Project acronym ASEA
Project The aftermath of slavery in East Africa
Researcher (PI) Felicitas Maria BECKER
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Country Belgium
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2018-COG
Summary Legacies of slavery tend to affect societies deeply, but in inland East Africa have remained little explored. This project aims [1] to establish what happened to the hundreds of thousands of slaves present in mainland East Africa in ca. 1900 and to their descendants over the twentieth century, [2] to explain why the aftermath of slavery is so little discussed in the written sources and historiography of the region, and [3] to trace the social and political legacies of slavery up to the present. It will combine historical and anthropological methods, and, besides post-slavery, addresses questions pertaining to public history, social mobility, marginality and inequality, gender, and understandings of freedom. It pursues them through a series of place-specific case-studies tracing different courses and outcomes within the region, and through comparative work, both between the case studies and with studies on the aftermath of slavery in West Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Americas.
The project is ground-breaking through its long-term time frame, its wide-ranging combination of methods, and in questioning established assumptions, e.g. about the meaning of ‘freedom’ for ex-slaves. It is high-risk in the sense that the field researchers leading the case studies will need good knowledge of Swahili, good social contacts and the flexibility to identify and follow emerging leads wherever they take them. It is feasible because the proposed research program and conceptual frameworks can be adapted as the work develops, and given the obscurity of the regions, groups and questions involved, the resulting gains to knowledge will be major. It is high-gain because it will fill a gaping hole in current knowledge, and establish how people in East Africa coped with the toxic legacy of slavery, which often presents intractable problems, apparently with little disruption. The resulting comparisons will contribute to a better understanding of tensions in other post-slavery societies.
Summary
Legacies of slavery tend to affect societies deeply, but in inland East Africa have remained little explored. This project aims [1] to establish what happened to the hundreds of thousands of slaves present in mainland East Africa in ca. 1900 and to their descendants over the twentieth century, [2] to explain why the aftermath of slavery is so little discussed in the written sources and historiography of the region, and [3] to trace the social and political legacies of slavery up to the present. It will combine historical and anthropological methods, and, besides post-slavery, addresses questions pertaining to public history, social mobility, marginality and inequality, gender, and understandings of freedom. It pursues them through a series of place-specific case-studies tracing different courses and outcomes within the region, and through comparative work, both between the case studies and with studies on the aftermath of slavery in West Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Americas.
The project is ground-breaking through its long-term time frame, its wide-ranging combination of methods, and in questioning established assumptions, e.g. about the meaning of ‘freedom’ for ex-slaves. It is high-risk in the sense that the field researchers leading the case studies will need good knowledge of Swahili, good social contacts and the flexibility to identify and follow emerging leads wherever they take them. It is feasible because the proposed research program and conceptual frameworks can be adapted as the work develops, and given the obscurity of the regions, groups and questions involved, the resulting gains to knowledge will be major. It is high-gain because it will fill a gaping hole in current knowledge, and establish how people in East Africa coped with the toxic legacy of slavery, which often presents intractable problems, apparently with little disruption. The resulting comparisons will contribute to a better understanding of tensions in other post-slavery societies.
Max ERC Funding
1 921 250 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-11-01, End date: 2024-10-31
Project acronym BantuFirst
Project The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa
Researcher (PI) Koen Andre G. BOSTOEN
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Country Belgium
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2016-COG
Summary The Bantu Expansion is not only the main linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It is also one of the most controversial issues in African History that still has political repercussions today. It has sparked debate across the disciplines and far beyond Africanist circles in an attempt to understand how the young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. This massive dispersal is commonly seen as the result of a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture, but many questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still open. They can only be answered through real interdisciplinary collaboration. This project will unite researchers with outstanding expertise in African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics to form a unique cross-disciplinary team that will shed new light on the first Bantu-speaking village communities south of the rainforest. Fieldwork is planned in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Angola that are terra incognita for archaeologists to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest villagers and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. Special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental data to get an idea of their subsistence, diet and habitat. Historical linguistics will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics and open new pathways in lexical reconstruction, especially regarding subsistence and land use of early Bantu speakers. Through interuniversity collaboration archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data and phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach to acquire a new holistic view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa.
