Rising populism and polarization, coupled with declining democratic legitimacy, all point toward a crisis in European democracies. This crisis has a regional dimension: a political and perhaps cultural divide between rural and urban areas. The project examines whether and how urban-rural residency is related to divides in legitimacy beliefs, social identities, perceptions of injustice and threat, political and social attitudes and political behavior of European citizens. It explores “Democratic governance in a turbulent age” from different thematic angles. First, it deals with shifting identities and their consequences for democratic governance and political representation (theme 4). Stable cleavages only emerge when struggles for identity are accompanied by perceptions of social inequality and unfair resource distribution (theme 1). Second, it examines the role played by globalization: increasing rural-urban economic divides create social status threats which exacerbate rural-urban political divides (theme 2). The project will combine a broad comparative study of all European countries with an in-depth analysis of five established European democracies. The project will result in the provision of significant new evidence on rural-urban disparities in European politics, which will allow us to examine the consequences of – and cures for – the current crisis of democracy, thereby engaging both academic and policymaking audiences. The coordination of the project, setting of the agenda, and the timely delivery of work packages will be the responsibility of the Frankfurt team. In particular, the project will be coordinated by holding six internal workshops and using a shared cloud server.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and other major particle-physics experiments past, present, and future, are vast public investments in fundamental science. However, while the data-analysis and publication mechanisms of such experiments are sufficient for well-defined targets such as the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 (and the W, Z, and gluon bosons before), they limit the power of the experimental data to explore more subtle phenomena. In the 10 years since the Higgs-boson discovery, the LHC has published many analyses testing the limits of the Standard Model (SM) — the established, but suspected-incomplete central paradigm of particle physics. Each direct-search paper has statistically disproven some simplified models of physics beyond the SM, but such models are no more a priori likely than more complex ones: the latter feature a mixture of the simplified ones’ new phenomena, but at lower intensity, rather than concentrated into a single characteristic. To study such “dispersed signal” models requires a change in how LHC results are interpreted: the emphasis must shift to combining measurements of many different event types and characteristics into holistic meta-analyses. Only such a global, maximum-information approach can optimally exploit the LHC results. This project will provide a step towards building the infrastructure needed to make this change. It will facilitate experiments to provide fast, re-runnable versions of data-analysis logic through enhancements of a domain-specific language and event-analysis toolkits. It will join up the network of such toolkits with the public repositories of research data and metadata. It will provide common interfaces for controlling preserved analyses in the multiple toolkits, and for statistically combining the thousands of measurements and assessing which combinations can provide the most powerful scientific statement about any beyond-SM theory. At the start of the 3rd major data-taking run of the LHC, the time is now ripe to put this machinery and culture in place, so that the LHC legacy is publicly preserved for all to reuse. The project specifically aims to enhance the extent to which public analysis data from particle-physics experiments (in a general sense, but particularly summary results such as those used in publication plots and statistical inference, rather than raw collider events) can be combined and re-used to test theories of new physics. These tests, pursued by theorists and experimentalists alike, can also go beyond particle physics and also connect to astrophysics and cosmology, nuclear-physics direct searches for dark-matter. The value of combining information from different individual analyses was made clear early in the LHC programme, as early experimental data proved crucial for improving models of SM physics. The huge scientific volume, greater model-complexity, and increased precision of the full LHC programme requires pursuing this approach in a more systematic and scalable manner, open to the whole community and including use of reference datasets to ensure validity into the far future. The time is right for this step, as the key technologies (DOI minting and tracking, RESTful Web APIs, version-control hosting with continuous integration, containerisation) have become mature in the last 5 or so years. Particle physics already has established open data and publication repositories, but the crucial link of connecting those to scalable preservations of the analysis logic needs to be made, as does normalising the culture of providing such preservations and engaging in the FAIR principles for open science data. Individual physicists are generally enthusiastic about such ideals, as evidenced by the uptake of open data policies at particle-physics labs, and preservation of full collider software workflows. But an explicit, funded effort is required to eliminate the technical barriers and make these desirable behaviours more accessible and rewarded.

Motivation: Health and fitness wearables present mobile solutions for ICT in public wellbeing by providing personal remote control and clinical intervention through telemedicine networks. Due to their noninvasive and continuous vital sign monitoring, wearables are incorporated in several studies to identify the onset and progression of the Coronavirus pandemic, and institutions deployed patient surveillance networks based on them. However, today's consumer wearables rely on sensing technologies vulnerable to motion artifacts due to discontinuous skin contact or insufficient motion artefact reduction mechanisms that prevent them from being a reliable source of vital signs. Objective: The SNOW project specifically aims to heterogeneously integrate the best options of different disciplines to offer a complete ICT solution based on a Nano-Opto-Electro-Mechanical system (NOEMS) that is mechanically flexible and energy-efficient. The combination of optical and mechano-acoustic sensors into a single platform and consequent manipulation of the light signal via mechanical input and integrated electronics offers accurate heart rate and respiration rate extractions. With the combination of material and flexible-electronics-based technologies, our project aims to provide a wearable solution for ICT to contribute to a decent level of personal and public health. By benefiting from the proven expertise of the interdisciplinary consortium, here we propose to realize the next generation wearable devices that can continuously monitor and provide instant feedback on the user’s personal health parameters. Implementation: Our hybrid approach provides artefact compensation by using the heart rate signal from both optical and mechano-acoustic sensors. Integrating these sensors into a neuromorphic processor yields strict control on the actively extracted data and creates instant feedback in the case of abnormalities. The energy and data communication requirement of the proposed mobile sensing unit will be realized by a specific wireless communication that provides an efficient capacitive coupling to operate the sensors and circuitry components bypassing the need for an additional battery and bulky readout systems. Capacitive coupling with a smartwatch module will also provide transmission of the processed signal back to the final smart devices such as smartphone, laptops and the smartwatch itself. The final system integration work package will employ a heterogenous integration methodology to pack these technologies in a wearable device form factor suitable for user experience and validation. Systematic validation of the final wearable device prototypes will be provided to reach reliable device deployment. Active user experience will be investigated to improve design aspects and the measurement methodologies.