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

PLURIFONT focuses on the single greatest astronomical bestseller of the eighteenth century: Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), and its Italian, German and English translations as one interconnected case study, to be addressed from a transnational European perspective. I seek to appraise the several versions of the Entretiens over a timespan going from 1686 to circa 1780 as interventions in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural conversations on natural philosophy, while recovering the agency and voices of translators mostly unknown to present historiography. By addressing the wider topic of the production of translations as means of transmission of knowledge in the long eighteenth century, my main purpose is to examine some of the debates on natural philosophy at the core of the Enlightenment period in an innovative way: by reconsidering the traditional approaches employed within the interdisciplinary field of translation studies. My working hypothesis contends that the Entretiens constituted an open, flexible and porous ‘site of knowledge’ that travelled temporally and geographically across Europe, providing fertile ground for its many translators to revise the scientific ideas of the ‘source’ text through a wide range of paratextual devices and to adapt them to the debates of their times. As a result, these translations became conflictual sites of knowledge, conceptually removed from the original work, while remaining the vehicles of heterogeneous scientific discourses usually dismissed by the simplified narratives of ‘progress’ associated with Enlightenment’s historiographies.

Mots clés : translation studies, natural philosophy, circulation of knowledge, enlightenment studies

Participants :
- Université d'Europe centrale (Autriche) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 214344.72 €
Projet CLIC (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The project investigates the effect of language contact on the structural make up of clitics through the analysis of their use and function in three South Slavic contact varieties: Molise Croatian (MC), Burgenland Croatian (BC) and Torlak (TK). Although clitics have been extensively examined in standard(-ized) Slavic languages, very little attention has been paid to marginalized and/or endangered varieties. Besides the language preservation and documentation effect, the study aims to provide an insight in the layering of complexity in the syntactic structure of clitics by examining their inventories, the structural layers truncated in the simplification triggered by contact as well as those interacting with the structures of the other contact variety, specifics of the clitic cluster and the presence or absence of clitic doubling and clitic climbing. The chosen varieties constitute a minimal triple, since 1) MC has had a very extended contact with Italian and Italo-Romance varieties, having a fairly rich clitic system, 2) BC has been in contact with Austrian German, displaying very scarce cliticization phenomena and 3) TK has been in contact with Serbian Standard, Macedonian and Bulgarian, all with very rich clitic systems. Empirically, the project combines fieldwork in terms of a sociolinguistic questionnaire and elicitation tasks in the three areas with a corpus-based study. The latter extends an ongoing study on Torlak to further marginalized South Slavic varieties in order to provide a wider perspective onto contact-related issues. The data is treated both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results of this investigation will therefore not only fill the gap in the empirical description of the use of clitics in understudied varieties and types of contact, but they will also provide a contribution to the fundamental questions on the nature of human language.

Mots clés : clitics, molise croatian, burgenland croatian, torlak, south slavic, language contact

Participants :
- Université de Graz (Autriche) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183600.96 €
Projet AM Joint (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The construction industry needs optimal solutions to meet sustainability goals, reduce carbon emission, decrease material consumption and improve the speed of construction. In addition, economic and resource efficiency play a significant role in utilizing new methods and technologies. Developing innovative construction techniques to meet all these criteria has been a challenging topic recently. Therefore, the present study introduces a novel steel frame connection as an alternative to nominally pinned joints in steel frame buildings, which in addition to providing safety under normal conditions, also significantly improves the robustness of the frame in extreme conditions such as column loss, and prevents progressive collapse. The topology of the components will be optimised to have a high capacity to sustain normal loads along with the tie forces due to column removal. Consequently, optimised components will be constructed using additive manufacturing (AM) techniques that will result in savings in material consumption. Considering a simple configuration that combines AM with traditional construction methods, the provisional connection will provide a fast and easy assembly process. The efficiency and structural performance of the proposed connection under normal loads as well as extreme tie forces will be evaluated through a comprehensive numerical and experimental study which is elaborated in the current research proposal. A close connection with industrial partners and intensive interaction with other academic entities will ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed connection. Comprehensive design guidelines along with quantified assessments of environmental and economic benefits will be developed in order to facilitate the practical application of the proposed connection.