Summary
The Bantu Expansion is not only the main linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It is also one of the most controversial issues in African History that still has political repercussions today. It has sparked debate across the disciplines and far beyond Africanist circles in an attempt to understand how the young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. This massive dispersal is commonly seen as the result of a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture, but many questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still open. They can only be answered through real interdisciplinary collaboration. This project will unite researchers with outstanding expertise in African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics to form a unique cross-disciplinary team that will shed new light on the first Bantu-speaking village communities south of the rainforest. Fieldwork is planned in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Angola that are terra incognita for archaeologists to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest villagers and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. Special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental data to get an idea of their subsistence, diet and habitat. Historical linguistics will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics and open new pathways in lexical reconstruction, especially regarding subsistence and land use of early Bantu speakers. Through interuniversity collaboration archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data and phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach to acquire a new holistic view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa.
Max ERC Funding
1 997 500 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31
Project acronym BEHAVE
Project New discrete choice theory for understanding moral decision making behaviour
Researcher (PI) Caspar Gerard CHORUS
Host Institution (HI) TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT DELFT
Country Netherlands
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH2, ERC-2016-COG
Summary Discrete choice theory provides a mathematically rigorous framework to analyse and predict choice behaviour. While many of the theory’s key developments originate from the domain of transportation (mobility, travel behaviour), it is now widely used throughout the social sciences.
The theory has a blind spot for moral choice behaviour. It was designed to analyse situations where people make choices that are optimal given their consumer preferences, rather than situations where people attempt to make choices that are right, given their moral preferences. This neglect of the morality of choice is striking, in light of the fact that many of the most important choices people make, have a moral dimension.
This research program extends discrete choice theory to the domain of moral decision making.
It will produce a suite of new mathematical representations of choice behaviour (i.e., choice models), which are designed to capture the decision rules and decision weights that determine how individuals behave in moral choice situations. In these models, particular emphasis is given to heterogeneity in moral decision rules and to the role of social influences. Models will be estimated and validated using data obtained through a series of interviews, surveys and choice experiments. Empirical analyses will take place in the context of moral choice situations concerning i) co-operative road using and ii) unsafe driving practices. Estimation results will be used as input for agent based models, to identify how social interaction processes lead to the emergence, persistence or dissolution of moral (traffic) equilibria at larger spatio-temporal scales.
Together, these proposed research efforts promise to generate a major breakthrough in discrete choice theory. In addition, the program will result in important methodological contributions to the empirical study of moral decision making behaviour in general; and to new insights into the moral aspects of (travel) behaviour.
Summary
Discrete choice theory provides a mathematically rigorous framework to analyse and predict choice behaviour. While many of the theory’s key developments originate from the domain of transportation (mobility, travel behaviour), it is now widely used throughout the social sciences.
The theory has a blind spot for moral choice behaviour. It was designed to analyse situations where people make choices that are optimal given their consumer preferences, rather than situations where people attempt to make choices that are right, given their moral preferences. This neglect of the morality of choice is striking, in light of the fact that many of the most important choices people make, have a moral dimension.
This research program extends discrete choice theory to the domain of moral decision making.
It will produce a suite of new mathematical representations of choice behaviour (i.e., choice models), which are designed to capture the decision rules and decision weights that determine how individuals behave in moral choice situations. In these models, particular emphasis is given to heterogeneity in moral decision rules and to the role of social influences. Models will be estimated and validated using data obtained through a series of interviews, surveys and choice experiments. Empirical analyses will take place in the context of moral choice situations concerning i) co-operative road using and ii) unsafe driving practices. Estimation results will be used as input for agent based models, to identify how social interaction processes lead to the emergence, persistence or dissolution of moral (traffic) equilibria at larger spatio-temporal scales.
Together, these proposed research efforts promise to generate a major breakthrough in discrete choice theory. In addition, the program will result in important methodological contributions to the empirical study of moral decision making behaviour in general; and to new insights into the moral aspects of (travel) behaviour.
Max ERC Funding
1 998 750 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-08-01, End date: 2022-12-31
Project acronym ChinaCreative
Project From Made in China to Created in China - A Comparative Study of Creative Practice and Production in Contemporary China
Researcher (PI) Bastiaan Jeroen De Kloet
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Country Netherlands
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2013-CoG
Summary With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to move from a “made in China” towards a “created in China” country. Creativity and culture have become a crucial source for innovation and financial growth, but are also mobilised to promote a new and open China to both the citizenry as well as the outside world. They are part of what is termed China’s “soft power.”
