Fictions of all kinds (involving images, novels, plays, operas, ballets, movies) generate a rich fund of emotional experience in a large audience. For over forty years, aestheticians have struggled with the “paradox of fiction”, which is the issue of how we can get emotionally involved with fictional characters and events. What is the nature of sadness or joy which is not tied to a real personal loss or satisfaction? The FICTION project addresses this issue with the aim of understanding the nature of our emotional responses and their dependence on the cognitive background. Empirical evidence suggests that involvement with fiction as such is associated with a disengagement or inhibition of the episodic system involving limbic structures such as the hippocampus, which underlies episodic experiences (either memory of personal events or self-projections into the future), to the benefit of other cerebral areas implicated in semantic processes such as fronto-temporal areas. Moreover, the episodic system is arguably an essential component of the emotional responses towards real people and events. On that basis, our main hypothesis, to be assessed at both conceptual and empirical levels, is that emotional responses towards fictional scenes identified as such are what we call “semantic emotions”, a species of emotions to be distinguished from real-life emotions. On our view, “semantic emotions” are emotional experiences that disengage the episodic system, and are mainly modulated by semantic circuits (whence our terminological choice). We surmise that “semantic emotions” are stirred up by emotional fictional scenes as soon as they are recognized as fictional. On the conceptual level, FICTION aims at offering contributions to both general philosophy of mind and aesthetics. First, FICTION will focus on the claim that “semantic emotions” form a psychological natural kind. FICTION will assess the hypothesis that even if “semantic emotions” are characterized at the sub-personal level by a disengagement or inhibition of the episodic system, they are unique experiences at the personal level of the conscious subject. Second, the implications of this claim to philosophical aesthetics will be explored. We suspect that this new concept of emotions provides a new way of looking at the paradox of fiction, by bridging the gap between issues about the role of the self in our interactions with fiction and issues about the nature of our emotional responses to fiction. On the empirical level, FICTION will elaborate protocols in experimental psychology and neuroscience to understand the processes at the root of emotional responses to fictional and non-fictional type-identical scenes, and the role of the awareness of the fictional or non-fictional aspect of the scene in these processes. By exploiting the capabilities provided by SenseCam, a wearable digital camera, FICTION will recreate in the lab the conditions of emotional encoding. FICTION will have participants wearing SenseCam while viewing clips of fictional scenes of various emotional valences, as well as viewing type-identical non-fictional scenes in natural environments. FICTION will then investigate the impact of fictional content on emotional processing and the neural correlates of “semantic emotions” by conducting a fMRI study to measure brain networks activated in response to images shot in these various conditions. FICTION is the first scientific project to put forward the “semantic emotions” hypothesis, to operationalize this hypothesis and to construe as “semantic emotions” at least some of the emotions that can be enjoyed in fictional contexts. FICTION has wide applications since its hypothesis concerns vast populations who, engaged with fictions, enjoy being thrust into various emotional “semantic states” without paying the neural episodic price that the non-fictional analogues of these states would require.

<< Background >>The accelerated digital transformation that our societies have been undergoing for several decades has created significant generational, cultural, social and geographical differences that severely limit the opportunities and possibilities for inclusion in our future society. In addition, the recent health crisis has shown that the lack of digital resources and skills increases exclusion, as it strongly interferes with personal and professional interactions and, as a consequence, with the teaching and learning processes.To address these major challenges, CONNECT-UNITA aims to offer technical and methodological solutions to support the different actors in teaching and learning processes towards the new era of digital transformation of higher education, thus reducing existing gaps and maximising inclusion. The European UNITA alliance offers an ideal framework for the development of this project, as it integrates, on the one hand, common elements such as the situation of our institutions in rural and mountainous cross-border regions of southern, central and eastern Europe; the promotion of Romance languages as common academic languages, thus favouring inclusion; the development of strong links in education and research in 3 strategic axes: cultural heritage, renewable energies and circular economy; Moreover, transnational cooperation between our institutions offers us an ideal context to design and implement a digital and pedagogical transformation strategy enabling the reconciliation of geographical, linguistic, temporal and social distances, and to promote cooperation and experimentation by bringing together the stakeholders involved in the project of creating European universities and offers a springboard for its dissemination and transfer to other alliances and international cooperation networks.