Background

Following agreement with funding organisations in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Turkey, the European Science Foundation has launched a Call for Outline Proposals for Collaborative Research Projects (CRPs) to be undertaken within the EUROCORES Programme on “Modelling intelligent interaction - Logic in the humanities, social and computational sciences (LogICCC)” in March 2007. 

To download the LogICCC Call for Outline Proposals click here.

The programme aimed to support high quality multidisciplinary research and was expected to run for 3-4 years; it included national research funding as well as support for networking and dissemination activities managed by the ESF. The participating funding organizations brought together a research budget of approx. 7.5 Mio Euros.

At the time of the deadline, 11 May 2007, the Call had attracted 34 Outline Proposals, with 157 individual projects and 46 projects with associate status. On the basis of the criteria published in the Call, the Review Panel selected 16 proposals which have been invited to submit a Full Proposal. Out of these, a total of 8 proposals have been funded, with 30 individual projects and 17 associated partners.

The Launch conference in October 2008 marked the formal start of the programme which has, since then, been characterized by a high level of activity and collaboration – both within and across the various Collaborative Research Projects.  An overview of these research activities - and their output - can be found in the final publication “LogICCC: A Retrospective”.

At the end of the programme (late 2011), the external Review Panel evaluated the programme. The Panel concluded that the LogICCC programme has been very successful. The LogICCC primary ambitions have been exceeded, on all fronts: it solidified the European lead position in logic if compared to the US, it advanced the input to logic from areas outside of the traditional ones as well as the application of logical methods in these areas, and it facilitated the emergence of a logic community that will transcend the classical boundaries of disciplines, backgrounds, and schools. In particular, the evaluation stressed the brilliant research output of the LogICCC projects in terms of publications. The Panel was impressed by both the quantity and quality of publications that appeared in the proceedings of the very best conferences (like IJCAI, LiCS, AAAI, TCS, AiML) and in prestigious journals (Synthese, Journal of Philosophical Logic, etc.) This attests to the excellence of both the participants and the work they have achieved within the programme.

In their reports, all LogICCC projects reported positively about the added value of the programme. The Review Panel echoed these words and concluded that the contacts among the LogICCC projects have greatly enhanced the understanding of the programme members of the overall field and thus have influenced their individual publications. Though the direct benefit is difficult to estimate, the Panel found it safe to say that many activities and research collaborations would not have materialized without the motivation induced by the LogICCC Call. 

The full text of the Panel’s consensus statement, summarizing the Panel’s assessment of the achievements of programme, can be found here.

 

 

LogiCCC Theme proposal

EUROCORES is a  truly “bottom-up” funding mechanism, where -  through its annual call for theme proposals – the ESF solicits new ideas from the scientific community with a view to creating large-scale collaborative research programmes in and across all scientific domains. Out of these submitted ideas - called EUROCORES theme proposals – around five will be selected each year to be developed into EUROCORES programmes. The names of the people who submitted the LogicCCC theme proposal, and in this way stood at the basis of the LogiCCC programme, can be downloaded here.