What does creativity mean in the context of China, and what does it do? When both the state and profoundly globalised creative industries are so deeply implicated in the promotion of creativity, what are the possibilities of criticality, if any? Whereas creativity has been extensively researched in the fields of psychology, law and neurosciences, scholarship in the humanities has by and large side-tracked the thorny issue of creativity. Yet, the worldwide resurgence of the term under the banner of creative industries makes it all the more urgent to develop a theory of creativity. This project understands creativity as a textual, a social as well as a heritage practice. It aims to analyse claims of creativity in different cultural practices, and to analyse how emerging creativities in China are part of tactics of governmentality and disable or enable possibilities of criticality.
Using a comparative, multi-disciplinary, multi-method and multi-sited research design, five subprojects analyse (1) contemporary art, (2) calligraphy, (3) independent documentary cinema, (4) television from Hunan Satellite TV and (5) “fake” (shanzhai) art. By including both popular and high arts, by including both more Westernized as well as more specifically Chinese art forms, by including both the “real” as well as the “fake,” by studying different localities, and by mobilising methods from both the social sciences and the humanities, this project is pushing the notion of comparative research to a new level.
Summary
With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to move from a “made in China” towards a “created in China” country. Creativity and culture have become a crucial source for innovation and financial growth, but are also mobilised to promote a new and open China to both the citizenry as well as the outside world. They are part of what is termed China’s “soft power.”
What does creativity mean in the context of China, and what does it do? When both the state and profoundly globalised creative industries are so deeply implicated in the promotion of creativity, what are the possibilities of criticality, if any? Whereas creativity has been extensively researched in the fields of psychology, law and neurosciences, scholarship in the humanities has by and large side-tracked the thorny issue of creativity. Yet, the worldwide resurgence of the term under the banner of creative industries makes it all the more urgent to develop a theory of creativity. This project understands creativity as a textual, a social as well as a heritage practice. It aims to analyse claims of creativity in different cultural practices, and to analyse how emerging creativities in China are part of tactics of governmentality and disable or enable possibilities of criticality.
Using a comparative, multi-disciplinary, multi-method and multi-sited research design, five subprojects analyse (1) contemporary art, (2) calligraphy, (3) independent documentary cinema, (4) television from Hunan Satellite TV and (5) “fake” (shanzhai) art. By including both popular and high arts, by including both more Westernized as well as more specifically Chinese art forms, by including both the “real” as well as the “fake,” by studying different localities, and by mobilising methods from both the social sciences and the humanities, this project is pushing the notion of comparative research to a new level.
Max ERC Funding
1 947 448 €
Duration
Start date: 2014-09-01, End date: 2019-08-31
Project acronym DIMENSION
Project Real-time Data-Informed Multi-scale Computational Methods for Material Design and Processing
Researcher (PI) Karen VEROY-GREPL
Host Institution (HI) TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT EINDHOVEN
Country Netherlands
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE8, ERC-2018-COG
Summary The fundamental importance of materials to modern society is evidenced by the way new materials have revolutionized almost every aspect of our lives. Despite the many advances, dwindling resources and more stringent demands on product cost and performance demand increasingly better material designs and production processes, resulting in a heightened reliance on computational methods.
In the field of computational materials engineering, the recent emergence of data science into the mainstream is causing a paradigm shift in the way models and data are used. There is a shift from traditional simulation methods which use data mainly to calibrate parameters in models, to data-driven simulation methods which seek to bypass the use of models by extracting knowledge from large data sets. This project synergistically combines aspects of both – by developing advanced computational methods that permit multi-scale material models to be informed by available measurement data.
This project addresses this challenging problem through two main tasks. In the first part, we develop dimension reduction techniques for rapid multi-scale materials simulations. These methods must be capable of dealing with deterministic and stochastic microstructure parameters reflecting variations in loading, material, and morphological properties. In the second part, the reduced order models serve as an enabler for the development of computational methods for the selection of the most informative data and its assimilation into multi-scale material models. By enabling parameter estimation and model correction, this leads to increased accuracy and precision in the prediction of engineering quantities of interest.
The success of the project will give rise to a novel computational framework that enables real-time multi-scale materials simulations informed by optimally chosen data, thus permitting effective risk management and cost reduction in the design of materials and control of manufacturing processes.
