Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-actions-marie-curie-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet NON-LINFMAPS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Information Science and Engineering
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The functional maps (FM) is an effective and established method for shape matching in several applications such as computer graphics, medical imaging, computer-aided design and biomedical data analysis among many others. In the last few years, a large quantity of research has been devoted to this topic, giving rise to new analysis and implementation of innovative methods. The interest in FM arises from its efficiency, its effectiveness and the several applications in which FM can be involved. Given two 3D shapes, FM focus on the correspondence between the functional spaces defined on two surfaces rather than between the points of their 3D embeddings. A small matrix can compactly encode the FM representing the functional spaces on a fixed basis. A common choice is to approximate the functional spaces as a linear vector space through a truncated subset of their Fourier basis. In most cases, only the vector space structure of functional spaces is exploited, but not their algebra, i.e., the ability to take pointwise products of functions. With NON-LINFMAPS, we aim to reinforce the FM injecting the non-linearity in the framework through new representations of the functional spaces and innovative techniques for the conversion of the FM in a point-to-point matching. The main motivations of this proposal are twofold. First, there is solid evidence that non-linearity encodes essential map properties. Second, the non-linearity of maps between embedded surfaces makes non-linearity more suitable to extract high-quality correspondences from FM. Through the MSCA, we plan to create an entirely novel computational framework for FM that directly exploits the algebra structure of functional spaces integrating non-linearity. Based on these new insights, we will design efficient algorithms and entirely new applications for different shape representations, such as graphs, point clouds and volumetric data confirming the multi-disciplinary potential of our proposal.

Mots clés : functional maps, non linearity, spectral geometry, shape matching, deformations transfer

Participants :
- École polytechnique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 92353.92 €
Projet CompNanozymes (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2018)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The functionalization of monolayer-protected gold nanoparticles is at the frontier of nanotechnology, with innovative applications emerging in fields such as nanomedicine, chemosensing, and catalysis. Here, we focus on nanomaterial-based artificial enzymes called nanozymes, which have been shown to be highly stable and low-cost alternatives to natural enzymes in a wide range of applications. For example, the self-organization of Zn complexes on the surface of gold nanozymes has been shown to generate multiple bimetallic catalytic sites capable of promoting the cleavage of an RNA model substrate. This two-metal-aided mechanism found in nanozymes closely resembles that used by many metalloenzymes that process nucleic acids in cells. However, the complex, hybrid, and flexible nature of the outer coating monolayer of nanozymes has so far made it difficult to investigate the structure and dynamics of these multifunctional chemical systems, which have reached a level of complexity resembling that of proteins. Within this context, this project’s ambition is to use classical and hybrid QM/MM simulations coupled to free-energy computation, integrated with experiments, to study the metallo-dependent functionality and mechanisms of nanozymes that cleave nucleic acid model substrates. Through CompNanozymes, the fellow will thus acquire additional expertise in computational simulations, completing his research skill set and allowing him to grow into an independent group leader. Success will also fill the large knowledge gap in our understanding of nanoparticle structure-function relationships in nanozymes, advancing the field of computational nanodesign and directly impacting nanochemistry as a whole.

Mots clés : functionalized nanoparticles, nanozymes, molecular simulations, molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, reaction mechanism, catalysis

Participants :
- Italian Institute of Technology (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 183473.28 €
Projet ORACLE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The lower ionosphere (70–90 km), a ionized region in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, can be understood as a membrane acting as a sensor to different kinds of phenomena originating at Earth (e.g., lightning) or in space (e.g., space weather). Unexpected strong changes in this region can influence dramatically the performance and reliability of navigation and communication. However, the impact of those phenomena in this region is difficult to quantify accurately. On one hand, this region is too high for balloons and on the other hand it is too low for satellites. In this project, Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio waves will be used because they propagate between the Earth surface and the ionosphere with low attenuation. The researcher will push forward novel scientific understanding of the properties of the lower ionosphere and magnetosphere. She will: (1) determine whether the day-to-day variability of the VLF signal during sunrise can be explained by the ozone variability at its upper boundary, (2) find the yet unknown generation mechanism of VLF banded emissions, and (3) improve the detectability of galactic gamma-ray bursts, known as the most energetic phenomena in the universe. The project is strongly multidisciplinary, involving perspectives and concepts from astrophysics, magnetospheric, ionospheric, atmospheric physics and big data handling. This will be developed by the researcher within the frame of interaction and cooperation with the host and secondments. The results of this proposal have the potential to convey new perspectives in ionospheric and magnetospheric studies and provide some answers to long standing issues within the field of space weather, which has become of central importance in many aspects of human life and industry. As a consequence, by completing this action, Europe will improve its know-how in the topic of this proposal and reinforce its position on a global scale. This project is in line with the EU commission sector on Space and Security.

