Anna Monte and Matteo Dunnhofer are the winners of two 3-year research fellowships for a total of €576,000 under the “Marie Skłodowska-Curie” programme: one of the most prestigious research programmes funded by the European Commission to reward post-doc excellent research,allowing the selected researchers to carry out their research also abroad. In particular, these 3-year fellowships belong to the “Global fellowship” category, i.e. they include the possibility to conduct two years of activity in a non-European country and one year at their University of Udine, in this case. The University of Udine had already won two projects under the “Marie Skłodowska-Curie” programme in 2023. “To increase attractiveness of young talents, the University of Udine encourages the submission of research projects to prestigious national and European competitive calls, such as those under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme, providing concrete ways to support the winners,” explained Rector Roberto Pinton.
Anna Monte, researcher from the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage, has received a grant of €320,000 to conduct her research on climate, environment and health in Greco-Roman Egypt that will lead her to study ancient papyri initially in Basel, for two years, and then at the University of Udine. Her research project is entitled “Exploring the relationship between climate, environment, and health in antiquity through the papyri from Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt – Reclean” and aims at analysing the impact of human activities on the natural environment in ancient Egypt and that of climate characteristics and “ancient” pollution on human health based on papyri documents in Greek between III century b.C. and VII century A.D.
The other researcher who won the grant of €256,000 is Matteo Dunnhofer, currently working at the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics of the University of Udine. His research project, entitled “Towards primate-like artificial neural networks for visual object tracking – Prinnevot,” aims at studying intersection algorithms between Artificial Intelligence and neuroscience in the field of Visual Object Tracking (VOT), which involves detecting objects using video data (people, vehicles, animals…). Application sectors, such as autonomous driving, video surveillance, robotics and medicine, are expected to greatly benefit from the results of these studies. During the first two years, the research activities will be carried out at the York University of Toronto, Canada, while the last twelve months they will take place at the Machine Learning and Perception (MLP) Lab of the University of Udine, a laboratory that has been operating for several years in fundamental research applied to machine learning and computer vision algorithms.
