Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet SELF-TOUCH (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Self-touch is perceived as less intense than physically identical touch from an external source. Current computational theories propose that the brain predicts and dampens the sensory consequences of actions, a phenomenon referred to as sensory attenuation. When prediction mechanisms fail, it can have powerful consequences for perception, from mild perceptual disturbances to more extreme hallucinations and delusions that are characteristic of psychosis-spectrum disorders such as schizophrenia. Predicting touch is likely supported by specific patterns of brain oscillations, subserving brain connectivity, yet little is known about these mechanisms. SELF-TOUCH will use cutting-edge methods from magnetoencephalography to study oscillatory dynamics during the prediction, generation and attenuation of self-touch. The objectives are to i) reveal how the brain dynamically predicts touch during the time-course of actions, ii) to study how the brain treats violations of sensory predictions and iii) to examine these predictive mechanisms in individuals with high schizotypy. Understanding the temporal dynamics of sensory prediction could reveal how perceptual disturbances manifest in psychosis and may aid development of biomarkers for early intervention of schizophrenia. The project will result in a synergy between the applicant’s highly interdisciplinary profile and the high quality of the host institution. It will be completed at a world-leading research-led institution (Karolinska Institutet, Department of Neuroscience) within a team led by Dr. Konstantina Kilteni providing theoretical knowledge and practical expertise in sensorimotor neuroscience and sensory attenuation. The applicant brings highly complementary expertise in cognitive neuroscience, psychophysics, and neural time-series analyses. The proposed work will expand the applicant’s experience, research competencies and professional networks, enhancing the development of his career as an independent researcher.

Mots clés : somatosensory motor control schizotypy, magnetoencephalography

Participants :
- Institut Karolinska (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 206887.68 €
Projet MACOOIL (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Virgin olive oil is probably the most representative and iconic component of the Mediterranean diet. No industrial processes or chemicals are added during production, thus providing an extra value reflected in its higher price compared to most edible oils. For this reason, the assessment of the quality, safety and authenticity is of importance from both economic and health perspectives. Considerable effort has been put during the last decades in this direction. Organizations such as the European Union, the International Olive Council and The Codex Alimentarius (FAO-WHO) have established guidelines and regulations to protect the quality and authenticity of virgin olive oil and to prevent fraud. However, despite these efforts towards developing new procedures for olive oil quality and authenticity assessment, appropriate solutions for some specific issues have not been found yet. Current gaps in EU analytical methods include the detection of selected blends of olive oil with other vegetable oils (seed oils), to identify fraud. Hence, it is urgent to identify and improve analytical solutions that can detect both standard and emerging frauds and to meet all the international market required information . MACOOIL (Multidimensional approaches for comprehensive olive oil authentication) aims to propose novel cutting-edge solutions based on mass spectrometry, previously unexplored in the field, to provide adequate solutions for some of the challenges -in terms of authenticity- that need to be addressed in the virgin olive oil sector. This project will develop novel tools to extend the potential to detect fraudulent practices of mixing virgin with refined (deodorized) lower-quality olive oil.

Mots clés : olive oil authentication, mass spectrometry

Participants :
- Université de Jaén (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 181152.96 €
- Leibniz-Gemeinschaft (Allemagne) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet OBSEX (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

OBSEX explores the crucial, yet overlooked, role that anthropological material culture played in the emergence of sexual science. I argue that, from its outset (1870-1940), Western research on sexual behaviours was not just medical, but that anthropological investigation had a crucial role in making pleasure and desires key interests in the production of scientific knowledge on sexuality. In this way, OBSEX questions Michel Foucault’s dichotomy between an ‘Oriental’ Ars Erotica and a Western Scientia Sexualis by demonstrating that, European scientific knowledge on sexuality was not just focused on pathology, but it was comprised of discourses addressed to pleasure. During OBSEX, I will complement my background in cultural history with new historical scientific and museological skills, crucial to understanding the role of anthropological objects in the development of sexual science. I will use Italy and Britain as main cases to trace the scientific collection, cataloguing and study of the material evidence of ‘primitive’ sexualities (amulets, ornaments, pleasure devices, medical instruments) by anthropologists, folklorists and museum curators, and the impact of their work on sexological theories. I will detect and deconstruct colonialist and gendered narratives embedded in sexological discourses. I will demonstrate that the study of anthropological material culture was not only used to prove the backwardness of the sexuality of the 'Other', but also served a scientific interest on common human features, such as the pursuit of pleasure. In this way, I will be able to show how the study of objects embedding the sexuality of the ‘primitive’ Other had a crucial role in the development of European sexual knowledge and was used as a mirror to read ‘civilised’ sexuality. Showing that from its outset sexual science considered pleasure and desire as constitutive elements of being human, OBSEX will place pleasure at the core of today European debate on sexual health rights.

