Open to all topics.
The 2024 edition of the CROSS program calls upon researchers at EPFL and the University of Lausanne to submit proposals for joint projects that bring the natural sciences and engineering together with the social sciences and humanities.
Through this annual call for projects, CROSS provides competitive grants to support new seed research endeavors that have the potential to grow into full–scale interdisciplinary research projects.
Selected projects
In order to support transition policies at the level of the Arc lemanique territory, “LOCAL: Lifestyles and Carbon impact in the Arc Lemanique territory” is a project aiming to quantify the energy and carbon footprint of its inhabitants’ lifestyle and their socio-economic determinants by jointly analyzing the different spheres of activity and their interactions. The project is based on an interdisciplinary methodology at the interface of environmental economics, urban metabolism, urban sociology, and industrial ecology and is part of a broader study based on the survey “Panel lemanique de suivi de la durabilite des pratiques” lead by EPFL’s ENAC School for a period of 5 years. Hence, LOCAL is an important step for local authorities towards a contextual understanding of regional carbon emissions and for the advancement of research on the interrelated dynamics of individual change and territorial policies in the face of climate change.
Our project proposes to investigate a new way to use artificial agents by introducing a disruptive virtual agent to enrich collaborative ideation processes. The virtual agent will bring new perspectives to these activities in the form of a “productive bias” towards novel ideas. This could in turn counterbalance the cognitive effect of fixation, which prevents participants from generating alternative ideas due to the fixation initially proposed ideas. Our research on the effect of such agent will be instrumental to the design of integrated and interactive digital systems for collaborative ideation.
The construction of buildings is a process with several pain points of concern, including carbon emissions and high risks to workers. There is an industry potential to mitigate these challenges with robotics. Prior to being fully implemented in construction, robotic processes must be collaborative with humans. Borrowing from principles of semiotics and ongoing research in anthropomorphic machines, the project explores how sensing and signaling technology could be leveraged to establish communication, including recognition, categorization, association, coexistence, prediction. The project is designed as a technology assessment, documenting its impact on collaboration and workflow adaptability between the agents. By conducting interdisciplinary analysis of the human-robot interaction based on current CRCL work, the project aims at achieving a technology foresight in order to better inform further decisions in funding research and innovation in construction robotics.