Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet OpeningUpScience (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : European Researchers' Night
Statut du projet : CLOSED

While 2020 can be defined using the word "Lockdown", we hope to define 2021 with the words "Opening Up". If the world is about to return to normality, the key contributor to this achievement is Research. Thus, the 2021 European Researchers? Night aims to celebrate science, as the hero that made it possible for the world to open up. Designed around the concept of "Opening Up Science", our event will highlight the impact that science and researchers have had in the process of opening up the world again. Never before in the history of humanity has the impact of science on our lives been clearer and faster. The concept will be extended to underline the key role that research will play in a post-Covid green recovery, a process that will allow societies to move forward to a cleaner, more sustainable, carbon-neutral and resilient future. Public trust in science comes with a higher responsibility for researchers in society: Opening Up Science will also carry a key message to the research community that needs to open up to the public. Using our event as a best practice example, we will highlight the importance of public engagement and science education as vital elements in making science truly more open in the society. The event will be organised by a national consortium, based in large Romanian university cities (Iasi, Timisoara, Craiova, Constanta and Sibiu), in collaboration with their traditional partners and local authorities, as well as joining goals with local science festivals or science associations. Flexibility will be key principle in organizing of the 2021 - whether returning to face-to-face interaction or remaining in an online format, focused on minds-on experiments, the event will capitalise on the newly gained experience of 2020, that allowed for better reach in underserved communities and even across Europe, through the collaboration between various projects coordinated from different countries.

Mots clés : citizen science, minds on experiments, research, public outreach

Participants :
- Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu (Roumanie) — Partner, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 10000.0 €
- Constanta Maritime University (Roumanie) — Partner, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 6000.0 €
- Polytechnic University of Timişoara (Roumanie) — Partner, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 4000.0 €
- University of Craiova (Roumanie) — Partner, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 10000.0 €
- West University of Timişoara (Roumanie) — Partner, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 10000.0 €
- Alexandru Ioan Cuza University (Roumanie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 20000.0 €
Projet NWICWEP (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

While Western countries regularly intervene militarily abroad, recent years have seen increasing levels of military intervention by non-Western authoritarian and weakly-democratic states in the EU periphery. Non-Western interventions profoundly impact the security dynamics of an increasingly fragile EU neighbourhood. Despite this, the patterns and character of resulting conflicts are ill-understood, especially compared to recent conflicts involving Western states (on which much of the recent conflict literature is based). This project will conduct a highly original comparative analysis of three EU-periphery conflicts (Ukraine, Yemen and the West African Sahel) that have seen the involvement of four of the most militarily active non-Western states in the wider EU neighbourhood (Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria/Chad respectively). The fellowship will advance knowledge of: 1) how the character of conflict involving non-Western military powers differs from general conceptualizations of contemporary warfare (and each other); and, 2) how the character of these conflicts is comprehended strategically both by key state actors involved, and by Western security actors (EU and NATO). Such a project is timely given rising levels of conflict in the EU periphery and necessary given the absence of comparative enquiry into the evolving character of armed conflict across the wider EU neighbourhood. Through a mixed-methods analysis of three conflicts of critical importance to the EU, this project will offer innovative research findings on the causes, politico-military strategic logics, military practice and potential resolution of contemporary non-Western war that will support the EU’s recently-developed 2016 ‘Global Strategy’ for the EU Foreign and Security Policy.

Mots clés : military intervention, character of war, warfare, conventional, unconventional, non west, authoritarian, asymmetry, connectedness, utility of force, democracy

Participants :
- Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 180277.2 €
Projet META-DORM (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