Summary
The fundamental importance of materials to modern society is evidenced by the way new materials have revolutionized almost every aspect of our lives. Despite the many advances, dwindling resources and more stringent demands on product cost and performance demand increasingly better material designs and production processes, resulting in a heightened reliance on computational methods.
In the field of computational materials engineering, the recent emergence of data science into the mainstream is causing a paradigm shift in the way models and data are used. There is a shift from traditional simulation methods which use data mainly to calibrate parameters in models, to data-driven simulation methods which seek to bypass the use of models by extracting knowledge from large data sets. This project synergistically combines aspects of both – by developing advanced computational methods that permit multi-scale material models to be informed by available measurement data.
This project addresses this challenging problem through two main tasks. In the first part, we develop dimension reduction techniques for rapid multi-scale materials simulations. These methods must be capable of dealing with deterministic and stochastic microstructure parameters reflecting variations in loading, material, and morphological properties. In the second part, the reduced order models serve as an enabler for the development of computational methods for the selection of the most informative data and its assimilation into multi-scale material models. By enabling parameter estimation and model correction, this leads to increased accuracy and precision in the prediction of engineering quantities of interest.
The success of the project will give rise to a novel computational framework that enables real-time multi-scale materials simulations informed by optimally chosen data, thus permitting effective risk management and cost reduction in the design of materials and control of manufacturing processes.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 632 €
Duration
Start date: 2020-01-01, End date: 2024-12-31
Project acronym DIVERSE-EXPECON
Project Discriminative preferences and fairness ideals in diverse societies: An ‘experimental economics’ approach
Researcher (PI) Sigrid SUETENS
Host Institution (HI) STICHTING KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT BRABANT
Country Netherlands
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH1, ERC-2016-COG
Summary In economics, a distinction is made between statistical and taste-based discrimination (henceforth, TBD). Statistical discrimination refers to discrimination in a context with strategic uncertainty. Someone who is uncertain about the future behaviour of a person with a different ethnicity may rely on information about the different ethnic group to which this person belongs to form beliefs about the behaviour of that person. This may lead to discrimination. TBD refers to discrimination in a context without strategic uncertainty. It implies suffering a disutility when interacting with ‘different’ others. This project systematically studies TBD in ethnically diverse societies.
Identifying TBD is important because overcoming it requires different policies than overcoming statistical discrimination: they should deal with changing preferences of people rather than providing information about specific interaction partners. But identifying TBD is tricky. First, it is impossible to identify using uncontrolled empirical data because these data are characterised by strategic uncertainty. Second, people are generally reluctant to identify themselves as a discriminator. In the project, I study TBS using novel economic experiments that circumvent these problems.
The project consists of three main objectives. First, I investigate whether and how preferences of European natives in social interactions depend on others’ ethnicity. Are natives as altruistic, reciprocal, envious to immigrants as compared to other natives? Second, I study whether natives have different fairness ideals—what constitutes a fair distribution of resources from the perspective of an impartial spectator—when it comes to natives than when it comes to non-natives. Third, I analyse whether preferences and fairness ideals depend on exposure to diversity: do preferences and fairness ideals of natives change as contact with non-natives increases, and, if so, how?
Summary
In economics, a distinction is made between statistical and taste-based discrimination (henceforth, TBD). Statistical discrimination refers to discrimination in a context with strategic uncertainty. Someone who is uncertain about the future behaviour of a person with a different ethnicity may rely on information about the different ethnic group to which this person belongs to form beliefs about the behaviour of that person. This may lead to discrimination. TBD refers to discrimination in a context without strategic uncertainty. It implies suffering a disutility when interacting with ‘different’ others. This project systematically studies TBD in ethnically diverse societies.
Identifying TBD is important because overcoming it requires different policies than overcoming statistical discrimination: they should deal with changing preferences of people rather than providing information about specific interaction partners. But identifying TBD is tricky. First, it is impossible to identify using uncontrolled empirical data because these data are characterised by strategic uncertainty. Second, people are generally reluctant to identify themselves as a discriminator. In the project, I study TBS using novel economic experiments that circumvent these problems.
