The project, titled AI-Driven Behavioural Epidemic Models for Intervention Design (AIBEM), has been selected in the 2026 Health Research Call by the “la Caixa” Foundation, one of the most competitive biomedical research funding calls in Spain and Portugal. AIBEM was one of just 32 projects chosen from 800 submitted proposals, a success rate of roughly 4 percent, and will receive €970,139 over three years. In total, the foundation will award €25.7 million to the projects selected in this edition. The consortium’s ambition is to build generative agent-based models, or GABMs, in which every simulated individual is powered by a large language model—the same underlying technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT or Gemini—configured with a specific personal profile, memory, goals, and tools.

“For two decades, science has allowed us to accurately model the dynamics of pathogen spread through contact networks. However, the true challenge has always been the unpredictability of our own nature. Capturing the complexity of human behavior during a health crisis remains an unresolved challenge. The rise of generative AI changes the rules of the game in our favor: by equipping autonomous computational agents with reasoning capabilities and mutual influence, we can transform epidemiological models from mere mathematical projections into a faithful reflection of the human factor on a societal scale,” said Yamir Moreno, the project’s principal investigator, Director of the Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) and a member of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Zaragoza.

The technical core of AIBEM represents what the researchers describe as a paradigm shift. In conventional epidemiological modeling, human behavior is treated as exogenous—something imposed on the model from outside rather than emerging from it. Compliance rates are assumed, contact patterns are fixed, and the subtle feedback loops between policy, perception, and action are lost. In a generative agent-based model, by contrast, each simulated person can interact with others, make decisions, set expectations, and generate social norms. Trust in health authorities can erode or strengthen; misinformation can propagate through a simulated community; socioeconomic inequalities can shape who isolates, who keeps working, and who gets sick. The researchers say these agent responses will be systematically validated against experiments involving real human participants, a step they consider essential to keeping the simulations anchored in observed behavior rather than plausible-sounding fiction.

“UC3M’s main contribution is its extensive experience in designing and executing behavioral experiments with human participants,” said Anxo Sánchez, a researcher on the project from UC3M’s Interdisciplinary Group of Complex Systems (GISC). “This capability is key, as validating generative agents requires not only comparing their behavior against standard experiments, but also modeling epidemic-related scenarios and designing experiments that faithfully replicate them—many of which have not been addressed before and will be crucial to the project’s success.”

The work is divided into three main packages distributed across the consortium. UC3M will run behavioral experiments with socioeconomically diverse participants using the IBSEN platform, developed within the framework of the European H2020 project of the same name. The University of Zaragoza will build the generative agents, replicate human behavior, and integrate them into epidemiological models, drawing on BIFI’s supercomputing infrastructure—the CESAR system—and the accumulated expertise of the Complex Networks and Systems Group (COSNET) in mathematical and computational epidemic modeling. UPF will translate the results into decision-support tools for health authorities, including an explicit assessment of how the costs and benefits of each intervention are distributed across society. That distributional analysis is not an add-on, the team insists, but a defining feature of the project.

“Epidemics are not purely biological phenomena: their spread and consequences are deeply conditioned by social inequalities, living and working conditions, and power dynamics. Therefore, developing technologically more sophisticated epidemiological models is not enough if they fail to incorporate the structural drivers that leave certain social groups more exposed, more vulnerable, or less equipped to protect themselves. At UPF, we will contribute our expertise in ecosocial determinants, health inequalities, and public policy, leading the design and evaluation of interventions that consider both efficacy and equity impacts. Our challenge is to ensure that AI goes beyond better predicting epidemics to helping explain them and developing socially just public health responses—built with stakeholder participation and capable of reducing, rather than reproducing, existing inequalities,” said Joan Benach, Director of the Health Inequalities Research Group – Employment Conditions Network (GREDS-EMCONET) and Co-Director of the JHU-UPF Public Policy Center at UPF.

In practical terms, AIBEM will treat equity as a primary model outcome rather than an afterthought. The age-based contact matrices that underpin most epidemic models will be expanded to include socioeconomic dimensions—occupation, income, and neighborhood—drawn from Spanish census data, labor force surveys, and stratified epidemiological records. This means disparities in disease burden and in the capacity to respond to an outbreak will emerge naturally from each simulated group’s material conditions, rather than being imposed by the modelers afterward. The approach echoes one of the hardest lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic: that a single national policy can produce profoundly unequal outcomes depending on who can work from home, who lives in crowded housing, and who can afford to isolate.

The project also embeds an ethical and governance framework aligned with the European AI Act, including bias audits, human oversight, and independent equity reviews. All models, datasets, and validation protocols will be published open-access following FAIR principles, making the methodology available for scrutiny and reuse. The expected deliverables include behavioral agents validated against real human experimental data with explicit socioeconomic diversity, coupled epidemiological models that quantify how behavioral heterogeneity modulates transmission, a systematic methodology for designing and evaluating interventions under realistic social conditions, and a decision-support toolkit for Spanish and European health authorities featuring policy briefs, ethical guidelines, and simulation software.