While cancer survival rates have improved significantly in recent years, survival decreases dramatically after tumour metastasis. One of the most common sites for metastatic tumours to develop is bone. Intriguingly, evidence suggests that once they have invaded the bone marrow, individual metastatic cancer cells can persist for years in a quiescent or “dormant” state, and are resistant to both radiation and chemotherapy treatment. These dormant cells can reside for months or years while the cancer is in remission, and then “reactivate” without warning to form new, usually fatal, skeletal lesions. Tumour cells achieve this by “hijacking” the normal bone remodelling cycle, a homeostatic balance between bone formation and resorption, to form a metastatic niche within the marrow. However, the signalling mechanisms that cause metastasis and dormancy, particularly in such a mechanically active environment, are poorly understood. Therefore, the goal of this project is to investigate the chemical and physical interactions between bone and cancer cells, both during dormancy and mechanical stimulation, to provide new insight into bone metastatic lesions and explore novel therapeutic targets to prevent cancer metastasis. This will be achieved by culturing specific bone and cancer cell types together for the first time to observe changes in their signalling and behaviour. Dormancy will also be induced, to observe its effect on changes in signalling. Mechanical stimulation will be applied to investigate whether the complex mechanical environment of the bone marrow plays a role in cancer metastasis. Finally, a specific cellular mechanosensor, the primary cilium, which has been implicated in the development of cancer and is known to be involved in bone formation, will be investigated. This will shed new light on its chemosensing and mechanobiological roles in cancer metastasis, as well as explore its potential as a novel target for cancer treatment and prevention.

Mots clés : cancer, tumour, bone marrow, mechanobiology, primary cilia, osteocyte

Participants :
- Columbia University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- University of London (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183792.6 €
Projet SPACES (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

While for a long time historians of ideas have highlighted the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Northern European liberal genesis of the idea of tolerance, recent historical research has indeed revealed its medieval and early modern gestation across the Mediterranean area. SPACES aims to originally investigate these attitudes by analyzing the links between two apparently disjointed aspects: religious and sexual toleration in the early modern Mediterranean world. Thanks to a survey of the sources I have already carried out in the archives of the Spanish and Roman Inquisition, I have uncovered a not yet investigated 'heresy' that circulated in the Italian peninsula between the 16th and 18th centuries. The defendants thought that Adam and Eve practiced anal sex in the terrestrial paradise, praising the pleasures of unreproductive sexuality. They also stated that ‘all can be saved in their own law’, that is, that the eternal salvation was not limited to any specific religious or cultural tradition. These heretical ideas were partially influenced by Islamic beliefs, although through the meditation of Christian anti-Islamic writings. Some of the defendants were also charged with apostasy to Islam. These facts further prove the influence of Islamic thought on religious heterodoxy in early modern Europe. I aim to prove that, in these cases, questioning the religious prescriptions regulating sexual morality prepared the ground for a wider critique of the political and social order, stimulating more inclusive understandings of religious identities. Uncovering a past in which toleration was practiced and theorized despite an ongoing religious war contrasts the simplified interpretation of today interactions with Islam in the public discourse in terms of a 'Clash of Civilizations'. Furthermore, the focus on sexuality allows SPACES to interrogate the complex relations between religious and sexual identities in an increasingly multicultural world.

Mots clés : early modern history, gender, sexuality, homosexuality, queer theories, cross cultural interactions, mediterranean, religious studies, connected history

Participants :
- University of Verona (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 244269.0 €
- State of Maryland (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet RED 4 MARS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

While imagining future Martian exploration and colonization one mustn’t forget about new materials assuring required performance and resistance to the harsh Martian conditions. One of the most unique materials used in engineering is rubber, providing both elastic and damping properties. Currently, the rubber used on Earth exhibit too low resistance against Martian environment. This project aims to overcome this issue by designing rubber withstanding harsh Martian conditions (presence of radiation and low operating temperature). This tailor-made rubber will have a low glass transition temperature (elasticity at low temperatures), contain functional and self-healing groups (radiation resistance) and reinforcing fillers for good mechanical properties (operational performance). For a sustainable approach, the use of local materials will be investigated by synthesizing reinforcing silica from Martian regolith, and the recyclability will be optimized to extend the utilization time of the materials. My background in designing versatile rubber materials for special applications and being familiar with extra-terrestrial conditions in the Solar system allows me to carry out successfully this MSCA IG Global Fellowship, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Anke Blume and Dr. Wilma Dierkes hosted at University of Twente (UT), in one of the leading rubber groups in the world: Elastomer Technology and Engineering (ETE). The outgoing phase will be done at the University of Akron (UA) for 24 months under supervision of Dr. Li Jia. UA has a long experience in rubber education (since 1909) and is cooperating with the Glenn Research Center of NASA. Short scientific visits are also planned to perform radiation resistance measurements and prototype rubber testing.