Mots clés : history of sexual science sexuality sexual pleasure anthropology folklore italy britain scientific museums material culture digital humanitites nineteenth century history sexual rights

Participants :
- Université d'Exeter (Royaume-Uni) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Padoue (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 445401.9 €
- Université Yale (Etats-Unis) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo (Italie) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche), subvention : 0.0 €
Projet NIEB-PHAB (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2021)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Mathematics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

I will carry out this fellowship at the University of Oslo, under the supervision of Professor Kenneth Karlsen at the Department of Mathematics.  The project is devoted to study existence and blow-up properties of the solutions of initial value problems (IVPs) for nonlocal nonlinear integrable PDEs. Nonlocal integrable equations were introduced by M. Ablowitz and Z. Musslimani in 2013 and have become a hot topic in the theory of integrable systems. By applying inverse scattering transform (IST) method it was shown that soliton solutions of nonlocal equations blow-up in isolated points in x,t plane. Therefore the natural question is to study the existence and blow-up properties of the general IVPs for such equations. To this end we will use the mixture of the IST method and PDE techniques. The former will be used for predicting the presence and the form of the blow-up of the solution, while the PDE approaches will be used for describing the blow-up of the solution of the general IVP and for finding a suitable concept of a weak solution, which exists even after the collapse.  Also by the IST method it was shown that apart from zeros, which correspond to solitons, the associated to the initial data spectral functions have the new type of singularities. These singularities correspond to the winding of the argument of the spectral function and play a significant role in long-time asymptotic behavior of the solutions ? they are responsible for a transition between qualitatively different asymptotic zones in x,t plane. It is a challenging open problem to describe analytically the nonlinear effects corresponding to these new singularities and in the framework of the project we are going to investigate this phenomena numerically.  The fellowship will allow me to expand my skills in PDE methods, which is different, but related to my present expertise field. Also it will enable me to become an established interdisciplinary researcher, who could pursue top academic positions.

Mots clés : nonlinear integrable pdes, blow up phenomena, well posedness theory, inverse scattering transform method

Participants :
- Université d'Oslo (Norvège) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 226751.04 €
Projet IcoNet (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Brunetto Latini’s Tresor and Tesoretto, Francesco da Barberino’s Documenti d’Amore, Dante Alighieri’s Commedia, and Francesco Petrarca’s Trionfi are four closely interconnected literary works composed in, or strictly related to, Tuscany between the 13th and 14th centuries. These texts share a central focus on visual component, inspirational sources, and historical and material contexts. While these interconnections have received notable scholarly attention from a literary perspective, a comprehensive and detailed examination of their convergences in terms of material and illustrated traditions has never been conducted. To address this gap, IcoNet will systematically compare the full range of iconographic representations produced for each work, from their composition to their latest figurative transpositions in manuscript books (ca. 1260 to ca. 1510). IcoNet will operate on two complementary levels: (1) examining each manuscript tradition individually, focusing on internal iconographic links; and (2) analyzing each tradition in relation to every other one, particularly through common iconographic choices for shared subjects or figurative modules. The primary objective is to map and delineate the unexplored iconographic network that deeply connects these works. By introducing an innovative highly interdisciplinary methodology, that integrates traditional stylistic and geographical classification criteria with extensive analysis of iconographies and compositional modules, IcoNet aims to reconstruct one of the most significant and intricate networks of cultural exchanges spanning two centuries of Italian and European civilization. This foundational iconographic network case study, crucial for its role in the Italian vernacular literature, will establish a new, robust system of classification criteria for grouping and comparing similar illuminated manuscripts. This system is designed to be extendable to other traditions and across different centuries.

