Who is new in our fellow community?

Project

“Cloud gaming atlas: from Earth’s metabolism to the longing for radiant infrastructures”

Eduardo completed his doctoral degree in the Communication Sciences programme of Unisinos University in São Leopoldo, Brazil. During his degree, he also had the opportunity to undertake a short research stay (five months) at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
“The defence of my doctoral thesis was scheduled for early March 2020, but due to the pandemic it had to be postponed to July 2020,” reports Eduardo. “As the opportunities and conditions for conducting research on an international level were too uncertain at the time, I started preparing a revised research agenda for my first postdoctoral project – fortunately, this project was later selected by the recruitment committee of the Zukunftskolleg”.
Apart from that, he worked on translating articles by prominent researchers in the field of media studies in order to have them published and made available to Portuguese-speaking readers. He also coordinated an interdisciplinary (remote) study group called “Technopolity: Design, Infrastructure, Geopolitics”. The weekly meetings brought together young Brazilian scholars from the fields of international relations, design, philosophy, arts, communication and literature to debate the tensions and overlaps of the technical and aesthetical dimensions of digital media with issues of governance and political geography.
His current project – entitled “Cloud gaming atlas: from Earth’s metabolism to the longing for radiant infrastructures” – is aimed at the development of transnational telecommunication infrastructures to support cloud gaming platforms. “What interests me more specifically is observing how these infrastructures are intertwined with the management of natural resources in local and wider environmental settings. With the project, I am seeking to explore to what extent media are ingrained within Earth systems, while at the same time questioning the regimes of visibility/invisibility of these material infrastructures. I believe these questions are important not only for their epistemological value. Assessing how the environmental and aesthetic dimensions of media phenomena intermingle in a time when the so-called creative industries are migrating to a platform model based on high energy-demanding streaming services might be particularly significant.”
Moreover, Eduardo is associated with and cultivates various forms of research cooperation – mostly regarding the aesthetic dimension of gaming – with two particular research groups, Audiovisualities and Technoculture (TCAv) at Unisinos University and Leuphana University’s Gamification Lab. From this semester onwards, he will also start collaborating with the Department of Literature, Arts and Media Studies of the University of Konstanz and more specifically with the university’s GameLab.

Project

“Colonialism, the ‘Counter-Crusade’ and the early development of Crusader studies”

James Wilson earned his doctoral degree at the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, UK. After his doctorate, he had a short-term (six-month) research scholarship at the Trier College of Middle Ages and Modern Times (TRIKO) at Trier University before coming to the Zukunftskolleg.
His research project at the Zukunftskolleg – which is entitled “Colonialism, the ‘Counter-Crusade’ and the early development of Crusader studies” – examines the extent to which colonial attitudes influenced the edition and translations of several key medieval Arabic chronicles relating to the Crusades. Many Crusade historians still rely on these French translations even today, which were mostly published in the nineteenth century.
“The project aims to evaluate the editors’ linguistic decisions by comparing these editions and translations with the original Arabic manuscripts, seeking thereby to better understand the approaches underpinning their compilation,” explains James. “It will then review how this editorial process has impacted modern scholarship, written by historians who have long depended on these materials. There are two main research questions. Firstly, whether these editors did take a colonialist approach to the editing and translation of these sources (and, if so, how exactly this approach impacts on the texts in question). Secondly, if evidence of colonialist attitudes can be identified in the editions and translations, then how has this influenced everything written by scholars relying on these texts in later years?”
In focusing on the means by which Arabic sources – interpreted through a nineteenth century lens – were integrated into the academic study of the Crusades, this project not only aims to provide nuanced insight into the field but also explores the latent challenges which anachronous editorial practices present to those engaging with difficult texts from the medieval past.
Additionally, James is currently also writing a book with the title “Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades” (which will be published by Edinburgh University Press).