Mots clés : rubber, composite, low temperature, radiation resistance, mars exploration, in situ resource utilization, recycling, silica precipitation

Participants :
- University System of Ohio (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 0.0 €
- University of Twente (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 253052.16 €
Projet GraphNeT (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : TERMINATED

While it is currently undergoing rapid developments, the neutrino sector still has many open questions: the neutrino mass hierarchy is not known, several parameters of the PMNS matrix are poorly constrained, and the inability to explain the nonzero neutrino masses is a clear indication of physics beyond the Standard Model. Neutrino oscillation experiments at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory may be able to address these fundamental questions, but the reconstruction of neutrino interactions in the detector is a challenge which urgently needs to be addressed: the current reconstruction algorithm is prohibitively time-consuming, cannot account for all known optical anisotropies in the ice, and cannot make full use of all of the information from new modules in the IceCube Upgrade due to excessive computing time and memory requirements. This project proposes graph convolutional neural networks (GCN) as a machine learning paradigm excellently suited for neutrino telescope experiments, with potential to revolutionise reconstruction in IceCube. GCNs impose no structural requirements on data, requiring only a concept of adjacency, naturally afforded by the spatial, temporal, and causal separation of hits in the detector. With expected improvements in particle identification of a factor of 10 compared to analytical methods and a factor 10,000 speed-up in reconstruction, GCN-based reconstruction will be developed and implemented in the IceCube-DeepCore oscillation analysis, to better measure PMNS parameters by improving the atmospheric muon background rejection and performing per-flavour event categorisation. Powerful and fast GCN-based reconstruction will benefit several physics analyses in IceCube --- and possibly ANTARES, KM3NeT, and Baikal-GVD --- and help answer the open questions in the neutrino sector. Finally, the possibility for private and public sector partners to benefit from these high-performance GCN tools will be explored through intersectional partnerships.

Mots clés : icecube, deepcore, very large volume neutrino telescopes, graph convolutional neural networks, neural networks, deep learning

Participants :
- University of Copenhagen (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 207312.0 €
Projet HMST-PC (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

While modern photovoltaic cells (PVCs) are capable of efficiently and directly generating usable electricity from sunlight, daily variations in availability of this key resource during day/night cycles points to a need to store the generated power for use when the PVCs are not active. To this end, systems that directly use the energy of sunlight to drive chemical reactions that otherwise would be thermodynamically uphill have been vigorously studied since the late 1960s. Such “solar-to-fuel” generating systems are targeted to store energy from sunlight in the form of chemical bonds which can be later broken with mild external stimulus to provide energy on-demand. Of these systems, the most studied for the collection and storage of solar energy is the photoinduced solar water splitting reaction, wherein liquid water is broken down into hydrogen gas (H2) and oxygen gas (O2) using semiconductor photocatalysts. This proposal seeks to develop a novel nanoscale Hybrid Metal-Semiconductor Tetrapod Photocatalyst (HMST-PC) for solar energy conversion. This catalyst is specifically designed for the efficient generation of fuels (H2 and O2) from only sunlight and H2O. The nanocatalyst will consist of: i) four light-absorbing CdS antennae, ii) an embedded CdSe core to guide internal energetics, iii) a binary noble metal cocatalyst for H2 evolution, and iv) a robust metal-oxide cocatalyst for O2 evolution. In addition to developing an all-in-one solar photocatalyst, fundamental scientific advances made in this action will serve to i) expand the toolbox of precision nanomaterials synthetic methods available to researchers, ii) address long standing issues of charge-extraction in nanoscale catalyst systems, and iii) develop new methods to stabilize functional photocatalysts against photocorrosion. These advances will help enable future researchers to engineer better (more well-defined) model systems with a level of synthetic precision not available in the past.

