The Young International Academics postdoctoral programme (YIA) is a career development program proposed by the University of Luxembourg (Uni.lu) to nurture early-career postdoctoral applicants to gain momentum in interdisciplinary/intersectoral research. YIA applicants are international talents willing to propose and realize their own interdisciplinary research projects through a bottoms-up approach. YIA will welcome, in two calls, a total of 10 postdoctoral fellows with 36-month contracts over 5 years. YIA is open to all disciplines and sectors, involving Uni.lu in the drive towards an increased interdisciplinarity and intersectorality, which are strategic for Uni.lu, for the country and for Europe. A unique aspect of YIA is its integration into Uni.lu’s Institute for Advanced Studies-Luxembourg (IAS) created in 2019 to promote interdisciplinarity and outreach towards the society. This integration provides the YIA fellows with (1) a supervision for interdisciplinary and intersectoral research with more than 350 potential (co)-supervisors, and with about 350 potential public-private partners, (2) peer and cross-generational interactions/mentoring through the IAS fellows, invited distinguished senior scientists, early career researchers, and a mandatory academic or industrial secondment, and (3) a truly international flavour in an environment that cherishes diversity and excellence. YIA fellows recruited at Uni.lu are offered competitive contracts with mobility fellowships and access to excellent research infrastructures. A professor of Uni.lu provides supervision for the primary discipline of the applicant’s project and a co-supervisor covers the complementary discipline/sector. The YIA fellows are offered an “à la carte” training including mandatory courses, to suits the fellow’s career aspirations, increase the fellow’s interdisciplinarity and employability. The YIA programme will support a rapid ramp into a long-term Uni.lu funding of postdoctoral IAS fellows.

Bias in the perception of bodily sensations (interoception) can be dangerous or even fatal; for example, if we do not recognize signs of a stroke or take medication anytime we feel the slightest change in our body. Research consistently reports that anxiety is closely related to interoception and (mis)interpretation of bodily sensations, but little is known about more fundamental processes underlying this relationship. The aim of this project is to test whether categorization as basic perceptual process links anxiety and interoception via generalization and perceptual decision strategies. Bundling the continuous flow of interoceptive information into distinct categories such as “pain” or “pleasure” can facilitate perception and coping. By assigning sensations to interoceptive categories (e.g., symptom groups) we can infer information about causes and consequences and apply coping schemata fast and efficiently. Research on visual perception, however, suggests that anxiety can be related to excessive generalization which may turn into harmful over-generalization, particularly if stimuli are misclassified. We will test whether also in interoception, anxiety is related to excessive category-related generalization. Furthermore, we will test whether individuals higher in anxiety are more prone to take a “better safe than sorry” strategy and misclassify benign sensations (e.g., heartbeat and breathlessness associated with exercise) more often as sign of disease. We will test our hypotheses of categorization linking anxiety and interoception in a newly developed research paradigm. In contrast to traditional paradigms, it allows distinguishing interoceptive accuracy and bias. The project is of theoretical relevance by targeting fundamental processes linking anxiety and interoception. Furthermore, it is of clinical relevance by testing the relationship between anxiety and interoceptive classification strategies, which are related to choices in health behaviour.

Shape-shifting systems would offer unique innovation capabilities which have inspired fiction and driven exciting science and engineering research over the past decades. Such adaptable, multi-functional, shape-shifting creatures that could freely assume any desired form, mimic natural or engineered systems and even perform tasks beyond the capabilities of any human or conventional machine are indeed exciting prospects which could change the way we see world around us and interact with it. Yet shape-shifting systems, which include soft and reconfigurable robots, remain in their infancy. We are still to estimate physical limits for such technology and thus remain unable to predict which of all the exciting potential applications are actually achievable. In this project, through a continuous interaction between Robotics, Soft-Matter Physics, Computer Science and Computational Mechanics, with my host, I will devise novel theories and algorithms, implemented in open-source software which will enable to effectively control shape-shifting systems. Such predictive and control tools remain the major obstacle to designing and constructing actual shape shifters with unique and adaptable properties. The impact of shape-shifting devices would span the whole of engineering and medicine. Such systems could be used in communication and entertainment to physically reproduce virtual moving and interacting entities. In medicine, they could be injected into the blood stream, adapt to physiological conditions, enter the most remote, sinuous and confined areas in organs, treat them or invest them with required enhancements, e.g. cochlear implants for earing aids. These exciting opportunities, however, require the ability to effectively control these shape-shifting and adaptable systems, which is the aim of this Fellowship.

Existing technologies usually represent norms as formal rules involving deontic operators. Such a rule-based representation of norms is not suitable to handle real data. Norms emerge from laws via an interpretation process. The methodology of Normative Multi-agent Systems (NorMas) by prof. Boella and prof. van der Torre has been conceived to overcome these limits. Nevertheless, the current formalization of NorMas features two main limitations. Firstly, its models are based on deontic logic such as input/output logic. Deontic logic is typically propositional, i.e. its basic components are propositions connected by modal operators. A proposition basically refers to a whole sentence. On the other hand, natural language semantics includes a wide range of fine-grained intra-sentence linguistic phenomena: named entities, scope-sensitive operators, etc. It is then necessary to move beyond the propositional level, i.e. to enhance the expressivity of NorMas fit to formalize the meaning of the phrases constituting the sentences (noun phrases, verbal phrases, named entities, etc.). Secondly, NorMas has never been implemented and tested on real legal text. Currently, NorMas is only a promising logical theory, but it is time to see how it behaves on real data, in order to make it suitable for commercial applications. Drawing from my past experience in natural language semantics, parsing, and corpora building, I propose a project for extending NorMas in that sense, leading to ProLeMAS: (Processing Legal language in normative Multi-Agent Systems), a new logic for normative reasoning in multi-agent systems. In particular, the present project aims at (1) filling the gap between the current formalization of NorMas and the richness of natural language semantics (2) Implementing a pipeline from legal text to ProLeMAS formulae, passing through parsing and reasoning.