Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council funding

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 13:14:45 +0000

Cambridge received the most awards of any UK institution, alongside ̽��ֱ�� College London, which also received five awards.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge winners are among 313 winners of the latest round of Consolidator Grants, backed with some €632 million. Part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, this new round of grants will create an estimated 1,900 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at 189 host institutions.

Dr Ana Cvejic from the Department of Haematology was awarded a grant for her CONTEXT project (Aneuploidy and Its Impact on Blood Development: Context Matters). ̽��ֱ��focus of her research is to understand how blood cells develop and how their development and their ultimate function is influenced by their environment and environmental cues. ̽��ֱ��aim is to use this knowledge to develop new ways to treat disease and improve human health.

Professor Nikku Madhusudhan from the Institute of Astronomy was awarded a grant for his SUBNEPTUNES project (Probing Exoplanetary Atmospheres in the Sub-Neptune Regime). His research is focused on the atmospheres, interiors and formation mechanisms of exoplanets. In 2021, he identified a new class of exoplanet, dubbed Hycean planets, which could greatly accelerate the search for life outside our Solar System.

Professor Ulrich Schneider from the Cavendish Laboratory was awarded a grant for his KAGOME project (A quantum gas microscope for the Kagome lattice). Schenider studies ‘many-body’ phenomena at the interface between quantum optics and solid state physics.

Dr Philippa Steele from the Faculty of Classics was awarded a grant for her VIEWS project (Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems). Her research focuses on the relationships between Aegean writing systesm and the development of the early Greek alphabet.

Dr Laura Torrente Murciano from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology was awarded funding for her RESTARTNH3 project (Energy functional processes and materials for storage of renewable energy in ammonia). Her research focuses on the integration of processes and development of novel catalytic routes for sustainable technologies.

President of the ERC Professor Maria Leptin said: ”Even in times of crisis and conflict and suffering, it is our duty to keep science on track and give our brightest minds free reign to explore their ideas. We do not know today how their work might revolutionise tomorrow - we do know that they will open up new horizons, satisfy our curiosity and most likely help us prepare for unpredictable future challenges. So, I am thrilled to see a new group of ERC grant winners funded for their scientific journey. I wish them the best of luck on their way to push the frontiers of our knowledge!”

Five ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers have been awarded Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council, the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research.

Westend61

European Commission, Brussels

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Study identifies our ‘inner pickpocket’

sc604 — Tue, 21 May 2019 07:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the Central European ̽��ֱ��, and Columbia ̽��ֱ��, found that one of the reasons that successful pickpockets are so efficient is that they are able to identify objects they have never seen before just by touching them. Similarly, we are able to anticipate what an object in a shop window will feel like just by looking at it.

In both scenarios, we are relying on the brain’s ability to break up the continuous stream of information received by our sensory inputs into distinct chunks. ̽��ֱ��pickpocket is able to interpret the sequence of small depressions on their fingers as a series of well-defined objects in a pocket or handbag, while the shopper’s visual system is able to interpret photons as reflections of light from the objects in the window.

Our ability to extract distinct objects from cluttered scenes by touch or sight alone and accurately predict how they will feel based on how they look, or how they look based on how they feel, is critical to how we interact with the world.

By performing clever statistical analyses of previous experiences, the brain can immediately both identify objects without the need for clear-cut boundaries or other specialised cues, and predict unknown properties of new objects. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the open-access journal eLife.

“We’re looking at how the brain takes in the continuous flow of information it receives and segments it into objects,” said Professor Máté Lengyel from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who co-led the research. “ ̽��ֱ��common view is that the brain receives specialised cues: such as edges or occlusions, about where one thing ends and another thing begins, but we’ve found that the brain is a really smart statistical machine: it looks for patterns and finds building blocks to construct objects.”

Lengyel and his colleagues designed scenes of several abstract shapes without visible boundaries between them, and asked participants to either observe the shapes on a screen or to ‘pull’ them apart along a tear line that passed either through or between the objects.

Participants were then tested on their ability to predict the visual (how familiar did real jigsaw pieces appear compared to abstract pieces constructed from the parts of two different pieces) and haptic properties of these jigsaw pieces (how hard would it be to physically pull apart new scenes in different directions).

̽��ֱ��researchers found that participants were able to form the correct mental model of the jigsaw pieces from either visual or haptic (touch) experience alone, and were able to immediately predict haptic properties from visual ones and vice versa.

“These results challenge classical views on how we extract and learn about objects in our environment,” said Lengyel. “Instead, we’ve show that general-purpose statistical computations known to operate in even the youngest infants are sufficiently powerful for achieving such cognitive feats. Notably, the participants in our study were not selected for being professional pickpockets -- so these results also suggest there is a secret, statistically savvy pickpocket in all of us.”

̽��ֱ��research was funded in part by the Wellcome Trust and the European Research Council.

Reference:
Gábor Lengyel et al. ‘Unimodal statistical learning produces multimodal object-like representations.’ eLife (2019). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.43942

Researchers have identified how the human brain is able to determine the properties of a particular object using purely statistical information: a result which suggests there is an ‘inner pickpocket’ in all of us.

These results suggest there is a secret, statistically savvy pickpocket in all of us

Máté Lengyel

Yes

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Central European ̽��ֱ��

Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council funding

Study identifies our ‘inner pickpocket’