Mots clés : illuminated manuscripts, iconographic networks, medieval literature, iconography, visual and textual culture, visual and textual philology

Participants :
- Université de Bergame (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 388940.52 €
- Université de la Suisse italienne (Suisse) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet NetworkStim (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Disorders of the brain are a major source of disability, and place an enormous burden on society. Currently, many first-line treatments are non-specific, invasive, or cause side-effects. Non-invasive brain stimulation techniques, such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), have been shown to offer a safe treatment alternative, with rTMS first clinically approved for major depression in 2007. Unfortunately since then, translation to other disorders has been slow, mainly due to the lack of reliable methods to identify where in the brain to stimulate. Lesion network mapping (LNM) is a method recently introduced to address this problem. LNM works by mapping the connections of causative brain lesions, converging upon a small number of commonly connected locations in the brain. LNM has localised abnormal networks in over 40 different disorders. However, as yet no study has tested whether these networks respond to treatment. Therefore, the aim of this study is to conduct a clinical trial testing whether rTMS delivered to a specific site in the somatosensory cortex identified in our previously published LNM study (Corp et al., 2019, Brain) results in treatment benefit for cervical dystonia patients. Cervical dystonia is an ideal test case, as changes in abnormal neck movement symptoms are easily measurable, and this somatosensory location is on the surface of the brain, so easily reachable with rTMS. We will employ a randomised, sham-controlled, double-blind, crossover clinical trial, with 30 patients receiving 10 daily sessions of real and sham rTMS. Before and after the brain stimulation, we will collect clinical, behavioural, and physiological data to measure patients’ response to the intervention. Improvement in cervical dystonia symptoms after brain stimulation would serve as proof of the principle that LNM can effectively identify therapeutic targets, potentially unlocking safe and effective treatment protocols for a range of brain disorders.

Mots clés : lesion network mapping, brain stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation

Participants :
- Université de Turku (Finlande) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Campus Bio Medico University Hospital (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 158354.24 €
Projet ALGETIQ (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Mathematics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Information theory is a discipline at the intersection of statistics, engineering and computer science. As the study of information quantities, such as compression or communication capacities, information content or measures of statistical dependency, it is one of the theoretical underpinnings of data science.  Computational problems in information theory are highly non-linear. The goal of this project is to transfer state-of-the-art methods of computational non-linear algebra to information theory, to study the inherent algebraic complexity of information-theoretical problems and to provide tools for solving them in practice. The algebraic point of view has proven to be fruitful in seemingly unrelated areas, as witnessed by a surge of recent work in algebraic statistics, in particular on likelihood geometry. However, maximizing the likelihood function is the same as minimizing relative entropy — a specific information quantity. Hence, this project also aims at generalizing the techniques developed in likelihood geometry.  One focus is on the practical computation of information quantities using numerical and differential algebraic geometry. Such quantities are defined via non-linear optimization problems and we aim to pinpoint the algebraic complexity of these problems in instances of general interest, such as common information measures. The final objective is finding fundamental laws and limits of data science imposed by non-linear inequalities constraining the entropic region. These inequalities provide, by duality, universal bounds for many of the optimization problems studied in information theory.

Mots clés : information theory algebraic statistics applied real algebraic geometry non linear algebra numerical algebraic geometry

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Partner, associated partner, Recherche, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université de Tromsø (Norvège) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 210911.04 €
Projet Rand4TrustPool (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are deep learning architectures that hold the promise of durably changing our way of, e.g., predicting inter-molecular chemical affinity to accelerate drug discovery or smartly balancing power loads on the electricity grid. My project focuses on pooling layers, a major building block of neural networks, including GNNs. In a nutshell, pooling layers generate local summaries of the data to enable faster computations and generate discriminative multiscale representations. The traditional periodic-sampling-based pooling that has proven so successful for data defined on regular grids such as time series or images becomes ill-defined when the underlying space of the data loses its regularity – such as data defined over graphs. Today’s existing solutions stem from a trial-and-error approach often driven by two practical and somewhat short-sighted objectives: computation efficiency and empirical predictive performance. The aim of my project is to add trustworthiness as a main objective in the design of novel pooling layers for GNNs. To achieve this, I will bridge the fields of signal processing, point processes, and random numerical linear algebra with graph machine learning to incorporate random methods (mainly random sampling and random projections) into the design of pooling layers for GNNs. Indeed, randomized approaches are provably well adapted to three pillars of trustworthiness: technical robustness, transparency, and privacy. The outcome of my project will be an extensively tested, theoretically-grounded, trustworthy, ready-to-be-deployed, open-source, GNN-based toolbox, along with its user guide for practitioners. It will be the first GNN architecture benefiting from the theoretical guarantees random pooling layers come with. Such trustworthy GNNs will have an impact in the increasingly many fields in which GNNs are pushing the state-of-the-art: including circuit chip design, physics, drug discovery and network neuroscience.

