Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet SYNAPTRON (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Neuromorphic computing refers to the development of hardware that emulates the efficient way the brain processes information by exploiting the principles of parallelism, sparsity, and low power consumption. In the last decade, new device concepts and exotic materials have been explored to imitate the behaviour of neurons and synapses. However, demonstrations of the interaction between synaptic and neuron devices are very scarce, due to their different functional requirements and operating mechanisms. Moreover, to construct a fully functional neural network the individual artificial synapse and neuron devices are often integrated with transistors, capacitors, resistors and other peripheral circuits which greatly reduce the efficiency of the neuromorphic hardware. Therefore, a crucial step towards the practical integration of these systems in large-scale networks is to seamlessly integrate synaptic and neuronal functionalities using the same technology, preferably the same material and even (ideally) the same device. The unique electronic properties of strongly correlated oxides make them excellent candidates to face this challenge. The insulator-to-metal transitions in complex oxides can be tuned electronically in a non-volatile manner by several means, including ferroelectric effects, phase change transitions, valence variations, etc that can be used to demonstrate both neuron and synapse functionality. In this essence, this project SYANAPTRON aims at integrating neuron and synapse functionality in a single three-terminal nano-scale device, leveraging the co-existence and interplay of ferrionic (ferroelectricity and control of oxygen vacancies) and insulator-to-metal transitions in complex oxide heterostructures. The integration of synapse and neuron functionality in a single device is revolutionary as it will reduce the complex fabrication process, and peripheral circuitry, and enhance the packing density of future neuromorphic hardware systems.

Mots clés : neuromorphic computing, insulator metal transition, negative differential resistance, ferroionics, correlated oxides

Participants :
- ALBA Synchrotron (Spain) (Espagne) — Partner, associated partner, Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche), subvention : 0.0 €
- Université complutense de Madrid (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 194074.56 €
Projet FUTURE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Artificial intelligence is rapidly permeating diverse domains. In the criminal procedural field, AI is enhancing the efficiency of law enforcement authorities and criminal justice systems in both preventing and prosecuting crimes, through the streamlining of tasks like data analysis, evidence assessment, and crime prediction. Despite this accelerating trend, a conspicuous gap persists due to the lack of a clear and comprehensive legal framework at both national and supranational levels. An additional factor hindering a responsible and beneficial implementation of AI in the criminal procedural sector is that some technical characteristics of the AI prototypes developed so far (e.g. opacity) interfere with some criminal procedural principles and standards. The lack of dialogue between legal scholarship and scientific community prevents the identification of suitable technical solutions. Given this scenario, managing the legal and ethical implications of AI in the criminal justice system proves to be a prohibitive challenge. The aim of FUTURE is twofold: to support national legislators across the EU in the regulation of artificial intelligence in criminal procedure, while fostering a harmonized approach to the subject; to bridge the gap between the technical and the legal community, ensuring the compliance of AI systems implemented in the criminal procedural field with its principles and safeguards. To achieve these objectives, FUTURE will firstly employ the legal comparison method in a groundbreaking manner: it will be applied on a comprehensive legal and empirical data set, covering all EU Member States’ jurisdictions. Secondly, it will bridge the expertise of legal and computer science professionals, giving them the first tangible chance to investigate the technical issues obstructing the use of AI in criminal proceedings and to assess the feasibility of technical solutions.

Mots clés : artificial intelligence criminal procedural law and policy law and technology harmonisation in eu comparative method procedural and fundamental rights ai technical aspects and criminal procedure

Participants :
- Université complutense de Madrid (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 165312.96 €
Projet Blood and Tears (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

