Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet EarlyCare (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

EarlyCare project aims at developing and implementing cutting-edge sensing technologies and advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to create a Health Monitoring System enabling early prediction of Diabetes Mellitus (DM) and Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), through the continuous monitoring of vital signs of older adults’ living alone related to micturition and cardiac activities as well as their warning signs. The innovative aspect of EarlyCare solution is the efficient deployment of completely nonwearable, unobtrusive, and privacy-friendly devices such as gas sensors and wireless physiological sensors which are coupled with explainable AI to detect and analyse the underestimated warning signs (i.e., nocturia and pollakiuria as abnormal micturition activity, arrhythmia and breathlessness). The AI-powered systems will be trained using publicly accessible sets and refined during the first phase of piloting. EarlyCare will be integrated into an interoperable IoT platform (enSenior) and validated on voluntary patients. The successful conclusion of this project will contribute to promote healthy ageing and reduce burden of formal and informal caregivers of older adults by advancing in development of eHealth tools and smart devices. The proposed multidisciplinary research activities, training, transferable skills and secondments will grant the improvement and acquisition of the most appropriate skills for his future career development.

Mots clés : health monitoring system, gas sensors, physiological data analysis, machine learning, explainable artificial intelligence

Participants :
- N vision systems and technologies sl (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 172932.48 €
Projet CALCHAS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Earth Observation (EO) is undergoing a radical transformation due to the massive volume of observations acquired by remote sensing and in-situ sensor networks. While satellites provide coarse-resolution, yet global-scale monitoring of environmental processes, in-situ sensor networks acquire high-accuracy localized measurements. Extracting information from spaceborne and ground based instruments requires innovative solutions which will allow the autonomous integration of diverse in nature and scale observations in order to provide high-quality geophysical parameter estimation. CALCHAS will demonstrate cutting edge technologies targeting three major factors towards the vision of fully automated multi-source EO data understanding, namely (i) the fusion of observations from different sources and modalities, (ii) the efficient aggregation of the sampling scales associated with spaceborne and in-situ measurements, and (iii) the analysis of time-series of dynamic observations. To that end, the paradigm-shifting signal processing and learning framework of Deep Learning will be utilized and extended through powerful mathematical tools and appropriate methodologies like supervised and generative learning, dramatically extending the current scope of single source data analysis. The developed framework will be employed for analyzing time-series of measurements from active and passive microwave and multispectral spaceborne imaging instruments (SMAP, SMOS and Sentinels), and in-situ sensor measurements, targeting the high-accuracy spatial and temporal resolution enhancement for observations and soil moisture estimation. The merits of the developed technology will be demonstrated in two intelligent water management case studies, namely optimized irrigation management and water pipeline leakage detection.

Mots clés : multispectral imaging, microwave imaging, synthetic aperture radar, deep neural networks, data fusion, soil moisture estimation

Participants :
- Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (Grèce) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 215492.16 €
- University of South Carolina System (Etats-Unis) — Partner, organization partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
Projet DAMAGE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Earthquakes are one of the deadliest geo-hazards in the world causing huge societal and economic impact. Destructive earthquakes are generally represented by ruptures which nucleate, grow and terminate along pre-existing faults with catastrophic strain energy release. Seismological observations and theoretical arguments demonstrated that most of earthquake energy is dissipated into heat by friction within the core of faults at depth. The remaining energy amount is the one driven to the Earth surface by seismic waves and associated to the generation of extensive DAMAGE in the vicinity of seismic faults. Vast research was recently performed to investigate on-fault mechanisms during earthquakes whereas much less has been done to constrain the physical processes and energy sinks associated to coseismic off-fault deformation. I propose here to systematically study off-fault coseismic damage in carbonates, which are the rocks where most of the destructive seismicity striking Europe is hosted. The proposed research is innovative since it tackles a scientific topic which was so far overlooked with a multiscale interdisciplinary approach combining: detailed field structural and geophysical characterization of exhumed active fault zones, compressive and tensile dynamic loading tests on carbonate rocks, and microstructural-petrophysical characterization of natural and experimental fault rocks. This integrated strategy will lead to build a wealth of novel datasets to quantify the damage structure and scaling relations of seismogenic fault zones in carbonates. Newly conceived rock deformation experiments will then help to determine the mechanical origin of coseismic damage in carbonates. The research will be conducted at Universitè Grenoble-Alpes with a secondment at University of Manchester. The experience of the supervisors and the equipment at both organizations will guarantee the successful progress of the research and my professional growth as independent researcher.

Mots clés : earthquakes, off fault damage, structural geology, geophysics, rock mechanics

Participants :
- Université Grenoble Alpes (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 184707.84 €
Projet NAMDIA (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Earth’s atmosphere is a massive photochemical reactor, and human activities are changing its chemical composition, impacting both climate and air quality. Detailed chemical mechanisms – constructed from coupled kinetic networks of thousands of elementary reactions – are crucial in advancing our fundamental understanding of atmospheric chemistry, and developing reliable predictive models. Because the elementary mechanistic details of volatile organic compound (VOC) oxidation are often beyond the reach of experiment, in silico molecular kinetics studies (utilizing ab initio quantum chemistry and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics) are increasingly used to construct atmospheric chemistry models – particularly for describing VOC kinetics on electronic ground states. For electronic excited states, in silico studies of VOC kinetics remain an almost entirely unexplored horizon, even though light absorption and dynamics on excited states initiate most of the atmosphere’s chemistry. Neglect of excited states is increasingly problematic: for example, standard ground-state oxidation kinetics cannot explain experimental results for isoprene and toluene, two of the troposphere’s most abundant VOCs. By fusing state-of-the-art ab initio quantum chemistry, excited-state dynamics, and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, we will carry out detailed investigations of atmospheric VOC intermediates, developing new software tools, methods, and results for direct comparison with experiments. These tools will enable theoretical chemists and atmospheric modelers to calculate in silico absorption cross-sections, quantum yields, and photolysis rate coefficients for electronic excited states of key VOCs, providing insight into how excited-state dynamics impact atmospheric chemistry on global and regional scales. This project will blaze a trail in an exciting new area of physical chemistry, tightening the link between fundamental in silico chemical dynamics and applied atmospheric chemistry.

Mots clés : excited state dynamics, atmospheric chemistry, nonadiabatic effects, kinetic models, oxidation chemistry

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

Earth’s history is punctuated by climate disturbances, often marked by abrupt changes in the carbon cycle, and by mass-extinctions. Episodes of rapid, large-scale carbon release are linked to global warming events that last for 100,000s years. Warming is accompanied by ocean acidification and widespread oceanic anoxia representing a combination of environmental threats that we increasingly face today. It is less well appreciated that these processes form a continuum of feedback mechanisms that eventually remove carbon from the atmosphere and re-stabilise the climate. However, the precise operation of this complex climate recovery process is poorly understood and the role of each feedback mechanism is hotly debated. An accurate understanding of these feedbacks in the past is crucial to defining scenarios of anthropogenic climate change and understanding the boundary conditions for a habitable planet. To fully understand this complexity, a detailed description of each individual carbon removal process is required. This project will provide the first systematic separation of parallel feedback mechanisms using a suite of metal isotope proxies in marine sediments, combined with a quantiative biogeochemical modeling approach. These tools will be applied to a number of past warming events to characterize the climate recovery process

Mots clés : climate recovery, carbon sequestration, anoxia, weathering, acidification

Participants :
- Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 175419.6 €
Projet REMIND EBOV (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Ebola virus, one of the deadliest human pathogens, is a known candidate for severe outbreaks and has caused several thousand deaths in the more recent outbreaks alone. To fight against it, a detailed knowledge about its viral life cycle is fundamental to the development of efficient vaccines and drugs. In this project I suggest to investigate the role of the mucin-like domain (MLD) of the viral glycoprotein (GP) in modulating virus attachment, detachment and diffusion on glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), responsible for recruiting the virus at the cell surface. To do so, I will generate GP-containing pseudotyped viruses, mimicking the tropism of the pathogen. Specifically, I will compare the GP of the Zaire strain of EBOV, an MLD-deleted mutant and a natural mutant that occurred during the West Africa outbreak (2013-2016) that is reported to have an increased tropism for human cells. I will use advanced biophysical techniques to examine the interactions on a molecular level as well as on the cellular level. On a molecular level, I will study the binding strength of individual bonds formed between the GP and GAGs using force spectroscopy. In addition, I will investigate the attachment and detachment of virus particles from GAGs immobilized on a glass surface in a biomimetic fashion, using total internal fluorescence microscopy. Proceeding to a more physiological model using living cells, I plan to study the diffusion behavior at the cell surface of pseudotyped viruses carrying the various mutations in their MLD. Stepping up in complexity, in the last part of the project, I will investigate the role of the MLD in modulating the ability of the virus to cross the glycocalyx, the sugar coat of cells, by employing 3D tracking. Taken together this project will lead to a better understanding on how viral particle migrate on the cell surface and how the interactions function on a molecular level.

Mots clés : ebola virus, virus diffusion, virus membrane interactions, glycoaminoglycans

Participants :
- Umeå University (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 191852.16 €
Projet EBOPATH (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Ebolaviruses comprise five virus species of which at least three are highly pathogenic for humans. Other mammalian species such as non-human primates, forest antelopes and pigs are susceptible to ebolavirus infection with different degree of severity. However, bats and laboratory mice are entirely resistant to ebolaviruses. Why do ebolaviruses cause severe disease in some species but not others? This question, which is paramount to understand ebolavirus pathogenesis is the central question of our proposal. To address it, we will build on technology developed by the host laboratory to develop xenochimeric mice, that is, severely immunodeficient mice whose hematopoietic system has been replaced with another from a donor species (e. g. bats, monkeys or humans). This novel in vivo system will allow us to investigate the kinetics of ebolavirus infection across species and to dissect the mechanisms responsible for pathogenicity.

Mots clés : ebola virus, chimeric mouse models, hemorrhagic fever

Participants :
- Leibniz Association (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 71442.0 €
- Leibniz Association (Allemagne) — Partner, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 100018.8 €
Projet EcoDA (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

EcoDA investigates methods for co-designing platforms that can stimulate collective civic actions of urban resilience and enhance the capacities of urban residents to become resilient. The project focuses on food practices as case studies of resilient actions and tests a hybrid platform in three European cities – London, Paris and Bucharest. The research has three main objectives: 1) to examine the social, cultural, political and technological contexts for urban resilience, and map existing civic initiatives around resilient food practices in the three selected cities; 2) to co-design, prototype, test and refine open source digital platforms that could enable such civic initiatives to take place and/or expand, and enhance resilience capacities for citizens; and 3) to evaluate the capacity of these co-designed platforms to generate forms of public participation and urban governance that can stimulate actions of urban resilience. To address these objectives, the research will be carried out through design practice, through secondments within three professional practices working in the area of urban resilience, in the three elected cities. The methodology includes traditional qualitative methods (e.g., interviews), participatory action research, co-design experiments and collaborative workshops. The innovative and original aspects of EcoDA offer significant value in the context of the Horizon 2020 EU Programme, by addressing areas of special focus (e.g., sustainable food security and waste management) and key objectives (e.g. boosting industry engagement and supporting innovation). Moreover, the practice-based research approach, the open-source nature of the platform and the provision of the ‘metadata’ needed to enable the platform, will facilitate the up-scaling and up-taking of EcoDA’s outcomes in various cities across Europe and possibly further away, thus enabling collaborations beyond the term of the project.

Mots clés : collaborative technology, open source, food, resilience, public participation, governance, civic action, co design, co production, experimentation, prototyping

