This round involves grants in the domains of Science (ENW), Applied and Engineering Sciences (AES), Social Science and Humanities (SSH), and Healthcare Research (ZonMw).
The UvA and Amsterdam UMC laureates
In alphabetic order
- Prof. Theo Araujo (Amsterdam School of Communication Research): Interactions and trust calibration on generative AI conversational agents
A growing number of individuals increasingly integrate Generative AI conversational agents such as ChatGPT in their daily lives, asking for recommendations, as productivity tools for work or school, or even as companions for emotional support. While useful, these agents also bring several risks, as they often provide inaccurate or biased answers, and individuals can overestimate their capabilities. This project investigates how individuals interact with these agents, and tests strategies to empower them to adequately calibrate their trust in this technology.
- Dr Susanne Baumgartner (Amsterdam School of Communication Research): Why we see media effects but do not find them
Understanding how digital media affect youth is crucial in today's digital society. Yet, clear empirical evidence remains elusive. This project challenges the status quo in media effects research, questioning the prevalent assumption that media effects are linear and cumulative. It proposes a completely new idea: media effects stabilize over time, rendering them difficult to detect with existing analytical techniques. The project will deploy cutting-edge methods to test this theory, revolutionizing our understanding of digital media's influence.
- Dr. ir. Erik Bekkers (Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab): Neural ideograms: shaping AI with geometry-grounded learning
This project aims to develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems that learn and utilize 'neural ideograms'—geometric symbols for abstract concepts. These symbols will function similarly to how pictograms and ideograms simplify and convey complex information, thus enabling AI to interpret and organize complicated data through geometric constructs efficiently. Recognizing that most data is rooted in our physical world—and inherently grounded in geometry and physics—it's clear that neural ideograms must preserve this grounding to reality in order to be meaningful.
- Dr. Jochem Bernink (Amsterdam UMC, location AMC): Tuft cells: a key to healing the gut beyond inflammation
Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) presents a global health challenge with unclear causes and limited treatment options. The problem lies in impaired intestinal healing, perpetuating immune activation that exacerbates disease. Research unveiled tuft cells as pivotal players in gut repair post-injury, through surviving damage and leveraging signals from the immune system to kick-start healing. Innate lymphoid cells are a source of those signals. This research aims to unravel their collaborative mechanisms in intestinal repair, particularly in IBD patients. This insight holds promise for novel treatments, not only in IBD but also for other conditions involving tissue damage.
- Dr Maximilian Engel (Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics): Transitions between order and chaos in stochastic environments
Dynamical systems provide a mathematical description of the time-dependent processes in nature and society, from the movement of planets or the activity of neurons to the voting behaviour in democracies. Typically, such models are not complete but contain random parts due to uncertainty about environmental influences. This project studies the randomly occurring changes between different states and their predictability: how may a system seem in an ordered, predictable state for some time (e.g. hot weather over several weeks) but then changes into a fluctuating chaotic regime (e.g. rapid changes of temperature and precipitation)?
- Dr Jonne Guyt (Amsterdam Business School): Could a health tax on junk food be the secret to societies’ health issues?
Ultra-processed foods, high in sugars, salt, and saturated fats, are not good for us. What happens if we add a tax? Using novel methods and a unique setting, the project explores what happened when the first health tax was introduced. How did consumers react and how did supermarkets and food producers respond by changing prices, products, and packaging? And how are these taxes linked to other ‘wicked problems’, such as carbon emissions and air pollution?
- Dr Jan Hausfeld (Amsterdam School of Economics): Us vs them: using attention to understand and reduce discrimination
We often give preferential treatment to people we know or share an identity with (ingroup). This can deepen societal divisions, 'us versus them' , especially when choices are made in groups. Using eye-gaze data and experiments, this research investigates the influence of groups when deciding who should be hired or how to distribute scarce resources. A novel approach will be developed using attentional data, such as eye-tracking, to understand which factors drive decisions, and provide interventions aimed at shifting individual’s attention and perspectives, thereby promoting fairer and less biased choices.
- Dr Janneke Heijne (Amsterdam UMC, location AMC): Gonorrhoea superbug: prevention of emergence and transmission
What is the reason that antibiotics are slowly losing their effectiveness? This project investigates this for gonorrhoea, a sexually transmitted infection and one of very few pathogens for which strains resistant to all available antibiotics were described. It will make mathematical models of the development of resistance to antibiotics, based on laboratory experiments and data collected at sexual health centres. These models will be used to calculate effective ways to control the emergence and transmission of superbugs.
- Mr. Dr Marieke de Hoon (Amsterdam Center for Criminal Justice): From war to court: how the prosecutor can navigate a technology-driven information overflow emerging from armed conflicts
How can a prosecutor select suitable pieces of evidence from large amounts of (potential) evidence that emanate from conflicts like Ukraine and Syria to prosecute war criminals in their own courts? This research studies how prosecutors can improve their strategies and collaborations with new actors (civilian investigators, OSINT-analysts, evidence databases) and how they can sufficiently protect the rights of suspects, threatened witnesses, and large groups of foreign victims. The study examines experiences in The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, France and Ukraine and develops a theory for this new role of the prosecutor.