Mots clés : d region, ionospheric disturbances, radio propagation, earth ionosphere waveguide, magnetospheric waves

Participants :
- University of Bath (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 212933.76 €
Projet HEIEL (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The main goal of HEIEL is to examine how Chinese immigrants in Italy perceive their bodies, manage their health, and experience the local healthcare system in the context of national austerity, rising anti-immigrant sentiments, and on-going political, social, and demographic transformations and how these perceptions and experiences affect their identity formation. This ethnographic study will be based on 12 months of fieldwork mainly involving in-depth interviews and participant observation in Bologna and Rome. It will provide a new bottom-up narrative of immigrant health amid ambiguous power dynamics in which immigrant subjects are simultaneously economically privileged and socially vulnerable. It is a timely research project that locates immigrant subjects' everyday healthcare practices at the intersection of their transnational migration process, dynamic political and social realities, and geopolitics. It is a comparative study that examines structural considerations and investigates how immigrants negotiate and choose among formal and informal healthcare providers in a multi-ethnic EU welfare state and why informal medical treatments are often preferred over formally legitimate and cheaper public services. It is a multi-sited ethnography of encounters that examines healthcare seekers' interactions with various types of healthcare providers, institutions, and authorities, which may affect their healthcare choices and practices. It is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of anthropology, sociology of migration, and public health. This project will inspire healthcare and immigration policymaking, as well as contributing to theoretical debates surrounding immigrant health, as well as biopolitics and identity. The HEIEL will ultimately contribute to the ER’s career development plan of becoming a leading interdisciplinary scholar of Chinese migration to Europe.

Mots clés : immigrant health, informal medical treatment, integration of immigrants, immigrant everyday life, healthcare practice, ethnic encounters, social inclusion and exclusion, ethnography of encounters

Participants :
- Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italie) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 171473.28 €
Projet SimpSoCoS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The main goal of SimpSoCoS is to explore how personal reactivity to social stress impacts on the pathophysiology of social cognition (SC) in schizophrenia (SZ). The drive: to open avenues for novel therapies by reducing the knowledge gap among the social context, the biological damage and the SZ clinical expression. SZ is a severe, highly stigmatised mental disorder conferring a vast economic burden. In Europe, the incidence of SZ is 15/100,000 persons and the morbidity risk, 7/1000. SC allows people to understand the social world. Thus, deficits in SC deeply limit functional recovery within SZ patients, causing severe socio-occupational disability. Yet, treatment efficacy on SC functioning is modest and a broad understanding of how daily life events influence SC dysfunction is missing. Stress evokes integrated physiological and behavioural adjustments in a changing environment. The autonomic nervous system and a neuroendocrine axis are the primary effector systems during stress responses. Within key stress regulatory brain circuits, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) integrates and regulates physiological and behavioural stress responses and is a candidate modulator of social functioning. Its activation may be impaired in SZ. This project will address these challenges by connecting an interdisciplinary team combining stress integrative biology, clinical psychiatry research and neurophysiology. Based on a novel paradigm representative of real-life social exclusion situations for people with SZ, we propose a case-control evaluation of: a) SC performance before and after the stressor; b) subjective appraisal of the social stressor; c) cardiovascular and cortisol stress reactivity; d) the effect of mPFC activation by transcranial magnetic stimulation on the abovementioned endpoints in SZ patients. The interdisciplinary skills gained during this action will significantly enhance applicant’s future career prospects on bringing basic neuroscience closer to patient care.