Mots clés : steel structures steel connections additive manufacturing joint details robustness deconstruction digital manufacturing

Participants :
- Université Heriot-Watt (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 276187.92 €
Projet LipidAge (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Aging has long been considered a passive process that could not be reverted. Fortunately, it is now clear from genetic and pharmacological intervention studies that aging is actively regulated and can be influenced to reduce the burden of age-related diseases, such as neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases. Studies in various organisms established the importance of dysregulated lipids in the development of aging and age-related diseases. It remains unclear, however, how complex lipids and lipid metabolism causally affect aging, and the mechanisms are poorly understood. In my preliminary lipidomics analysis in ten different tissues of aged mice, I found a striking accumulation of bis(monoacylglycero)-phosphate (BMP) in all tissues. While little is known about BMPs, one lysosomal enzyme that has been described to contribute to its production is PLA2G15. Remarkably, knocking down Pla2g15 in worms leads to a significant lifespan extension. Together, these findings suggest a causal involvement of Pla2g15 in aging. I hypothesize that targeting complex lipid metabolism could promote healthy aging. Therefore, the main goal of LipidAge is to unravel the role of complex lipids, specifically BMPs in the development of aging, and how these pathways and their downstream effects impinge on lysosomal functions and healthy aging. I will use human and mouse lipid data profiles, worm C. elegans, and apply a combination of molecular, biochemical and phenotypic experiments with a focus on lipids and aging. These experiments will lead to a better understanding of conserved complex lipid changes, and the role of Pla2g15 in the BMP synthesis cascade relevant for health and disease during aging.

Mots clés : lipids, lysosomes, aging, phospholipids

Participants :
- Amsterdam University Medical Centers (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 203464.32 €
Projet SMartGut (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2024)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) are a group of debilitating conditions affecting up to 40% of the global population, significantly impairing quality of life and driving up healthcare costs. Current treatments focus on managing symptoms rather than addressing the root causes of FGIDs, such as inflammation, increased intestinal permeability, and gut microbiome disruptions.  The SMartGut project aims to develop innovative therapeutic microbeads that encapsulate probiotics within a photo-crosslinkable biopolymer-based core. To enhance functionality, SMartGut will employ the Layer-by-Layer assembly technique to create a nanoscale protective and bioactive coating on the therapeutic microbeads surface. This coating can incorporate antioxidants to reduce inflammation and improve probiotic adhesion in the gut, and targeted peptides to strengthen gut barrier function.  The therapeutic microbeads will be evaluated for their structural, morphological, and physico-chemical properties, followed by assessing the release kinetics of the bioactive components of the therapeutic microbeads and the survival of the encapsulated probiotic strains in the intestine using a simulated gastrointestinal digestion test designed for both healthy adults and the elderly. This test will ensure the effectiveness of the therapeutic microbeads in reducing gut inflammation, restoring the microbiome, and reinforcing intestinal epithelial junctions to address FGIDs. Then, the therapeutic microbeads will be incorporated into food models to evaluate their stability and impact on food characteristics while preserving their bioactivity features after food storage.  SMartGut has the potential to revolutionize FGID treatment by delivering a multifunctional therapeutic system that targets the core factors of these disorders. SMartGut promises significant scientific, societal, and economic impact by introducing a novel approach to FGID management and advancing the development of functional foods.