Project

“The neural basis of insect pattern vision: from flowers to behaviour”

Anna completed her doctoral degree in the Vision Group at Lund University, Sweden, before moving to Aalto University in Finland for a one-year postdoctoral position. In the past four years, she has developed her own research programme as a research associate at the University of Würzburg. It centres on understanding how the visual system of insects extracts spatial and temporal information from their natural environment – and how this information is used to guide behaviour. “Our key model are hawkmoths,” she says. “They are extremely agile fliers with a unique ability: they hover in front of flowers to suckle nectar like hummingbirds. Their high-resolution compound eyes can extract fine details, while also providing nocturnal species with the high sensitivity required to see well even in starlight. Thus, these fascinating insects allow us to study fundamental principles of night vision, spatial vision, motion vision and locomotion control, and thereby contribute to the general understanding of how neural processing gives rise to visual percepts and actions based on them.”
Anna’s research project at the Zukunftskolleg will examine the neural basis of a key aspect of spatial vision: the perception of patterns. With essential functions in object recognition, navigation and communication, it constitutes a fundamental pillar of animal vision. “Given that our brain dedicates several hundred million neurons to this task, it is all the more astonishing that insects, with brains smaller than a grain of rice, recognize and memorize visual patterns as well. Some insect pollinators even possess the ability to generalize pattern features across colours, contrasts or orientations. They thus provide a model to study the neural implementation of invariant pattern recognition with limited computational resources.”
While insect pattern discrimination behaviour has been studied extensively, very little is known about its neuronal implementation. Anna plans to close this gap, using hawkmoths as a tractable model to dissect the invariant pattern vision circuits of insects from photons to behaviour. “This will help us understand how insect pollinators with their tiny brains recognize patterns and how they use these to interact with flowers.”

Project

“Cross-linguistic influence in multilingual children and adults: evidence from the real-time processing of Romanian wh-questions”

Anamaria completed her doctoral degree in General Linguistics at the University of Geneva. During her doctoral degree, she also spent a year as visiting doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland.
After completing her doctoral degree, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences of the University of Reading. “Here I had the opportunity to start a research programme in bilingual language acquisition thanks, in part, to a fellowship awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation,” Anamaria reports. “I recently joined the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, and I am continuing to work on language acquisition and processing in multilingual speakers.”
Her research project at the Zukunftskolleg tackles a central question in the field of multilingualism concerning the nature and the extent of cross-linguistic influence, that is, whether the various languages that a person is acquiring or speaking influence each other in a significant way. “Specifically, it investigates the development of the first (heritage) language in speakers with a migration background and the impact that the dominant (societal) language has on heritage language outcomes, as these have been shown to be highly heterogenous,” she explains. “The project thus aims to break new ground in our understanding of how the societal language interacts with and shapes the real-time comprehension and production of the heritage language in child and adult multilingual speakers. In doing so, the project focuses on Romanian as heritage language and compares the acquisition and processing of complex syntactic structures across various multilingual groups in Germany, the UK and Romania. To this end, the project uses (i) visual world eye-tracking tasks to investigate online sentence comprehension as well as (ii) sentence production tasks in the heritage language. The systematic comparison across different groups of multilinguals makes it possible to determine whether the presence (or absence) of similar linguistic properties in the majority language facilitates (or delays) the acquisition of the same properties in the heritage language. Therefore, if any differences emerge in the way the various bilingual groups comprehend or produce the heritage language, then these differences can be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from the majority language. The findings of the project can thus have important implications for theoretical models of bi/multilingual syntactic processing as they can shed light on how cross-linguistic influence might impact the cognitive mechanisms that implement grammatical operations (e.g. whether grammatical rules or constraints are represented independently or jointly for each language). Moreover, the project will have practical implications for heritage language teaching and, more broadly, for foreign language teaching. Understanding what aspects of heritage language development are affected by the dominant societal language can help develop teaching methods and materials which facilitate their acquisition in the heritage language.”

Project

“Time-Dependent Moments”

Philipp completed his doctoral degree at the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, under the supervision of Professor Konrad Schmüdgen in the field of the (truncated) moment problem with an emphasis on functional analytic aspects. His doctoral degree was funded by a scholarship of the Max Planck Institute and the German Research Foundation.
After his doctoral degree, he continued his research with Konrad Schmüdgen at the University of Leipzig for a short time. He then joined Mario Kummer at the Technical University of Berlin to continue working on the (truncated) moment problem and intensifying his algebraic perspective in this field. After that, he moved to Toulouse, France, to join the Laboratoire d’analyse et d’architecture des systèmes (LAAS-CNRS) under the supervision of Victor Magron, Milan Kordan and Jean-Bernard Lasserre in order to intensify his computational understanding of the moment problem.
“Moments appear in different aspects of our everyday lives, e.g. in physics and engineering as the moments of inertia or rotation, in statistics as expectation values or in image processing in medicine (MRI),” says Philipp, explaining the focus of his research project. “In my project, I want to investigate time-dependent moments of distributions (functions) from partial differential equations (PDE). Recently, moment problem implementations have shown the usefulness of finding solutions for PDEs. I have extended the moment problem in a systematic and general way to derivatives of moments and proved the existence of solutions for a PDE. Both methods (the moment theoretic and the PDE methods) will be combined in this project to improve the theoretical foundation of moment problem implementations for PDEs.”
Apart from his research, Philipp likes the opera and classical music, contemporary and modern art – he paints himself, as well as gardening, plants and nature – when hiking, climbing, cycling or visiting the Mainau Island.

