New ERC project on the joys that children seek in facts

"One of the panel members made everybody chuckle during the interview when he said that I had cleverly designed a project on the joys of what most of us do most of the day - and what everyone would like their children to find pleasure in as well," says Anežka Kuzmičová. She has won a prestigious ERC Starting Grant of one and a half million Euro for a five-year research project exploring children's affective engagements with facts and nonfiction, making her the first ever recipient of an ERC grant in the Social Sciences and Humanities at Charles University.

...receives ERC grant to improve algorithms

Erin Carson from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University will analyse numerical computations and search for new algorithms for computational systems thanks to a five-year ERC Starting Grant.

ERC grant will help capture ultrafast electrons on video

Kozák from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the research of new electron microscopy techniques that will allow capturing the motion of electrons in matter with high spatial and temporal resolution. “We want to develop a tool for the research of new materials and phenomena for faster electronics and information transfer,” says the scientist, who was inspired by his experience abroad and whose parental leave helped him to succeed.

...Natural language generation research wins ERC grant

“Our goal is to create a universal natural language generator that will be able to learn from only a few examples and will not make mistakes,” says Ondřej Dušek from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. If all goes well, in the future users can look forward to virtual assistant technology like Amazon’s Alexa, in Czech, and other applications that are able to clearly summarise even complex data. Dušek was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for research on natural language generation.

Inspired by the real world

“Most of my work still takes place on paper,” says theoretical mathematician Zdeněk Dvořák from the Computer Science Institute of Charles University. He focuses on combinatorics, graph theory, and theoretical informatics, and he received the ERC CZ Consolidator Grant for his research.

Researching the revival of religiosity

Italian scientist Alessandro Testa has been awarded with an ERC CZ Starting Grant. “My project examines religious phenomena that are re-emerging in the countries of so-called Central and Eastern Europe. Put simply: I’ll be interested in religiosity in the Visegrad countries and eastern Germany. I don’t necessarily deal only with forms of official religiosity such as Christianity, for example, but with various alternative cults and new religious movements. I’d like to capture a broader picture in comparison with more countries, and how the situation has changed after the fall of the communist regimes,” Testa says.