This project will provide fresh perspectives on access to justice in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), where human rights litigation must often take place across the border in Israeli courts. The project asks how this cross-border dynamic - with intersecting legal regimes defined by space and personal status - affects rule of law outcomes. The project will focus on cases of a cross-border nature, such as family reunification petitions for Palestinian families on both sides of the border, or confiscation of property in occupied east Jerusalem belonging to Palestinians living elsewhere in the West Bank. Methods will include analysis of case law, statutes, and regulations in various Israeli civilian and military courts and interviews with legal practitioners. The project will develop a tool for new evidence-based insights in the form of a research blog that will excerpt, translate, and analyze important legal materials - many of which have never been translated from Hebrew. The blog will also serve to catalyze discussions among stakeholders by inviting contributions from the community of human rights practitioners working on the oPt. Finally, a set of workshops for researchers and practitioners will act to crystallize and extend the online conversation started by the blog.

In recent years, the academic and policy circles around the world are very interested in how weather index insurance, an innovative financial product much less costly than other agricultural insurance products, can be used to mitigate negative impacts of large rainfall shocks among rural households. So when considering an expansion of existing safety net programs, should weather index insurance become a new part? How can it be cost-effectively integrated? Or should the government just give more cash to the poor? Which of these two alternatives will bring larger positive effects on consumption, investments and agricultural production? Which will be more effective in alleviating poverty? To obtain unbiased causal estimates that can properly answer these questions, this project will use a randomized controlled trial (RCT) on a sample of 30 rural villages and 900 rural households in Ethiopia. We will randomly assign the sample into one of the three groups: 1) Pure PSNP: Poor households receiving benefits from the existing Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP); 2) PSNP+WII: Poor PSNP households receiving also Weather Index Insurance (WII) as in-kinds; and 3) PSNP+CCT: Poor PSNP households receiving additional conditional cash transfers (CCT). The RCT design and data collected will allow us to conduct econometric analysis to answer our questions. Overall, this study aims to provide scientific and policy recommendations on the use of agricultural weather insurance as an additional component in safety net program. These insights will be useful for future design on social protection programs and for economic and agricultural development.

The brain is the most intelligent information processor we know, but it does not come into the world this way. Most of the brain’s intelligent functions have to be learned from experience with the world. The key to understanding the brain, therefore, is to understand how the brain learns. I will target this important question, by combining knowledge about the brain and the environment from which it learns, with insights from self-learning computer algorithms. Thanks to recent, exponential developments in these algorithms, we are now in a position to apply similar techniques to model learning in the brain. Using visual perception as a test bed, I will adapt existing supervised learning methods into a new computational model of unsupervised learning in the brain’s visual cortex. From this model, I will distil concrete, testable predictions that I will validate against data from human participants performing perceptual tasks. By thus dovetailing computational and empirical methods, this research aims to understand how neurons wire together into complex information-processing networks. This not only addresses a fundamental and outstanding question in our understanding of the brain, but may also aid the development of more advanced self learning computer algorithms based on the same principles.

This is a computation time proposal for 5,000,000 (five-million) CPU-hours on Cartesius supercomputer. The research in this project is in the research area of astrophysics and more specifically with the physical processes around very massive objects such as black holes and neutron stars. Computer simulations of gas in a so-called plasma state are being conducted to investigate the transformation of energy from strong magnetic fields to the plasma.

“Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS)” (www.datasproject.org) develops an innovative method to explore African ethnonyms from the era of trans-Atlantic slavery, circa 1500-1867. Ethnonyms index African identities, places and historical events to reconstruct African culture that is linked to a history of slavery, colonialism and racism. The project centres on the need to understand the origins and trajectories of people of African descent who populated the trans-Atlantic world in the modern era. The development of a method for analysing demographic change and confronting social inequalities arising from racism constitutes a social innovation. The team’s methodology implements a research tool developed in Canada for handling ethnonyms that can be applied in a trans-Atlantic context from France and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Caribbean and Africa. This innovation confronts methodological problems that researchers encounter in reconstructing the emergence of the African diaspora. A methodology for data justice is salient because ethnonym decision-making used in our digital platform, requires a reconceptualization of the classification systems concerning West Africans. This methodology depends on an open source relational database that addresses important decisions that researchers face in the field about how to develop best practices and a controlled vocabulary for four reasons. First, scholarly expertise on West Africans is scattered globally. Second, the slave trade was transnational, rarely limited to one country or population, and the transfer of Africans across borders reflects this global relationship between colonial and colonized. Third, DATAS makes available a vast amount of information of immense value to marginalized communities deprived of information on their own history. Fourth, the trans-Atlantic and trans-national nature of this project complements the aims of a platform predicated on global collaboration. The project treats ethnonyms as decision making tools as a method whose concepts require rethinking entrenched assumptions about demography, data justice and research transparency.