Mots clés : layer by layer assembly, therapeutic delivery system, nutraceutical, gut, gastrointestinal disorders, nanocoating, probiotics, antioxidants, in vitro model, dynamic gut models, food models

Participants :
- Université polytechnique de Valence (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 194074.56 €
Projet GaRlic (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Horses represent one of the animal species that most impacted human history. They armed past societies with fast mobility while they provided new farming companions and crucial allies at war. As one of the most prominent symbols of wealth and prestige, horses were also commonly integrated in a variety of belief systems. This was the case for protohistoric Gaul from 500 BCE, where horses became increasingly associated with ritual practices, ranging from simple isolated deposits, to funerary rituals in connection with humans and chariots, and sacrificial sanctuaries. Current understanding of these horse-centered practices, and how they were transformed under Roman influence from the 1st century CE is, however, extremely limited for the lack of relevant textual historical sources. The GaRlic project proposes to combine state-of-the-art methodologies at the forefront of biomolecular archaeology to gain fine-grained resolution into ritual and breeding practices in protohistoric Gaulish horses, and follow their changes during the Romanisation process. Our core hypotheses are that specific animal types were bred across Gaul and selected for ritual practices, and that non-local horse resources were increasingly integrated during the Roman Period, ultimately reshaping both breeding and ritual practices. GaRlic builds on the availability of an exceptional archeological collection of protohistoric and Roman horse assemblages in Gaul and involves internationally recognised experts in zooarchaeology, ancient DNA and statistical genomics. It will investigate, for the first time, the horse bloodlines and the embodiment of social norms underlying Gaulish ritual practices and will reveal how the rise of the Roman Empire transformed such practices and, more generally, the pre-existing Iron Age horse agrobiodiversity.

Mots clés : ancient dna, horse, genomics, gaul, romanisation, rituals, agrodiversity

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 211754.88 €
Projet DANAL (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Neuroscience research tries to tease apart how brain circuits work together to give rise to behaviour, namely cognitive flexible processes, such as reinforcement learning (RL). RL requires neurons to be tuned to relevant inputs in order to maximize behavioural performance. Most of the excitatory synaptic inputs in pyramidal neurons are located in the thin dendrites where the majority of the spines are located. Thus, thin dendrites play a crucial role in synaptic integration and experience-dependent plasticity. They mediate local computations that endow single neurons with a variety of input–output transformations and change their information transfer. In agreement, individual dendrites have been proposed as the fundamental computational unit of neurons and the substrate for increasing the computational power of the brain. On the other hand, the neuromodulatory systems are known to be critical regulators of brain states and of adaptive responses relevant to RL. Different neuromodulators, acting through their receptors, can alter intrinsic properties of dendritic ion channels and receptors and synaptic efficacy, having a direct impact on dendritic computations. Thus, in order to understand how the brain allows to quickly improve behavioural performance during RL, it is critical that we 1) gain insight about the activity on thin dendrites, 2) to systematically understand the activity of different neuromodulatory inputs on those and 3) their impact on RL. This proposal aims at identifying how neurons change their properties during RL, by observing and manipulating the neurophysiology of behaving mice, using interdisciplinary approaches and state-of-the-art methods. The work will address several original questions: 1) what is the role of tuft dendritic activity to implement an adequate RL?; 2) what is the role of different neuromodulators in shaping the tuft dendritic activity and on RL?

Mots clés : dendritic activity, in vivo imaging, neuromodulators, reinforcement learning

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 211754.88 €
Projet DESCRIBE (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2023)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : SIGNED

Tensor analysis plays a central role in signal processing and machine learning for the representation, analysis, fusion, and classification of data. Responsible for up to 25% of brain strokes, atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most prevalent sustained cardiac arrhythmia and remains the last great frontier of cardiac electrophysiology. Catheter ablation is the most attractive therapeutic option for persistent AF, although the identification of suitable target areas is strongly dependent on practitioner’s subjectivity. Multi-electrode catheters are increasingly used in ablation as they facilitate the electroanatomical mapping of the atria, but often deliver incomplete data due to lack of contact with the atrial wall. This project aims to improve the personalized characterization and management of AF by proposing novel tensor-based methods for multimodal data fusion in a possibly missing information scenario. New coupled tensor models will be introduced for effectively coupling multimodal information and robust optimization algorithms will be developed for retrieving unknown/unavailable information. It is expected that the optimal exploitation of invasive (intracardiac EGM) and noninvasive (surface ECG) records will allow the automatic identification of the best targets for successful ablation. Encouraging preliminary results have been obtained with the block-term decomposition (BTD) to handle multiple time segments of the ECG for the blind separation of the atrial activity signal. The contribution of EGM into the ECG will be identified by analyzing the common factors obtained by the proposed coupled tensor decompositions. Extensions of coupled BTD to multimodal, possibly missing data will also be proposed. Expected impacts lie in original tensor models and algorithms for data fusion and tensor completion, leading to novel descriptors of AF that can significantly advance the understanding of this prevalent cardiac condition and derive patient-tailored ablation protocols.