The project consists of three main objectives. First, I investigate whether and how preferences of European natives in social interactions depend on others’ ethnicity. Are natives as altruistic, reciprocal, envious to immigrants as compared to other natives? Second, I study whether natives have different fairness ideals—what constitutes a fair distribution of resources from the perspective of an impartial spectator—when it comes to natives than when it comes to non-natives. Third, I analyse whether preferences and fairness ideals depend on exposure to diversity: do preferences and fairness ideals of natives change as contact with non-natives increases, and, if so, how?
Max ERC Funding
1 499 046 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31
Project acronym DREAM
Project Distributed dynamic REpresentations for diAlogue Management
Researcher (PI) Raquel FERNANDEZ Rovira
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Country Netherlands
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH4, ERC-2018-COG
Summary Our ability to communicate using language in conversation is considered the hallmark of human intelligence. Yet, while holding a dialogue is effortless for most of us, modelling this basic human skill by computational means has proven extremely difficult. In DREAM, I address this challenge by establishing a new computational model of a dialogue agent that can learn to take part in conversation directly from data about language use. DREAM stands at the crossroads of the symbolic and the sub-symbolic traditions regarding the nature of human cognitive processing and, by extension, its computational modelling. My model is grounded in linguistic theories of dialogue, rooted in the symbolic tradition, but exploits recent advances in computational learning that allow the agent to learn the representations that it manipulates, which are distributed and sub-symbolic, directly from experience. This is an original approach that constitutes a paradigm shift in dialogue modelling --- from predefined symbolic representations to automatic representation learning --- that will break new scientific ground in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence. The DREAM agent will be implemented as an artificial neural network system and trained with task-oriented conversations where the participants have a well-defined end goal. The agent will be able to integrate linguistic and perceptual information and will be endowed with the capability to dynamically track both speaker commitments and partner-specific conventions, leading to more human-like and effective communication. Besides providing a breakthrough in our capacity to build sophisticated conversational agents, DREAM will have substantial impact on our scientific understanding of human language use, thanks to its emphasis on theory-driven hypotheses and model analysis.
Summary
Our ability to communicate using language in conversation is considered the hallmark of human intelligence. Yet, while holding a dialogue is effortless for most of us, modelling this basic human skill by computational means has proven extremely difficult. In DREAM, I address this challenge by establishing a new computational model of a dialogue agent that can learn to take part in conversation directly from data about language use. DREAM stands at the crossroads of the symbolic and the sub-symbolic traditions regarding the nature of human cognitive processing and, by extension, its computational modelling. My model is grounded in linguistic theories of dialogue, rooted in the symbolic tradition, but exploits recent advances in computational learning that allow the agent to learn the representations that it manipulates, which are distributed and sub-symbolic, directly from experience. This is an original approach that constitutes a paradigm shift in dialogue modelling --- from predefined symbolic representations to automatic representation learning --- that will break new scientific ground in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence. The DREAM agent will be implemented as an artificial neural network system and trained with task-oriented conversations where the participants have a well-defined end goal. The agent will be able to integrate linguistic and perceptual information and will be endowed with the capability to dynamically track both speaker commitments and partner-specific conventions, leading to more human-like and effective communication. Besides providing a breakthrough in our capacity to build sophisticated conversational agents, DREAM will have substantial impact on our scientific understanding of human language use, thanks to its emphasis on theory-driven hypotheses and model analysis.
Max ERC Funding
2 000 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31
Project acronym EPIC
Project Earth-like Planet Imaging with Cognitive computing
Researcher (PI) Olivier ABSIL
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITE DE LIEGE
Country Belgium
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), PE9, ERC-2018-COG
Summary One of the most ambitious goals of modern astrophysics is to characterise the physical and chemical properties of rocky planets orbiting in the habitable zone of nearby Sun-like stars. Although the observation of planetary transits could in a few limited cases be used to reach such a goal, it is widely recognised that only direct imaging techniques will enable such a feat on a statistically significant sample of planetary systems. Direct imaging of Earth-like exoplanets is however a formidable challenge due to the huge contrast and minute angular separation between such planets and their host star. The proposed EPIC project aims to enable the direct detection and characterisation of terrestrial planets located in the habitable zone of nearby stars using ground-based high-contrast imaging in the thermal infrared domain. To reach that ambitious goal, the project will focus on two main research directions: (i) the development and implementation of high-contrast imaging techniques and technologies addressing the smallest possible angular separations from bright, nearby stars, and (ii) the adaptation of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to the problem of image processing in high-contrast imaging. While the ultimate goal of this research can likely only be reached with the advent of giant telescopes such as the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) around 2025, the EPIC project will lay the stepping stones towards that goal and produce several high-impact results along the way, e.g. by re-assessing the occurrence rate of giant planets in direct imaging surveys at the most relevant angular separations (i.e., close to the snow line), by conducting the deepest high-contrast imaging search for rocky planets in the alpha Centauri system, by preparing the scientific exploitation of the ELT, and by providing the first open-source high-contrast image processing toolbox relying on supervised machine learning techniques.
