Archive for ERC
Durham skyline [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags Durham, Durham cathedral, ERC, Guillaume le Conquérant, jatp, Norman invasion, Northumberland, Oceanerc, River Wear, roman church, St Cuthbert, William the Conqueror on September 6, 2026 by xi'an
Dawn on Wear [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags #ERCSyG, dawn, Durham, Durham university, ERC, jatp, Low Burnhall Woodlands, Northumberland, Oceanerc, River Browney, River Wear, sunrise, The North, trail running, Woodland Trust on September 4, 2026 by xi'an
off to Durham
Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags #ERCSyG, Cambridge, collegial university, Coventry, Duke University, Durham, Durham university, England, ERC, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, North Carolina, Ocean, Oxford, The North, USA, warwick university on August 31, 2026 by xi'an
ISBA³
Posted in pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags adversarial privacy, approximate Bayesian inference, Aussois, BayesComp 2027, Bayesian predictive, differential privacy, ERC, European Research Council, grilled eel, hitsumabushi, ISBA 2026, Isle of Skye, mirror workshop, Ocean, Oceanerc, persuasive privacy, privacy, PSL Research University, Savage award, Skye, student visa, Université Paris Dauphine, Warwick Statistics, working visa on July 2, 2026 by xi'an
After another absurdly early run along the Sendai River, in higher humidity than yesterday, I had plenty of time to have breakfast and commute to the conference centre for our privacy section. (“Ours” since I organised and chaired the session, but also all speakers were related with our ERC OCEAN project.) With talks by Antoine Luciano (Dauphine), Shenggang Hu (Warwick) and Joshua Bon (formerly Dauphine), Shenggang presenting his work with Gareth on calibrating a DP, noisy, unbiased, version of Metropolis-Hastings. Given the other sessions highly competing with ours, this 100% OCEAN session was well-attended! My second morning session was the theory & method part of the Savage Award, with unfortunately two of the speakers stuck in the US for visa issues and presenting remotely. There have been years where this session suffered from competition from parallel sessions, but this time showed a quite decent attendance.
As most members of the scientific committee of the BayesComp mirror in Aussois were present, we went out for lunch at a nearby hitsumabushi restaurant to plan registrations and local sessions. Which proved very productive despite enjoying the fantastic eel dishes! If making me miss the beginning of the afternoon session… and then the whole session as the room on predictive Bayes was packed (and some speakers had already delivered on the Isle of Skye). I managed to get to Bottond Szabo’s Foundation lecture, with again common threads with Skye, and then returned to my rental as I was quickly crashing…
Nature on ERC funding
Posted in Books, University life with tags agentic AI, AI, AI generated grant applications, bibliometrics, Brussels, budget cuts, ERC, ERC Advanced Grant, ERC Consolidator Grant, ERC Starting Grant, EU, EU Horizon Europe programme, European Commission, European Parliament, European Research Council, h-factor, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Nature, reviewers, reviewing on June 8, 2026 by xi'an
In four recent opinion articles, Nature questions the response of the European Research Council (ERC) to a steep increase in grant applications supported by AI tools, namely Responses to the AI grant flood must prioritize fairness as part of excellence, Prestigious European science funder scraps stricter rules after researcher backlash, Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems?, and European funder must increase capacity to meet the ambition of scientists,
What is happening is that LLMs are making the construction and design of grant applications much easier, even improving their scientific worth in many cases. Hence seeing the number of submitted proposals rise. For instance, an 142% for EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowships. This is getting worse with agentic AI. The funding bodies are unable to implement the various bans they set against relying on these agents. The low-tech solution of increasing the role of interviews and team assessments, while worthwhile, is not working above a certain threshold, being time-intensive (and open to many biases). A comment of 27 April 2026 suggests burning all bridges and resorting to locally designed agentic AIs to assess these proposals… As if the well-studied drawbacks of AIs and LLMs relying on black-box, biased, bibliometric, unsecured, machines would magically vanish with this new construct! The mention of post hoc human verification is also wishful thinking, considering the impact of earlier bibliometric tools such as the h-factor. (Even more recent proposals are similarly bananas.)
An editorial of 05 May 2026 claims the higher moral ground by calling for fairness and inclusivity. But with a bounded budget and an equally bounded pool of human reviewers, the protocol of evaluating an ever-growing pile of applications cannot remain the same. The ERC step of limiting how many grants researchers can apply for and how long unsuccessful candidates have to wait before they can re-apply has been rescinded under protest from some researchers. But a call of 01 May 2026 for more structural investment does not stand the test of reality. Working in an ERC panel is time-consuming, equivalent to one month of investment, and finding more willing experts is unlikely to succeed, not mentioning the rise in the ERC budget the EU Commission is not going to vote, the more (or the less!) with the rise of populist fractions in the European Parliament