Mots clés : graph machine learning, graph neural networks, trustworthy ai, pooling, sampling, graph signal processing, point processes, random numerical linear algebra

Participants :
- Université de Tromsø (Norvège) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 226751.04 €
Projet SIBERICE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Significant research efforts have been directed toward documenting glacial landform signatures for constraining the extents and chronology of past ice masses. Reconstructions show that global ice masses during the last glaciation were larger than present, lowering global sea level by ~114 m. However, ~12% of this ice contributed sea level budget is unaccounted for, suggesting that a “missing” ice mass has yet to be constrained. SIBERICE will test the hypothesis that a Siberian ice sheet existed during the last glacial, with its demise representing the unbudgeted contribution to the last glacial sea levels. To reconstruct past ice masses, I will collate landform data relating to the ice masses that glaciated Siberia and use high-resolution satellite imagery to systematically identify and map glacial landforms. This landform record will be inverted to reconstruct past ice extent and dynamics. Ice mass volumes and sea level equivalents will be calculated from the reconstructed lateral ice extents using a numerical model. I will also develop a novel method for remotely determining the age of ice margins from the morphometry of moraine ridges. To establish the moraine degradation dating curve, dimensions of chronometrically dated moraines will be systematically measured. Establishing this curve will allow the approach to be applied to remote locations around the world. The SIBERICE project at UiT will provide a prestigious platform to gain valuable training in: the leadership of large science projects; morphometric and statistical analysis of large geomorphological datasets; application of numerical models for researching the cryosphere; and teaching experience. SIBERICE targets an area of high uncertainty in palaeo-glaciology and climate change, which is highlighted as of strategic importance by scientific and governmental organisations. SIBERICE will therefore place me in a strong position to become a world leader in palaeo-glaciology and secure a faculty position.

Mots clés : siberia, palaeo glaciology, glacial geomorphology, glacial inversion, sea level budget, ice sheet modelling

Participants :
- Université de Tromsø (Norvège) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 251578.56 €
Projet FOOD-WEBS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

During the Upper Palaeolithic, Europe witnessed major climatic changes, the extinction of mammal species, and substantial transformations in human demography and culture. In the Cantabrian Region, a climate refuge during colder phases, human populations grew exponentially, marking the onset of resource overexploitation. By integrating cutting-edge paleoclimate reconstructions, extensive archaeo-paleontological data, ancient environmental DNA and trophic network models, FOOD-WEBS will test whether, and to what extent, the loss of biodiversity affected: a) the human carrying capacity, and b) the vulnerability of human populations to climate changes. The Evolutionary Ecology Group, led by Prof. Manica and renowned for ecological modelling, will provide training in machine learning techniques to reconstruct trophic interactions between species. In addition, training in ancient DNA metabarcoding will be acquired during a secondment in Prof. Alsos’s Ancient DNA lab. Using climate-induced biomass fluctuations, we will estimate the abundance of each species and compute, for the first time, energy fluxes along trophic links. This will enable the first quantitative assessment of human resilience to climate change and biodiversity loss in our deep past. The training and research offered by this MSCA will position me as an expert in past trophic networks and computational archaeology. FOOD-WEBS will build a new reference framework to assess the relationship between climate change, biodiversity loss, and human population dynamics in Prehistory.

Mots clés : paleoecology, modelling, computational archaeology, environment

Participants :
- Université de Cambridge (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 260347.92 €
- Université de Tromsø (Norvège) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €