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INSTITUTE NEWS ASSESSING POPULATION TRENDS IIASA Population and Just Societies Program Director, Raya Muttarak, was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the Population Dynamics under Global Climate Change (POPCLIMA) project. She and her team will investigate how the changing climate has affected, and will affect, future population trends. The aim is to gain insight into the socioeconomic costs of climate change and provide more realistic population projections. “The new projections take into account the impact of climate change and help the design of policies that protect vulnerable subgroups of the population," says Muttarak. The ERC also awarded Sergei Scherbov, senior researcher in the Population and Just Societies Program, a 2020 Proof of Concept grant to develop research as part of the ReAging project. “With this research we present an innovative methodology that produces scenarios of equitable normal pension ages using the details of a specific pension system. The project shows how fairness can enter public policy discussions of aging,” notes Scherbov. CLIMATE CHANGE AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES Energy, Climate and Environment Program Director, Keywan Riahi, was awarded the GENIE project (GeoEngineering and NegatIve Emissions pathways in Europe). Funded by an ERC Synergy Grant and working with colleagues from MCC (Germany) and Aarhus University (Denmark), Riahi aims to identify if, how, where, and when to use negative emissions technologies effectively. The project will provide an urgently needed interdisciplinary perspective of risks and opportunities of these technologies. “The aim is to bring social science into energy system models. We want to understand and include soft factors, such as public perception and social learning, which are underrepresented in current integrated assessment models,” explains Riahi. In addition, IIASA researcher Charlie Wilson has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to study how the digitalization of our everyday lives impacts climate change and to explore how it can be steered to help, rather than hinder climate action. The Impacts of Digitalized Daily Life on Climate Change (iDODDLE) project aims to develop an evidence-based program of action to support policymaking aimed at ensuring that digitalized daily life helps tackle climate change, including the quantitative systems analysis of energy and material flows. CROWD-DRIVEN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) The development of the crowdsourcing game Picture Pile, which is funded by an ERC Proof of Concept Grant, aims to provide users with the opportunity to run their own crowd-sourced image classification campaigns, which can then train AI algorithms. “The new platform will address the current gap in the market for a platform that allows users to build their own quality controlled crowdsourcing campaigns to collect image classifications in an efficient and fair way, and then make the data collected openly and freely available. Once the platform has been built, the running costs will be low, and the overall benefit for society will be tremendous,” explains IIASA Strategic Initiatives Program Director, Steffen Fritz, who is developing the platform within the Advancing Systems Analysis Program as part of the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group. European Research Council funding news Further info: www.iiasa.ac.at/erc Five IIASA researchers have won grants from the European Research Council (ERC) to lead groundbreaking projects looking into the dynamics of global change. 27www.iiasa.ac.at IIASA corner