This project investigates how avatar agency impacts practices of ascribing moral responsibility in emergent avatar communities (Metaverse, augmented Metaverse, and Human-Cybernetic Avatar societies). These communities challenge traditional frameworks of agency and moral responsibility. The unprecedented persistent and continuous use of multiple avatars by both humans and organisations, has the potential to permeate prior boundaries of the physical, the augmented and the virtual world. We propose a dynamic normative framework of ascribing moral responsibility that is grounded in a philosophical conceptualisation of avatar agency. This framework considers the way interactions between avatars, individuals, and organisations generate intertwined and mutual ascriptions of moral responsibility, potentially enhancing or, on the contrary, diminishing human agency and responsibility in emergent avatar communities. We construct our approach along five main objectives: 1) to clarify avatar agency and related responsibility pertaining to individual, organisational, and artificial members of emergent avatar communities; 2) to delineate the way avatar agency enhances or restrains individual agency and responsibility; 3) to correlate the way interactions between social entities in avatar communities generate mutually enhancing (or perhaps decreasing) ascriptions of moral responsibility to all participants; 4) to evaluate the extent in which the ethical characteristics of the community environment can generate normative attributions of responsibility; 5) to project normative evaluations of blaming and praising practices in avatar communities. The successful delivery of this ethical framework is an original contribution to the problem of moral responsibility and bears direct implications for future regulation, impacting societal moral practices of accountability and blaming.

Detection of cosmic neutrinos can answer very important questions related to some extremely energetic yet unexplained astrophysical sources such as: compact binary stars, accreting black holes, supernovae etc., key elements in understanding the evolution and fate of the Universe. Moreover, these particles carry the highest energies per particle known to man, impossible to achieve in any present or foreseen man made accelerator devices thus their detection can test and probe extreme high energy physics. One of the newest techniques for measuring high energy cosmic neutrinos regards their radio detection in natural salt mines. A first and essential step is to determine experimentally the radio wave attenuation length in salt mines, and this will represent the main goal of this project. The results shall be used to estimate the implications on the construction of the detector. The outcome of this project may rejuvenate the radio detection in salt technique and be a compelling case for Romanian involvement. The same measurements can be used: to validate and improve previous work on theoretical simulation models of propagation in heterogeneous media –a regime not very well understood (which represents another goal of the project), and to study the behavior of classical antennas in non-conventional media (the third major goal). The results to be obtained would be immediately relevant in determination of the key parameters that describe a cosmic neutrino detector, its performances and limitations. The events detected by such a telescope will allow identification of individual sources indicating a step forward in “neutrino astronomy”. The extensive propagation and antenna behavior studies in heterogeneous media will be in the direct interest for the scientific community and have a prompt impact in telecommunications theory and industry.

This proposal aims to understand, through the conceptual lens of home, tenants’ and landlords’ practices in ‘hidden’ private rental sectors, where informal transactions increase risks and hide vulnerability away from state regulatory gaze - as the Covid-19 pandemic has undoubtedly exposed across much of the globe. Taking the post-communist context as an example of an emerging and hidden PRS and drawing on a specific view of home as assemblage of materials, money, relations and affects, this research project aims to: Understand a hidden social world, by asking why tenants and landlords engage in the sector, whether their practices permit making a private tenancy home, and how they construct ideas of power, risk and trust; Nuance existing concepts of space and propose new concepts of time as they unfold in a privately rented home; Inform the national and international debate on PRS regulation. To achieve its aims, the proposal takes a qualitative multi-disciplinary approach, creating synergies between methods developed from meta-ethnography (critical interpretative synthesis), sociology and visual studies (qualitative questionnaires and photo-elicitation interviews), and public policy (scenario building). Through its focus on rental housing, a mechanism that generates important inequalities of wealth, health and wellbeing, the project aligns with the European Union strategy of creating a more resilient and inclusive society, and its concern for addressing inequalities.