Project

“Using primate population genetics to map ancient trade routes”

Fellow host: Gisela Kopp 

Nathaniel J. Dominy is Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Dartmouth College. His training includes degrees from Johns Hopkins University (BA, 1998) and the University of Hong Kong (doctorate, 2001) as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago (2002-04). His research programme focuses on the ecology and evolution of primates, with a particular focus on food detection, acquisition and assimilation. His ultimate motivation is to unravel key transitions during human evolution through the prism of feeding behaviours and mechanics. Nathaniel Dominy is a Senior Fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and an elected Fellow (and council delegate) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nathaniel Dominy is delighted to join the (academic) staff and students at the Zukunftskolleg, where he is collaborating with Gisela Kopp. Their project centres on the commercial trade and transhipment of baboons in antiquity and the origins of economic globalization.

Project

“Surviving the Anthropocene: The Political Economy of Coloniality of Virtual Space”

Fellow host: Gruia Badescu

In his most recent book, “Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources” (2021), Alexander Etkind examines the history of extracting and trading resources. He also discusses the perspectives of humanity facing climate catastrophe. In his analysis of state and economic power, Etkind argues that it is not the powerful who control the resources, but the resources that control the powerful. This is a key element in his discussion of climate change. Beyond his work on Russia and the theory of memory, Professor Etkind’s work responds to many of the research interests at the Zukunftskolleg, and particularly to the theme of sustainability. Discussing his vision for his time at the Zukunftskolleg, Alexander Etkind outlined his plan to develop a thread that came from this research into a new project. The theme is virtual space as a resource, testing his key tenets from his self-colonization book with the discussion of political economy of resources and exploring the relationship between digital space and survival in the age of the Anthropocene.

Project

“Expanding baboon studies in Konstanz via new collaborations”

Fellow host: Gisela Kopp

James Higham is Professor of Biological Anthropology at New York University. He works on the biology of primates, especially African and Asian monkeys, such as macaques, baboons, drills and guenons. While at the Zukunftskolleg, he was co-organizing a workshop and a resulting manuscript on the topic of the “Sensory ecology of collective behaviour” and collaborating with Gisela Kopp on exploring the genetics of Kinda baboons.

Project

“If Hooks Could Kill: Urban Soundscapes; and Marx in Texas: Slavery, Capital, and the "Revolutionary Turn”

Eric Lott is seen as a towering figure in the field of American Studies: his work “Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class” has become a touchstone for recent generations of scholars on matters of popular culture, race and class in the nineteenth-century United States, music and performance, and archival methodologies.

Fellow host: Jacob Bloomfield

Report on his stay at the Zukunftskolleg in 2022:

Project

“Enhancing methods and theory in primate genomics and foraging decisions”

Fellow host: Gisela Kopp 
 

Amanda Melin is a Canada Research Chair and an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, Canada. She studies the molecular, behavioural and dietary ecology of primates and other mammals in order to understand how sensory systems evolve and how animals respond to changing environments over evolutionary time and over the course of their lifetimes. Dr Melin is a co-director of the Santa Rosa Primate Project in north-western Costa Rica and in charge of the primate molecular ecology laboratory at the University of Calgary. As a Senior Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, she is collaborating with Gisela Kopp in order to increase the breadth and scope of non-invasive genomics applications in field biology and co-organizing a workshop on the sensory ecology of collective behaviour.

Project

“Naeem revisits Naeem et al. 1994: Reading between the lines of a scientific paper”

Fellow host: Gisela Kopp 

Report on his stay at the Zukunftskolleg in 2021:

“I was fortunate enough to be supported by the Zukunftskolleg through two Senior Fellowships. I took up the first, between October 2020 and April 2021, remotely from India, on account of the pandemic. Then, during November-December 2021, I also spent time in-person at the Zukunftskolleg in Konstanz. The Zukunftskolleg’s support was critical to enabling me to make substantial progress on a book manuscript (commissioned by Cambridge University Press) that looks at stories behind famous scientific papers in ecology and evolution. I also used this time to work on an invited paper from The American Naturalist that synthesizes learning from the project and to conceptualize a digital exhibit that highlights the contrast between the writing and doing of science (which is supported by a Zukunftskolleg co-funding grant).