Blood and Tears: the Emotional Experience of Classical Greek Warfare aims to provide the first comprehensive and scientific analysis of the emotional aspects of Classical Greek military campaigns in the period 490-323 BC. Previous scholarly analyses fail to fully address the issue, offering either simplistic and inadequate reconstructions (Hanson: 1989), or seminal contributions on single phenomena regulating the emotional experience in war (e.g. cohesion: Crowley: 2012; social pressure: Cairns: 2019, van Wees: 2004). This study will fill a considerable gap in the scholarship with a fresh, multifaceted approach to the emotional and psychological aspects of Greek military campaigns. The cultural idiosyncrasies of the Greek culture(s), the interplay of different cultural dynamics, and the difference from polis to polis will be acknowledged to reconstruct a culturally appropriate and solid picture. The modern notion of morale will be used as a heuristic tool to unravel significant patterns and psychological phenomena hidden in the ancient sources, whilst three case studies – Athens, Sparta, and the Ten Thousand – will frame inter-poleis similarities and differences. The findings are expected to dramatically advance the promising field of the study of the emotions and psychology of the ancient Greeks, but also to develop a better appreciation of how ancient intelligentsia conceptualised complex socio-psychological dynamics.

Mots clés : ancient warfare ancient greece athens sparta morale history of emotions ancient psychology

Participants :
- Université complutense de Madrid (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 165312.96 €
Projet QNETS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Over the last decade, quantum networks have grown as one of the top candidates to greatly enhance secure processing, communication and computation of information. They exploit entanglement (distributed by photons) to establish correlations between distant systems that are stronger than possible with classical physics. These strong quantum correlations can boost technologies beyond classical limits: they provide a quantum advantage. However, common theoretical approaches to quantum networks suffer from the trade-off between quantum advantages, experimental demands, and security. A first approach is to fully-trust the implementation of network devices, i.e., to assume no defects or malicious behaviour. While optimally providing quantum advantages, this approach is vulnerable to malfunctioning or unnoticed hacking, rendering it insecure for applications. The second approach fully-distrusts the devices and assumes they are subjected to hacking attacks. While providing the highest-level of security, this approach is currently too demanding to practically implement it, rendering it unrealistic for near-term technologies. QNETS will overcome this challenge through the concept of quantum steering. In a steering approach, the network is composed of both, fully-trusted and fully-distrusted devices. It assigns a level of trust to each device individually depending on its role in the network, allowing for implementations of quantum networks under more realistic security assumptions using near-term technologies. In an inter-disciplinary effort, QNETS combines techniques from quantum information, applied mathematics, and computer science. In particular, QNETS will (1) lay out the theoretical foundation of quantum network steering (2) develop mathematical tools for its characterization, and (3) design protocols for its real-world applications, such as cryptography. Upon completion, QNETS will pave the way for the long-term goal of a quantum internet for information processing.

Mots clés : quantum networks, entanglement, steering, nonlocality, communication, quantum foundations, quantum correlations, semi device independent, quantum information processing

Participants :
- Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 226420.56 €
Projet Bernar (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Modern machine learning models have been successfully deployed across fields, from scientific studies to tech- nological developments in industry, but their development remains poorly understood. The training of a large language model such as GPT-3 is estimated to cost $4.6M, and public attempts to replicate the training process alone required teams of engineers to rotating on-call for months, monitoring various statistics and constantly tweaking the training procedure when it broke. Existing theoretical frameworks offer limited insights into this process, as they do not capture the main difficulties that arise in practice when training neural networks, leaving practitioners to rely on error-prone heuristics and expensive trial-and-error. This leads not only to a large devel- opment cost dominated by wasted resources, but also limits the possible impacts of machine learning to areas considered profitable by industries that have the resources to carry this development.  The objective of this project is to build a better understanding of how recently identified bottlenecks in neural network training slow down optimization and how to adress them. The specific aims are to: (a) Understand the impact of class imbalance on the dynamics of neural networks to identify where to allocate algorithmic resources. (b) Develop a theory to capture optimization difficulties early in training to guide the development of algorithms that improve performance during this crucial phase. (c) Identify new bottlenecks that arise from applications to new data types.  The project combines experimental expertise of the postdoctoral and the theoretical expertise of the host insti- tution to identify and describe the real impact of data characteristics on neural network training. Understanding these bottlenecks will help develop more efficient and reliable algorithms and guidelines on best practices that depend on properties of the data.

Mots clés : machine learning, optimization, algorithms, neural networks, large scale, training dynamics

Participants :
- Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 226420.56 €
Projet BIOMICAR (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Bacteria, protozoa and microalgae have evolved mechanisms to self-propel. The interactions between different types of Biological Microswimmers (BM) are relevant in natural processes such as the regulation of carbon and oxygen biogeochemical cycles and the toxin releasing by phytoplankton blooms under certain environmental conditions, but also in development of technological applications due to the emergence of a collective behaviour and a spatio-temporal synchronization. BM have been used as transporters, showing promising results at carrying and releasing a cargo in a specified target. However, there is still a lack of sharp control of the collective movement of BM towards a target, which implies a poor delivery of the cargo at the desired place. This flaw comes from the fact that, in real scenarios, BM swim through complex porous media where interact with passive and active agents, and are subjected to external fields, such as light, concentration of chemicals and global background flow, that highly affect their motion and hinders its predictability. Up to date, the concomitant effects of confinement, external fields and interactions with other BM or active agents, have not been taken into account in current simulations or experiments. The proposed action, therefore, aims to develop a new computational approach that enables simulation of suspensions of interacting BM in complex confined environments, at the same time subjected to external fields, providing a platform to gain fundamental knowledge on the control of the collective behaviour of mixtures of BM under conditions compatible with the conceptual design of efficient cargo delivery systems. The simulation platform will be feedbacked and tested with experiments, in which suspensions containing phototactic (C. reinhardtii) and chemotactic (E. coli) BM will be studied with microfluidics.

Mots clés : computer simulations, active matter, swimmers

Participants :
- Université des îles Baléares (Espagne) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université complutense de Madrid (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 181152.96 €
Projet TES (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Stigma is a familiar feature of human life – and, often, a clearly objectionable one. Opposition to stigmas that reinforce oppressive norms (for example, racist, sexist, or ableist norms) should be amongst the few uncontroversial starting points for a liberal egalitarian politics. But intuitions are significantly more divided in other cases: is it sometimes permissible to stigmatize unjust behaviour (e.g., employers who pay poverty wages) or to use stigma to help secure important social goods (e.g., a stigma against smoking that promotes public health)? My project will develop an account of the moral risks of stigma that helps to answer these questions. Stigma is undertheorized in philosophy. The literature that does presently exist on the topic largely focuses on the objection that stigmatizers treat others as their inferior – and it typically understands stigma in terms of this complaint. Stigma is theorized as a way of (objectionably) treating someone as less than one’s equal. This project aims to fill the large gaps left by the narrow focus of the current literature. In a word, not all stigmas are wrong to the same degree – and the reasons why they are wrong can vary from context to context. We cannot make progress with the large disagreements that exist about the morality of stigma if we theorize stigma in terms of a single kind of wrong. Instead, we need a broader and disaggregative account of its moral risks. This is what my project will offer. This project builds on my recently published work which has started to correct the lack of attention given to stigma within philosophy – thus demonstrating the substantial potential for the growth of this research programme. Stigma is an issue of vast public concern, as well as the subject of large literatures in the social sciences and psychology. The findings of this project will thus be of great interest to an interdisciplinary and general audience, in addition to a philosophical one.


Participants :
- Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 217965.12 €
Projet Imperial Affliction (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

This project explores the impact of ruling the Roman Empire on the rulers themselves and asks how this fed back into the practice of rule, as an explanation for well-recognized, but poorly explained, trends in Roman administrative practice towards greater arbitrariness, violence, and despotism. Inspired by comparative evidence and scholarship on modern imperial systems, it hypothesizes that the tactics by which Rome compensated for its limited manpower, such as ad-hoc decision-making and the empowerment to deal summarily with provincials, incrementally changed the practice of those figures—emperors, governors, officials, military commanders—who enacted them. This brings together two poorly-theorized observations of Roman imperialism—its reactiveness, and its increasing arbitrariness—in a compelling explanatory thesis with comparative payoffs. It has relevance for the study of all imperial systems in which the ruling class consider themselves superior to the ruled, re-conceptualizing arbitrary and violent practice as a pathogen contracted through the experience of ruling subject communities. It ties into EU objectives concerning citizen participation in institutions of the state, since it argues that when a state views its citizens as subjects, rather than partners, a tendency towards arbitrariness is inevitably involved.

Mots clés : comparative history imperialism violence

Participants :
- Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 202125.12 €
Projet VIBE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Social interaction is the glue of society and positive interactions can increase well-being; however, negative interactions can also lead to harm. Establishing prerequisites for increasing positive experiences and mitigating negative consequences in different situations is of utmost importance. Since more and more of our social lives are happening in virtual interactions, this knowledge is especially critical for immersive virtual 3D worlds called virtual reality (VR). VR offers exciting opportunities to reduce inequality, a Sustainable Development Goal, e.g. by creating safe spaces for minorities regardless of country borders or physical distance. Therefore, the overall objective of VIBE is to explore the influence of three key aspects of virtual social interactions on prosocial behaviour in VR: (1) anonymity: whether one knows who they are interacting with and whether they are known to their interaction partner, (2) self-identification with the avatar: to which degree a person identifies with the avatar representing them, and (3) agent-belief: whether a person believes they are interacting with another human or with an AI-controlled agent. Building on my extensive experience researching physically-embodied social interactions, I will test the influence of these three factors on prosocial behaviour in social interactions in two experiments using a trust game in VR. VIBE will scrutinise the factors that facilitate prosocial behaviour in virtual interactions. Incorporating these factors into VR design and implementation will help to realise VRs full potential to achieve social good, by increasing online collaboration and mitigating harmful experiences. The MSCA postdoctoral fellowship will allow me to build strategic international collaborations, add conducting interactive experiments in VR to my portfolio of skills and use these skills to establish myself as an upcoming leading expert in science of social interactions, both in virtual and physically-embodied spaces.

Mots clés : virtual interactions social interactions

Participants :
- Université Flinders (Australie) — Partner, associated partner, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 0.0 €
- Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 337154.64 €
Projet RIHWAS (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Elucidating the role of interfaces during photochemical processes (PCP) for hybrid nanomaterials (e.g., metal-semiconductor or metal-insulator-semiconductor; MS or MIS) is critical to boost the performances of photodevices, as well as improving our fundamental knowledge on those materials. Extensive efforts have been performed to design novel nanomaterials and to investigate their efficiencies to attain an affordable, sustainable and renewable solar-to-energy conversion. Despite those research achievements, the role of interfaces is highly controversial regardless of their significant effect on PCP. In this project, I will develop a new platform combining interferometric scattering and scanning electrochemical microscopies. This platform unlocks in operando measurements to investigate the different interfaces’ mechanisms at multiple scale (meso-, micro- and nanoscales). The project focuses a reference system (Au-Al2O3-TiO2) and a model reaction (water splitting) to create knowledge on (1) analytical methods for identifying physical/chemical interactions at local scale and (2) fundamental understandings on the role of interfaces in nanostructures. The obtained results will establish a rationale for nanomaterial design applied to solar-to-energy conversion field. The platform versatility enables the study of all kind of 2D materials applied to most of the PCP. My previous experiences demonstrate my ability to develop and establish new techniques/ methodologies to answer fundamental questions for the energy conversion field. The original skills and my current expertise polished through this project will become an invaluable asset for my future career and contributions in the scientific community as a leading expert in the to-be developed fields. The fellowship will enable me to develop meaningful collaborations around the world and establish myself as an independent researcher.

Mots clés : electrochemistry, plasmonics, interferometric scattering microscopy, scanning electrochemical microscopy, hybrid nanomaterials, water splitting

Participants :
- Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 202125.12 €