- Dr Franca van Hooren (Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research): Breaking the silence: politics, workers’ rights and the future of elderly care in Europe
Across Europe, the future of elderly care is endangered by the poor working conditions of care workers. Only political reforms can really change this situation, but despite the attention for elderly care during the Covid-19 pandemic, this has hardly happened. This project investigates why such political interventions are absent. It creates indicators of care workers’ rights, studies the political activities of care workers and analyses the processes leading to political decisions. Hereby the project reveals which political strategies can contribute to a sustainable future for elderly care and decent working conditions for care workers.
- Dr Mazi Jalaal (Institute of Physics): Living levers: unveiling the adaptive and active elasto-viscoplasticity of living systems
The materials from which life is built are typically soft, adaptable and active. In order to study them, we need model materials with similar properties. Based on new insights into a complex material class called elasto-viscoplastics, which includes toothpaste, this project develops a new class of active elasto-viscoplastics (A-EVP). These materials could mimic natural life processes like cell migration and embryo development. Advanced experiments and simulations will be integrated to develop a mechanical framework, enhancing our understanding of biological mechanics and advancing the creation of innovative, bio-inspired materials like smart 3D-printed and autonomous active matter.
- Dr Arturas Juodis (Amsterdam School of Economics): Enhancing interpretability and transparency of econometric procedures for dynamic economic model
In the social sciences, a gap exists between complex dynamic models and commonly used econometric and statistical tools. This makes it challenging to translate theoretical predictions into verifiable questions using real-world data. This project aims to develop a novel methodological framework to enhance interpretability and transparency in dynamic models and statistical procedures. Results will consist of innovative mathematical and statistical tools facilitating the generation of sound, statistically grounded conclusions from economic predictions.
- Dr Jeffrey Kroon (Stichting Amsterdam UMC, location AMC): The key role of endothelial cells as gatekeepers of our immune system in heart and vascular diseases
This project explores the critical role of inflammation in heart and vascular diseases and focuses on tuning our immune system through adjustments in how our blood vessel cells function. These 'gatekeepers' can either promote or reduce inflammation, thus providing an opportunity to enhance the response of our immune system, our 'body's own soldiers'. The goal is to investigate more effective ways to address heart and vascular diseases.
- Dr Maarten Marsman (Psychology Research Institute): Robust inference for dynamic network models
Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) have the potential to lead to a complete idiographic understanding of psychological processes, and to precision psychiatry. Dynamic networks are essential to this, as they provide a logical model for the coevolution of variables in the time series of EMA data. However, the growing popularity of EMA has outpaced the methodology for adequately analyzing these data. Several methodological challenges now prevent EMA research from reaching its full potential. This proposal overcomes the existing challenges with a new methodological framework for robust inference of dynamic networks.
- Dr Antonia Praetorius (Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics): Small fibres, big legacies?
Our clothes release very small plastic fibres (microfibres) during washing, which break down extremely slowly in the environment. We do not know what happens if they continue to accumulate over a very long time in our rivers. In this project, researchers will use a unique dataset on microfibre release from textiles collected by citizen scientists, to predict current and future emissions of microfibres into Dutch rivers. Combining models and experiments, they will investigate how many microfibres are needed to disrupt natural sediment processes. Interactive maps will visualise microfibre accumulation in the Netherlands under different scenarios.
- Dr Petter Törnberg (Institute for Language, Logic and Computation): Improving social media with Artificial Intelligence
Social media have become invaluable spaces where we share ideas and debate important societal issues. But our current social media platforms make such productive conversations difficult by amplifying conflict and driving polarization. How can we redesign social media to help foster more productive political conversations? With the recent emergence of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, we finally have a way of answering this crucial question. This project creates synthetic social media platforms with thousands of interacting chatbots, allowing researchers to experimentally test how different platforms shape political discourse. This will help us design social media with more positive societal outcomes.
- Dr Renée Visser (Psychology Research Institute): Memories in motion: from emotional events to life stories
How do memories work together to create the stories of our lives? While we know a lot about the processing of single events on the one hand, and autobiographical memory on the other, we do not have a research framework that connects the two phenomena, preventing a comprehensive understanding of one of the most fundamental human experiences. Importantly, we know little about the effects of time and emotion on the transformation of memory networks, which may be key to understanding and treating persistent mental health problems. This project develops a model for ever-evolving memory networks underlying our sense of self.
The Vidi is awarded annually by the Dutch Research Council NWO. In this round a total of 86.7 million euros was awarded to 102 scientists in the domains of Science (ENW), Applied and Engineering Sciences (AES), Social Science and Humanities (SSH), and Healthcare Research (ZonMw).