- The successful projects were by Professor Albrecht Schmidt in the field of computer science and Professor Christian Weber in medicine.
- Each endowed with funding of up to 2.5 million euros, the grants are among the most highly regarded research awards in Europe.
Computer scientist Albrecht Schmidt and medical researcher Christian Weber have each been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). For Christian Weber this is already the third ERC grant of his career, while for Albrecht Schmidt it is the second.
The award comes with funding of up to 2.5 million euros. ERC Advanced Grants are designed for established researchers from all disciplines whose highly innovative research goes well beyond the current state of research and forges ahead into new research territories.
AI Twins and the vision of a symbiotic intelligence
Albrecht Schmidt is Professor of Computer Science and Chair of Human-Centered Ubiquitous Media at LMU.
With the new ERC project "AI Twins of Human Experience: Towards Personal Generative AI-Systems for Amplifying Human Cognition" the researchers aim to establish a scientific foundation for AI-twins of human experience - personalized multi-modal generative AI systems that capture and encode an individual's real-world experiences and tacit knowledge. Through continuous and privacy preserving data capture from wearable devices, they will explore and develop AI-twins as advanced personal systems for storing and processing human experiences.
The researchers believe AI-twins can augment human cognitive and social abilities and enhance human memory creation and retrieval, metacognition, planning and prioritizing, decision making, and creativity. AI-twins, says Albrecht Schmidt, will enable personal simulations of future scenarios grounded in one's own experience. Using ubiquitous sensing, they hope to continuously add new and authentic real-world information (e.g. texts, conversations, images, gaze, location) to ensure the sustainability of the generative AI model. They will adopt an experimental approach, prototyping functional systems that facilitate in situ capture, processing, storage, and access. And they will empirically explore applications in skill acquisition, human memory aids, selfreflection, and social networking.
The vision is to research the scientific foundations for a co-evolution where the human intellect is amplified by machine intelligence and to establish the conceptual and theoretical foundations for human-controlled symbiotic intelligence.
New role of microRNAs in atherosclerosis
Christian Weber serves as the Director of the Institute for Cardiovascular Prevention at LMU University Hospital, where he is Chair and Professor of Vascular Medicine, and is also a member of the SyNergy Cluster of Excellence.
Atherosclerosis is the principal cause of cardiovascular diseases, which remain the leading cause of death worldwide. Christian Weber has demonstrated that a microRNA fragment called miR126-5p can protect against atherosclerosis by binding to and inhibiting the enzyme Caspase-3 in the cell nucleus, which otherwise confers programmed cell death. Weber has thus discovered a completely new function of microRNAs, which had generally been assumed to operate in the cytoplasm by suppressing or degrading messengerRNAs in a silencing complex. The new signaling pathway is mediated by the RNA-binding protein MEX3A, which will now be the focus of Weber's ERC project MONOFUN-CV.
In his project, Weber takes MEX3A as the starting point to systematically investigate these newly discovered non-canonical miRNA mechanisms together with his team. Their goal is to explore the cell-specific role of MEX3A in atherosclerosis in a mouse model and by analogy identify genetic risk variants in humans. By using various screening methods, the researchers aim to find other miRNAs that functionally require MEX3A as well as other proteins directly regulated by miRNAs, and they further plan to elucidate the structural mechanisms underlying the functions of MEX3A. Other goals of the project include analyzing the direct interactions between miR-126-5p and Caspase-3 - including their biological relevance in vivo - and the systematic quest for functional miRNA-protein pairs, which could serve as a template for novel RNA-based therapeutics.
In the long term, these findings could yield new insights into the non-canonical mechanisms of miRNAs and open up novel therapeutic approaches - for cardiovascular diseases and beyond.
