Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet AgroPHYS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Land plants have coped with drought since they first colonized dry land. Drought is the most frequent cause of water stress – a functional and structural plant response to low water availability. An understanding of the impact, mechanisms and traits underlying drought tolerance in agricultural plant species is essential to improve productivity, and it further represents a major European priority (SFS-01-2016): optimizing agriculture in a changing climate with reduced water availability and a growing population. To address this urgent need it is necessary to first understand how stomata regulate leaf gas exchange, since stomatal is the main limitation of photosynthesis in crops under water stress. Both hydraulic and non-hydraulic or hormonal signals are the main drivers of stomatal regulation. Therefore, AgroPHYS proposes to investigate how these signals interact to protect plants against damaging desiccation. This project will generate physiological knowledge, at UTAS, from a range of experimental techniques and apply it to a physiology-based model and an automatic plant-based sensor to guide both irrigation management and research, at IRNAS-CSIC. The objectives of AgroPHYS are (i) to evaluate the relative importance and coordination of hydraulic and hormonal signals in plant stomatal responses to drought and recovery, and (ii) to apply this knowledge, by means of a mechanistic model and a plant sensor, to predict productivity relative to water consumption in agricultural plant species with different water use strategies. The outgoing research group is at the cutting-edge of physiological research and the environment of learning will provide maximum benefit to the candidate and excellent opportunities to interact with researchers from across the globe. These skills and knowledge will be transferred back to IRNAS-CSIC, providing essential data not only for scientific research on plant function but also for precision agriculture and optimal management of irrigation.

Mots clés : stomata, ecophysiology, hydraulic signals, water use efficiency, mechanistic models, plant, sensors

Participants :
- Spanish National Research Council (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 263440.8 €
- University of Tasmania (Australie) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet kelbus2 (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Landslides, the violent motion of large masses of debris, rock or snow, are an ever-present danger in mountainous regions the world over. After the landslide material falls down the mountainside, it will run out some distance away from the mountain even on relatively flat surfaces until the energy it gained from falling is dissipated by friction with the terrain. Although a simple energy balance argument suggests that a single rock cannot travel farther than the height from which it fell, many landslide runouts extend their ruin to seemingly safe distances far removed from their origin. These long runout landslides have baffled scientists for over a century, ever since Albert Heim recorded his study of the Elm rock landslide that devastated the village of Elm, Switzerland in 1881. There are many explanations for this phenomenon, such as lubrication by an interstitial fluid, but none of these satisfactorily addresses how a completely dry landslide can run out so far. Not understanding how and when long runouts will occur makes hazard mitigation and prediction extremely difficult, highlighting the urgency of this issue. Recently, Melosh and coworkers have provided support for a mechanism borrowed from the fluidization of impact craters, “acoustic fluidization”, by using idealized 2D simulations of circular disks, but more work is needed to show that this mechanism is a feature of real 3D flows and robust for a range of conditions. We will perform laboratory experiments and fully 3D simulations of granular flows using simultaneous pressure and velocity measurements to test the acoustic fluidization hypothesis. We will also look for a crossover between this dry mechanism and the lubrication mechanisms for wet landslides. Besides application to landslide engineering, we will also explore for the first time how fundamental features of granular flows such as shear flow instabilities (clustering and longitudinal stripes) affect the rheology of landslides and long runouts.

Mots clés : granular flow, landslides, instabilities

Participants :
- Université de Bordeaux (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet ModelingCommonGround (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Language is inherently ambiguous. The meaning of words and sentences depends on the identity of the communicative partners and the nature of the context. In simple behavioral experiments children and adults can use a wide variety of social-contextual cues (jointly known as “common ground”) to interpret ambiguous utterances. But this limited empirical evidence – especially in the developmental context – does not live up to the theoretical importance of common ground: In theory, common ground is not only involved in online language use but it is also a necessary prerequisite to learn language in the first place. Studying the development of children’s ability to form and use common ground is therefore crucial to understand the psychological foundation of language. It is still unknown how both adults and children integrate different social-contextual cues in complex, naturalistic interactions. Bayesian modeling provides a mathematical framework for formalizing theoretical assumptions about this interaction and deriving quantitative predictions about new experimental situations. This project will unite developmental and computational approaches. The key objective is to find out what constitutes common ground at different ages and how it informs language learning across development. I will develop mathematical models and behavioral experiments in parallel to obtain quantitative predictions for different forms of interactions between social-contextual cues. By comparing these predictions to data from early children’s word learning at different stages of development, I will be able to empirically evaluate the theoretical importance of the different components of common ground. The interdisciplinary focus of the project at the intersection of psychology, linguistics and computer science will open up new avenues for the empirical study of language use and language learning.