The fellowship also gave me the opportunity to present and discuss my work, remotely, at the Zukunftskolleg, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour and the Department of Biology of the University of Konstanz. Although the pandemic limited the opportunities for in-person meetings during my visit to Konstanz, I still managed a few valuable discussions of my project with Gisela Kopp, Giovanni Galizia, Gruia Badescu, Jolle Jolles and Graham Underwood from the Zukunftskolleg, as well as Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin and Iain Couzin from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour.

I would like to use this opportunity to extend my heartfelt thanks to a number of people who helped in making this fellowship possible and enjoyable in difficult times: Gisela Kopp, Giovanni Galizia, Anda Lohan, Michael Krause, Daniela Kromrey and Sigrid Elmer. I very much look forward to coming back to the Zukunftskolleg sometime.”

Project

“The Historicity of Axioms. The historicizing effect of mathematical formalism on the axiomatization of early modern sciences.”

Fellow host: Carolin Antos-Kuby

Report on his stay at the Zukunftskolleg in 2021/2022:

“As a Senior Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg in Konstanz, I chiefly worked on a research project in the field of theoretical philosophy and philosophy of science with the general topic: The Historicity of Axioms. The historicizing effect of mathematical formalism on the axiomatization of early modern sciences. I was able to develop some of the important theoretical foundations in a research paper, a short monograph written during a fellowship in Cambridge (July-October 2019) with the title: Vom Aufspüren der Axiome. Die Epistemisch-Strukturelle Intuition und das moderne Wissenssystem (Karl Alber Verlag Freiburg, 2021).

My research at the Zukunftskolleg mainly investigated the historical influence of the mathematical formalism on the axiomatization of early modern mathematical sciences, especially mechanics. Dr Carolin Antos, junior professor and fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, who works on axiomatic set theory in her research, agreed to support my fellowship as host at the Zukunftskolleg. The research collaboration with Dr Antos gave me adequate opportunity to become more familiar with the interdisciplinary nature of research at the Zukunftskolleg – i.e. between philosophy and mathematics with regard to its theoretical-axiomatic foundations and their historical development. Through this fellowship, I could establish sustainable research collaborations with the Zukunftskolleg and the faculties of the University of Konstanz – especially in the areas of theory of science and philosophy.

I had the opportunity to present and discuss my research on various occasions at the University of Konstanz, such as the lecture in the seminar on “Emergence of Limit. Revisiting the Foundations of Infinitesimal Calculus”, my official talk at the Jour fixe on “The Epistemic-Structural Intuition” as well as a lecture in the postgraduate colloquium of the Art History section on “Die ikonische Retention der Zeit. Reflektionen zur Filmästhetik Andrei Tarkovskys”. The Department of Literature, Arts and Media Studies invited me to give a seminar at their session at the European Parliament. In a half-day seminar, I was able to discuss the shared history of India and Europe in the early modern period (16-17^th century) with the students and doctoral researchers.”

Project

“Investigating the role of light and endogenous rhythms on the motility behaviour of benthic diatoms”

Fellow host: Bernard Lepetit

Report on his stay at the Zukunftskolleg in 2021/2022:

“I am a marine and freshwater biologist, with a strong ecological focus to my research. I was looking for a period of time away from my home institution, where I could really focus on learning new techniques and approaches and building a set of collaborations to develop my research interests on marine diatoms, an important group of single-celled algae. Professor Peter Kroth’s research group and the diatom photophysiology expertise of ZuKo fellow Dr Bernard Lepetit made the University of Konstanz an ideal choice. I was also attracted to the concept and environment of the Zukunftskolleg.

Our research project was successful, with new and novel data generated on the movement behaviour of marine diatoms to gradients in intensity of different wavelengths (=colours) of light and the cell’s corresponding adjustments to their photophysiology (i.e. how much photosynthesis they are doing) and their use of photoprotective mechanisms. We completed the work by running experiments to look at the expression of different sets of genes in the cells in order to see if we could identify key molecular controls on movement, photosynthesis and internal control mechanisms. These data are still being processed. All these data will be written up as scientific papers and form the basis of a future joint grant application.

