Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet AETSOM (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Many of the defining optoelectronic properties in low-dimensional materials – e.g. exciton Bohr radii and diffusion lengths, defect sizes and spacings, and Moire lattice periods – are determined by materials physics and processes that occur at the single-digit nm length scale. Their direct investigation and elucidation – crucial for future applications – therefore requires the ability to probe light-matter interactions at a resolution an order of magnitude better than what is generally achievable with existing nano-optical approaches. Here we propose a strategy for achieving single-nm optical resolution by developing a breakthrough capability which we will refer to as Atomic Energy Transfer Scanning nano-Optical Microscopy (AETSOM). The one-nm optical resolution will be attained by the attachment of a lanthanide-doped upconverting nanoparticle (UCNP) at the end of a near-field scanning probe tip. The intended probe is composed of a tapered metal-insulator-metal waveguide fabricated at the end of a glass fiber, enabling the efficient coupling of far-field light to the near-field and vice-versa through the probe tip, over a wide range of wavelengths. Lanthanide-doped UCNPs absorb multiple photons in the NIR and emit at higher energies in the NIR/visible with efficiencies orders of magnitude higher than those of the best 2-photon fluorophores. The robust attachment of the UCNPs to the probe through specific functionalization of the UCNPs will enable illumination/collection to/from single-digit nm volumes. The establishment of this breakthrough single-digit nano-optical capability will provide the ability to perform photon-based characterization and activation over multiple length scales on nearly any sample and in the real environments encountered in most technological applications. The anticipated results will immediately impact numerous fields, from quantum materials to photo-chemistry to energy harvesting to ultrasensitive biomolecular control and detection.

Mots clés : nano optics, nano photoluminescence, optoelectronics, layered 2d materials, quantum materials, defects

Participants :
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israël) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 269998.08 €
- Columbia University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet ETAB (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Many of the fascinating phenomena predicted by quantum mechanics, like non-local correlations and entanglement, were implemented with photons in the framework of quantum optics. It is today a mature field with applications emerging in cryptography, random number generation, and quantum computation. Based on the analogy between matter waves and electromagnetic waves and on particle-wave duality, quantum atom optics started to develop recently, thanks to the development of tools for matter wave manipulation. A crucial point for the success of quantum optics was the availability of twin-photon sources, based on a non-linear medium. Very recently, several approaches towards realizing twin-atom pairs have been investigated (most notably by the applicant and the host institution of this proposal) and successfully realized. The ETAB project will use this new twin atom beam (TAB) source to implement quantum atom optics experiments. Characterization of the resulting strongly correlated states will be performed through measurement of correlation functions. These experiments will go beyond the analogy with quantum optics due to fundamental differences between atoms and photons: mass and intrinsic nonlinearity due to interactions. This second property allows high efficiency twin atom beam generation, with an important pump depletion. This allows us to investigate new physics, including beyond linear response, quantum simulation, and non-equilibrium physics. Furthermore, by preparing the twin beams in an entangled state, we will perform the first test of Bell inequalities with untrapped atoms, which could rule out spontaneous decoherence or gravitational nonlinearity models.

Mots clés : twin beam, entanglement, bell inequality, atomchip, double well, correlations, quantum atom optics

