The Institute for Advanced Studies Luxembourg (IAS) of the University of Luxembourg held its annual community event on 23 November 2022, on Belval Campus, with interdisciplinarity as a leitmotiv.
Prof. Jens Kreisel, Vice-Rector for Research and nominated Rector of the University, described how the IAS is instrumental to interdisciplinarity at the University, enabling bold and excellent research at the forefront of science and technology: “By building bridges inside the academic community, with international visitors, and the public, the IAS kickstarts new ideas that wouldn’t be funded anywhere elsewhere.”
Prof. Claus Vögele, full professor in Clinical and Health Psychology and new Head of the IAS as of 1 October 2022, insisted on the importance of strengthening both the IAS network within Luxembourg, notably through opportunities to exchange digitally and in person at regular meetings, seminars, events, and throughout the world by building strong bonds with other IAS and society-at-large. “Scientific results need to be communicated in a way that can be understood accurately. Scientists play an important role in explaining their own research to non-scientists, and non-scientists must make an effort to incorporate science into public policies.”
Ten PhD candidates selected in the 2021 Young Academics programme then showcased their audacious interdisciplinary projects.
- Meryem Abbad Andaloussi presented the IBIOMO project, aiming to better understand and predict malignancy of brain tumors using patients MRIs acquired within the usual clinical process.
- Mirela Puleva’s AQMA project objective is to build a general hybrid quantum mechanics/machine learning model, which would be able to accurately capture the physical characteristic of interacting biochemical systems on a feasible time scale with the goal of aiding drug-protein binding predictions.
- Leo Fel’s e/i-V:PLACE brings together experiences of electronic and internet voting in European democracies, provides an overview of current trends, and formulates guidelines for decision-makers to improve the process of e/i-voting adoption and evaluation.
- Nina Buntic’s SUMCO project on fatigue in Post-COVID-19 Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), investigates alterations in multiple organ systems and their translation into chronic complaints focusing on interoception, the ability to perceive own bodily states.
- In his AES anti-phishing project, Xiaowei Chen applies theories from psychology and human-computer interaction methods in the field of countering phishing attacks and aims to achieve effective and sustainable anti-phishing solutions.
- Through MITIGATER, Linnet Reid investigates the gendered vulnerabilities to weather catastrophes in Jamaica, looking at how these vulnerabilities are shaped by both gender norms/stereotypes and the policy environment assessing. She is also looking at how resilience is built and assesses the importance of policy coherence for promoting gender equality and whether access to microcredit helps to alleviate or further compound these vulnerabilities for female-headed households.
- Tobias Fischbach is looking to understand and optimise the energy dependency of communication from a CPU instruction to a data centre in NETCOM.
- In LeukoKids, Nora Nicolai investigates the impact of early life stress experiences on health in children who experienced leukemia during their early childhood.
- The HARMONISE project of Stanislav Gubenko seeks to analyse the interplay between mega-infrastructure projects and human rights by looking at modern Chinese infrastructure development in the Western Balkans from the legal perspective.
- In DATART, Alessandro Tugnetti investigates the importance that collectibles play in wealth management, and how this necessitates the development of models which can efficiently predict their price fluctuations. In this research, he exploits the ways in which technology is changing the art market by applying machine learning methods to artistic products.
From left to right: Meryem Abbad, Nora Nicolai, Tobias Fischbach, Alessandro Tugnetti, Xiaowei Chen, Stanislav Gubenko, Mirela Puleva, Nina Buntic, Linnet Reid
There were two keynotes presented at the event: “Learning and failing to learn from other disciplines: The example of economics”, by Prof. Without transition: a new history of energy, and “Alan Kirman”, by Dr Jean-Baptiste Fressoz.
Lastly, the two current Audacity projects selected in 2021 by the Scientific Council of the IAS, presented their goals, and some early findings. Audacity is a strategic instrument of the IAS to enable audacious interdisciplinary research, breaking the barriers between scientific disciplines and sectors, and fostering increased collaboration.
Dr Jun Pang and Dr Lasse Sinkkonen presented GENERIC: Reconstructing gene regulatory networks with neural relational inference. The researchers aim to integrate theories, techniques and tools from biology and computer science to discover structures of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from large-scale data, which is crucial to understand complex diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. The inference of accurate GRNs from data is challenging not only because of the large number of components involved, but also their possible mutual interactions.
Prof. Stéphane Bordas, Prof. Andrea Binsfeld, Dr Pratik Suchde, and doctoral researcher Juan Francisco Aguilar Kons, teamed up to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, at threat through man-made and natural disasters. ADONIS: Archeological Digital Forensics: reverse engineer the future of cultural heritage, uses Tell Nebi Yunus in Mosul, Iraq, as a case study to combine archaeology, history, art history, data and computational sciences, geophysics and geology. The ancient palace, unexcavated yet and believed to contain the tomb of Biblical prophet Jonah, was initially an Assyrian palace, then an early-Christian monastery, and lastly an Ottoman mausoleum, before being pillaged and destroyed by the so-called Islamic State (IS). The team of researchers strives to digitally recover, record and preserve our cultural heritage with a new generation of image-guided multi-physics computational archaeology tools.
New IAS events will be planned in 2023. If you are interested in participating, or for more information on upcoming calls, please contact Dr Sylvie Fromentin, IAS coordinator, or Prof. Claus Vögele, Head of IAS.