. Concurrent software is particularly difficult to test, as bugs depend on particular interlavings between the sequential computations. Defects are therefore difficult to reproduce and diagnose, and often elude even very experienced programmers. We propose to develop new, ground-braking reasoning and testing technology for this kind of software, with the goal of cutting the staff effort in QA of concurrent effort in half. We will use a tightly integrated combination of scalable and performant testing technology and Model Checking and abstract interpretation engines to prune the search. Every aspect of the research programme is geared towards improving the productivity of the average application programmer. Our theories and reasoning technology will therefore be implemented in a seamless fashion within the existing, well-accepted programming environments Visual Studio and Eclipse, in close collaboration with Microsoft and IBM.

1 368 355 €

Start date: 2011-12-01, End date: 2017-11-30

Knowledge of the last 1000 years in the West African Sahel comes largely from historical sources, which say that many regions were ruled by vast polities. The aim of my archaeological project is to seize how, in fact, lhe 'empires' of this region structured the landscape, and the movemenl of peoples, ideas, and things, with a focus on the period AD 1200-1850. Is 'empire' really a useful term? I will confront historical evidence with archaeological data from one area at the intersection of several polities: the dallols in Niger. This area is rich in remains, said to result from population movements and processes of religious and political change, but these remains have been only briefly described so far. As this region is a key area of migrations and cross-influences, it is the ideal 'laboratory' for exploring the materialisation of contacts and boundaries, through a mapping of material culture distributions. My project will approach these sites holistically, carrying out archaeological regional survey and prospection. Excavation will indicate chronology and cultural affiliation. At lhe same time, I will take an interdisciplinary approach, using anthropological and oral-historical enquiries to obtain background information to test hypotheses generated by the archaeological data. Enquiries will assess how material culture can show group belonging and population shifts, and examine the role of individuals called 'technical specialists'. This will help solve the current impasse in our understanding of vast empires which, though they are historically known, remain poorly understood. My project will not just improve our knowledge of an almost-unknown part of the world, but thanks to its geographical location, interdisciplinary nature and strong thematic framework, open up avenues of thinking about the relalion between archaeological and historical data, the mediation of relations through artefacts, and the archaeology of empires, all widely-relevant research issues

893 161 €

Start date: 2011-01-01, End date: 2015-12-31

This project involves developing and applying new methods in palaeography, bringing digital resources to bear in innovative ways. It comprises three components: a web resource, a database, and a monograph. The web resource will allow the study of medieval script in the context of the manuscripts and charters that preserve it. It will focus on discovery and citation, allowing users to retrieve digital images, verbal descriptions, and detailed characterisations of the writing, as well as the larger context including the content and structure of the manuscript or charter. It will incorporate different ways of exploring the material such as images, maps and timelines as well as text-based browse and search. It will provide a flexible, extensible framework to integrate external data-sources and so applies to any period or area of palaeography. It will therefore enable new developments in palaeographical method which have been discussed in theory but not yet achieved in practice. To demonstrate these methods, content will be provided for handwriting from England in the vernacular, particularly that of AD 990-1100. This period saw rapid change in vernacular script despite relative stability in that of Latin, something that has never been fully explained. This problem will be addressed by integrating existing datasets but also by producing and incorporating an entirely new database of scripts. The result will provide access to the complete corpus of surviving examples of the script for the first time, bringing an unprecedented rigour to palaeographical analysis. A monograph will then draw on this research, demonstrating the new methods in practice and providing the first comprehensive account of English vernacular script from the period. The work will address issues in Digital Humanities (integration, interface design, visualisation and standards), in palaeographical method (quantitative methods, terminology and evidential rigour), and in the history of vernacular script

995 531 €

Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2014-09-30

The project aims to bring about a paradigm shift in our understanding of how the ancients conceived of the universe and its contents over a period of 9 centuries, 600 BC to 300 AD. The driving research hypothesis is that the sole elementary building blocks of nearly all ancient ontologies are powers, from which all there is in the universe is built. Powers are relational properties which are directed towards an end (e.g. the power to heat); thus a world of powers is structured in a web of causal relations. What is revolutionary about such a world is that there is only structure in it; hence, causal structuralist ontologies underlie object-metaphysics or process-metaphysics, and worlds of being and becoming, supplying structures from which objects and processes are derived. Yet such ontologies have never been investigated about ancient thought. The project’s topic is new: ancient causal structuralism; the speciality is novel too, requiring targeted training of a team of post-doc researchers which will be provided by the applicant and collaborators. The innovativeness of the methodology consists in training ancient philosophy researchers to discern and identify formal aspects of ontologies at the very roots of human rationality – discerning how the ancients built everything out of power structures. The paradigm shift will generate new knowledge and understanding about the ancient accounts of the world; provide a heuristic vantage point for redrafting the map of the intellectual influences between ancient thinkers; stimulate fruitful debate; and inspire new insights into ancient thought that are literally unthinkable at present. Cognate disciplines that will be affected by the paradigm shift are such as: history of physics; of mathematics; of theology; ancient anthropology.

1 228 581 €

Start date: 2011-04-01, End date: 2016-03-31

The five-year EngLaId project will look at the long-term history of the English landscape from 1500 BC to AD 1086, combining evidence on landscape features, such as track-ways,fields and settlements, with the distribution of metalwork. The project aims to understand how people built relations with each other and broader cosmological forces from the start of the settled landscape to the early Medieval world. The project will combine a mass of digital data on landscapes and artefacts to uncover both continuity and change over 2500 years throwing a new light on the nature of pre-modern communities, contributing method and theory which can have model value in other areas of Europe.

2 059 935 €

Start date: 2011-08-01, End date: 2016-12-31

Although there are many types of cognitive ability, they correlate substantially; general cognitive ability (g) indexes this covariance and is an important predictor of many key life outcomes. The PI’s 40-year programme of research has contributed to a once controversial finding that is now widely accepted: Individual differences in g are substantially influenced by genes, as well as the environment. The proposed research will use cutting-edge methodologies to identify genes responsible for the heritability of g. The PI’s research group conducted the first genome-wide association (GWA) studies of g and of specific cognitive abilities using microarrays to genotype common single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) sampled across the genome. Although GWA studies by the PI and others are beginning to identify a few of the genes responsible for genetic influence on cognitive abilities and disabilities, there remains a problem of ‘missing heritability’, in the search for which the proposed research features two innovations. First, by studying a large sample of individuals with exceptionally high g, statistical power to detect associations of small effect size will be boosted. The project will capitalise on the unique Genetics of High Cognitive Abilities (GHCA) resource recently created by the PI: a sample of 2000 individuals with IQs greater than 160, which represents the 99.997th percentile and exceeds the average IQ of Nobel Prize winners. Second, the project will go beyond reliance on common-SNP microarrays to exploit DNA sequencing, which captures all DNA sequence variation including rare variants. The project will fully sequence the exomes (traditional gene-coding regions) of 1000 of the high-g GHCA individuals and replicate results for targeted DNA variants using the other 1000 high-g individuals. Few discoveries would have greater impact across the social and life sciences – from genes to brain to behaviour – than identifying genes associated with g.

2 462 298 €

Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2017-03-31

Over 25 years, knowledge of modern human origins, evolution and diversity has increased dramatically. Genetics has been a major driver, promoting the ‘out of Africa model’, but, except for ancient DNA, it only tells the story of evolutionary survivors. African human population’ distributions mean that the history reconstructed from genetic data is partial and comparatively shallow. Although patchy, archaeological research in South and North Africa reveals the complexity of early human prehistory. Homo sapiens’ fossils in Africa from 200Kyr, (earliest 'modern-looking' remains) to ~10Kyr are known from only 17 sites. This makes it difficult to address questions on the selective and demographic pressures that led to our evolution, rates of population expansion/fragmentation, the scale of differentiation and levels of diversity in Africa through time, and the reasons why an African population was so successful that it eventually dominated the world. This proposal argues that intensive research ‘in Africa’ lies at the heart of the ‘out of Africa’ paradigm, and that the discovery of new fossils and archaeological sites, especially in East Africa, the hinge of the continent, is essential. Our recent field and archival surveys in Kenya (Turkana, Nakuru) have identified extremely rich archaeological and fossiliferous deposits of apparent Upper Pleistocene-Early Holocene age. This project will carry out a major fieldwork programme in W. Turkana, and sampling and dating of sites around Gamble's Caves, Nakuru. The goals are to: 1 Increase significantly the human fossil record of Upper Pleistocene age in East Africa; 2 Record changes in human behaviour in the area leading to the dispersals across and out of Africa; 3 Map the character and timing of the Middle to Later Stone Age transition in the Central Rift Valley; 4 Integrate the prehistoric record with palaeoenvironmental data; 5 Increase public awareness in Kenya of the role of Africa in the evolution of H.sapiens.

2 499 215 €

Start date: 2012-06-01, End date: 2018-01-31