by Juan Ye
29 January 2018
Have you experienced the challenge when you are socialising with people from a wide, diverse background? You may have different ethnic, educational, cultural background, and understanding each other may take a lot of effort. Our EU FET project, called DIVERSITY, is to deliver technological tools that humans can use to overcome the pervasive challenge of understanding people who are different from ourselves – whether by virtue of gender or race, sexuality or neurodiversity. The ambition is to pave the way for ground-breaking technologies that will reshape the ways people interact with each other and make sense together. We aim to instigate this new discipline of Diversity Computing, bringing together psychology and philosophy, design and human-computer interaction, with multiple branches of computer sciences to investigate the very nature of social interaction, using unconventional means and radical theoretical concepts. Through a series of ambitious, interdisciplinary work packages, we will lay the foundations of this new field, ultimately addressing big questions for our individualistic, globalised and multi-cultural society.
Developing this proposal is very pleasant, stimulating, and rewarding experience. Most of the consortium members are young, early-career researchers who share a lot of common research interest. I was very surprised by that even though all of us are from quite diverse disciplines. We started working on the proposal very early, around March 2017. We have several Skype calls and email communications to exchange thoughts, consolidate ideas, and share writings. It is the trip to Vienna in August that brought most of us together and finalized the proposal. During the trip, we had a lot of discussion and writing exercise. The proposal was finally submitted on September 2017.
SICSA PEER funding was very supportive to the proposal writing and the trip. Compared to many other funding applications, PEER is probably the most lightweight, easiest, and quickest. You are only required to complete a short form with one’s basic details along with the call’s information, the idea of your proposal, and purpose for the trip. The SICSA Directors made the decision quickly and the processed the claim was fast and very efficiently.
I really appreciate the SICSA PEER funding award and would encourage anyone who is planning or has already started a EU proposal to consider PEER funding.