Summary
One of the most ambitious goals of modern astrophysics is to characterise the physical and chemical properties of rocky planets orbiting in the habitable zone of nearby Sun-like stars. Although the observation of planetary transits could in a few limited cases be used to reach such a goal, it is widely recognised that only direct imaging techniques will enable such a feat on a statistically significant sample of planetary systems. Direct imaging of Earth-like exoplanets is however a formidable challenge due to the huge contrast and minute angular separation between such planets and their host star. The proposed EPIC project aims to enable the direct detection and characterisation of terrestrial planets located in the habitable zone of nearby stars using ground-based high-contrast imaging in the thermal infrared domain. To reach that ambitious goal, the project will focus on two main research directions: (i) the development and implementation of high-contrast imaging techniques and technologies addressing the smallest possible angular separations from bright, nearby stars, and (ii) the adaptation of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to the problem of image processing in high-contrast imaging. While the ultimate goal of this research can likely only be reached with the advent of giant telescopes such as the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) around 2025, the EPIC project will lay the stepping stones towards that goal and produce several high-impact results along the way, e.g. by re-assessing the occurrence rate of giant planets in direct imaging surveys at the most relevant angular separations (i.e., close to the snow line), by conducting the deepest high-contrast imaging search for rocky planets in the alpha Centauri system, by preparing the scientific exploitation of the ELT, and by providing the first open-source high-contrast image processing toolbox relying on supervised machine learning techniques.
Max ERC Funding
2 178 125 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-05-01, End date: 2024-04-30
Project acronym EU-JUSTICE
Project Building EU civil justice: challenges of procedural innovations bridging access to justice
Researcher (PI) Xandra Ellen KRAMER
Host Institution (HI) ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM
Country Netherlands
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH2, ERC-2016-COG
Summary Civil justice is under pressure. The proclaimed crisis in civil justice results from the ineffectiveness of procedures in terms of the long duration, high costs, and complexity. These undermine access to justice as guaranteed by the Human Rights Convention and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It is illustrative in this regard that 26% of the violation judgments concern undue delay of procedure. A well-functioning civil justice system is pivotal for enforcing rights for consumers and businesses and protecting fundamental rights. Civil justice is also increasingly valued for its contribution to economic growth as seen from the World Bank reports and the EU Justice Agenda for 2020.
Key issues in the current efforts to bridge the access to justice gap at the EU and national level are digitalisation of procedures, privatisation of justice (ADR), an increased possibility of self-representation, and specialisation of courts and procedures. These trends are potentially ground-breaking in contributing to easier and cheaper access to courts and private forms of adjudication. However, a one-sided focus on procedural efficiency or competitive advantage may have repercussions for procedural justice and the inclusive quality of the civil justice system. The question is how these digitalisation, privatisation, self-representation, and specialisation trends influence access to justice in the selected Member States, and what the repercussions are for the emerging EU civil justice system.
Using a unique combination of legal-normative, comparative law, and qualitative research, the project will (1) develop an urgently needed integrated approach to digitalisation, privatisation, self-representation, and specialisation; (2) scrutinise these against the background of strengthening access to justice as a fundamental right and as the pillar of civil justice in the EU; and (3) build on the foundation of EU civil justice, securing effective and equal access to justice for EU citizens.
Summary
Civil justice is under pressure. The proclaimed crisis in civil justice results from the ineffectiveness of procedures in terms of the long duration, high costs, and complexity. These undermine access to justice as guaranteed by the Human Rights Convention and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It is illustrative in this regard that 26% of the violation judgments concern undue delay of procedure. A well-functioning civil justice system is pivotal for enforcing rights for consumers and businesses and protecting fundamental rights. Civil justice is also increasingly valued for its contribution to economic growth as seen from the World Bank reports and the EU Justice Agenda for 2020.
