Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg

Women’s imprisonment, social control and the carceral state – an interdisciplinary study of the experiences of detention Prison research in Germany is largely of a quantitative nature and overwhelmingly based on male prisoners who make up the vast majority of the prison estate. The fact that women are far fewer in number can pose a variety of challenges for prison administrations, often resulting in less favourable treatment as compared to imprisoned men. WISCA responds to the Council of Europe’s call for more research and gender-sensitive monitoring which is attuned to the potential compounding of problems women face in prison. Prison research is mainly based on generalisations from mainstream male prisoners (Howe 1994; Loeber et al 2007) and women have remained largely absent from studies into key penological issues such as legitimacy and order (Bosworth 1996; Liebling 2009). Female prisoners are particularly interesting, however, precisely because many reform agendas are trialled on this relatively small and seemingly more manageable group (Kubiak et al. 2017). While attention has been directed towards the Nordic countries in search for penal reform ideas (Pratt & Eriksson 2015), central European countries have been overlooked despite low imprisonment rates; and little is known about prisoners’ experiences in Germany due to a lack of qualitative research. Further, carceral geography as a newly emerging discipline has so far seen no German data, so this project will provide an expansion of carceral geography and qualitative criminology into the German-speaking interdisciplinary field. Using mainly qualitative research methods with some quantitative elements, WISCA will address these gaps in scholarship by focussing on the experiences of female prisoners in order to expose the dynamics of the penal state, the texture of imprisonment as lived and experienced, and wider networks of social control beyond release.

One of the greatest technological challenges of today is efficient storage of electrical energy for portable applications, including electric vehicles, mobile electronic devices, and robotic systems. Further progress in these areas, however, is often hindered by the limitations of current rechargeable lithium ion battery technologies, which are among the most common power sources for these systems. Despite tremendous progress in electrode materials, the intrinsic drawbacks of current batteries are related to their planar two-dimensional design, which restrains the performance in terms of output power and charging speed. NANO-3D-LION is aimed to make a breakthrough in these major battery characteristics by a paradigm shift in battery engineering: the goal is to develop and employ advanced nanoscale 3D printing techniques to fabricate active battery materials with ultrasmall structural features, which will provide almost a thousand-fold increase in the surface area of the battery enabled by nanoscale spacing between its electrodes without compromising the battery capacity. To reach this, high-aspect ratio metal features will be fabricated and further converted into the active material of the cathode and the anode. This will enable unprecedented level of control of the battery architecture, allowing groundbreaking improvement of the key battery performance characteristics, including higher output power and charging times of only several seconds. NANO-3D-LION will establish a unique engineering approach with a potential to completely change the future landscape in research and industry related to portable electronic devices and electric vehicles and will also benefit many technologies beyond battery research, where nanoscale 3D printing opens new unparalleled capacity, therefore ensuring its broad scientific, economical and societal impact.

In both speech and music perception, the auditory system decomposes sounds that overlap in time and frequency into distinct perceptual events and streams, which is referred to as auditory scene analysis (ASA). Hearing-impaired listeners suffer from severely compromised ASA, as illustrated by their immense difficulties to understand speech in noisy environments. Although the central role of ASA in shaping the experience of music is widely acknowledged—perceptually organizing sounds from multiple instruments or voices into melody and accompaniment, for instance—the role of hearing loss in musical scene perception remains largely unexplored. At the same time, hearing aids are typically designed for speech perception, not for music perception. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach that employs methods from music perception, auditory modelling, and signal processing, this Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action aims to Test, Predict, and Improve Musical Scene Perception of Hearing-Impaired Listeners (TIMPANI). Firstly, a series of music perception tasks will be designed to assess the effects of hearing loss on musical scene perception abilities. Secondly, an auditory model will be developed in order to predict normal and hearing-impaired listeners’ performance in ASA tasks. Finally, algorithms for scene-aware music mixing will be developed for improved music perception of hearing aid users. This research is timely and addresses the H2020 challenges to improve demographic change and wellbeing in European societies: The rise of hearing loss calls for scientific and technological breakthroughs in order to include hearing-impaired individuals in the cultural resource of music listening and making.

Humans have two ears – and for good reason: So-called binaural hearing is critical not only for localizing acoustic events but also for selectively focusing on a target sound while suppressing sound from other directions. In order to perform these tasks, neural circuits with the most temporally precise processing within the entire nervous system have evolved. 360 million people have impaired hearing. Although hearing aids and cochlear implants help restore audibility, they provide insufficient benefit in restoring the advantages of true binaural hearing. IBiDT is designed to fundamentally change this perspective. Appreciating the individual nature of each hearing deficit, it will provide the means of diagnosing pathologies, not just the perceptual symptoms. IBiDT will suggest algorithms specific to the individual detailed patient profile and suggest therapeutic interventions specific to the listening situation. To achieve these aims, a multidisciplinary approach in which both auditory and non-auditory aspects of patient profiles and a computer model simulating the impaired auditory system will, together, transform diagnosis of hearing impairment from one concerned with audibility to one concerned with effective communication in any listening environment. Binaural hearing is an ideal conceptual framework in which to investigate this approach as it increases greatly the number of possible pathologies, compared to unilateral diagnostics. The binaural hearing system is also ideal to investigate because it allows for large improvements in listening performance. Despite significant R&D expenditure, cochlear-implant performance has plateaued over the last 15 years, at least with respect to unilateral devices. Improvements from Individualized Binaural Diagnosis and Technology will have a large, positive impact on the increasing number of bilateral cochlear implant users (many of them children), as well as on the many tens of millions of people who use hearing aids.