Mots clés : nanomaterials, semiconductor, photocatalysts, water splitting, colloidal nanocrystal, cdse cds

Participants :
- Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Israël) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 170509.2 €
Projet PNAIC (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

While positive intergroup contact has been shown to reduce discrimination, negative contact has the potential to worsen intergroup relationships. Yet little is known about the interaction between positive and negative contact, whereas people are frequently exposed to both types of contact. This research project will provide an original and comprehensive investigation into the positive-negative asymmetry of intergroup contact (PNAIC) effect, to understand whether positive contact exerts stronger effects than negative contact, improving social integration. The net impact and the possible consequences of a mix of both positive and negative intergroup contact will be examined at interpersonal and contextual levels. A series of studies will systematically test three plausible outcomes: buffering (i.e., positive contact attenuates detrimental effects of negative contact), facilitation (i.e., negative contact augments the impact of positive contact), and poisoning (i.e., negative contact reduces the impact of positive contact) effects. Using one diary study, one longitudinal survey and two experimental studies, the research project will consider also key moderating processes that help explain the joint impact of positive and negative contact on intergroup discrimination. The phenomenon will be analyzed on linguistic and physiologic outcomes, as reliable and unobtrusive measures of discrimination. The unintentional use of language to perpetrate outgroup discrimination and the unintended different physiologic responses to ingroup and outgroup faces will provide insight into the challenge of contact not just in temporary discriminatory reactions but in future interactions. Across the studies, the positive-negative contact asymmetry effect will be investigated towards groups that are both discriminated against and perceived as threatening, such as immigrants in Europe today. This will be done among majority and minority group members, using both direct and vicarious contact.

Mots clés : intergroup contact, intergroup discrimination, linguistic discrimination, social neuroscience of prejudice

Participants :
- University of Oxford (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet ViRMA (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

While the popular press often depicts a future where white collar jobs have been taken over by artificial intelligence, evidence suggests it is far more likely that many jobs will require non-IT specialists to analyse, in real-time, huge volumes of complex data with the help of a computer. Media files make up a large portion of these data volumes, and already today our personal and professional lives are full of large digital media collections (e.g. Netflix, Google, YouTube, etc.) that must be interactively explored, analysed, understood, annotated, and used. The research described in this proposal seeks to address this trend by designing and evaluating a large-scale interactive multimedia analytics prototype designed for a rapidly emerging new mode of visual access, namely virtual reality. Platforms supporting virtual reality provide unparalleled immersion and can afford the ability to submerge their users into an environment where visual analysis can occur in three spatial dimensions and six degrees of freedom. In this proposal we discuss our hypothesis that by combining the state-of-the-art in scalable multimedia analytics with a highly interactive access mechanism such as virtual reality, it will enable the development of pioneering applications to support unprecedented analysis of large-scale multimedia datasets. The research proposed in this application aims to significantly extend the state of the art in this domain by addressing a confluence of three major trends in computing: interactive analysis, novel access mechanisms, and collection scale.

Mots clés : multimedia analytics, data visualisation, virtual reality

Participants :
- IT University of Copenhagen (Danemark) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 207312.0 €
Projet GAP (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Why does the geographic distribution of species richness vary so much across the earth’s surface? This question has been a central focus of biology for almost two centuries, but despite extensive study, biologists have been unable to provide a comprehensive answer. Considering global richness patterns, tropical mountain ranges stand out as the hotspots for vertebrate species diversity. However, our ability to predict the large number of species present in these areas as a result of current climatic and environmental conditions is poor, implying an important influence of evolutionary history in generating these trends. In GAP, I will test the relative importance of different evolutionary processes; dispersal, diversification and lineage persistence in generating species richness patterns throughout the world’s mountain regions, for the most speciose avian order (passerines, ~6,500/10,000 bird species). I will also test whether diversification, followed by the dispersal of lineages from mountain regions to lowland areas, is a major contributor to the production of continental/global gradients of species richness, evolutionary diversity and functional diversity. To determine where efforts should be focused to preserve montane diversity into the future, I will also evaluate how conservation threat status varies among global mountain assemblages, and how well this predicts the evolutionary and functional diversity maintained there. I will achieve these analytical objectives following the generation of a novel and comprehensive global dataset. This will encompass a time-calibrated phylogeny, classifications of global mountain regions and elevational zonation for the world’s passerine species. Together, the research outputs from GAP will significantly improve our understanding as to why mountains are so rich in species, and how historical processes in these areas have influenced the formation of global biodiversity gradients.

Mots clés : species richness, mountains, dispersal, diversification, macroevolution, macroecology and passerine birds

Participants :
- University of Sheffield (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €