The pivotal role of software in our modern world mandates strong requirements on quality, correctness, and reliability of software systems. In software development and maintenance, the ability to understand program artifacts plays a key role for programmers to fulfill these requirements. Despite significant progress, research on program comprehension has a fundamental limitation: program comprehension is a cognitive process that cannot be directly observed, which leaves considerable room for misinterpretation, uncertainty, and confounders. In Brains On Code, we will develop a neuroscientific foundation of program comprehension. Instead of merely observing whether there is a difference regarding program comprehension (e.g., between two programming methods), we aim at precisely and reliably determining the key factors that cause the difference. This is especially challenging as humans are the subjects of study, and inter-personal variance and other confounding factors obfuscate the results. The key idea of Brains On Code is to leverage established methods from cognitive neuroscience to obtain insights into the underlying processes and influential factors of program comprehension. Brains On Code will pursue a multimodal approach that integrates different neuro-physiological measures as well as a cognitive computational modeling approach to establish the theoretical foundation. This way, Brains On Code will lay the foundations of measuring and modeling program comprehension and offer substantial feedback for programming methodology, language design, and education. Addressing longstanding foundational questions such as "How can we reliably measure program comprehension?", "What makes a program hard to understand?", and "What skills should programmers have?" will become into reach. A success of Brains On Code would not only help answer these questions, but also provide an outline for applying the methodology beyond program code (models, specifications, etc.).

This action supports physical and blended mobility of higher education students and staff from EU Member States and third countries associated to Erasmus+ to any country in the world. Students in all study fields and cycles can take part in a study period or traineeship abroad. Higher education teaching and administrative staff can take part in professional development activities abroad, as well as staff from the field of work in order to teach and train students or staff at higher education institutions.

In her TED Talk 2009 the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made an argument on „the danger of a single story“. She maintained that only plural narrations do justice to the complexity of humankind: „Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.“ Thus narrations have the power to produce a unifying experience of equal humanity. Minor Universality aims to make a substantial contribution to the debate on the problem of universality after Western universalism. Indeed, the question of how universality can be produced is crucial in times characterised by a double relativistic signature: the necessary critique of Occidental universalism, and identitarian assertions. But how can a shared human horizon be addressed? Here general narratology provides a crucial twist: if it is an anthropological characteristic of the narration to make a claim about the world as a whole starting from a singular setting, narrations create ways of extending concrete contexts towards universality. This can be analyzed in literature, in an epistemic field beyond the book and in social practices being part of global migrations. In contrast to the conceptual debate on World Literature, which addresses the question through canons and legitimacies, this project shifts the debate to narratological problems of world production: with which aesthetic means do contemporary cultural productions such as literatures, films and social media, literary festivals, architectures and museums, open up local settings so as to produce a new sensuous, embodied or intellectual awareness of universality? Re-expanding the material and medial turns to processes of consciousness and agency, the project is set to have a general impact in comparative literature and cultural studies. It will explore new literacies about the role of narration for civil imaginaries of our world and provide ways to address universality in debates about justice and legitimacy within world society.

This project lies at the nexus of complex and symbolic dynamics, group theory, decision problems and computation. It aims to solve major problems in each of these fields by means of automatic actions and relations. Finite state automata, pervasive in theoretical computer science, will serve to define self-similar mathematical objects, and produce efficient algorithms to manipulate them. — I will explore a novel notion of automatically acting group, encompassing the previously unrelated notions of automatic groups, automata groups and substitutive shifts. Geometric group theory propounds the vision of groups as geometric objects. A basic notion is volume growth, and Milnor's still open “gap problem” asks for its possible range. — In this proposal, I will give candidates of groups with very slow superpolynomial growth, defined by their automatic action on dynamical systems, and a proof strategy. A celebrated open problem by Gromov asks whether all groups are “sofic”. This property has too many valuable consequences to always be true, yet there is no known non-example! — I will present a strategy of producing non-sofic groups closely associated to automata. Rational maps on the Riemann sphere provide a rich supply of dynamical systems. A fundamental goal is to give a combinatorial description of the dynamics across families of maps, constructing models of parameter space. — I will encode the maps via automatic actions, and study relations between automata to produce such models. I aim to achieve a full topological description (including the long-open connectedness problem) of Milnor's “slices” of quadratic maps. This project will tackle these fundamental questions from group theory and dynamics, and develop presently unexplored interactions between them, through a unified use of automata. It will prove decidability of certain algorithmic problems such as Dehn's and Tarski's, and construct efficient tools to further our exploration of these mathematical universes.

The increasing demand for environmentally friendly reagents to perform sustainable processes has become of paramount relevance for modern academia and industry. Transition metal-based catalysts are long-established players in many important chemical transformations, given their ability to cleave and form chemical bonds with facile oxidation state changes. Their high cost and/or toxicity, however, have prompted the search for potential replacements. The past decades brought fascinating discoveries of main-group-based species exhibiting low-oxidation states and/or metal–metal bonds with excellent and tunable reducing properties. Nonetheless, despite formidable efforts invested in broadening the scope, existing examples are restricted to Mg-containing molecules, while other s-block metal-metal bonds remain unaccomplished. MeMe-BONDS will address this challenge by engineering novel sustainable reductants based on hitherto unknown s-block bonds stabilized by tunable electronic interactions. This breakthrough will be possible by combining the steric shielding provided by commonly used ligands with the introduction of a σ-acceptor functionality to tame the inherent reactivity of formed radical intermediates. This innovative metal-ligand interaction will allow for the precise incorporation of one or two extra electrons, resulting in a unique electronic structure, which - under suitable conditions - will afford the new s-block metal–metal bonds. Tandem experimental and computational methods will enable a fundamental understanding of the electronic structures and their interplay with the nature of the substituents. The properties and reactivity of these novel bonds will be thereby tuned, opening the door for application in small molecules’ activation and as electronically versatile catalysts. The output of this project will enrich the synthetic chemistry toolbox and pave the way for more environmentally friendly chemical processes.