From July 14- 21 30 postdocs and final year PhD students gathered at the CREA premises in Amsterdam for the second CCCT summer school Film, Game, Emotion and Brain.

Participants from South Korea, Canada, New Zealand and nine European countries worked in teams on funding proposals for interdisciplinary research in the theme area. Lecturers from Israel, the UK, the US, Denmark, Hungary and the Netherlands served as consultants advising the teams in the process, lending their expertise on the subject, acting as sparring partners or assuming the role of funding proposal reviewers. Some of them also contributed through lectures in plenary meetings. Funding experts from UvA’s Transfer Office presented an introduction on funding programmes and guided participants in their search for suitable calls. UvA scientist Maarten de Rijke, experienced in writing proposals and running funded projects shared his best practice with participants. Christian Keysers of the Netherlands Neuroscience Institute held an inspiring keynote lecture on the Empathic Brain, cutting right across the interests of the teams.

On finale day teams presented their achievements. Three teams launched a proposal for development of a gaming application or technology of some sort, for health, education or entertainment. Two teams delivered a proposal for the development of a film analysis and synthesis system. The proposals exhibited a rarely seen interdisciplinary integration of concepts and approaches from neuroscience, film, game and media studies, experimental psychology, clinical psychology, rehabilitation studies, computer system design, AI, game design, design for the arts, human factor research, interaction design, human movement science and communication research.

With some research proposals having a somewhat more definite shape grace to extensive preparations, all presented interdisciplinary collaborative research projects were deserving of further elaboration into funding proposals answering calls from EU funding programmes. Teams had to work very hard to converge on their proposals, in some cases starting virtually from scratch, going through often painstaking processes of deliberation and choice. But going through these stages was experienced by participants as highly instructive.

There is neither a handbook nor a formula for a course on writing collaborative proposals, learning by doing reigns supreme. In offering a hands-on exercise Film, Game, Emotion and Brain inspired the delivery of breakthrough syntheses and perspectives that no single-disciplinary team could have arrived at in isolation, and so illustrates one of the key objectives of CCCT. We expect the ideas will find their continuation in real interdisciplinary funding proposals to be submitted by research institutes in collaboration with the now former participants. The next generation of interdisciplinary research leadership is teaming up for joint efforts.

CCCT Summer School Film, Game, Emotion and Brain
Convenors: Ed Tan (ASCoR) and Sennay Ghebreab (ISLA)
Producer: Maarten de Rijke (ISLA)
Manager: Marije Kuijs
Administration and finance: Caroline van Impelen
Management assistance: Nadine Kuijper