Mots clés : language development, common ground, pragmatics, bayesian modeling

Participants :
- Stanford University (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Leipzig University (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 219844.5 €
Projet LOVe (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Language mediates between concepts in our mind and the things they refer to in the world. Semantic theories are typically biased towards conceptual or referential aspects. My goal is to develop a theory of meaning that takes both aspects into account, and is supported by computational modelling experiments, so that it will also enable computers to match linguistic expressions with entities in the world. This is a highly interdisciplinary proposal that will bring computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and theoretical linguistics forward. My model is based on distributional semantics, a scalable and flexible approach to computational semantics that, by inducing meaning representations from naturally occurring data with statistical methods, can model large portions of the lexicon and account for nuances in meaning that pose difficulties to traditional semantic theories. Distributional semantics has so far largely eschewed the reference issue, by testing its models on language-internal tasks. The project bridges this language-world gap, and integrates the distributional framework into a referential semantic theory. The project promises to advance our scientific understanding of language, a defining trait of the human species, and to make significant progress towards building computers we can talk to, with the ensuing strong impact on our everyday lives. Even though I am an established researcher in computational semantics and also contributed to semantic theory, I still need to fully develop my own line of research to become a leading, independent researcher in Europe. Carrying out the present proposal at the University of Trento CLIC laboratory will be a fundamental step towards achieving my goal, since CLIC is a world leader in distributional semantics. Conversely, my unique profile, addressing theoretical linguistic questions through computational means, will fill a gap in the lab, widening the scope and outreach of the research conducted at CLIC.

Mots clés : distributional semantics, computational semantics, corpus based methods, lexical semantics, semantic theory, reference, grounding, computational linguistics, natural language processing

Participants :
- University of Trento (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 180277.2 €
Projet T-LICS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Languages often come into contact, as witnessed by the wide spread of bilingualism across the world. Whenever language contact takes place, there emerges the possibility of features from one language being transferred to the other one. This transfer is often illustrated by loanwords, but it can involve any aspect of a language, like syntactic or phonological patterns. In this context, the T-LICS project will develop a general theory of how intonation features are transferred, through meta-analysing previous studies and original fieldwork. Although every language uses pitch in a conventional way in order to convey sentence-level meanings, such as the contrast between statements and questions, intonation is rarely recorded in written texts, and is underrepresented in descriptive grammars. The project, hence, devotes its empirical core to a notable case of intonation contact, where a previously-homogeneous sub-dialect of Basque is coming into increasing contact with French or Spanish. I will conduct fieldwork and analyse how the intonation system of younger (vs older) speakers is diverging at each side of the political border. By further comparing these patterns to their French/Spanish intonation, I will identify which features from their Basque intonation are attributable to transfer from the other language. Beyond standard phonetic/phonological analysis, I will also exploit machine learning techniques to quantify the extent of the intonation divergence between the two generations of speakers (using classification accuracy), and the extent of intonation overlap within these bilingual speakers (using clustering techniques). In order to complement and expand the field data, I will also crowdsource intonation patterns using a mobile app, a recent and successful tool in dialectology which has not been employed yet to study intonation.

Mots clés : language contact

Participants :
- University of the Basque Country (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 172932.48 €
Projet TimePresCompBridge (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2016)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Large EU projects and surveys reveal that the frequency and cost of bridge repairs in Europe have significantly increased due to traffic loads higher than those considered in the initial design, harsh environmental conditions, use of de-icing salts especially in countries with cold climates, poor quality of construction materials, and limited maintenance. Most importantly, the aforementioned projects and surveys highlight that current repair and strengthening methods are costly and time-consuming and result in large socio-economic losses due to disruption of traffic flow such as travel delays, longer travel distances, insufficient move of goods, and loss of business. Therefore, bridge owners and bridge engineers urgently seek to transfer into real-life projects more efficient and less disruptive methods for bridge repair, strengthening and maintenance. External post-tensioning is recognised as a powerful technique in the rehabilitation of existing bridges as well as in the construction of new bridges. For the advantages of noncorrosive property and high strength, fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) composites are being increasingly used for external tendons instead of conventional steel ones. Existing research on externally prestressed steel-concrete composite bridges has focused on the short-term loading. However, the inevitable loss of long-term performance of prestressed composite bridges is of primary concern in practice, especially when FRP tendons are used. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate deeply the long-term behaviour of these bridges and, on this basis, to propose practical design guidelines. In this fellowship, an experimental and numerical study will be carried out to understand the time-dependent performance of composite girder bridges with FRP tendons. Long-term tests will be performed. Moreover, a novel computer programme capable of performing time-dependent analysis will be developed and used to conduct an extensive numerical investigation.

Mots clés : bridges, steel concrete composite structures, structural analysis, structural design

Participants :
- University of Southampton (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195454.8 €
Projet GRAPHENERGY3 (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Large area, scalable production of single layer and defect free graphene is important for its use in industrial applications. Currently, common methods used to prepare graphene include micromechanical cleavage, chemical vapor deposition, and chemical reduction. However, all these methods have their own shortcomings, for example, difficulty in scale-up or poor quality due to significant defects. To address this issue, in this project, we will focus on developing a novel electrochemical cathodic exfoliation approach to produce high quality graphene. Non-covalent edge-functionalization will be employed to open graphite edges. Upon a negative potential applied on the functionalized graphite electrode, H+ cations from protic ionic liquid electrolyte will be inserted into graphite interlayers and be reduced to hydrogen gas to further open the edge of graphite, which will facilitate the larger imidazolium cations to intercalate, expand and completely exfoliate graphite to single layer graphene. This cathodic exfoliation approach is nondestructive to the resultant graphene, and maintains its perfect structure and electronic properties, which will result in high electrochemical stability and benefit the performance of graphene-based fuel cell electrocatalysts. Finally proton exchange membrane fuel cells will be fabricated with graphene based electrocatalysts above and these are expected to exhibit high power density and long term durability, which may produce a promising future energy technology.