Working and living in Konstanz was really wonderful, and I left feeling intellectually refreshed.  The ZuKo environment was very stimulating. Meeting the other Fellows and Senior Fellows and hearing about their research was fascinating, and the support of the team at the Zukunftskolleg was outstanding. I was co-hosted within Kroth’s biology group. I enjoyed learning from as well as mentoring/supporting the postdoctoral candidates, doctoral researchers and master’s students in the group, including supervising a bachelor’s dissertation student, who made a significant contribution to my ZuKo research project and will be included as an author in the papers we will write.

During my time in Konstanz, in addition to the laboratory work mentioned above, I completed a reviewed book chapter on “EPS production in benthic diatoms”, which will be published in the volume “Diatom Photosynthesis – From High Value Molecules to Primary Production” in 2023, and submitted an EU Horizon Europe proposal (REWRITE: rewilding coastal soft sediment ecosystems). Currently, this proposal is ranked second in the call and on the reserve list for funding, and I obtained a project grant (€5,000) from the British Phycological Society to support the sequencing of our diatom transcriptome material.
The Zukunftskolleg model and its Senior Fellowship programme are really very special and, coupled with the excellent support and wider facilities at the University for me and my wife, contributed to making our stay in Konstanz very memorable. Vielen Dank!”

Research project

“Microbial-mediated protection against virus infections”

Funded by: Independent Research Grant

Microbe-host association is a defence strategy against pathogens; it is widespread and found from unicellular organisms to humans. Focusing on host-virus interactions and associated microbes interfering with virus replication, we found virophages. Virophages are virus-dependent, meaning virophage replication depends on their parasitism on virus virion production to make their own virions. Consequently, virus production decreases or is inhibited, which leads to a higher survival in host populations. My aim with the Independent Research Grant is to study the role of the virophage as a protective microbe against virus infections.

Research project

“Analysis of media bias in news articles using natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning”

Funded by: Interdisciplinary Collaborative Projects Programme 

Much research in the social sciences relies heavily on manual annotation, e.g. of textual documents such as party manifestos or news articles. And for good reason because only humans can reliably recognize subtle nuances in texts and read between the lines. However, these analyses are fairly costly and can take considerable time since they are conducted manually. This talk will give an overview of our previous and future research on making these analyses more efficient by using state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques, such as BERT. Specifically, we will summarize our prior work on the automated identification of media bias in news articles. We will then outline our current research project, in part funded by the Zukunftskolleg, which will extend our approach to further use cases in social science research.

Research project

“Visually lossless compression for JND-based video quality assessment using crowdsourcing”

Funded by: Independent Research Grant 

In this project, in addition to conducting laboratory experiments on subjective perception to estimate the JND for images and videos, he and his group evaluate the feasibility of replacing time-consuming and expensive traditional human-centred subjective testing in the laboratory with a scalable, faster and cheaper crowdsourcing alternative. They adapt distortion boosting techniques, such as flickering between the source and distorted videos, to increase the sensitivity and precision in estimating the just-noticeable difference (JND) threshold. They conduct user studies in the laboratory environment using a set of videos with resolutions of 3840x2160 and 1920x1080 as well as their cropped versions with a resolution of 640x480 pixels to subjectively estimate the JND of each stimulus when compressed with different video compression codecs such as H.264/AVC and H.266/VVC. They also conduct user studies by crowdsourcing the cropped stimuli at 640x480 resolution to investigate how crowdsourcing would replicate the JND data obtained in laboratory experiments.

Research project

“Global mental health in post-conflict regions”

Funded by: Transdepartmental Collaborative Teaching Programme

Her research interests broadly focus on global health policies, development and social epidemiology, by looking at measures at individual level (e.g. poverty, literacy, education), along with contextual factors (e.g. violence, gender inequality, health systems and access to health care), and studying the impact on health and mental health. She tries to look at disease and health from a social science perspective aimed at the role of social factors as causes of excessive morbidity and mortality, with a special focus on middle- and low-income countries. Her focus is on the interplay between poverty, violence and disease, and the evaluation of the impact and sustainability of interventions (such as narrative exposure therapy or specific health policies) to promote health, namely aspects of mental health, trauma and gender equality.

