Experience and projects

Hands4Grants has supported a variety of projects, proposals and research consortia in Life and Computer Sciences. We supported European projects within the programmes FP6, FP7, IMI, ERC, and Horizon 2020. National projects included NWO projects within the programmes Dutch Research Agenda (NWA), Gravitation (Zwaartekracht), Talent Scheme (VENI, VIDI, VICI), Research Infrastructure and RVO submissions within the MIT programme. A selection is described below.

 

NWO Research Infrastructure (RI)– submission and project management 

Phased array radar for extreme weather analysis and prediction (PHARA) 

This RI project deals with development and realization of a first-of-its-kind research infrastructure for atmospheric and weather sciences: a fast-scanning phased-array radar in Ku-band with polarization diversity. PHARA will enable to track continuously cloud volumes and measure microphysical processes directly with a minimum of assumptions. To create PHARA, we bring together an outstanding multidisciplinary consortium with expertise both in remote sensing technology and in atmospheric science & water management. This new type of radar can observe the whole sky in a matter of seconds. It is designed to both reveal how particles grow inside clouds and precipitation and to track large-scale movements of weather systems. The transportable radar will contribute to breakthroughs in climate and atmospheric research, more precise weather forecasts and further (radar) innovations. We expect a major impact on not just atmospheric sciences, but also on weather forecasting, extreme weather warnings, electromagnetic wave-based sensing, hydrology and water management.  

 

Convergence Health & Technology Flagship programme – project management at project start-up

Helping young people with mental health problems earlier (PROTECt ME) 

Convergence connect the three institutes TU Delft, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Erasmus MC. By joining forces and integrating knowledge, expertise and methodology,  novel frameworks are formed that foster scientific discovery and technological innovation in the field of health and healthcare. The Convergence Flagship programme PROTECt ME has the ambition to optimize the well-being of Dutch youth aged 12 to 25 by improving early identification of mental health problems, using cutting edge real-time measures, smartphone and wearable technology, and data modeling; by improving decision making of who needs which intervention and when, combining professional expertise with artificial intelligence; and by creating and evaluating new technology-driven proactive interventions (e.g., eHealth).  The integrated approach involves stakeholders and end users in each step and builds a sustainable infrastructure and collaboration for convergence and impact.  

 

Zwaartekracht – interim project management 

Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDIT)

This philosophical research programme will develop new approaches to deal with social and ethical challenges brought about by emerging socially disruptive technologies (SDTs), like robots, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and climate technology. SDTs will change society, culture and everyday life, and also challenge some of our most basic concepts and values. We will innovate the ethics of technology so that we can critically evaluate and guide the development and introduction of these technologies. 

 

Zwaartekracht - submission

Stress in Action

Stress-in-Action capitalizes on the fast advances in technology and big data analytics to move stress research from the lab to daily life. The Consortium enables synergistic collaborations to discover 1) how responses to daily-life stress arise from the temporal, dynamic interplay between context and person-specific factors, 2) how daily-life stress can be reliably measured in a specific individual in real-time, and 3) how and when potential beneficial stress-response mechanisms turn into detrimental effects on mental and cardiometabolic health. This enables the development of novel monitoring and intervention strategies to track and reduce daily-life stress and its health impact

HORIZON2020 Coordination and Support Action - submission and project management

VISION

The aim of the VISION project is to reinforce, interconnect and mobilise Europe’s AI community and to orchestrate and accelerate Europe’s transition to a world-leading position in the research, development and deployment of AI technologies.

Making sure Europe stays at the forefront of AI developments.

A broad and ambitious vision is needed for artificial intelligence (AI) research and innovation in Europe to thrive and remain internationally competitive. Building upon its strength across all areas of AI and commitment to its core values, Europe is excellently positioned to take a human-centred, ethical and trustworthy approach to AI. Therefore, the four networks of AI excellence centres under ICT-48-2020 have been established.

VISION shall reinforce and build on Europe’s assets in AI, including its world-class community of researchers, and thus enable Europe to stay at the forefront of AI developments, which is widely recognised as critical in maintaining Europe’s strategic autonomy in AI. VISION will achieve this in the most efficient and effective manner possible, by strongly building on the success and organisation of CLAIRE (the Confederation of Laboratories for AI Research in Europe, claire-ai.org) as well as on AI4EU, and by leveraging the expertise and connections of several of Europe’s leading institutions in AI research and innovation.

Zwaartekracht - submission and project management

The Hybrid Intelligence Centre

Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is the combination of human and machine intelligence, expanding human intellect instead of replacing it. HI takes human expertise and intentionality into account when making meaningful decisions and perform appropriate actions, together with ethical, legal and societal values. Our goal is to design Hybrid Intelligent systems, an approach to Artificial Intelligence that puts humans at the centre, changing the course of the ongoing AI revolution.

By providing intelligent artificial collaborators that interact with people we strengthen our human capacity for learning, reasoning, decision making and problem solving. This interaction has the potential to amplify both human and machine intelligence by combining their complementary strengths. Hybrid Intelligence requires meaningful interaction between artificial intelligent agents and humans to negotiate and align goals, intentions and implications of actions. Developing HI needs fundamentally new solutions to core research problems in AI: current AI technology surpasses humans in many pattern recognition and machine learning tasks, it falls short on general world knowledge, common sense reasoning, and human capabilities such as collaboration,  adaptivity, responsibility and explainability (CARE). These challenges are being addressed in four interconnected research lines.

The Hybrid Intelligence Centre is a collaboration of top AI researchers from the VU Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam, the TU Delft, and the Universities of Groningen, Leiden, and Utrecht, in areas such as machine learning, knowledge representation, natural language understanding & generation, information retrieval, multi-agent systems,  psychology, multimodal interaction, social robotics, AI & law and ethics of technology. The HI centre will create a national and international focus point for research on all aspects of Hybrid Intelligent systems.

HORIZON2020 Training network - submission

TIPAT

TIPAT: Historically, drugs for infection and disease have been developed from tests in large populations of similar patients. Scientific advances, particularly in the field of genetics, have ushered in a new era of personalised medicine in which genes, proteins and even parts of proteins can be used to create targeted therapeutics. Personalised antibiotic therapy is an area where such methods can be used to increase the efficacy of antibiotic therapy while combating the dangerous rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. TIPAT is training young researchers in the techniques required to strategically evaluate drug-pathogen-host interactions for effective personalised antibiotic therapy. A fresh look at what is becoming a common problem may be just what the doctor ordered.