Scholars of the Mesopotamian literature of the Old Babylonian period (roughly 2000-1500 BCE) usually deal with one of three literatures written in cuneiform script that are distinguished linguistically: (1) Myths, epics, wisdom literature, hymns and prayers written in the main register of Sumerian (Emegir) and known mainly from the scribal schools; (2) Lament-prayers in the Emesal register of Sumerian; and (3) myths, epics, wisdom literature, hymns, prayers, and incantations, written in the Akkadian languages. On the one side, usually each of these literatures is dealt with independently, and the connections between these genres are only very rarely investigated. On the other side, on the rare cases that such connections are treated, the limits are often completely removed by reconstructing a common tradition for the Sumerian and Akkadian bodies of literature. Both approaches reflect extreme positions, but neither of them seems convincing. The main goal of the present proposal is to converge the extreme positions and to gently start crossing the borders between the three literatures without treating them on the other hand as belonging to one large corpus. The two applicants have each worked independently on these corpora, and together they will try to identify the literary “agents” that allowed the flowing of motifs and themes, between the three main bodies of literature of this period.

The purpose of this research project is to examine the interface of cybersecurity breaches and legal liability under private law, according to two perspectives:

1- The first perspective is to conduct a legal analysis on how current private law doctrines (both particular and general torts-based liability) respond to cybersecurity breaches. In addition to a critical-comparative examination of current law, the research will examine whether there is a need for a legal reform, in private law, that will craft explicit norms for cybersecurity breaches. In addition to general torts liability aspects, particular legal branches to be examined include (as an inconclusive list): privacy law; consumer law; software and computer law; insurance law, trade secrets and intellectual property liability regimes.

2- The second perspective of the research will attempt to examine and shape legal policy proposals based on field analysis of particular industries in areas that are either related to cybersecurity or that raise cybersecurity concerns: software companies; cybersecurity companies; "the internet of things" companies; autonomous cars and more and will be made in light of the legal analysis realized above.

Elucidating the neural mechanisms that subserve conscious awareness is a fundamental goal of neuroscience. There is abundant evidence that conscious perception is gated by the ability to direct attention to behaviorally relevant stimuli in the environment, through top-down modulation of sensory pathways by attention control networks. Attention can be directed by internal goals (endogenous) or salient external cues (exogenous). There is also evidence that attention can be guided by emotional significance of stimuli even when these are goal-irrelevant (1), suggesting that emotional information can be detected prior to conscious awareness (2). The exact neural pathways and timing of these emotional effects remain unresolved, as well as their relationship to other attention mechanisms (3). Non-invasive electrophysiological methods with EEG and MEG provide powerful tools to dissect the specific types and stages of processing that controls how attention is directed to sensory stimuli (2) and can now be applied to ecological free-viewing conditions (4-7) rather than unnatural experimental paradigms as used in many studies (3). Here we will exploit the latter approach by combining expertise from both labs on emotion perception (1, 2, 3) and combined EEG-eyetracking methodology (4,5). We will record fixation-related brain potentials (FRPs) while participants freely explore visual scenes and direct their gaze at stimuli with different properties: either goal-relevant (target objects to be searched/counted), emotionally significant but task-irrelevant (e.g. faces, animals), or physically salient and irrelevant (based on sensory feature analysis of pictures (8). FRPs will allow us to identify and compare neural signatures for different conditions of attentional capture.

The scope of this joint proposal is the application of multiscale modeling for the systematic study of photoreceptor proteins and their mutants. Photoreceptor proteins are the key molecules for response to and sensing of light in many organisms. They mediate a variety of functions in nature such as visual perception, regulation of circadian rhythm, phototaxis and light-oriented growth of plants. However, due to the large size of these proteins their computational studies are challenging. The unfavorable scaling of quantum chemical methods renders any explicit treatment of the environment unfeasible. Multi-scale methods -i.e. based on interfacing treatment at different levels of theory for different parts of the system- were hence developed as solutions to this problem. Frozen Density Embedding Theory (FDET) [1,2] uses the electron density of the environment (ρB) to describe its effect on a system of interest. While maintaining a quantum-level description of the whole system, FDET allows for the use of any method for generating ρB, including experimental densities and time-averaged densities from Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations.[3] Furthermore, FDET could be interfaced with quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) resulting in a QMA/QMemb/MM approach for an even better trade-off between accuracy and computational cost. MD simulations provide a comprehensive insight into the time evolution of light induced processes.[4,5,6] Such reactions often have non-adiabatic effects that enable efficient transfer of electronic excitation energy to nuclear kinetic energy and vice versa, often causing irreversible transfer of potential energy to heat, or form a unique mechanism for reactions which are forbidden in the adiabatic framework. With our collaboration we aim to explore the possibilities of combining FDET with nonadiabatic molecular dynamics and QM/MM simulations to study photoreceptor proteins.