ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The past thirty years have seen cryptography move from arcane to commonplace: Internet, mobile phones, banking system, etc. Homomorphic cryptography now offers the tantalizing goal of being able to process sensitive information in encrypted form, without needing to compromise on the privacy and security of the citizens and organizations that provide the input data. More recently, cryptographic multilinear maps have revolutionized cryptography with the emergence of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), which in theory can been used to realize numerous advanced cryptographic functionalities that previously seemed beyond reach. However the security of multilinear maps is still poorly understood, and many iO schemes have been broken; moreover all constructions of iO are currently unpractical. The goal of the CLOUDMAP project is to make these advanced cryptographic tasks usable in practice, so that citizens do not have to compromise on the privacy and security of their input data. This goal can only be achieved by considering the mathematical foundations of these primitives, working "from first principles", rather than focusing on premature optimizations. To achieve this goal, our first objective will be to better understand the security of the underlying primitives of multilinear maps and iO schemes. Our second objective will be to develop new approaches to significantly improve their efficiency. Our third objective will be to build applications of multilinear maps and iO that can be implemented in practice.

2 491 266 €

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

"At the core of this research proposal is the aim of reconstructing and understanding the nature, exact trajectories, mechanisms and implications of cross-cultural contact and transfers between Europeans and the native people of the Americas, focusing on, but not limited to, the Nahuatl-speaking zone of central Mexico. A major innovation of this project is to study this process of cross-cultural communication in its full historical depth, through the colonial and postcolonial eras up to the present day and encompassing different stages and types of contact. The meticulous and cross-disciplinary study of an extensive body of texts in Nahuatl (“Aztec”) and Spanish, complemented by present-day ethnolinguistic data, will make it possible to deduce and understand patterns across time and space in ways novel to existing scholarship, embracing both micro- and macroregional trends. The proposed research starts with identifying transfers in language, studied systematically through the creation of extensive databases, but leads to exploring the substance of cross-cultural transfer and the essence of developments, becoming a fundamental way of studying culture and its transformations. Thus, an important aim is the correlation of language phenomena with more general contact-induced culture change, including especially evolving forms of political, social and municipal organization in the native world, where the change is more salient. Breaking existing disciplinary boundaries in the humanities, the project embraces both indigenous and European perspectives, assuming that the innovation of studying both sides in a single framework and in the proposed time span is particularly promising in dealing with a notably two-sided, prolonged historical process. The complementary lines of research, native and Spanish, are expected to highlight and make understandable factors underlying and facilitating cultural convergence between them in different aspects of colonial life and beyond."

1 318 840 €

Start date: 2012-12-01, End date: 2017-11-30

This project is the first comprehensive study of transcultural knowledge production in early modern Europe. Its underpinning idea is that the students who travelled from central-eastern Europe to attend renowned universities were active agents of this transcultural knowledge. During their stays abroad they created personal hand-written notebooks containing lecture notes and any other texts that attracted their interest. Conserved in the archives of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine, these notebooks provide us with unique and first-hand documentary evidence of the impact of multiple cultural stimuli on knowledge. Combining intellectual history, history of migration and physical analysis of documents, the project will consider the period from the rise of this practice among students, due to an unprecedented availability of paper (c. 1470), up to the Thirty Years’ War, which restricted their travels. Its objectives are to analyse: the relationship between academic and non-academic knowledge gathered in the students’ notebooks; the emergence of new forms of self-learning, examining the criteria of text selection; and the contact between humanist culture and the cultures of the countries the students came from. Early modern studies of knowledge production have traditionally focused on academic teaching. Although the cosmopolitan nature of universities is an established fact in these studies, the impact of different cultures (languages, artistic-literary interests, religious practices) on knowledge creation has been neglected, due to lack of evidence. Students’ experience makes it possible to observe links between knowledge and a plurality of languages and traditions which best reflects the European scenario at the time. The project will explore knowledge creation from an unprecedented angle, fostering a rethinking of the notion of centre and peripheries in Renaissance studies and breaking important new ground for research on intellectual history.

1 737 225 €

Start date: 2020-11-01, End date: 2025-10-31

The project aims at developing a pioneering approach to the reception of Classical Antiquity in children’s and young adults’ contemporary culture. This newly identified research field offers valuable insights into the processes leading to the formation of the culture recipients’ identities along with their initiation into adulthood. However, the most vital potential of this phenomenon remains unexploited, for the research is still selective, focused mainly on Western culture. With my project, I intend to overcome these limitations by applying regional perspectives without the pejorative implication of regional as parochial or inferior. I recognize regions as extremely valuable contexts of the reception of Antiquity, which is not only passively taken in, but also actively reshaped in children’s and young adults’ culture in response to regional and global challenges. Thus, the essence of this innovative approach consists in comparative studies of differing reception models not only across Europe but also America, Australia & New Zealand and – a bold but necessary step – in parts of the world not commonly associated with Graeco-Roman tradition: Africa and Asia. The shared heritage of Classical Antiquity, recently enhanced by the global influence of popular culture (movies, Internet activities, computer games inspired by the classical tradition), gives a unique opportunity – through the reception filter – to gain deeper understanding of the key social, political and cultural transformations underway at various locations. The added value of this original research, carried out by an international team of scholars, will be its extremely broad impact on the frontiers of scholarship, education and culture: we will elaborate a supra-regional survey of classical references, publish a number of analyses of crucial reception cases, and prepare materials on how to use ancient myths in work with disabled children, thus contributing to integration and stimulating cultural exchange.

1 489 200 €

Start date: 2016-10-01, End date: 2021-09-30