Two FSE researchers involved in Dutch Research Agenda projects

Professor Moniek Tromp of the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials (ZIAM) and Dr. Fatih Turkmen of the Bernoulli Institute are both involved in a large research consortium that receives a grant of several millions from the Dutch Research Agenda (Nationale Wetenschapsagenda, NWA). Moniek Tromp is principle investigator in a project that focuses on realizing the next generation of safe batteries. Fatih Turkmen is a partner in a project that focuses on chat technology and making it useful for small languages and applications with privacy and security in mind. Both consortia consist of several universities, universities of applied sciences, companies and societal organizations. The Dutch Research Agenda is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Moniek Tromp | BatteryNL – Next Generation Batteries based on Understanding Materials Interfaces

The BatteryNL project will realize safer next-generation batteries with higher energy densities and longer cycle life. This is necessary for a society based on renewable energy sources. Making use of the unique knowledge position of the Netherlands, the heart of these desired batteries, the electrolyte-electrode interface, will be investigated to reveal the bottle-neck processes, and improved with scalable interface technology. To ensure that technological breakthroughs are actually integrated into society, there is cooperation with small companies, multinationals and societal organizations. In this way, the consortium creates a crucial role for Dutch parties in the development of future battery technology.

Fatih Turkmen | LESSEN: Low Resource Chat-based Conversational Intelligence

Our interaction with devices and access to information is increasingly conversational. People express their questions and needs to a system via a conversation; the system responds in a natural way, possibly by asking questions for clarifications, and meets the needs of its users. How do we ensure that this chat technology is also accessible for languages and applications with limited training data and compute power? LESSEN focuses on developing efficient chat algorithms and methodologies that can make optimal use of written conversational data, in a safe, secure and transparent way.

Dutch Research Agenda

On behalf of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), NWO has been funding research in the context of the National Science Agenda (NWA) since 2018. The aim of the NWA is to make a positive and structural contribution to the global knowledge society of tomorrow, where new knowledge flows easily from researcher to user and where new questions from practice and society quickly and naturally find their way into new research.