Mots clés : social exclusion, schizophrenia, psychosis, social cognition, subjectivity, acute stress, cardiovascular, responses, cortisol, prefrontal cortex, neurophysiology, transcranial magnetic stimulation

Participants :
- University of Alcalá (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 259398.72 €
Projet ISICD (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The proposed research (Islamic State identity construction through discourse or ISICD) will explore the discourse of the Islamic State (IS) with the aim of contributing to a system of detecting, tracking, monitoring and studying such discourse in the Internet. As a tool, language allows us to establish our relationship with people discursively, to represent and distort reality, and to convince those with who we communicate to act in a certain way. This makes it a valuable resource for exploring larger motives and ideologies that are not explicit at the level of the text itself. The growing popularity of IS and its global influence depends on the ability of its members to communicate and share information online. As a consequence, its social identity as a political and religious group is established through online language in particular. The research will be carried out with a triangulation methodology, incorporating corpus linguistic methods with a discourse analysis frameworkand systemic functional linguistics, to determine four specific objectives (O): O1 how extremism is identified within language use through quantitative linguistic markers such as n-grams and collocations; O2 how extremism is identified through qualitative structural patterns such as transitivity, modality and appraisal; O3 how the use of these linguistic traits explains rhetoric and persuasive strategies used by IS; O4 what these findings tell us about how IS ideology is represented discursively. The findings from this research will provide a much-needed comprehensive account of the linguistic markers that characterise online identity of IS members. The project will develop original quantitative methodologies which will be transferrable to other contexts in which ideology is constructed in online communities. The findings will also have a wider relevance in areas such as sociology, the media, anti-terrorism research, politics and border control.

Mots clés : discourse analysis and identity politics show how linguistic fingerprints can be used to measure the, spread of extremists  attitudes to local populations over time

Participants :
- University of Granada (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 160932.48 €
Projet MALCOD (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Mathematics
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The proposed research aims to establish groundbreaking new methods for the numerical analysis of dynamical systems by using tools from the field of machine learning. The intersection of the fields of machine learning and computational dynamics is largely unexplored, and this proposal aims at the first systematic development of a unified theory, with a view to applying the ideas to problems in the commercial and energy sectors. Recent results by the applicant in set approximation for control systems demonstrate the power of this approach, the results of which significantly improve on the current state-of-the-art methods for set approximation. This approach is based on a functional analytic framework frequently exploited in modern machine learning methods: the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). Algorithms are designed to seek functions in the RKHS that characterise important dynamical properties of the system. This highly interdisciplinary research programme will develop a powerful and unified approach to create new algorithms that can either use input data generated from the evolution equations (if they are available) or measured data obtained directly from applications. The host institution PIK is a transdisciplinary host institution focused on climate modeling and sustainability. The tools developed during the course of the fellowship will be applied to the problem of basin stability and synchronisation of power grid networks. This proposal also includes two secondment phases to be spent at the non-academic partner organisation Ambrosys GmbH (AMB). There, the applicant will apply the research results to problems in image rendering in movies and turbulent flow across aerofoils, which are commercial applications already studied at AMB. The applicant will benefit from training in climate modeling and complex systems at PIK, and industrial training during the secondment phases.


Participants :
- Leibniz Association (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 171460.8 €
Projet NWACOMPLEX (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Physics
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The proposed research program entitled NWACOMPLEX aims at pioneering studies of nonlinear wave processes in optics and hydrodynamics implementing by young talented theoretical researcher Dr. A Gelash in exceptional collaboration with top-level experimental teams of the EU Host Université de Bourgogne and partners organizations. The transfer of the Fellow knowledge to experimental teams will make his theoretical and numerical developments widely used in practice. The project will strongly enhance the expertise and professionalism of the Dr. Gelash by high-quality trainings, new contacts and collaborations leading to a cascading effect on his career development. The Fellow being experienced inverse scattering transform technique, physics of nonlinear coherent structures and various computational methods proposes novel theoretical approaches and numerical tools for advanced analysis of modern experiments on generation, detection and nonlinear propagation of light in optical systems and waves on the surface of water. The innovative idea of the project is to reveal the nature of complex nonlinear phenomena using inverse scattering transform theory employing the most recent numerical advancements. The project will benefit the nonlinear science by fundamental studies of novel mechanisms of coherent structures interactions, statistic of nonlinear waves, dense soliton and breather gases. The Fellow will present theoretical predictions on nonlinear wave dynamics and statistic which will be verified by experimental groups of the host and partner organizations. The developed numerical tools will allow to generate various nonlinear light and water surface waves patterns for experiments on their propagation, as well as provide the opportunity to reliably analyse complex experimental data revealing coherent structures and their parameters.

Mots clés : soliton, inverse scattering transform, breather, rogue waves, nonlinear waves, integrable systems, nonlinear fourier transform, soliton gas, optical fibre, surface waves, modulation instability

Participants :
- Université Marie et Louis Pasteur (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 196707.84 €
Projet ADHERE (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The proposed research programme deals with the development of aptamer nanostructures for targeted cancer therapy. Immunotherapy encompasses a growing field of anti-cancer therapeutics that target cancer cells expressing specific antigens, such as members of the HER receptor. Currently, immunoglobulins directed to HER1, better known as EGFR, and HER2 are used in the clinical management of several types of cancer. There are, however, several disadvantages associated with the production and application of immunoglobulins. Moreover, there is evidence that dual-targeting of multiple receptors at the same time is advantageous for improving clinical outcome and reducing drug resistance. Aptamers, which are short single-stranded oligonucleotides that can bind a target molecule in a similar fashion as immunoglobulins, may form, due to their physicochemical properties, a superior alternative strategy for targeted cancer therapy. In ADHERE, I will design (WP1) and investigate in vitro (WP2) and in vivo (WP3) the use of aptamer nanostructures with bispecific (against both EGFR and HER2) and multivalent (up to 4 binding ligands) targeting properties for cancer cell targeting. The 24-month research project will be executed at the department of Polymer Chemistry and Bioengineering at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. The aim of this MSCA IF fellowship is to integrate my extensive background in targeted drug delivery and cellular therapeutics within the host institute, which is highly experienced with DNA nanomaterials and is positioned among the top 10 institutes of the world in the field of material science. Importantly, this fellowship will strengthen my career perspectives, by allowing me to gain valuable new transferable skills and receive additional high-level training. This will enable me to position myself as a leading young scientist in the field of clinical nanomaterials.

Mots clés : nanomedicine, drug targeting, targeted therapeutics, cancer therapy, aptamer, dna nanotechnology, her2, egfr

Participants :
- University of Groningen (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 177598.8 €
Projet ProactionPerception (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The proposed scientific project addresses a gap in our current knowledge in neuroscience linking sensory physiology and motor behavior to active perception. Animals disambiguate between motion in the environment and self-movement using corollary discharge, proprioceptive signals and reafferent sensory input. These signals can also be used to influence information acquisition to optimize sensory processing. I plan to explore the links between oculomotor action and perception during proactive exploration of a visual scene to understand how eye movements reshape processing in the early visual system. Because humans are largely ‘visuals animals’ ‘active vision’ is of primary importance to our behavior in our everyday lives. A better knowledge of this phenomenon is relevant to improved understanding of the visual system but will also be relevant to the study of all sensory systems and to a deeper understanding of information processing algorithms, including the value of internal predictive paradigms used throughout the brain. The project has translational potential for the fields of medicine and neural prosthetics, neuromorphic computing, and robotics. This project combines my previous knowledge in cognitive neuroscience and eye movements, acquired during my 6.5 year stay in the USA with the host laboratory’s expertise in low level synaptic system neuroscience. It therefore ensures both acquisition and transfer of new knowledge and opens opportunities of new collaborations. The MSCA Reintegration Fellowship will furthermore give me the opportunity to fully reintegrate in Europe and significantly widen my competences with the ultimate goal of providing the best career possibilities, enhancing the creative and innovative potential, to maximize the contribution of research to the knowledge-based economy and society.

Mots clés : neuroscience, visual perception, perception action, intracellular electrophy, eye movements and visual reafference, dynamic perceptual filtering, intra v1 horizontal binding

Participants :
- Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 173076.0 €