The grants allow the academics to establish themselves as independent research leaders. This year, the ERC has awarded Consolidator Grants to 328 researchers. The Consolidators are part of the European Union's Horizon Europe programme.

The UvA recipients:

Dr Corentin Coulais (Institute of Physics): Animating Metamaterials using Non-Reciprocity (ANIMETA)
Living materials such as cells, tissues and simple organisms are animate: they navigate their environment, adapt to it, and are resilient to damage. The goal of ANIMETA is to take inspiration from nature and create synthetic animate materials. This vision has become tangible thanks to major progress in Coulais’ field of expertise: that of mechanical metamaterials. These lab-made materials exhibit functionalities that very promising when it comes to the dream of achieving animacy. In particular, their properties can power locomotion—a crucial aspect of animacy. Yet, the locomotion of such metamaterials remains poorly understood and we lack principles for their design and control. Therefore, metamaterials cannot yet locomote in complex and unpredictable terrains. Coulais proposes to overcome these limitations by introducing a new class of shape-changing metamaterials and adding robotics to the metamaterials toolbox. In this way, he will create three-dimensional metamaterials that can autonomously roll, crawl and jump, and that display optimal locomotion performances in complex and unpredictable terrains.

Dr Antonia Rowlinson (Anton Pannekoek Institute of Astronomy): Using short radio flashes to probe the remnants of neutron star mergers (QuickBlitz)
Neutron stars are stellar objects that are roughly the size of Amsterdam (10 km radius) but contain a mass equivalent to that of the Sun – they are the densest objects in the universe. When neutron stars merge, they produce extremely powerful bursts of gamma rays and gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of space). But we still don’t know what their mergers make: a black hole or an even more extreme neutron star? If they make an even more massive neutron star, we would expect to see short radio flashes after the merger has occurred, but such emissions have not yet been unambiguously detected. Rowlinson’s project aims to find an answer to the fundamental question of what happens after neutron star mergers by using LOFAR, the largest low frequency radio telescope in the world. LOFAR is based in the Netherlands and operated by ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy). QuickBlitz will also build a new instrument on LOFAR that will be able to search the whole visible radio sky above the Netherlands for the tell-tale radio flashes.

Dr Ekaterina Shutova (Institute for Logic, Language and Computation): Towards globally accessible language technology and its alignment to cultural contexts (CulturAL)
In the last two years, large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have been widely adopted in many areas of life. The development of LLMs requires access to vast amounts of data and resources in a given language, as well as considerable computational infrastructure. As a result, these models are in practice limited to a handful of widely-spoken languages, leaving over 6,000 of the world's languages and dialects without access to such technology. Furthermore, research on LLM alignment, which aims to ensure the safety of their use, has been almost exclusively directed toward the English-speaking world. Taken together, these problems lead to a major inequity in today's language technology (and artificial intelligence more broadly). Taking a step towards a more inclusive and equitable language technology, Shutova’s project will develop a novel methodology for cross-lingual transfer of LLMs to a wide-range of (low-resource, understudied) languages and dialects, and their alignment to diverse cultural contexts. Her project will, therefore, advance multilingual natural language processing technology, extending its reach to populations currently underserved by it and making it safe for them to use.