This project will develop a decision-support system (DSS) for disaster risk management by considering multiple interacting natural hazards and cascading impacts using a novel resilient-informed and service-oriented approach that accounts for forecasted modifications in the hazard (e.g., climate change), vulnerability/resilience (e.g., aging structures and populations) and exposure (e.g., population decrease/increase). The primary deliverable from MEDiate will be a decision support framework in the form of service-orientated web tool and accompanying disaster risk management framework providing end users (local authorities, businesses etc) with the ability to build accurate scenarios to model the potential impact of their mitigation and adaptation risk management actions. The scenarios, which can be customised to reflect local conditions and needs (e.g., demographics, deprivation, natural resources etc), will be based on a combination of the historical record and future climate change projections to forecast the location and intensity of climate related disaster events and to predict their impacts, including cascading impacts, on the vulnerability of the local physical, economic and social systems. The scenarios will allow end users to evaluate the potential impact of different risk management strategies to reduce vulnerability and enhance community resilience. The project will consist of analysis of relevant data and co-development with testbed decision-makers of a DSS to enable more reliable resilience assessments, accounting for risk mitigation and adaptive capabilities, to be made, therefore reducing losses (human, financial, environmental etc) from future climate-related and geophysical disasters. The project will involve a multi-disciplinary team of geophysical and meteorological scientists, risk engineers, social scientists, information technologists and end-users, working together to ensure that the system is user-led and supported by appropriate technology.

As the master figure of speech, metaphor is a powerful communicative tool that might nevertheless come with costs for our processing system. Research in different fields has highlighted that a full-fledged metaphor comprehension capacity is a late achievement in development, it may decay as a consequence of several pathological conditions, and it evokes distinctive electrical activity in our brain compared to literal equivalents. However, we still miss a comprehensive framework able to account for all these empirical findings in a unitary fashion, and this despite a vast number of linguistic and cognitive accounts of metaphor. This project will ground on theoretical insights from the pragmatics of language to sketch a novel and comprehensive model of metaphor understanding able to account for neural, developmental, and clinical findings. The leading hypothesis is that metaphor comprehension is an inferential process that involves first adjusting the lexical concepts, and then deriving the implicated -non-literal- meaning. The model also takes into account the multiplicity of metaphor types, which might in turn engage visual images and sensory-motor processes, in line with recent multimodal accounts of lexical and semantic processing. The model will be tested and refined through a series of behavioral and electrophysiological studies employing innovative experimental paradigms and involving neurotypical adults, children, and individuals with psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. This multidisciplinary approach will lead to a significant breakthrough in our understanding of metaphor as the pinnacle of human verbal creativity, in addition to disclosing important aspects for research on language processing, development and decay.

ERIES responds to the call INFRA-2021-SERV-01-07: Research infrastructure services advancing frontier knowledge with the overall objective of providing transnational access to advanced research infrastructures in the fields of structural, seismic, wind and geotechnical engineering. This project, together with the research infrastructure team assembled, provides access to leading experimental facilities that permit users to advance frontier knowledge and conduct curiosity-driven research towards: the reduction of losses and disruption due to these hazards; the management of their associated risk; and the development of innovative solutions to address them that will contribute to a greener and more sustainable society. To this end, ERIES will offer transnational access to the best European experimental facilities in each field, with new and unique infrastructures available for the first time in this programme, along with the provision of a key laboratory in North America. It also foresees a key contribution from the European Commission?s Joint Research Centre, as anticipated by the call. It integrates the successful results and implementation of the past infrastructure projects, such as SERIES and SERA, and expands access capabilities to new communities and disciplines which were not yet focused on in past projects. Its anticipated outcome is to provide authoritative input for diverse stakeholders, from Civil Protection agencies to the European seismic building code; develop future standards for experimental techniques in earthquake, wind and geotechnical engineering; and provide a platform from which European researchers can develop innovative solutions and testbed applications of next-generation technologies. With 12 beneficiaries from 8 countries, ERIES builds an important element toward the reduction of losses, management of risk, and overall a greener and more sustainable engineering future in Europe.