Human Rights Justifications (HRJ) are when States use human rights to justify decisions. Human rights regimes operate on the presumptions that only individual persons can be in possession of human rights. The regulatory gaps occurring when the States use HRJ for their actions are two-fold, one in the regulation of the States’ use of HRJ and one in the individual human rights protection when States use HRJ. This activity is not regulated by any international, regional or national regime. In other words, significant and important gaps in human rights regulations has now been identified, which this project seeks to address. We will develop a theory of HRJ and a process for Systematic Ongoing Civil Society Engagement (ODCSE) as a tool for a gender and intersectional inclusive Civil Society engagement. Through ODCSE, we will identify gaps in human rights regulations and protection, serving as underpinning data for our recommendations to EU in support of a multinational human rights system and promotion of transnational democratic governance. ODCSE will also help us identify geopolitical elements that influence States’ use of HRJ. This will be done through 5 countries: Sweden, Finland, Taiwan, India and Ukraine, through three actions: human rights dialogue, inclusive democratic participations, and protection of human rights defenders, and operationalised through three themes: Covid, Migration and Climate.

Current evolutions in medical practices induce a change of paradigm with the convergence of diagnosis and therapy, going to personalized medicine and “theranostics”. One can observe the new role of biomarkers in biomedical and therapeutic applications, for instance in the development of molecular multiplex biosensors (nucleic acid, proteins, and metabolites). In addition this is supported by the explosion of point-of-care (POC) technologies and of home monitoring/testing devoted to probe patient parameters in his direct environment. In this context, synthetic biology provides new opportunities to develop a novel generation of biological biosensors able to perform multiplex biomarker detection, simple computation and return of a useful result. However, in order to design robust circuits and to be reliable in a clinical context, synthetic biological biosensor systems must progress in their biochemical implementation of logical tasks and simple operations. While for the biologist, as well as for the mathematician, the sizes of the biological networks and the number of elementary interactions constitute a complexity barrier, for the computer scientist the difficulty is not that much in the size of the networks than in the unconventional nature of biochemical computation. Unlike most programs, biochemical computation involve transitions that are stochastic rather than deterministic, continuous-time rather than discrete-time, poorly insulated in compartments instead of well-structured in modules, and created by evolution instead of by rational design. Although designing biochemical systems is in several ways similar to designing electronic systems, there are fundamental differences that require novel solutions. For example, an asynchronous design approach (in contrast to the standard synchronous approach to electronic system design) is more natural for biochemical reactions, which may vary in a wide spectrum of time scales. Signal integrity and modularity have to be carefully considered since molecules without confining to local compartments may have undesirable global interference. Moreover, available molecular species can be very limited and should be reused whenever possible. These difficulties await new design automation and robustness analysis tools for engineering biochemical systems. The scientific challenge proposed in this project is to master the complexity of biochemical computation and biochemical programming, by working on four fronts: • development of a compiler of behaviour specifications into biochemical reactions, • use of chemical reaction networks (CRNs) as a programming language suitable for mapping into biochemical system design, • implementation of biochemical biosensor programs in microfluidic reactors, • formal verification methods to assess what a circuit can and cannot do.

There is growing evidence that our increasing consumption of fossil fuels is leading to a change in climate. Such predictions have brought new urgency to the development of clean, renewable sources of energy that will permit the current level of world economic growth to continue without damage to our ecosystem. Photovoltaic cells based on organic or organic/inorganic hybrid materials have shown rapid improvements over the past decade, comparing favourably with existing inorganic semiconductor technology on energy, scalability and cost associated with manufacture. The most promising materials for organic or hybrid photovoltaics are based on blends of two components at whose interface light-generated excitations dissociate into charges contributing to a photocurrent. Blend morphology on the meso-scale plays a crucial role in these systems, with efficient photovoltaic operation requiring both large interfacial area and existence of carrier percolation paths to the electrodes. The proposed work will establish how both aims can be achieved, using a powerful new combination of non-contact femtosecond time-resolved techniques to examine a range of novel mesoscopic blends. This methodology will allow the simultaneous examination of exciton diffusion and dissociation, charge-carrier generation, recombination and conductivity, providing direct clues to the optimisation of materials for photovoltaics. Collaborations with researchers working on making photovoltaic devices will ensure that knowledge gained from these non-contact material probes will directly feed into enhancing device performance. This combined approach will allow the UK's exceptionally high expertise in the area of organic electronics to contribute effectively to its current goal of reducing harmful greenhouse gas emission.

Our goal is to combine advances in speech acoustics and language acquisition research to analyze the development of processing of spoken tone signals. The research program includes three studies, using behavioral methodologies adapted to the examination of auditory, perceptual and linguistic capacities in infants. These studies presented below form a coherent project, taking advantage of related scientific competencies and experimental procedures in two countries (France and Taiwan) whose languages (French and Mandarin Chinese) represent radically different families (syllabic and tone language respectively) and thus provide contrasting linguistic inputs to infants during a critical period of language development. Our project aims to relate auditory processing in terms of use of (Amplitude and Frequency) modulation cues in the speech signal to word acquisition abilities during infancy. This combination has the potential to result in a better understanding of the perceptual processing and weighting of acoustic temporal cues when infants are exposed to languages that do not use the same sound system to contrast meanings. The auditory processing aspects of these studies will be investigated by using vocoded speech signals, which allow selective degradation of temporal and spectral cues, and can be used to simulate the impoverished signal received via cochlear implant (CI) processors. Hearing French-learning and Mandarin Chinese-learning infants will participate during the same developmental period (6 to 20 months of age) in phonetic discrimination studies (Task 1) in order to explore whether (and how) infants’ auditory processing is modulated by the linguistic organization of the speech input. Specifically, lexical-tone contrasts (Mandarin and Thai tones) will be presented in two vocoded speech conditions (Intact: AM and FM cues are preserved; CI simulation: AM cues only [no FM cues] in a small number of frequency bands [8]). The word acquisition experiments (Task 2) will be run at NTU, in collaboration with H. Cheung, N. Li and T. Nazzi who started to investigate word acquisition by Mandarin-learning 20-month-olds. Infants will have to learn pairs of new words contrasting in tone information alone. Where possible, infants will be tested on both tasks in order to explore correlation between performance in discrimination and new word acquisition or, in other words, between use of AM and FM cues in simple discrimination and in lexical processing. In addition, deficits in lexical-tone perception and production have been repeatedly reported in tone-language speaking children who are deaf and equipped with CIs. One explanation is that tone perception relies mainly on the FM information, which is the most severely degraded in current CI processing strategies. The third study (Task 3) would be to examine how young deaf children who have been wearing CIs for at least 12 months are able to process tone contrasts in discrimination tasks and in the context of lexical acquisition. Mandarin-learning deaf children will participate in all parts of the third study, while the French-learning group will participate only in the discrimination experiments, allowing evaluation of auditory vs. linguistic components of tone processing via CIs. The members of the Taiwanese and French teams have conducted previous studies related to each part of this project. These previous results will serve as a base, both methodologically and theoretically. Research about development in lexical-tone perception is a growing field, but, to our knowledge, no study has used the multifaceted approach proposed here, which combines auditory and linguistic studies across developmental periods, from infancy through early childhood, and linguistic environments, using both natural and vocoded speech, and more importantly, has the possibility to validate results of CI simulation with young hearing children by testing CI-wearing deaf children of the same age.