Along with the FWF Wittgenstein Award, the FWF START Awards are among Austria’s most prestigious and highly endowed scientific awards. The FWF START Awards give excellent, up-and-coming researchers the opportunity to pursue their research with long-term planning horizons and financial security. The seven winning projects come from all disciplines and will receive funding of up to €1.2 million each.
How did we come to start using objects as tools? In order to gain a better understanding of our own technical evolution, it is important to explore the reasons for tool use in animals. Comparisons with distantly related animal species that have similar abilities can supply very useful information. Although more than 300 million years of evolution separate us from the Goffin’s cockatoo, this bird can use and even craft specific tools on a level similar to higher primates. This project will use a comparative study to investigate what triggers tool use in a non-primate from several different perspectives. The aim is to develop a new model for the conditions that trigger the emergence of tool use.
Tunable (or smart) materials are a special class of metamaterials that are responsive to changes in the external environment. Because of this property, they are considered to be the future of optical data processing, quantum information, and next-generation technologies. The project aims to explore three fundamental questions: In what way is the effective material response of an intelligent material influenced by the geometric distribution of its components? How do non-local effects interact with time-evolving phase transitions and with the possible onset of microstructures? How do the chiral properties of an active metamaterial interact with its macroscopic tunability?
The main goal of this project is to discover the relationship between universal spin models and universal Turing machines, as well as between universal spin models and universality in neural networks, and to explore the implications of this. The project will put classical spin models, machines, and neural networks on the same level by establishing strict links between them and their concepts of universality. In this way, the underlying ideas, evidence, efficiency, and limitations of these previously unconnected disciplines will cross-fertilise each other.
A well-established paradigm for the fine-grained analysis of computational problems, parameterized complexity theory, has been used very successfully in many areas of computer science, but it has clear shortcomings in basic research into artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The goal of this project is to remedy this situation and develop a parameterized toolkit for AI and ML problems, and to establish a theory of parameterized sample complexity. In this way, the project will drastically improve our understanding of which AI and ML problems can be solved efficiently.
The project investigates the significance of poetry performance in recent British literary history, taking into account the aesthetic and semantic potential of oral performance, alternative institutional structures, publication channels, career paths, presentation formats, styles, and poetic genres that have emerged from the performance scene. The project will provide a prototype and toolbox for a new branch of historical-literary research beyond the British context. It will provide the essential groundwork to establish poetry performance studies as an interdisciplinary field of research on an international level.
After the discovery of graphene, the first two-dimensional (2D) material to be isolated, it took more than a decade to detect ferromagnetism in 2D materials, but only at low temperatures and with a lack of stability in air. In order to overcome these deficits, the project aims to study iron-rich talc crystals and layered hydroxides, rare minerals that were previously overlooked in the search for magnetic layered silica. Using the insights gained from this, the researcher plans to synthesise magnetic silicate monolayers. The results are expected to lead to a breakthrough in the field of 2D magnetism and new applications ranging from data storage to biotechnology.
Photochemical processes in which atoms and molecules form new compounds under the influence of light are of the utmost importance for life. Although UV radiation is particularly significant in the excitation of electrons at the beginning of a reaction, there is often a lack of spectroscopic information in this spectral range. Based on the latest developments in laser technology, ELFIS will improve absorption spectroscopy in this frequency range and provide a new perspective on light-induced dynamics in molecules, which is of immediate relevance for both basic research and environmental sensing.