Mots clés : graphene, graphite, fuel cells, electrochemical exfoliation, platinum nanoparticles, electrostatic self assembly

Participants :
- University of Manchester (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195454.8 €
Projet PATRIMONiT (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Large quantities of 16th-Century Italian ‘popular’ books – the books read or ‘listened to’ by everyone during the Early Modern Period, printed with poor quality material and having usually a short life expectancy –, sometime after the 16th century found their way to the UK to join the largest single collection of Italian 16th-century books in the world, that is the British Library (BL). This library preserves today a substantial number of early Italian editions which do not survive in any Italian library and are still not adequately recorded. The objectives of the PATRIMONiT project are both bibliographical and historical: 1) to survey all the 16th Italian ‘popular’ books now at the BL which do not survive in any Italian library; 2) to define new rules for cataloguing 16th ‘popular’ books and catalogue approx. 250 items in the PATRIMONiT database, entering the data in EDIT16 and in the CERL Thesaurus; 3) to study the edition history of these books using archival sources, that is to examine the historical circumstances related to their survival and international circulation with a new methodology. Carnelos proposes to demonstrate that this ephemeral material is really important in reconstructing the socio-cultural history of a country. Specifically, her aim is to understand when and why ‘popular’ books underwent a change in their perceived value, from books to be used and reused to books that were considered at once disposable and worthy of collection, and how time and space, politics and cultural policies influenced this change. Supported by three centres of excellence (the Consortium of European Research Libraries or CERL, the BL and the Istituto Centrale per il catalogo unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche or ICCU), the PATRIMONiT project combines the more recent developments in three main disciplines (Library Science, History and ICT), to tackle historical questions which cannot be approached and successfully solved individually.

Mots clés : early italian books chapbooks cheap print history of the book history of libraries history of early printing ephemera british library collections 16th century popular culture book trade

Participants :
- Consortium of European Research Libraries (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Autres, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet Quantum BOSS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Large-scale quantum photonic networks promise to revolutionize computational processing and communication with the use of fundamental quantum-mechanical concepts. Limited by scalability, the field of quantum information processing (QIP) is so far lacking a real world, large-scale implementation that can allow for quantum computation and long distance quantum communication. These applications in QIP have distinct advantages over their classical counterparts. Quantum computation promises to provide unprecedented speed-up in processing for problems that are intractable for classical computers, while remote entanglement generation and swapping would allow long distance quantum networking. Integral to a functioning quantum network is a quantum optical memory (QM), a device allowing for the faithful storage and recall of quantum states of light using a strong and controllable light-matter interaction. The main scientific vision of this project is to develop multiple cavity-enhanced, broadband and long-lived QMs capable of long distance distribution of entanglement and multi-photon state generation. The resulting technology will provide the necessary resources for long-distance quantum communication and scalable quantum computing. The former is obtained by the heralded entanglement of two remote QMs to form an ‘elementary link’, and then swapping the entanglement between multiple links. The objective of this project is to implement the QM in a solid-state, scalable architecture.

Mots clés : quantum photonic networks, quantum optical memory

Participants :
- University of Oxford (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183454.8 €
Projet L3TD (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Learning from demonstration (LfD) is a paradigm for enabling robots to autonomously learn from demos to perform new tasks. But, environmental changes, expensive demonstration cost, and potential uncertainties caused by data-based learning make it hard to be applied in actual. The project aims to propose a robot skill learning framework from human learning process via a teleoperation interface to achieve human-like skill learning characteristics such as few-shot learning, learning from failed attempts and tentative actions, and strong skill transfer and generalization ability. Five work packages will be taken to realize the objectives. First, a teleoperated interface will be equipped with multi-sensors and special exoskeleton to minimize information difference between humans and robots. After building a scalable primitive skill (PS) library based on task segmentation with multimodal information, new theories of PS learning and PS-based task graph learning are explored. PS will be learned and generalized based on improved meta-learning that is associated and explained by physical laws and neural motor disciplines. The PS-based task graph will be learned from the human learning process, achieving failure reasoning and adaptation to zero/few-shot tasks. Some practical problems e.g. incomplete data set and difference of sim-to-real applications will also be addressed. Finally, the previous theories will be certified by medical robot tasks. The applicant will acquire a solid state-of-the-art interdisciplinary scientific training in the multidisciplinary research fields, such as artificial intelligence, robotics technologies and mechanical design, and that will enable him to generate new scientific knowledge and quickly develop his research career and leadership. The final aim is to consolidate Europe as the world leader in robot and AI areas and to benefit European robotics applications in industry, surgery, and nuclear waste disposition.

Mots clés : robotics technique, learning from demonstration, teleoperation, process learning, meta learning, task graph, mechanical design

Participants :
- University of the West of England (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 168700.32 €