Participants :
- TU Wien (Autriche) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 166156.8 €
Projet FORSEES (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Many of today’s world challenges cover the domain of safety and civil society. In a world like this the need for doctors and diagnosticians of the complex building and infrastructures organisms is imperative and high-priority. The number of variables have exponentially risen and the expert point of view is becoming more and more out of reach. The gap that just some decades ago would have required some years of work experience can be closed nowadays only with the help of new technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is displaying all its power for diagnosing pathologies and diseases in Human Medicine. Imagine to apply the same framework for buildings in order to have the real-time health of the living architectures. Computer science and data analytics are capable of extracting patterns from these data and of producing a knowledge graph of the external reality. The project integrates digital pattern perception with human percepetion models. This models are object of studies for cognitive neurosciences, and by monitoring neurofunctional activity it could be possible to grasp and interpret where a structural intuition resides when a human performs related simple tasks. This structural intuition, in form of a mathematical structure (algorithmic relations), would create an AI tool as structural assistant to see the forces alive by a Computer Vision device. It would represent the growth of a sixth sense for real time structural analyses, building risk perception and architectures performance investigation. The chosen research institutions to carry out in the project are: Structural Engineering Department (DISEG) of Politecnico di Torino, MIT Senseable City Lab and BioRobotic Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa as Secondment. The intelligent structural assistant that represents the research goal will rise up the knowledge to the level of extensive prediction, opening humans to a knowledge based on imaging and exploring more than focus and execution.

Mots clés : artificial intelligence, cognitive science, structural engineering

Participants :
- Polytechnic University of Turin (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 251002.56 €
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet GROUPIND (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Many organisms, including humans, group together and perform collective actions such as birds forming coordinated flocks to evade predators, forage or roost. Some, as social insects, have evolved complex societies in which the unit of selection is not the individual, as in most vertebrates, but the colony. Yet, in both there is evidence of consistent behavioural variability among both individuals and groups. The study of collective behaviour - coordinated actions resulting in emergent properties at the group level - and the study of animal personality - between individual differences that are consistent over time and contexts - have progressed tremendously in the last two decades and are converging in their search for the link between individuality and collectivity, a fundamental and timely issue in biology. The GROUPIND project aims to investigate the relationship between individual personality and group personality by using ants and starlings as study organisms, both of which showing distinct collective behaviour and marked individual behavioural variability. The project will use a comparative approach to address the following objectives: (1) To characterize, also upon experimental manipulation, the composition of personalities in the group and understand how this relates to personality at the group level. Are group personalities an average of individual personalities within the group? Do they result from different distributions of individual personalities? Are there keystone individuals that exert a disproportionate influence on the group personality? (2) To understand how diversity of individual personalities contributes to decision making and to the ecological success at the group level, and how this would feed back at the individual level. By bridging two major fields of study, this project will shed new light on the ability of groups to function effectively, unravelling the consequences that personality differences can exert on social life and its evolution.

Mots clés : animal personality, collective behaviour, birds, ants

Participants :
- Université Sorbonne Paris Nord (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 185076.0 €
Projet BOULDERING (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Many planetary surfaces are heavily cratered as they witnessed the early stages of Solar System evolution during which impact cratering was a frequent process. Upon impact, rock fragments are ejected from the crater cavity and deposited elsewhere on the surface, where they potentially form secondary craters. The unknown contribution of secondary craters increase crater density and distort crater statistics, which ultimately biases the estimated age of a surface unit, a key diagnostics for understanding the evolution of planetary bodies. The size and velocity distribution of the ejected rock fragments is a poorly understood aspect so that an important link between crater statistics and planetary surface age keeps missing. One way to close this connection is to make use of the population of boulders (meter-sized rocks) that can be detected on high-resolution images of planetary surfaces, such as the Moon’s. Boulders are the only remnants of the ejected materials and their size and shape as well as the terrain on which they are found provide important insight into the ejection mechanisms. BOULDERING aims to advance the detection of boulders on planetary surfaces from high-resolution imagery using deep learning and to compile size and shape distributions of boulder populations. Based on this, this project will boost our understanding of cratering records and the implications for planetary surface evolution. A versatile automatic boulder detection algorithm will be developed using a convolutional neural network. This algorithm will first be validated on terrestrial boulder populations in Death Valley and the Mojave Desert and will then be trained with remote sensing data for application on the lunar and martian surfaces. By following this approach, ground data collected on Earth will be used to test the algorithm’s capacity to measure the sizes and shapes of boulders, which is key to make robust inferences on the boulder population on other planetary bodies.

