CAPABLE’s long term objective is to develop a complex lidar spectrometer that allows us to measure vertically resolved profiles of trace gases, chemical components in particles, and bio-aerosols in atmospheric aerosol pollution. This information can be used for studies of the effect of the vertical distribution of aerosol and gas pollution on climate forcing, air quality, and human health. Impact on economically sensitive areas like air traffic safety caused by, e.g. volcanic plumes and desert dust, will be a spin-out product of our work. This lidar spectrometer will be based on simultaneous, vertically and spectrally resolved measurements of Raman and photoluminescence (PL)/fluorescence spectrums. In the first stage we develop the technique to the point that we can identify some of the most important climate-relevant aerosol components in a qualitative manner and we will develop computer models that will allow us to verify our measurement results on the basis of theoretical simulations. The models will form an end-to-end simulator that will allow us to develop and design the basic concepts of a Raman and PL spectroscopy lidar and necessary hardware specifications and explore the detection limits for the mobile measurement channel that can be installed in existing lidars. In the second stage, which can in part be achieved in this twoyear funding period we want to improve the methodology so that we can quantify at least some of the components, preferably to the level of profiles of mass concentrations measured under ambient atmospheric conditions. The third stage, which goes beyond the main purpose of our project, will explore the concept of Coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy (CARS) for chemical aerosol characterization. CARS could allow for detection of atmospheric pollutants with significantly higher sensitivity, and thus result in much shorter data integration times.

As robots become more omnipresent in our society, we are facing the challenge of making them more socially competent. However, in order to safely and meaningfully cooperate with humans, robots must be able to interact in ways that humans find intuitive and understandable. Addressing this challenge, we propose a novel approach for understanding and modelling social behaviour and implementing social coupling in robots. Our approach presents a radical departure from the classical view of social cognition as mind-reading, mentalising or maintaining internal rep-resentations of other agents. This project is based on the view that even complex modes of social interaction are grounded in basic sensorimotor interaction patterns. SensoriMotor Contingencies (SMCs) are known to be highly relevant in cognition. Our key hypothesis is that learning and mastery of action-effect contingencies are also critical to enable effective coupling of agents in social contexts. We use “socSMCs” as a shorthand for such socially rele-vant action-effect contingencies. We will investigate socSMCs in human-human and human-robot social interaction scenarios. The main objectives of the project are to elaborate and investigate the concept of socSMCs in terms of information-theoretic and neurocomputational models, to deploy them in the control of humanoid robots (PR2, REEM-C) for social entrainment with humans, to elucidate the mechanisms for sustaining and exercising socSMCs in the human brain, to study their breakdown in patients with autism spectrum disorders, and to benchmark the socSMCs approach in several demonstrator scenarios. Our long term vision is to realize a new socially competent robot technology grounded in novel insights into mechanisms of functional and dysfunctional social behavior, and to test novel aspects and strategies for human-robot interaction and cooperation that can be applied in a multitude of assistive roles relying on highly compact computational solutions.

Industry needs alternatives to textual passwords for access control. While tokens can still be stolen or transferred to other persons, biometrics technology can provide reliable, cost-effective and user-friendly solutions. The proliferation of smart services calls for unsupervised authentication at a distance. Being natural, non-intrusive and readily compatible with smart and mobile devices, automatic speaker verification (ASV) is an appealing solution. Even so, today’s state-of-the-art ASV systems lack robustness to environmental variability and are vulnerable to spoofing. Concerns regarding interoperability, scalability and privacy also form barriers to exploitation. While embracing standards, in addition to a privacy and interoperability-by-design ethos, OCTAVE will integrate commercial-grade and new, hybrid ASV systems with the latest environmental robustness and anti-spoofing technologies to deliver a scalable, trusted biometric authentication service (TBAS). While simultaneously relieving end-users from the inconvenience of dealing with textual passwords, the OCTAVE platform will reduce the economic and practical burdens related to password loss and recovery. The TBAS will support single (text-dependent, text-prompted and text-independent) in addition to hybrid operating modes. The delegation of authentication to a single, yet distributed TBAS, will increase trust and privacy, avoid single points of failure and allow for rapid breach notification and remediation. Solutions will be installed in data-sensitive and mission-critical services and validated in two real commercial trials: banking services and physical access within a critical airport infrastructure. Flexibility will support wider exploitation in future applications in, for example, customer care, telephone banking, e-commerce, logical and physical access control. OCTAVE will thus fuel new opportunities for commercial services making use of electronic identification and authentication.

The project aims to establish an authoritative scientific framework for understanding the relationship between group ritual, social cohesion, and pro-group behaviour. Rituals have shaped human societies for millennia, but the exact social consequences of rituals are poorly understood. The proposed research will identify the fundamental components of rituals worldwide and chart their effects on patterns of group alignment and action. Doing so will have a lasting impact on basic understandings of the nature, causes, and consequences of ritual dynamics as well as open up exciting new avenues of inquiry that bridge the humanities and social sciences. It is proposed that within numerous cultures and group types, collective rituals come in two main forms with distinct consequences: 1) affectively-intense, rarely-enacted rituals bond group members tightly and motivate extreme self-sacrifice; 2) frequently repeated rituals create allegiance to broad collectives and motivate ingroup bias. Using this model as a starting point, the proposed research programme will seek to achieve three tightly linked objectives. Objective 1 will examine psychological mechanisms underlying rituals’ effects on group cohesion and behaviour in ten nations. Objective 2 will focus on the ritual dynamics of special populations exposed to group-related violence (e.g., war veterans, ex-convicts, war-torn communities). Objective 3 will examine the functions of ritual and cohesion in cultural group selection. Using new techniques, we will quantitatively code and analyse qualitative data on ritual and cohesion in large historical databases from hundreds of groups over the past 12,000 years. Overall, these research objectives aim to provide insights into key questions (e.g., what are the fundamental building blocks of group rituals?), understudied groups (e.g., revolutionary combatants), and unresolved debates in many fields (e.g., what motivates self-sacrifice?).