CORDIScovery – unearthing the hottest topics in EU science, research and innovation – Details, episodes & analysis

Remember when you could wander around the internet, fairly confident that what you were looking at was probably reliable? Over the years it seems that information is becoming less and less trustworthy and with deepfakes and biased algorithms it’s starting to feel like the disinformation might be around every corner.

Here to help us navigate the maze are three researchers, who have all received support from EU science funding:

Owen Conlan, is a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics.He is also co-director of the Trinity Centre for Digital Humanities. Owen is very interested in user control over personalised AI-driven systems.

Joana Gonçalves-Sá is a researcher both at the Nova Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics and in the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics, Lisbon, where she leads the Social Physics and Complexity research group. Her focus in on human and algorithmic biases, using fake news as a model system.

Marián Šimko is an expert researcher at the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia. Marián focuses on natural language processing, information extraction, low-resource language processing and the interpretability of neural models.

Melted cheese over a burger – is your stomach rumbling? How about making that cheese from plant protein and the burger from insects?

We need to develop ways to produce more existing sources of protein more efficiently. Animal-based protein has an important role as part of a sustainable diet and as a contributor to food security. But now is the timefor alternative sources of complementary protein for direct human consumption, and animal feed, to increase their market share.

In this episode we are going to be looking at how to increase the production and market uptake of complementary proteins, with:

Emanuele Zannini who has a PhD in Applied Biomolecular Science and is now a senior researcher coordinator at the School of Food and Nutritional Sciences, University College Cork.

Tuen Veldkamp, a senior researcher in Animal Nutrition at Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and who is interested in testing and demonstrating innovative rearing methods to help the European insect supply chain become commercially viable.

Erlend Sild the founder of the deep-tech company, BugBox, who has developed an industrial and scalable technology forsustainable protein production from crickets, providing competitive production costs and increasing efficiency using AI.

Computational power, AI, genomics: the treatment and diagnosis of prostate cancer is advancing rapidly. This episode finds out how. 

A leap forward in the diagnosis and treatment would be very welcome: prostate cancer is the second most frequent malignancy in men. In 2020 alone, around one and a half million new cases and almost half a million deaths were registered worldwide.  To explore new diagnostics and treatment are: 

Jan Tkac, founder and chief scientific officer at Glycanostics, in Slovakia. The company has developed an innovative diagnostic test for cancer, based on novel biomarkers. Jan is also keen to explore how different sports relate to the levels of endorphin release. 

Harald Mischak, chief scientific officer of Mosaiques Diagnostics & Therapeutics, Germany. Harald is focused on understanding the underlying molecular structures of certain types of cancers.  

Joaquin Mateo, group leader of the Prostate Cancer Translational Research Group at Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, in Barcelona. He is especially interested in the development of novel forms of precision medicine. 

For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!dgTGkb

Printed buildings, energy from atmospheric humidity, earthquake resilience – some of the novel ideas taking age-old construction techniques and making them fit for the future. 

The way we build has not evolved much over millennia, but the context is radically different. So how can we build the homes we need in the least damaging way possible? To talk us through some of the latest ideas are: 

Abdelghani Meslem is senior research engineer in Hazard and Risk Modelling at NORSAR in Norway. His work is focused on earthquake risk modelling, risk reduction and management.

Paweł Sikora is an associate professor from the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Poland, where he researches additive manufacturing, lightweight concretes and nanotechnology.

Andriy Lyubchyk is assistant professor of Nanotechnologies and Nanomaterials at the Research Center in Industrial Engineering, Management and Sustainability, part of Lisbon University. Andriy focuses on harnessing nanoengineering to advance the generation of renewable energy.  

For more info, visit: https://europa.eu/!DRRdbj

Democracy is a collective achievement and 2024 has been called its biggest year. Europeans go to the polls in June, to vote for their representatives at the European Parliament, and 8 of the 10 most populous countries in the world are also holding elections. But the process will face challenges, perceived and unperceived.

Our three guests explore some of the latest ideas about those threats and how to counter them.

Jan Kubik is distinguished professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University in America, and professor emeritus of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. He is interested in the rise of right-wing populism.

David Dueñas-Cid is an associate professor at Kozminski University, Poland, and the director of the Public Sector Data-Driven Technologies Research Center. He researches the intersection between digital sociology and e-government, with a clear focus on electronic democracy and internet voting.

Sven-Eric Fikenscher is a researcher with the Center of Excellence for Police and Security Research, at the Bavarian Police Academy (website in German) in Germany. He is particularly interested in refining our understanding of how disinformation campaigns online can result in criminality.

For more info, visit: https://europa.eu/!mrpyYW

About 500 000 babies are born early in Europe every year, for some the condition is fatal. Complications relating to being born prematurely are the leading causes of death in the under-fives. Improving feeding, mitigating the impact on the brain and rethinking prevention – our three projects are doing what they can to push back these numbers.  

