Millions for research on heritage and stress in young children

Various UG researchers are involved in projects that were awarded funding in the context of the Dutch National Research Agenda. UG Professor Lambert Schomaker is the coordinator of the HAICu project, which has been awarded a grant of €10.3 million. This project brings together AI and Digital Humanities researchers, heritage professionals, and interested citizens who work together to achieve scientific breakthroughs in order to open up, link, and analyse large-scale digital heritage collections. UG Professor Menno Reijneveld is the coordinator of the HEALS Applied project, which has been awarded €2.6 million. HEALS Applied aims to diagnose stress in young children at an early stage, to support parents where needed, and to contribute to children growing up in a healthy and safe environment.

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) is financing research in the context of the Dutch National Research Agenda (NWA). In this annual funding round of NWA-ORC (National Research Agenda — Research on Routes through Consortia), consortia can submit applications that jointly articulate the width and innovative character of the National Research Agenda.

HAICu: Digital Humanities — Artificial Intelligence — Cultural heritage

Professor L.R.B. Schomaker

The HAICu project brings together AI and Digital Humanities researchers, heritage professionals, and interested citizens who work together to achieve scientific breakthroughs in order to open up, link, and analyse large-scale digital heritage collections. The exceptional challenges raised by cultural heritage offer a unique opportunity to broaden the horizons of AI. Future technologies must be easy to use outside the laboratory, learn from as few examples as possible, and continuously learn from the users. These technologies must take into account the societal demand for responsible and explainable methods for creating multimodal narratives around our cultural heritage that reach further than the current large-scale language models.

Healthy EArly Life Start (HEALS) Applied: optimizing opportunities to reduce early life stress and its adverse effects in routine preventive healthcare in the first 1000 days of life

Professor S.A. Reijneveld

A lot of stress in the first 1000 days of life, from pregnancy up to age two, can have a lifelong negative impact. HEALS Applied aims to diagnose stress in young children at an early stage, and to support parents where needed. HEALS Applied combines excellent knowledge about stress with the outstanding Dutch preventive care offered during pregnancy and at child health centres, and develops new methods to diagnose harmful stress at an early stage. In doing so, HEALS Applied contributes to children growing up in a healthy and safe environment, and produces new knowledge on stress, sensors and biomarkers, how to better support parents, and how to deploy preventive care.

In addition, in their role as consortium member, the UG researchers are involved in the following research studies.

Floating Future

How can we ensure that our densely populated country remains liveable? There is a growing demand for space for housing, industry, energy transition, and food production in the Netherlands. Approximately 60% of our country's land is vulnerable to floods, and climate change is intensifying the threats posed by rising sea levels and river discharges. But aside from risks, the water is also opening opportunities for new forms of safe use of space: large-scale floating construction work. The Floating Future research programme investigates from the perspective of governance, technology, and ecology how we can make floating buildings possible on a large scale and how socially acceptable such a project would be. We develop floating climate-adaptive perspectives for the hinterland (IJmeer), harbour cities, and the North Sea.

Dr. M.A. van den Brink is working as a projectleader for Floating Futures.

‘It's a cargo match!...’ Attaining waste-free and effective freight transport systems by seamlessly matching demand and supply with inclusive, smart, and green-oriented booking platforms

Social support for the external effects and expansion of the transport system is waning. The current approach of transport optimization, market structure, and governance of the chain has failed in delivering a sufficiently optimal use of the available capacity in transport networks. The platform economy offers opportunities to better align supply and demand in transport networks, but it also carries the risk that a platform provider becomes too dominant. In this project we develop the generic functionality and conditions for online platforms for compiling and booking services that consist of services from various providers, and apply these to intermodal transport networks.

HybridLabs — Accelerating Dutch innovations in offshore renewables through data-driven hybrid labs

HybridLabs accelerates the energy transition by developing renewable offshore technologies for electricity and hydrogen production. At the same time, HybridLabs also strengthens the offshore ecological and food transition. HybridLabs leads to a strong position for the Dutch knowledge and innovation chain, and also creates important commercialization opportunities for floating wind energy along the Irish Atlantic coast. The heart of HybridLabs is a unique Dutch infrastructure of hybrid experimental facilities, simulators, and offshore demonstration locations that learn from one another thanks to new data and physics-driven approaches. This hybrid infrastructure accelerates technological development and makes it more affordable. Knowledge exploitation is directed at the corporate sector, policy makers, NGOs, and citizens.

ECOTIP: identifying tipping points of the effects of living environments on the ecosyndemics of lifestyle-related illness

An ecosyndemic is characterized by unfavourable disease interactions resulting from an unhealthy living environment. Our objective is to identify the tipping points where the population's resilience diminishes in response to an unfavourable living environment, and develops into an ecosyndemic, and to establish the optimal conditions and timing for effective interventions from the perspective of policy makers, healthcare professionals, and citizens. We do so by performing advanced data analysis of historical data on indicators of the living environment and resilience, and by translating these findings into feasible measures for policy makers, healthcare professionals, and citizens, in collaboration with the learning network of stakeholders.