Funding is the fuel for scientific innovation. Each year, numerous calls for grants and other plans allow researchers to develop their work and contribute to their progress for society. If these processes are paralyzed, the professionals who depend on them can be harmed. This is what is happening with a call published by the Ministry of Universities in July 2023, when it was an individual portfolio. promised 31 million euros to finance projects in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Nearly a year and a half later, the applicants know nothing.
One of the people affected by this situation is Núria López, researcher at the Institut Català d’Investigació Química (ICIQ). At the start of the two-month deadline for submitting applications, set up a consortium with its center and seven others to present a common project. “We were very attracted to it. We thought our region would benefit a lot from it.” However, months pass and they get no response.
Added to this situation of silence is the disappearance of the Ministry of Universities as a single portfolio at the end of 2023. From that moment on, it is integrated into Science and Innovation. This complicates the process because the scientific contacts that López and his team can speak to know nothing about the subject and don’t know how to give them a reference contact who can give them information. “No one knows anything”deplores the Catalan.
Last July, a year after the call was launched, the list of rejected applications was published. The project of López and his team is not there, so they understand that his candidacy continueseven if they still don’t know anything else. “It seems to have been left in a crack between the past and the future,” he laments.
From the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, they indicate that this call “there is a delay in internal management to resolve it definitively”. They attribute this delay to the process of integrating Universities into this portfolio and to the changes made within the General Secretariat of Universities at the end of May 2024.
The money for the appeal comes from the European Next Generation funds, which have a certain lead time. This makes the researcher fear that this deadline will expire before they are awarded and that Europe will ask the government for reimbursement. All this uncertainty made them feel “totally helpless”.
Sources from the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the portfolio led by Diana Morant, assure that they have started to consider other options for this money. “Currently, the ministry is studying different scenarios allowing the use of these funds in case it is not possible to carry out the aforementioned appeal in its current format.” This newspaper asked the administration if it had a deadline to resolve the appeal and respond to researchers, but did not receive a response.
The others seven centers which form the consortium with which López applied to the call are: the National Center for Supercomputing (CNS), the ALBA Synchrotron, the Catalan Institute of Nanosciences and Nanotechnology, the Rovira i Virgili University, the University of the Basque Country and James I University.
His project studies materials for energy transformation. A process that requires analysis performed by hand, which is “very tedious and limits the discovery of new elements”underlines the scientist. Their proposal aims to include AI in these techniques to speed up the process. They already had prototypes, for example in microscopy, but lack of funding prevented them from moving forward.
Economic losses
This situation represents a problem for competitiveness because AI is a field with very rapid progress. In fact, one of the techniques López’s group was working on was published by another team last October in the journal Science. The researcher shows her frustration because she assures that, in the consortium, they had the tools to develop it and the knowledge to do it well.
They are now forced to look for alternatives. “We will have to think a little more about how to continue or look for something else”he laments. Instead of starting from scratch, if they were to return to this part now, they would have to start from the existing results. “We’ll have to be imaginative, because that’s what we’re good at.”
It is not just about the impact at academic level, this delay also involves other economic losses. López assures that there are technology companies interested in this type of technique. If they can’t grow them, they’ll buy them from professionals who can.
Human resources
The objective was to distribute the 31 million euros offered by the call between several projects. The proposal in which the Catalan is participating was one of the most ambitious, he emphasizes. They asked for two million euroswhich constitute their only source of financing. “This is the only way to support a consortium of this scale.”
This money is mainly intended for personnel expenses. They have IT resources thanks to the CNS: “They are always generous with us”. Likewise, much of the information they needed was going to be generated at the ALBA synchrotron, adds the scientist.
The project that includes López aims to generate knowledge, be a school for new researchersindicates the scientist. “The goal is to train a new generation of people who can do things that couldn’t be done before.” On the contrary, this process leaves them in utter despair and helplessness, because they do not know what else to do. “We are bound hand and foot.”