If the consortium succeeds, the implications could extend well beyond the next epidemic. Generative agent-based models are being explored across the social sciences as a way to simulate collective phenomena that resist traditional mathematical treatment, and AIBEM’s insistence on experimental validation against real participants offers a template for how such simulations might earn scientific credibility. For public health officials, the promise is more immediate: tools that can test, in silico, how a mask mandate, a vaccination campaign, or a lockdown will play out across communities with different levels of trust, income, and exposure—before those measures are imposed on real populations. The researchers caution that the challenge of capturing human nature remains formidable, but they argue that the arrival of generative AI has shifted the balance of that contest. The mathematics of pathogens, they note, has been solved; the mathematics of us is now within reach.

Subject of Research: Generative AI-driven behavioral epidemic modeling for public health intervention design

Article Title: UC3M participates in a pioneering scientific project using AI to anticipate human behavior during epidemics

Article References: UC3M participates in a pioneering scientific project using AI to anticipate human behavior during epidemics. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: AIBEM, epidemiological modeling, generative agents, large language models, agent-based models, human behavior, health inequalities, public health policy, UC3M, University of Zaragoza, behavioral experiments, la Caixa Foundation

ZENITIA, whose full name is Zero-Emission Next-Gen Innovation and Technology Integration for Aviation, brings together nine organizations from academia, industry, and air traffic management across Europe and beyond. The consortium includes UC3M in Spain, Boeing Aerospace Spain and Boeing Deutschland GmbH, Estuaire SAS in France, Future Needs Management Consulting Ltd. in Cyprus, Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, the International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Associations (IFATCA) in Canada, and Technische Universiteit Delft in the Netherlands. This mix is deliberate: the project’s premise is that climate science, aircraft engineering, operational simulation, and the practical realities of air traffic control must be developed in conversation with one another rather than in separate silos, if the aviation sector is to make evidence-based decisions about its transition.

Abolfazl Simorgh, project coordinator and professor in UC3M’s Aerospace Engineering Department, frames the challenge in stark terms. According to Simorgh, ZENITIA addresses a central question for future aviation: how to ensure that next-generation aircraft and fuels deliver measurable climate benefits while remaining safe, efficient, and manageable across airports and airspace. His stated approach is to connect environmental science with gate-to-gate operations and AI-enabled scenario analysis, turning today’s uncertainty into evidence that stakeholders can actually use. That framing matters because the current debate around zero-emission aviation is often dominated by promises and prototypes, while the operational and atmospheric consequences of introducing radically different aircraft into a mixed fleet remain poorly quantified.

The scientific gaps the project targets are specific and, until now, persistent. Researchers still lack detailed characterizations of both evolutionary and revolutionary aircraft concepts, including their payload and range limitations, their expected flight profiles, and their wake behavior, the turbulent air patterns that trail behind aircraft and constrain how closely and safely they can follow one another. Equally underexplored are the climate effects of non-CO₂ emissions, such as nitrogen oxides, water vapor, and contrails, which are believed to contribute significantly to aviation’s total radiative forcing, and the operational implications of airports and airspaces handling mixed fleets in which conventional kerosene-burning jets coexist with hydrogen-powered or battery-electric designs. Without this knowledge, regulators and infrastructure planners risk making expensive decisions on incomplete evidence.

To close these gaps, ZENITIA will develop three integrated solutions designed to transform climate science into practical operational tools. The first is high-fidelity environmental impact modelling, which will combine aircraft design and dynamic performance simulation with emissions estimation and atmospheric science. Crucially, the modelling will capture both CO₂ and non-CO₂ effects, including contrails, nitrogen oxides, and water vapor, alongside local air quality around airports. The models will be validated against real-world observations and consolidated industry data, a step intended to give the resulting estimates the credibility required for regulatory and investment decisions rather than leaving them as purely theoretical exercises.

The second solution is a gate-to-gate mixed-fleet simulation capability. Rather than examining aircraft in isolation, these simulation tools will model and optimize complete flight operations in which conventional and zero-emission aircraft coexist, from the departure gate through taxi, takeoff, cruise, descent, and arrival at the destination gate. The tools will assess airport infrastructure needs and identify operational best practices, responding directly to priorities set by major European initiatives such as the Alliance for Zero Emission Aviation (AZEA) and SESAR, the EU’s flagship air traffic management research program. This operational lens is essential because a hydrogen aircraft, for example, is not merely a different powerplant in the air; it implies different refueling procedures, storage requirements, turnaround times, and safety protocols on the ground.