Mots clés : planetary sciences, comparative planetology, moon, mars, surface processes, impact craters, impact cratering mechanisms, computer sciences, convolutional neural networks

Participants :
- University of Oslo (Norvège) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 284345.28 €
- Stanford University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet SemanDiff (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Many recent advances in machine learning and computational statistics rely on algorithms that calculate derivatives. This use of derivatives has motivated the creation of domain specific modelling languages in which each program can be differentiated automatically, by the compiler. This technique is known as automatic differentiation (AD). AD is typically implemented through source-code-transformations, either directly or indirectly via operator overloading. These transformations become intricate in languages with expressive language features like algebraic data types and higher-order functions. Meanwhile, traditional calculus and differential geometry do not suffice to prove their correctness or even give them meaning, as ordinary differential geometry cannot support higher-order functions. Indeed, such formal correctness proofs have never been published. This project will use the mathematical foundations of diffeological spaces, a conservative extension of traditional differential geometry to higher-order types, to give precisely such correctness proofs. In particular, it will give appropriate source-code transformations for both the forward mode and reverse mode techniques of AD on a language with specified semantics in diffeological spaces. Next, it will prove that these source-code transformations correctly implement the canonical semantic notion of differentiation, as given by the diffeological spaces semantics. It will perform this analysis for a higher-order language with tuples and variant types. These formal descriptions and correctness proofs of AD for expressive languages will be accompanied by closely matching implementations, built on top of the Accelerate framework for purely functional GPU programming.

Mots clés : programming language semantics, automatic differentiation, differential programming

Participants :
- Utrecht University (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 187572.48 €
Projet iGEMMdev (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Many studies have recently archived a remarkable clinical efficacy of immunotherapeutic treatments in several cancers including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, these approaches are not always successful and it is currently impossible to predict a therapeutic response or serious adverse event. These fundamental issues need to be addressed and, to recapitulate the complexity of interactions between immune cells and cancer, this has to be done in vivo. However, genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs) of NSCLC do not mirror the genomic instability and the high mutations rate of their human counterparts. Consequently, these tumours rarely present neo-antigens that can induce an immune response, and are considered poorly immunogenic. To our knowledge, a genetically defined model of an immunogenic spontaneous tumour does not exist. Here, we propose to develop such an immunogenic GEMM (iGEMM). The leading mouse model of lung cancer is the GEMM Kraslsl-G12D/wtTrp53fl/fl (KP). We propose two strategies to induce either genomic instability or mutation rate in the KP model. 1) We will overexpress Mad2, a component of the mitotic spindle assembly checkpoint, to induce aneuploidy in KP tumours; 2) We will overexpress the cytidine deaminase Apobec3 to increase the mutation rate of KP tumours. The resulting immunogenic GEMMs (iGEMMs) will be characterised and used to assess new therapies that trigger an immune response and to address mechanisms which drive immunotolerance. iGEMMs will facilitate the investigation of currently available immunotherapies which will help predict clinical response to these therapies and investigation on alternative strategies to treat resistant lung tumours. All together, these investigations will provide novel information regarding the best strategies to cure NSCLC by modulation of the IS.

Mots clés : nsclc, genetically engineered mouse model  gemm, neo antigen, single nucleotide variation  snv, chromosomal instability  cin, immunotherapy