<< Objectives >>The main objective of this project is the development of a collaborative platform and methodology framework for innovation in teaching and learning that not only aims to achieve success in the acquisition of knowledge and competences, but also to break down barriers of geographical, linguistic, temporal and social distances, thus fostering inclusion and international cooperation. More specifically, our project aims to achieve the following objectives: - Meet the needs for integration of learning management systems and learning spaces for students and teachers of UNITA alliance institutions and future associated partners, in order to break down geographical, linguistic and temporal barriers and support collaborative digital learning spaces. This will be done by designing and developing an integration platform offering an innovative solution for automatic translation services and geographical distribution of learning content and synchronous or asynchronous monitoring of students in the framework of international cooperations. - Provide a unified framework to guide teachers through digital and pedagogical transformation in the creation or adaptation of learning resources and activities in order to remove barriers that limit international collaboration in teaching and learning. This framework will provide both a methodology and a technical-pedagogical model aimed at integrating the geographical, multilingual and hybrid dimensions of learning and fostering international collaboration in course construction and delivery. - Create an international teaching and learning living lab for teachers and students of the UNITA alliance, as well as for the international community, thanks to the co-design and co-production of courses, oriented both to the transfer and multiplication of competences in technical and pedagogical innovation and also in priority subjects of the UNITA alliance (such as cultural heritage, renewable energies, circular economy, among others). The teaching and learning living lab will also allow the development of virtual mobilities between UNITA consortium members as well as other external members and will offer a space for cooperation in pedagogical and digital innovation.<< Implementation >>To ensure an adequate management of the physical, human and financial resources of the project, integrating the time constraints and the requirements of the institutions and of the national and international regulations, several design, implementation and production activities will be carried out in the framework of well-adapted methodologies for the achievement of the objectives and the development of the product results. Activities related to the development of the integration platform and the methodological and pedagogical model framework will be carried out integrating the different design and development teams of the 6 institutions. These activites will be made up within 4 main stages: the inception stage for the identification of the context, the specification of the needs and the identification of the available resources; the elaboration stage oriented to the incremental design of the solutions and the development of prototypes allowing the validation by the different members of the project to ensure that the design responds to the needs and constraints; the construction stage allowing the development of the solutions in a partial and incremental way, including evaluation and continuous improvement phases; finally the transition stage, allowing the implementation of the support tools, maintenance and evolution of the results of the product to ensure sustainability and continuous improvement. A second set of activities framed in an agile methodology, better adapted to small working groups and shorter development cycles, will be applied to guide the design and implementation of several series of courses. This methodology will be guided by the list of requirements for each course, specified in the form of expected learning outcomes. Iterations will take place between the teachers and the technical-pedagogical referents, to progressively create the content using the CONNECT-UNITA platform and framework.<< Results >>The main results and outcomes of the project include: - A digital platform called ITLPaaS aimed at enabling the Integration of Teaching and Learning Services in order to meet the needs of students and teachers of the institutions of the UNIT alliance and beyond, based on an Open Source model and deployed in a scalable, elastic and extensible community cloud. This model will ensure the performance and sustainability of the platform as well as the software developed at UNITA consortium level and will also facilitate its growth through the flexible aggregation of additional resources from future partners. - A digital and pedagogical innovation framework called the Time-Spatial-Linguistic Teaching and Learning Travel Machine (TSL-TL Travel Machine) that provides both a methodology and a technical-pedagogical model to support collaborative course construction and delivery using the ITLPaaS platform. This framework, made available to the community under an open source model, will favour collaboration between teachers while allowing the systematic integration of digital and pedagogical innovations and the elimination of geographical, linguistic and temporal barriers. - A teaching and learning living laboratory for teachers and students of the UNITA alliance, as well as for the international community. This lab will offer several series of courses produced thanks to the framework and platform developed during the project and will be shared publicly with the community, thus serving as tools for the transfer and multiplication of technical and pedagogical innovation. The teaching and learning living lab will also enable the development of virtual mobilities between UNITA consortium members as well as other external members and will offer a space for cooperation in pedagogical and digital innovation. The lab will allow experimenting innovations in teaching and learning and in particular in the implementation of the COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) approach at European and international level.

