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

Glaciers provide a crucial water storage in high mountain environments and contribute to the seasonal freshwater availability for billions of people worldwide. Predicting the current freshwater contribution of mountain glaciers from model simulations is, however, limited by the lack of observational data and process understanding within inaccessible, high elevation regions. As such, glacier melt models make simplistic assumptions about meteorological information, namely air temperature, in space and time. The aim of this proposal is to produce a novel, unified approach for on-glacier air temperature estimation that can be implemented for any mountain glacier on earth by combining unprecedented meteorological data on glaciers with the latest advancements in gridded reanalysis information. The research fellow will combine dedicated field analyses on Alpine glaciers near to the host institution with existing, global datasets of air temperature data on glaciers, to produce a generalizable framework of glacier air temperature estimation that accounts for local interactions of cold and warm air masses and their causes. This framework will be developed and tested within detailed, high resolution land surface models at experimental catchments worldwide. The proposed research will exploit the resources, academic support and expertise of the world-renown supervisor and host institution to provide training to the fellow on model development and implementation for globally-applicable research and outreach deliverables. The scientific results are anticipated to have wide-reaching implications for current and future water resources management in high mountain regions and be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, public outreach and open access data. The planned supervision, training and collaborative, interdisciplinary research of the action will strengthen both academic and non-academic networks of the fellow and enhance his future career opportunities.

Mots clés : glaciers, melt, climatic sensitivity, runoff

Participants :
- Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (Suisse) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 191149.44 €
Projet MicroAsh (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The ability to produce and control fire is a momentous technological development and one that is unique to humans. The ways in which early pyrotechnology evolved and varied amongst prehistoric foragers is, however, poorly resolved. The main objective of the MicroAsh project is to reconstruct Middle and Later Stone Age (MSA and LSA) pyrotechnology variability by focusing on three closed-space rockshelters located in the Kasitu Valley (Malawi), which show exceptional preservation of organic materials. My pilot studies have shown that ashes constitute the main sedimentary components at the selected sites, though individual combustion features are invisible based solely on field observations. Human remains have been retrieved from all three sites, with the apparent use of fire for ritual interment practices during the LSA. MicroAsh will apply high-resolution geoarchaeological techniques (micromorphology, µFTIR, GIS), to study (1) site formation processes, (2) the relationship between fire use and paleoenvironment, (3) variability in the use of fire for ritual and subsistence through time, and (4) site-use intensity. The project will create, and make openly available, experimental datasets on characterization of ashes from varied local botanical resources that are of use to research in similar archaeological contexts in Africa. The largely unexplored potential of using human-made residues will contribute to our understanding of the transition from MSA to LSA foraging strategies. My experience in geoarchaeological studies in Malawi will directly assist me on achieving the goals of this ambitious project. The array of technical and transferable skills I will gather through the completion of MicroAsh and the widening of my collaboration network will be key in achieving my future career goals of becoming a team leader and starting my own research group.

Mots clés : geoarchaeology, african prehistory, pyrotechnology, archaeological micromorphology, ftir, middle stone age, later stone age, combustion features, fuel sources, rockshelters

Participants :
- University of Algarve (Portugal) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 147815.04 €
Projet PreSpeech (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The ability to recognise spoken words relies on extracting phonological features from the acoustic input that distinguish a word from its cohort competitors. Neuronal circuits were suggested to use context to predict and pre-activate specific speech features. Bottom-up feature recognition is enabled by phase and amplitude coupling between cortical oscillations and acoustic signals and this process is facilitated by top-down predictive processing. Predictions may be critical for the speed, accuracy and noise resistance that distinguish fluent speech recognition and were related to specific cortical oscillatory patterns (theta/delta synchronisation, beta increase). Despite evidence, the nature and the timing of these predictions remains unclear. This project will address these key questions using MEG and EEG that provide good spatiotemporal resolution. Increasing predictability of a word should have two effects: A) Neuronal populations encoding its phonological form will become active before this word is uniquely identifiable from its potential competitors by bottom-up analysis (uniqueness point UP). Using spatiotemporal multivariate pattern analysis we will test if the latency of phonological feature detection, used for word identification, is modulated by word's contextual predictability. If specific predictions are made, divergence should occur before the UP and should be supported by changes in oscillatory activity; B) Generating predictions should decrease bottom-up feature processing demands. We expect predictability to reduce the phase-amplitude coupling between the speech envelope and the gamma oscillations (a neuronal measure of phonological processing). In summary we aim to identify whether and how context enables predictions of incoming words’ form before it can be acoustically established. This will be critical for understanding the cortical architecture of speech processing with practical applications in artificial speech recognition.