Participants :
- University of Sheffield (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 195454.8 €
Projet SinGly (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Effective neuron-microglial communication is a prerequisite to achieve the final connectome. It is mediated by both the formation of new synapses and selective removal of unnecessary connections through synaptic pruning. Recent evidences suggest that superfluous connections are eliminated by microglia. Almost 70% of the connections are lost in a primate cortex within six months of life. But what drives this selective elimination of so many synapses is a million-euro question. Identifying neuronal signals that differentiate weak synapses from the strong ones is an emerging frontier in cellular neuroscience. Several eat-me signals in synaptic pruning have been identified, but spare-me signals that limit phagocytic elimination of synapses are yet to be explored. Sialic acids on neuronal glycocalyx acts as spare-me signal and prevents microglial phagocytosis through Siglec receptors. Aberrant regulation of sialic acid caused neuronal loss and embryonic lethality. It is also becoming evident that sialic acid plays a key role in neurodevelopment, but the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which it regulates neurodevelopment is yet to be explored. This makes sialic acid an ideal candidate to evaluate its role in neurodevelopment. Hence, we aim to interrogate whether sialidases, glycocalyx recognizing proteins are developmentally regulated and also to define sialic acid’s role in synaptic pruning during neurodevelopment. We propose to implement gene, protein expression and metabolic profiling studies to investigate whether sialidases and glycocalyx recognizing proteins are developmentally regulated. Also, we will use fluorescent azido sugars in ex vivo cultures to visualise how sialic acid regulates synaptic pruning during neurodevelopment using superresolution STED microscopy. This paves a path to identify cellular and molecular mechanisms by which glycocalyx composition defines neuron-microglia interactions and thus circuit refinement through synaptic pruning.

Mots clés : neuronal glycocalyx, sialic acid, click chemistry, ex vivo organotypic hippocampal slices, neuron microglial dynamics, microglial mediated synaptic pruning, superresolution sted microscopy

Participants :
- Vilnius University (Lituanie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 146112.0 €
Projet MFOptBF (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Efficient transport structure is considered as fundamental for the economic growth and social cohesion of communities. Long-span suspension bridges have served to cross large physical barriers for decades as one of the most challenging structures in civil engineering. Several major suspension bridges are currently under planning; Coastal Highway E39 Route in Norway with floating foundation, Canakkale Bridge in Turkey, Tokyo Bay Bridge in Japan to name a few. The span length of suspension bridges has become longer with the advances in construction technologies, yet the bridge structures become more flexible and more prone to wind-induced vibrations, which are key concepts for the bridge design. For the construction of long-span bridges, huge material cost is required, and the reduction in material will be of great interest. The design optimization is a mathematical method of minimizing a cost function while satisfying structural requirements. Reliability Based Design Optimization (RBDO) performs design optimization while uncertainty in parameters are considered, producing more accurate optimum solutions; however, it has a drawback of high computational cost. In recent years, multi-fidelity optimization has attracted attention of researchers for a clear improvement of efficiency. The candidate has worked on RBDO of long-span bridges under probabilistic flutter in her thesis. She would like to expand her research by proposing multi-fidelity optimization method considering probabilistic wind-induced bridge vibrations accounting also for the hydrodynamics effects, and applying the method to on-going bridge projects. This research project is challenging for the incorporation of probabilistic buffeting and hydrodynamics effects. It is multidisciplinary involving in mathematical discipline of design optimization, wind, structural and marine engineering. This project will help to form efficient transport in the EU by providing method for the sustainable bridge designs.

Mots clés : reliability based design optimization, multi fidelity, aeroelasticity, flutter, buffeting, hydrodynamics, long span bridge, wind induced instabilities

Participants :
- University of Stavanger (Norvège) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 208400.4 €
Projet GRENHAS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Efficient usage of energy resources is a growing concern in today's communication systems. Solutions that consider energy harvesting, where nodes in a communication system utilize other available energy sources, such as solar, wind power or man made signals, instead of completely relying on a fixed battery or the power from the grid, offer a promising perspective. Such approaches have a wide range of applications including wireless sensor networks, smart homes and smart cities. Understanding the information transfer capabilities of communication systems with energy harvesting features have been the attention of a number of recent works. At the moment the main line of research on the subject is typically done in an information theoretic framework with the rate maximization criterion. This line of work is important for understanding the fundamental limits in energy harvesting systems, yet it falls short in applicability in the context of practical scenarios. Here we propose an alternative estimation theoretic perspective where the problem is investigated within a practical signal processing framework. We will focus on efficient transmission and resource allocation strategies. Practical receiver structures with linear filtering, low complexity designs such as linear precoders, power allocation methods will be important ingredients in our work. The resulting solutions will complement the existing information theoretic solutions, and contribute to creating future green and smart communication systems.


Participants :
- Chalmers University of Technology (Suède) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 185857.2 €