Research project

“Migration, tax evasion and bribery – evidence from a conjoint experiment in Mexico”

Funded by: Independent Research Grant

The research project examines how emigration and remittances influence individual tolerance of bribery and tax evasion. Her interest in studying this topic stems from her previous research on the developmental consequences of international migration in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Although extant research has identified a variety of factors contributing to the prevalence of bribery and tax evasion in these societies, the influence of international migration in producing these challenges is less clear. In this study, she aims to understand under what conditions some individuals – yet not others – are more likely to tolerate bribery and tax evasion and whether those exposed to international migration are distinct from other individuals in these types of attitudes.

Research project 1

“The Role of Embodiment in the Perception of Human and Artificial Creativity”

Funded by: Intersectoral Cooperation Programme

In this project, in collaboration with Laura Herman (Oxford Internet Institute and Adobe Research) and Aaron Hertzmann (Adobe Research), academic research and the creative technology industry join forces to better understand what artists working with AI technology should do in order to communicate and present their creative processes and products. In particular, they are interested in answering the question of how artists’ embodiment affects the perception of the creative process they perform. In July 2022, they organized a workshop within the International Conference on Computational Creativity 2022, in which they explored the impact of embodiment on the perception of creativity through a combination of performances by the digital illustrator Renaud Chabrier and the artist Daniel Berio, who works with generative methods and contributions from researchers interested in the role of embodiment in the judgement of the aesthetic value of an artefact and in the evaluation of the creativity of the process behind its creation (workshop website: lauramariahherman.wixsite.com/workshopiccc22). During the performances, they carried out a survey where they tested the participants’ perception of embodiment and the creativity of the artistic processes performed by the two artists. The results of this survey were published in the workshop proceedings.

Research project 2

“The Present and Future of AI Research”

Funded by: Transdepartmental Collaborative Teaching Programme 

In this project, in collaboration with Junior Professor Diego Frassinelli from the Department of Linguistics, an advanced seminar was organized which combined extensive work by the students with presentations and discussions by speakers and experts in various AI-related topics. Its structure was innovative and dynamic. During the semester, the students conducted research on the various topics of the course by reading and discussing papers and other materials available online. In this preparation phase, the students also participated in a one-day workshop led by Tanja Hess on how to design and present a research poster. On 28 July, the students attended a one-day, conference-like event with presentations by experts in a variety of AI topics and were responsible for organizing a panel discussion with questions from the students and the general audience. Moreover, they presented the posters prepared during the semester. Workshop website: sites.google.com/view/ai-konstanz/home 

Research project

“Corpus Exploration at Scale Using Contextual Implicit Entity Networks”

Funded by: Independent Research Grant

In the humanities and social sciences, the analysis and exploration of an ever-increasing amount of unstructured or semi-structured document collections are of central importance to researchers. Frequently, (named) entities, such as persons or locations, play a key role in the discovery of implicit relations between the contents of the documents and thus serve as natural entry points to a detailed manual analysis. To assist in these analyses, implicit entity-centric networks have been proposed as a language model that represents document collections as a co-occurrence network of entities and terms and thereby enables the visual exploration of corpora. In this project, we develop a versatile web application that enables researchers to upload, manage and explore document collections using implicit entity networks, even without programming expertise.

Research project

“Structural dynamics of chemically engineered 2D materials”

Funded by: Independent Research Grant

Since the discovery of graphene, two-dimensional (2D) materials have been in the focus of solid-state physics and materials science. MXenes are novel metallic 2D materials produced by a scalable, top-down chemical exfoliation, with superior performance in environmental and energy-related applications. In this project, we use ultrafast electron diffraction to investigate the structural dynamics of MXenes on fundamental time and length scales in order to understand the nature of electronic and heat transport in these technologically promising materials.

Research project

“Electrochemically active, luminescent and biocompatible Polymer@Metal-Organic Framework Composites for potential biosensor applications”

Due to the surging demand for point-of-care devices and significant technological uplift biosensors have gained a great deal of attention in the field of sensing. Being compact, fast responsive, and highly specific it has proven to be an effective tool in the sensing of various biological analytes. Deepanshu Bhatt’s research interest includes the usage of lectin-carbohydrate interaction for the fabrication of microbial biosensors. He is working on the topics of electrochemical and optical detections of nosocomial infection causing bacteria P. aeruginosa and E. coli using the sugar conjugated Metal organic frameworks. MOF is a hybrid material consisting of the linkage of the metal ion with an organic bridging ligand through coordination bonds having optical, electronic, and magnetic properties with tunable porosity and large surface area. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have rapidly emerged as important multifunctional mesoporous materials and works as a transducer in biosensor. He is an active researcher and contributes to various lab projects and as well helps fellow colleagues. He has good basic knowledge of nanomaterial synthesis and analytical instrumentation.