In a rapidly changing world, we need operational tools to predict and manage responses of biodiversity. To date, although it is clear from both theoretical and empirical work that adaptation can influence the persistence of populations on short time scales, biodiversity scenarios are conspicuously lacking an evolutionary component. One major limitation to the implementation of scenarios including adaptation dynamics is that our knowledge of evolutionary potential and constraints is still too imperfect. In this project, we propose to improve our understanding of adaptive mechanisms in wild populations by integrating theoretical and empirical approaches in wild bird populations at different spatial and taxonomic scales. Using state of the art molecular and quantitative genetics tools in combination with demographic analysis, we will use several populations / species of birds studied in the long-term to identify i) forces of selection acting on natural populations, and especially forces driven by climate change, ii) environmental factors affecting dispersal rates, with a special interest for habitat structure and fragmentation, iii) ecological and phylogenetic factors shaping genetic architecture and affecting its stability, and iv) which regions of the genome show signatures of selection and are therefore likely to be partially responsible for adaptation to different environments. Using a comparative approach among populations and species will allow investigating evolutionary processes at different time and space scales and hence link micro and macroevolutionary patterns. These results will be included in predictive niche models that will assess to which extent the inclusion of rapid evolution and stability of evolutionary potential are affecting predictions from biodiversity scenarios. Hence our approach should provide new tools at the interplay of ecology and evolutionary biology to quantify to what extent model projections neglecting the adaptive component might bias estimates of species extinction risks which are key parameters for policymakers. Moreover, we will put great emphasis on communicating the importance of the biodiversity/evolution interface by (i) collaborating with policy-makers working on biodiversity within the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations and by (ii) strengthening citizen science through the organisation of exhibitions and conferences in a leading natural history museum (Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris). All in all, results from this project will provide an integrative picture of factors affecting responses to global change improving fundamental knowledge at the interface of ecology and evolution but also including a resolutely operational dimension.

The COMIS project aims at developing a new method for evaluating the efficiency of innovative systems in energy-efficient buildings, through an original commissioning approach focused on the first year of a building's operation, which is often particularly critical in terms of fine-tuning the active systems operation parameters in the building. The proposed commissioning approach is based on measurements and numerical simulations, and combines a virtual comparison of the considered system's actual operating conditions to theoretical "ideal" operating conditions and to a conventional reference system. The proposed methodology will be developed in 3 main steps. The first step aims at measuring the operating characteristics of the considered systems, in their respective operating environments. One of the important aspects in this field is the choice of the adequate metrology, regarding the identification of the physical parameters relative to the considered systems, the indoor conditions, and the building's usage. The developed methodology will rely on statistical procedures such as "sensitivity analysis" or "principal component analysis", in order to choose the appropriate spatial granularity and acquisition frequency for the instrumentation to be installed. Then, even before being used for the model parameters identification in the numerical simulations, the acquired measurement data need to be filtered, corrected, possibly rebuilt, and finally aggregated into high level indicators. For this purpose, a full set of data processing algorithms will be developed. These algorithms will be adapted to the nature of the measured physical parameters and to the acquisition devices used. Once the system's operating conditions and parameters have been characterized in the used building, based on the measured and processed data, the next step is to evaluate its performance against the expected theoretical performance, which is estimated from the actual weather conditions, envelope measured characteristics and real usage of the building. For this the theoretical "ideal" operating conditions of the system have to be defined, considering its internal parameters and the expected service. A behavioral model of each considered system will be developed, and their parameters will be identified from the actual measurement data acquired in the building. These behavioral models will be used to identify the parameters of the theoretical "ideal" operating conditions, defined either in terms of sizing (of its internal elements) or command and control (of each element regarding the other ones). The reliability of the developed models and performance indicators used in the project will be assessed by characterizing the influence of models input parameters uncertainties on models output results. In addition to the "ideal" operating conditions approach, the observed system will be compared to a conventional reference solution providing an identical service under identical conditions (weather, usage, building envelope intrinsic performance). The aim of this complementary approach is to assess that the rightful choice has been made during the conception phase, regarding the expected service and original choice criteria. As a final step, the COMIS project will include the study of four new or newly renovated buildings displaying ambitious energy performance targets (low consumption, passive or positive energy labels) and including innovative heating, cooling, ventilation, DHW production and management systems. The developed commissioning methodology will be implemented, tested, improved and eventually validated on these test cases.