Key issues in the current efforts to bridge the access to justice gap at the EU and national level are digitalisation of procedures, privatisation of justice (ADR), an increased possibility of self-representation, and specialisation of courts and procedures. These trends are potentially ground-breaking in contributing to easier and cheaper access to courts and private forms of adjudication. However, a one-sided focus on procedural efficiency or competitive advantage may have repercussions for procedural justice and the inclusive quality of the civil justice system. The question is how these digitalisation, privatisation, self-representation, and specialisation trends influence access to justice in the selected Member States, and what the repercussions are for the emerging EU civil justice system.
Using a unique combination of legal-normative, comparative law, and qualitative research, the project will (1) develop an urgently needed integrated approach to digitalisation, privatisation, self-representation, and specialisation; (2) scrutinise these against the background of strengthening access to justice as a fundamental right and as the pillar of civil justice in the EU; and (3) build on the foundation of EU civil justice, securing effective and equal access to justice for EU citizens.
Max ERC Funding
2 000 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31
Project acronym EUROMIX
Project Regulating mixed intimacies in Europe
Researcher (PI) BERTHA DE HART
Host Institution (HI) STICHTING VU
Country Netherlands
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2016-COG
Summary This project is a study of the regulation of ‘mixture’(‘interracial’ sex, relationships and marriage) in Europe’s past and present. Informed by critical race and critical mixed race studies, it challenges the common assumption that Europe never had ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws comparable to those in the United States. In exploring if, when, how and why forms of regulation aiming to prevent or restrict ‘interracial mixture’ developed in Europe in certain times and places, the project delivers a vital contribution to our knowledge of the development of racial thinking in Europe. The concept of ‘mixture’ provides an eminently suitable approach to the construction of ‘race’, since ‘mixture’ confuses and destabilizes racialized categories that seem fixed and essentialized in specific times and places, such as ‘black/white’.
The project consist of a historical and a contemporary part. The historical part looks at the regulation of ‘mixture’ in four European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, in their African colonies, and wartime Europe. The contemporary part explores whether and how, in spite of norms of formal equality and colour-blindness, ‘race’ and ‘monoracial family norms’ still play a part in European law and the lived experiences of ‘interracial’ couples with law in their everyday lives. Through archival research, legal analysis and interviews with modern-day ‘mixed’ couples and families, this approach helps us understand what lawmakers and enforcers believed ‘race’ was, what they believed ‘mixture’ was, how this was translated into legal practices, and how targeted couples responded.
Theoretically, the project delivers a groundbreaking contribution to the genealogy of racial thinking in Europe, especially in addressing the understudied role of law and legal scholarship in the social construction of ‘race’ and ‘mixture’ in a increasingly diverse Europe.
Summary
This project is a study of the regulation of ‘mixture’(‘interracial’ sex, relationships and marriage) in Europe’s past and present. Informed by critical race and critical mixed race studies, it challenges the common assumption that Europe never had ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws comparable to those in the United States. In exploring if, when, how and why forms of regulation aiming to prevent or restrict ‘interracial mixture’ developed in Europe in certain times and places, the project delivers a vital contribution to our knowledge of the development of racial thinking in Europe. The concept of ‘mixture’ provides an eminently suitable approach to the construction of ‘race’, since ‘mixture’ confuses and destabilizes racialized categories that seem fixed and essentialized in specific times and places, such as ‘black/white’.
The project consist of a historical and a contemporary part. The historical part looks at the regulation of ‘mixture’ in four European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, in their African colonies, and wartime Europe. The contemporary part explores whether and how, in spite of norms of formal equality and colour-blindness, ‘race’ and ‘monoracial family norms’ still play a part in European law and the lived experiences of ‘interracial’ couples with law in their everyday lives. Through archival research, legal analysis and interviews with modern-day ‘mixed’ couples and families, this approach helps us understand what lawmakers and enforcers believed ‘race’ was, what they believed ‘mixture’ was, how this was translated into legal practices, and how targeted couples responded.
Theoretically, the project delivers a groundbreaking contribution to the genealogy of racial thinking in Europe, especially in addressing the understudied role of law and legal scholarship in the social construction of ‘race’ and ‘mixture’ in a increasingly diverse Europe.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 823 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2023-04-30