Dr Boris Kayachev (Department of Classics) and Dr Nicola Palladino (Human+ Fellow with Trinity Long Room Hub and Adapt) were awarded funding for their projects totalling over €1.1 million collectively. The funding awarded includes a contribution to the salary of the researcher and fees and stipend for a PhD student.
These are two of 7 such awards made to TCD under this programme. In total 47 awards were made under the scheme nationally with 15 awards made under the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) strand and 32 awards made under the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) strand.
The Pathway Programme is a collaborative initiative between Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Research Council (IRC) which supports talented postdoctoral researchers from all research disciplines to develop their track record and transition to becoming independent research leaders.
Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, congratulated the awardees and commended their novel approaches which will have “wide-ranging impacts on their disciplines and beyond.”
Dr Boris Kayachev’s project ‘Enjambement in Latin poetry: prosody, pragmatics and word order’was awarded funding of €566,057 over 4 years. His mentor on the project is Professor Anna Chahoud of Trinity’s Department of Classics.
Enjambement in Latin poetry: prosody, pragmatics and word order: Intonation plays a crucial role in language, but how can one study intonation in a language no longer spoken and only known from written texts, like Latin? Poetry provides one piece of evidence, but its study has been neglected until now. As we know from other poetic traditions, a verse of poetry is normally followed by a pause. When this pause occurs in linguistically unexpected places, it is called enjambement. Through the study of enjambement, we can learn something new about the articulation of Latin speech. The project will collect and analyse thousands of such cases from the works of two comic poets (Plautus, Terence) and two epic poets (Virgil, Valerius Flaccus).
Dr Nicola Palladino was awarded €565,769.23 for the project, ‘From Policy to Practices: Aligning Artificial Intelligence socio-technical design to European Union values and incoming regulation’. Dr Palladino was a fellow of the EU-funded Human+ Programme where his work was focused on questions that consider technological developments from the humanistic perspective.
From Policy to Practices: Aligning Artificial Intelligence socio-technical design to European Union values and incoming regulation: The European Union is discussing a proposal for a ‘Regulation Laying Down Harmonised Rules On Artificial Intelligence‘, better known as ‘Artificial Intelligence Act’ (AIA), establishing regulatory requirements for AI systems. This aims to position the EU as the global lead in trustworthy and human-centric AI and to set the global standard for the future use of AI.
However, practitioners are still struggling to understand how to implement ethical and good governance principles in their operational routines. Recently developed technical tools appear poorly integrated with broader accountability mechanisms. This project aims to fill this gap by linking regulatory and social requirements, technical tools and organizational practices into a comprehensive governance framework supported by a system of indicators, criteria, and operational plans. It will produce a “Guidebook on Artificial Intelligence Act Compliance” aimed at providing practitioners with concrete guidance on how to comply with the incoming EU regulation.