Mots clés : tensor decompositions, data fusion, tensor completion, atrial fibrillation, catheter ablation, electrocardiogram, electrogram

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 105877.44 €
Projet TIMING (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The TIMING project will develop a framework to analyse temporal networks and generate realistic surrogates. Observation of real-world temporal networks given as input will aim at grasping their intricate structure, resulting from temporal and topological causalities and correlations. I will devise a methodology to mimic these dynamics, using concepts of network science theory as guidelines. The generated synthetic networks will reproduce the fundamental features of the original topologies. This methodology will allow to obtain surrogate temporal networks to replace real data when the latter are not usable or sharable. This is particularly useful for social data, often subject to privacy issues. Moreover, since collected datasets are generally too small to observe interesting effects when simulating dynamical processes (a crucial problem, e.g., in computational epidemiology), it will serve as a tool for data augmentation. TIMING will in fact allow generating temporal networks with a higher number of nodes and a longer time span, based on original patterns extracted from smaller available datasets. TIMING will also provide the possibility to merge different original data, e.g., social interactions collected in different environments, providing a more realistic synthetic portrait of a society. Existing methods to generate realistic temporal graphs are scarce and are mainly based on blind reproduction of an original network, or they focus on specific theoretical aspects, while methods permitting an overall vision are missing. TIMING will fill this gap by combining an emulative algorithm with theoretical inductions, taking into account the mesoscale interplay between time and topology. I will develop the project in the team of Prof. Alain Barrat at CNRS (France), working at the intersection of multiple fields: physics of complex systems, network science, and statistical physics, establishing contacts with social scientists, epidemiologists and neuroscientists.

Mots clés : network science, temporal networks, network generation, data augmentation, networks of interactions, epidemic modelling

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 130609.92 €
Projet LoopMechColls (Horizon Europe, appel à projets 2022)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

This project focuses on the collision-free design of single-loop mechanisms, which are customized devices synthesized for a given task. With only few degrees of freedom, such mechanisms can perform very complex spatial motions, which nowadays industrial solutions can achieve for an extensive energy cost or cannot achieve at all. Although the kinematics of the single-loop mechanisms is a well-investigated topic among mechanism scientists, there exist very few real-world applications, because the synthesized kinematic models do not consider collisions between the links and joints. Also, their structural design is complicated – engineering tools struggle when dealing with closed-chain mechanisms given algebraically due to numerical rounding. The project aims to solve this problem through recent progress on mechanisms constructed by rational motion factorization along with numerical optimization methods. Rational motion has, in addition to the possibility of factorization, other benefits such as motion parametrization, algebraic collision detection, or can approximate even other types of motions, making the output of this work widely adaptable. This project will provide a simplified mechanism collision model, quantify the collision states on a continuous level, optimize the rigid body structural design, and deal with special cases such as folded states of mechanisms. Daniel Huczala recently finished dissertation at VSB-TU of Ostrava, Czech Republic, where he dealt with the synthesis of serial kinematic structures of robotic manipulators. His obtained knowledge in optimization of mechanisms design will be joined with the theoretical kinematics expertise of researchers at the Unit of Geometry and Surveying, University of Innsbruck, Austria, who participated in the development of the rational motion factorization and can transfer this knowledge to Dr. Huczala, which will considerably develop his research profile at the very beginning of his postdoc career.

Mots clés : robotics, kinematics, single loop and closed chain mechanisms

Participants :
- Université d'Innsbruck (Autriche) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 183600.96 €