Participants :
- The Francis Crick Institute (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet TRAUMA_CONTEXT (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Many victims of psychological trauma suffer from recurrent intrusive trauma memories. According to Dual-Representation Theory (DRT), intrusive memories reflect functional deficiencies in the brain’s hippocampal system, which fails to translate the egocentric perceptual impressions of the trauma into viewpoint-independent (or allocentric) spatial representations. This proposal tests this assumption and explores allocentric memory training as a potential novel intervention against intrusive memories. I propose to induce intrusive memories in healthy participants using aversive scenarios in real-time 3D Virtual Reality, and to afterwards test location memory from the original versus a shifted viewpoint, requiring allocentric memory. Study 1 links allocentric memory to intrusion levels. Study 2 explores the potential of an allocentric memory training. Furthermore, both studies will assess the potentially moderating role of hormonal and sympathetic stress markers known to affect hippocampal learning. The project will provide novel insights into mechanisms of trauma memory, with potentially important implications for theory and treatment. It will be conducted in Prof. Chris Brewin’s research group at University College London (UCL) that is renowned for empirical tests of DRT specifically, and for world-leading expertise in clinical, experimental, neurocognitive and neuroendocrine approaches to psychology, providing an inspiring environment that perfectly fits the interdisciplinary character of this project.

Mots clés : intrusive memory, post traumatic stress disorder, trauma film paradigm, virtual reality, dual representation theory

Participants :
- University of London (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet BEMAR (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Marine reserves are a valuable tool for protecting against overharvesting and are expected to support fisheries beyond their boundaries through spillover of adult fish. However, marine reserves may set unanticipated selection regimes on fish behavior when they fail to protect a sufficiently large part of the range of movements of the animals present in the target population and there are fishing activities at the reserve boundary. Under these situations, marine reserves may generate differences in the time that each individual spends at risk to be harvested, and ultimately the fitness of the individuals. Worryingly, consistent removal of individuals that spend more time at risk may entail evolutionary consequences because the behavioral traits that might determine time at risk are likely heritable (they have been show to be repeatable, i.e. personality traits). This mechanism, termed protection-induced selection and evolution, has received support from simulation studies but lack empirical evidence. By analyzing a unique dataset that includes long-term and fjord-wide behavioral information of two cod populations from Norway, before and after reserve establishment in one of the areas, we will 1) investigate the drives of protection-induced selection, 2) the immediate effect of protection on the fitness landscape of the protected populations and 3) the long-term, evolutionary consequences for the protected individuals and the spillover effect from the marine reserve. Results will be synthesized to provide management recommendations. We forecast very timely and novel results, with high impact, that will move the knowledge frontier several steps forward and will allow a better management of marine resources with clear benefits to the society.

Mots clés : animal personality, fisheries, marine reserve, contemporary evolution

Participants :
- Spanish National Research Council (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 170121.6 €
Projet SiDMACIB (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Masonry benefits contemporary architecture regarding sustainability and application to free-form construction. A masonry structure can be considered as an assemblage of conventional or interlocking rigid blocks with frictional joints. Although interlocking blocks’ resistance to sliding is higher and their construction is easier when compared to conventional blocks, there is no digital framework to design structurally-sound assemblages composed of interlocking blocks with diverse typologies. Therefore, I intend to develop a digital framework that supports designers in the design of structurally feasible and assemblable masonry assemblages of interlocking blocks. The framework will accomplish the following: -it allows designers to model an assemblage and to analyze its structural feasibility; -for the structurally infeasible model, it will automatically modify the geometry of the interlocking blocks’ connectors, making the model structurally feasible; -during the geometric modification, it will avoid geometries which do not construct the assemblable blocks. To evaluate the structural feasibility, a novel experimental method will equate the frictional resistance of the corrugated face of an interlocking block to that of the flat face of an equivalent conventional block. I also propose an extension of the limit analysis method, in which block resistance to sliding is different in different directions, and plan to use equations from the experimental method. The project is an interdisciplinary research in the fields of architectural, computational and structural design and will train skills helping to establish me as a researcher leading studies on structurally informed architectural design as well as to become an entrepreneurial architect who uses masonry in contemporary architecture. It will also create opportunities for host organizations to collaborate with architectural academia and manufacturing industry in the field of integrated architectural-structural design.

Mots clés : interlocking masonry blocks, orthotropic friction, limit analysis of masonry block structures

Participants :
- University of Naples Federico II (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 168277.2 €