Research project

“Polymer-embedded Metal Halide Perovskites for Enhanced Stability of Blue Light Emitting Diode”

Metal halide perovskites (MHP) have attracted tremendous attention in photovoltaic devices and light emitting diodes (PeLEDs) owing to their low-cost solution processing and excellent optoelectronic properties. PeLEDs showing infrared, red and green emission demonstrate external quantum efficiencies (EQEs) over 20%. However, the EQE of blue PeLEDs is significantly lower (~5.5%) due to a defect density in blue emitters. Besides that, the blue emitter also shows phase segregation due to migration of ions, generating defect states and thereby leading to poor spectral stability. Further improvement in efficiency and stability of blue PeLEDs requires inhibition of ion migration and effective defect passivation. Here, we propose embedding MHP with long chain polymers, such as polyvinylpyrrolidone and ethyl cellulose, to improve moisture-sensitive MHPs, inhibit ion migration and improve defect intolerance of (Cs/MA)Pb(Br/Cl)-based blue PeLEDs. Polymer embedment in the bulk of MHPs would favour the formation of smaller grain size, which can enhance carrier capture efficiency and thus the EQE.

Research project

“Digital financial service innovation for inclusion of women in the Global South: Examining mobile money use in Eswatini’s traditional informal markets in Manzini”

The project explores the impact of the use of mobile money (a form of digital financial service innovation) on the financial inclusion of women in traditional informal markets in Manzini, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). I examine how the women’s daily and mundane financial practices affect how they perceive, adopt and use mobile money in ways that link it to their cultures, traditions, taboos, kinships and relationships (Kusimba et al. 2015) as opposed to the rhetoric of the financial inclusion agenda. While it is partly true that the intensification of digital money is reinventing the “social” and is reinvented by it in return by inserting sociality at par with market relations, conceptually, the extent to which this social character of money is represented in new digital currencies like mobile money is less understood specifically in informal settings. Important to note is that dominant discourses have focused on mobile money’s promise to expand financial inclusion (Beck, et al, 2007; Anderlone and Vandone,2010; Dermiguc-Kunt et al, 2018) through bringing the untapped market segments into mainstream finance, as if the state of exclusion and lack of service thereof is a natural state in these communities. But this political process of banking the unbanked has failed to take into consideration the lived experiences of the local and the created nature of exclusion as its guiding principle, thereby undermining the potential of studying the social life of such initiatives as mobile money in heterogeneous contexts. This study therefore takes the women’s experiences as its starting point in order to understand financial inclusion from their perspective, as mobile money generates new kinds of social and economic opportunity and vulnerability as well as a way of overcoming the constraints of time and space.

Research project

“Cell signalling data mapping into cell trajectories from live imaging”

Understanding how cell signalling and tissue morphodynamics are coupled during embryogenesis is still an open question in developmental biology. Cell signalling and reaction-diffusion models have been extensively used to understand self-regulated pattern formation during embryonic development. However, due to the lack of experimental tools to simultaneously visualize tissue dynamics (i.e. cell movements) and signalling in vivo, these studies are restricted to time scales in which tissue morphodynamics can be neglected. To overcome this need, we propose developing a novel mathematical model that can estimate activation levels of different signalling pathways with high spatio-temporal resolution during early zebrafish development. Briefly, signalling data (i.e. extracted from immunostained fixed embryos) will be sparsely mapped into single cell trajectories from live imaging experiments (i.e. SPIM microscopy images). A statistical model based on random fields and an optimal linear predictor will then be used to generate a continuous description of the signalling activation levels over time and space. The model will be applied to study some of the most important signalling pathways active during early zebrafish development, such as Nodal, BMP and FGF.

Research project

“Development of continuous improvement QSAR models to predict sorption of organic pesticides in soils at field conditions”

To reduce the economic cost and accelerate environmental decision-making in soil pollution, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) proposed the use of Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) models that predict sorption coefficients using molecular descriptors of different organic pollutants to describe their environmental fate in soils. In my research, I generated QSAR models, including pedodiversity and science policy interaction, analyzed reliability and applicability in specific environmental contexts and detected three problems preventing representative prediction:
(i) QSAR are reductionistic tools based only on molecular properties of pollutants, but soils are complex systems that require pedological and climatic information on different spatial and time scales to improve predictivity,
(ii) the lack of consensus in literature makes the detection and validation of causal relationships difficult, and
(iii) the information is heterogeneous due to the diversity of assumptions and methodologies to define sorption coefficients and select potentially relevant soil pollutant properties. 
This work investigates possible solutions by answering the following open questions:
1) To what extent can we simplify the environmental dynamics of organic pollutants in soils?
2) Can we detect and estimate the causal relationships between endpoint and descriptors?
3) Can we extract reliable information from current soil sorption studies?

Research project

“Studying literary adaptation for the gamebook format. The case of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses”

This project aims to study literary adaptation for the gamebook format. To this end, it will create a gamebook adaptation inspired by Metamorphoses by Apuleius (c. 125 – c.170), written in English. Concomitantly with the rewriting and improvement of this interactive text, we seek to reflect on what new perspectives a classic text can gain through literary adaptation for the interactive gamebook format and in what way. Huizinga (1971) and Caillois (1990) will be authors used to explain the concept of game; Iser (1996, 1999, 2002, 2013) will be chosen regarding the type of game promoted by literature itself; Silva (2019), finally, will explain what a gamebook is. In a short time, the project will present the hypothesis that gamebooks coming from literary adaptations may contribute to the diffusion of literary works through their adaptation, e.g. the new version of Metamorphoses, the first gamebook created from a text originally written in Latin. To conclude, this project will result in the most in-depth study ever done with gamebooks, which may bring this textual hybrid closer to academic studies.

Research project

“Introduced plant-pollinator interactions across a gradient of anthropogenic landscapes”

Plant-pollinator interactions are important, as flowering plants require pollinators for pollination and most pollinators rely on angiosperms for food resources. Apart from native plants, introduced plants may be key food resources for pollinators. Understanding the potential value of introduced plants to pollinators is urgently needed. However, introduced plants which are more attractive and may have larger flowers or more flowers per plant can outcompete native plants for pollinators. Little is known about introduced plant-pollinator interactions across anthropogenic landscapes, particularly in tropical orchards. Hence, information about which pollinators forage on introduced plants and how landscape composition influences plant diversity in tropical orchards is important for habitat management and pollinator conservation. This project aims (1) to assess introduced plant diversity in tropical orchards, (2) to identify key floral traits of introduced plants based on available taxonomic databases and published studies, (3) to construct pollination networks between introduced plants and pollinators, and (4) to examine whether anthropogenic landscapes (proportions of surrounding agricultural and urbanized cover) affect the number of introduced plant species in tropical orchards.

Research project

“The fitness consequences of collective coordination during predator mobbing”

During the Herz Fellowship, Yuqi Zou will focus on collective predator mobbing. In social animals, collective decisions are a vital part of their daily live, including moving about and antipredator defence. Birds give diverse mobbing calls, presumably to recruit others and to coordinate collective predator mobbing. Individuals and groups likely vary in their collective decision-making during mobbing, but this aspect remains unexplored. The project will be carried out under the supervision of Dr Michael Griesser and Professor Iain Couzin.

Research project

“European Border Twin Cities under Strain of Migration before and during COVID-19: Responses by Civil Society and Political Actors”

The project surveys attitudes to migration among NGOs and political actors in twin cities in Europe. Local political actors, on the one hand, appeal to their electorate and, on the other hand, to higher level politicians and to a lesser extent address migrants themselves. NGOs, on the contrary, primarily target migrants – both transient flows and those who have settled down locally – and the receiving community. Finally, more often than not there is a dialogue between NGOs and political actors involved in migrant processing and integration that influences collective narratives portraying migrants either as a local hazard or a resource.
Two twin city pairs – Nikel and Kirkenes on the Russian-Norwegian border and Konstanz-Kreuzlingen on the German-Swiss border – have been selected for a comparative analysis of their capacity for and experience in migrant processing and integration before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the findings will be discussed in the context of the fear of competition for scarce welfare resources.

Research project

“Memories of the resistance to the catastrophe in the city of Concepción, Chile”

The macro objective of this project is to re-evaluate the socio-political catastrophe of the military coup (1973) and the dictatorship (1973-1990) in Chile from the vantage point of the present by examining the transmission and memory of these acts 50 years after they occurred. The focus is the urban memory of these events through this study of the places of memory in the city of Concepción, Biobío region, Chile, thus embracing a regional approach (Cavieres, 2006) to the memories of the political resistance (Tesche, González, 2019b).