The third pillar is an interactive decision-support platform covering the critical transition window from 2035 to 2050. The platform will offer a dashboard through which users can simulate aviation scenarios for 2035, 2040, and 2050, centralizing environmental, operational, and infrastructure data in a single interface. The intended audience is deliberately broad: regulators, airlines, and policymakers will be able to explore how different fleet compositions, fuel adoption rates, and infrastructure investments interact, and to plan regulations and capital expenditure that align with the EU Green Deal. In effect, the platform aims to function as a flight simulator for policy, allowing decision-makers to test the consequences of their choices decades before those choices become irreversible.

Industry participation gives the project an important grounding in real-world data. Eduardo Carrillo de Albornoz, Managing Director of Boeing Global Technology-Europe, emphasized the industrial contribution, noting that Boeing Aerospace Spain’s Global Technology division will provide OEM performance data to evaluate the fidelity of the models developed for kerosene-powered aircraft. He added that, together with UC3M and the consortium partners, Boeing looks forward to moving the dial on next-generation aircraft technology. This benchmarking role is more than a formality: any model that claims to predict the climate and operational behavior of future zero-emission aircraft must first demonstrate that it can accurately reproduce the known performance of today’s fleet, and access to manufacturer performance data is what makes that validation possible.

The project’s methodological backbone is computational simulation and modelling, an approach that reflects both the scale of the problem and the impossibility of testing future aviation systems experimentally. Researchers cannot fly a hypothetical 2045 fleet to measure its contrail formation or its effect on airport throughput. Instead, they must build physics-based and data-driven models, couple them across disciplines from combustion chemistry to air traffic flow management, and interrogate them with artificial intelligence to explore vast scenario spaces. The involvement of IFATCA ensures that the human dimension, the air traffic controllers who will one day sequence hydrogen aircraft alongside conventional jets in increasingly crowded skies, is represented from the outset rather than retrofitted at the end.

What makes ZENITIA notable in the broader landscape of European decarbonization research is its insistence on integration. Many projects have attacked individual pieces of the puzzle, cleaner fuels, novel airframes, contrail avoidance, or airport electrification, but the transition to climate-neutral aviation will succeed or fail as a systems problem. A fleet that reduces CO₂ but increases contrail warming, or an aircraft that is efficient in cruise but disruptive on the ground, could undermine the very climate targets it is meant to serve. By building validated environmental models, mixed-fleet operational simulations, and a forward-looking decision platform within a single 30-month effort, the consortium aims to give Europe a coherent evidence base for one of the most complex technological transitions in modern transport, and to do so while the window for meaningful 2050 action remains open.

Subject of Research: Integrated modelling and simulation of next-generation aircraft, sustainable fuels, and mixed-fleet operations for climate-neutral European aviation

Article Title: UC3M coordinates the European project ZENITIA to accelerate climate-neutral aviation

Article References: UC3M coordinates the European project ZENITIA to accelerate climate-neutral aviation. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: ZENITIA, climate-neutral aviation, UC3M, Horizon Europe, SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking, zero-emission aircraft, sustainable aviation fuels, non-CO2 emissions, contrails, mixed-fleet simulation, air traffic management, decision-support platform

The study’s author, Mirella Romero Recio, a professor in the Department of Humanities: History, Geography, and Art at UC3M, situates the poem within a long chain of transmission. The Odyssey and the Iliad first emerged as works of oral tradition, products of a professional storytelling culture in which bards recomposed vast narratives from memory before live audiences. Only later were they committed to writing, a transition that gave them unprecedented prominence throughout Greek antiquity. That written legacy then passed into the Roman world, where Ulysses became a familiar figure of Latin literature and moral debate, and from there it flowed continuously into the modern era. According to Romero Recio, understanding this chain of transmission is essential to grasping why the epic remains so adaptable: each generation has inherited a text that was itself shaped by centuries of reinterpretation.

One of the study’s central analytical points concerns what distinguishes the Odyssey from other epic traditions. Where the Iliad is organized around military exploits and the pursuit of honor on the battlefield, the Odyssey tells a story of return, the nostos, and of the protagonist’s defining quality of cunning intelligence, the mêtis. Odysseus survives not through superior strength but through adaptability, deception, improvisation, and an unshakable orientation toward home. This structural difference, the study argues, is precisely what has made the poem so endlessly reusable. A narrative centered on survival, displacement, and homecoming speaks to experiences far beyond the battlefield, which helps explain why the figure of Odysseus has been systematically reinterpreted in light of the dilemmas, crises, and ideologies of each historical period.