Audrey van der Meer is co-director of the Developmental Neuroscience Laboratory and professor of Neuropsychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. She is particularly interested in the infant brain, with its enormous plasticity and capacity to learn from day one.

Isabel Hoffmann is a deep-tech entrepreneur. By harnessing technology and connectivity, she is working to help create a world in which food contributes to health, not to societal diseases. Her company Tellspec is developing innovative ways of personalising nutrition to help premature babies thrive.

Julien Penders is co-founder of Bloomlife, a company designing wearable technologies and predictive analytics to promote prenatal health. Bloomlife has developed a device paired with data analytics to increase access to care, provide personalised feedback to mothers, and help doctors predict and manage pregnancy complications.

For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!BR3r43

Did the ability to feed babies porridge help to fuel the population explosion seen in the Neolithic period? Did people take to the seas far earlier than previously thought to chase whales and seals? What is the difference between a flourishing desert frontier fort and one that dwindles into dust? We take a look at three times when food was a catalyst for change.

Bettina Schulz Paulsson, an associate professor of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, specialises in research related to the Stone Age. Her interests encompass seafaring, megaliths, prehistoric whaling and scientific dating and methods. 

Associate professor of Egyptology at the Polytechnic of Milan, Corinna Rossi, focuses her research on the relationship between architecture and mathematics in ancient Egypt. Rossi has been exploring the antiquities of Egypt’s Western Desert for over 20 years.

Sofija Stefanović is professor of Physical Anthropology and Bioarchaeology in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. She is interested in the prehistoric patterns of fertility and the influence of the duration of breastfeeding on children’s health in the Neolithic period.

For more info the projects featured, visit: ⁠https://europa.eu/!nFkxTW

Pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss are all threatening our sustainable use of marine resources – at the same time we need seafood. It’s a conundrum! Could lights help by deterring the wrong fish from getting into nets? Can AI help zap the virulent sea lice that plague fish farmers? And how do zebra fish bridge the gap between aquaculture and medicine? Listen on to get some answers!

Rachel Tiller is a chief scientist and director of Biodiversity and Area Use, at SINTEF Ocean, Norway. She is interested in putting smart tools in the hands of the fishing community to help them catch what they are intending to catch.

Margaret Rae is the managing director of Konree Innovation, based in Ireland. The company aims to harness the latest technological approaches to improve the health and welfare of farmed fish.

Marc Muller , now retired, was a senior assistant professor at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), in the University of Liège. He studies skeleton formation in zebrafish, and the insights that gives us into human skeletal pathologies.

For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!RmVKTH

What do a mathematician, a palaeontologist and a researcher considering the rehabilitation of multiple sclerosis patients have in common? All three are women who have carved themselves successful careers as scientific researchers.

In a change to our usual format, this episode of CORDIScovery invites three female researchers from completely unrelated areas to talk about their work, discuss their own experiences and offer insights into what helped, and hindered them, in the development of their careers.

Elena Ghezzo is a fellow of Ca’Foscari University of Venice. She is particularly interested in screening fossils using spectral imaging, and in the distribution and extinction patterns of large carnivores before the Holocene. She is joined by Camilla Pierella, an assistant professor at the University of Genova. She studies the neural control of movement, robots for rehabilitation and body-machine interfaces.

Erika Hausenblas is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Leoben, in Austria. She studies how stochastic systems, characterised by randomness and uncertainty, impact the modelling of a wide range of phenomena, such as weather patterns, stock markets and biological systems.

For more info the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!QqDYJ3

Climate change is here: so what are we doing to meet the challenges in Europe? Ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 28, we will be hearing from four cutting-edge researchers who are working to get us ready to deal with the coming changes in our environment.

Using the internet of things (IoT) to track mosquitoes that carry diseases more often associated with the global South; protecting our woodlands and forests from the impact of destructive beetles and other factors; examining the impact of extreme storms on our architecture and working out how to keep people safe from waves that are higher than ever, overtopping coastal defences that were designed in another era – this episode is on adapting to climate change in Europe.

Talking us through these and other ideas are: João Encarnação CEO of Irideon, who is particularly interested in the development of IoT sensors for insects with impact on public health, food safety and biodiversity. Along with Guillaume Marie, an independent researcher and part of the team of developers behind ORCHIDEE, the French land surface model used by the UN to predict climate change. They are joined by Marie Pia Repetto, professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Genoa, Italy whose main interest is in wind engineering, and Corrado Altomare. Altomare is a postdoc researcher at the Maritime Engineering Laboratory of Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and is actively involved in mounting Europe’s response to the problem of sea wave overtopping in coastal areas.

For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!RHTnb9