The research pays particular attention to the constellation of characters surrounding the hero. Penelope, Telemachus, Circe, and Polyphemus have each accumulated their own reception histories, and the study shows how these figures function as flexible cultural templates rather than fixed literary types. Penelope has oscillated between the model of the self-sacrificing, faithful wife and a far more active figure of political strategy and resistance. Circe has traveled from the archetype of the dangerous femme fatale to a symbol of autonomy and self-determination. Polyphemus, the Cyclops, has served as a foil for debates about civilization and barbarity. The study emphasizes that these reinterpretations are not distortions of an original meaning but part of the myth’s operating mechanism: the narrative survives precisely because its characters can absorb new meanings in every context.

A striking example of this contemporary shift involves the poem’s female figures. In recent literature and theater, characters such as Circe and Penelope have been reimagined as protagonists of their own stories, embodying autonomy, resistance, and political agency rather than serving merely as obstacles or rewards in a male hero’s journey. Romero Recio highlights a feature of the ancient text that makes such rereadings possible: the Odyssey is unusual among narratives of such antiquity in giving women a major role. Beyond their prominence within the plot, she notes, these women are portrayed as having their own lives and their own ways of seeing the world. That interiority, present even in the archaic poem, provides the raw material from which modern authors have built some of the most celebrated feminist retellings of recent years.

The study also documents how deeply the myth has penetrated scientific and psychological vocabulary. The very word nostalgia was coined in reference to the longing for return that the poem dramatizes, and the so-called Ulysses syndrome has entered clinical and popular discourse to describe the chronic, multilayered stress experienced by migrants facing prolonged uncertainty and separation from home. These examples illustrate the study’s broader claim that the Odyssey has shaped not only artistic production but also the conceptual language through which modern human experience is characterized and understood. An archaic Greek poem, in other words, continues to supply the metaphors with which contemporary society names its own forms of suffering and desire.

Alongside this reception history, the research integrates a rigorous historiographical and archaeological perspective, testing the poem’s fictional geography against the material evidence of the real Mediterranean. Odysseus travels through a space that is mythical, yet it is anchored in recognizable places. As Romero Recio explains, scholars since antiquity have tried to identify the locations mentioned in the text, and some are straightforward because they were, and remain, well known: Crete, Egypt, Cape Malea. It is precisely in the eastern Mediterranean, however, that the fantastical world of the Odyssey unfolds, and this is no coincidence. That region was far less familiar to the poem’s original audiences, and the unknown periphery of the known world became the natural stage for one-eyed giants, enchantresses, and conversations with the dead.

The archaeological dimension of the study reaches back to the Mycenaean context in which the epic’s historical memory is rooted, and it follows the long scholarly effort to separate historical reality from narrative fiction. The research examines the material and social transformations between the Mycenaean era and the Archaic period, the span during which the world remembered in the poem gave way to the world in which the poem was actually composed. It also details the modern history of this pursuit, from Heinrich Schliemann’s pioneering and often controversial excavations to the ongoing debates over the geographical location of Homeric Ithaca. These controversies demonstrate how the boundary between evidence and desire has always been contested terrain in Homeric studies, with each generation of archaeologists bringing new methods, and new assumptions, to the question of how much history the poem can be made to yield.

The theoretical framework for the research was developed within the project Modernized Antiquity: Classical Reception and Modernity in the Arts, Spaces, and Voices of Spain and Ibero-America (1850–1939), known as ANTIMO and funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities through the State Research Agency and the ERDF/EU fund. The project situates the Odyssey’s afterlife within the broader field of classical reception studies, which asks not what ancient texts meant in their original context alone, but how their meanings have been continuously produced, contested, and transformed across time. The findings are presented in the monograph The Return of Ulysses: The Journey of a Myth, published by La Esfera de los Libros in 2026, which consolidates the study’s analysis of the epic’s transmission from oral performance to transmedia storytelling.

What emerges from the UC3M study is a portrait of the Odyssey as one of humanity’s most successful narrative technologies. Its combination of a recognizable emotional core, the longing for home, with an open, geographically elastic adventure structure has allowed it to migrate across media without losing coherence: from oral recitation to written epic, from Roman moralizing to Renaissance allegory, from modernist fiction to cinema, comics, video games, and transmedia universes. Its characters remain available for reinvention because the poem itself encodes multiplicity, offering perspectives, including those of women and of the defeated, that later ages could enlarge. And its fictional Mediterranean, layered over real coastlines and real archaeological deposits, keeps inviting each generation to test story against evidence. Nearly three millennia after its composition, the journey of Odysseus continues, less as a fixed text than as a living framework through which cultures narrate displacement, resilience, and the meaning of return.

Subject of Research: The historical interpretations, archaeological context, and enduring cultural reception of Homer's Odyssey

Article Title: A UC3M study analyzes the different interpretations and enduring relevance of the Odyssey throughout history

Article References: A UC3M study analyzes the different interpretations and enduring relevance of the Odyssey throughout history. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Odyssey, Homer, Odysseus, Ulysses, classical reception, archaeology, Mediterranean, Mycenaean, UC3M, Penelope, Circe, nostalgia