Mots clés : prediction, speech processing, phonology, oscillations

Participants :
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (Espagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 170121.6 €
Projet ACCESS2WM (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2014)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Life Sciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The ability to temporarily maintain and manipulate information in working memory (WM) is critical for adaptive behaviour. Because WM has limited capacity, it is essential to understand the mechanisms that govern selective access to it. I hypothesise that 1) selective access to WM is governed by states of the brain prior to the encoding and retrieval of sensory information (in particular the phase and amplitude of neural oscillations in the different sensory cortices), and that 2) changes in these states provide a common neural substrate through which several cognitive variables affect WM. I will use magneto-encephalography (MEG) to investigate several key aspects of these central hypotheses in healthy human volunteers. This will advance our understanding of the neural and cognitive mechanisms that govern selective access to WM and could ultimately be used to present relevant information when the brain is most susceptible to incorporate this into WM. The project will be carried out at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, together with leading scientist in the electrophysiological study of WM (Anna Christina Nobre and Mark Stokes) and the analysis of MEG data (Mark Woolrich). This will allow me to not only perform the proposed research to the highest standard, but also to further develop several key skills (broaden my conceptual horizon, acquire novel analysis techniques, establish long-term collaborations, translate research, etc.) that will further my independence as a researcher and place me in the ideal position to start my own research group within few years after the fellowship.

Mots clés : working memory, selective attention, neuronal oscillations, human electrophysiology, magnetoencephalography, perception, sensory cortex

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

The ability to understand and predict the actions of others is critical for human social interaction but how the brain accomplishes this function is still poorly understood. This project will explore this fundamental question using an original and innovative approach, by studying how we anticipate the actions of others before they even start to act. The final aim will be to develop a model that integrates different forms of information available before the action starts with kinematic features available once the action has started. To achieve this aim, we will use a combination of EEG/ERP and fMRI that will be integrated through the use of sophisticated source localization software and analysis to obtain a complete picture of when and where each mechanism becomes informative in the brain. This project will shed new light on the study of social cognition by unraveling little studied but crucial aspects of action understanding and prediction. In addition to opening new grounds in the field of social neuroscience and adding theoretical and methodological expertise to my skill-set, the findings and the resultant model of action prediction and social interaction will be useful also beyond social neuroscience. The project could contribute to technological development in the brain computer interface and social robotics fields (e.g. building robots able to smoother interactions), as well as be applied to the understanding of social deficits in psychiatric disorders (i.e. autism and schizophrenic patients). The Social Brain Lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) represents the most suitable environment for this project by providing: world expert in the field of action observation with prominent expertise in the fMRI and EEG techniques (C.Keysers and V. Gazzola); all the technical facilities necessary for the success of the project; a world leading neuroscience community present at the NIN that will contribute to my further training and project development.

Mots clés : action prediction, action anticipation, motor preparation, modeling, fmri coregistration, spatio temporal integration, fmri training

Participants :
- Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Recherche, subvention : 165598.8 €
Projet SpaceEye (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2017)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Environment and Geosciences
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The achievements of the space age are essential to modern society, but they come at an environmental cost. The vast majority of the more than 16000 tracked objects currently orbiting the Earth are space debris. Passive debris mitigation measures are insufficient for the stabilization of the debris environment. In this light, considerable effort is being devoted to develop active debris removal and on-orbit servicing. Dedicated high-performance CubeSat platforms with propulsion system could make on-orbit servicing missions more robust and cost efficient. High Δv propulsion systems technology was long awaited in the CubeSat community, and the proposed research project will significantly advance this field with innovative frameworks for mission design and quantification. The chosen mission concepts will enable a fast response to the changes in overall mission parameters which is rather novel for the space industry, where such parameters are typically frozen at the beginning of the project.


Participants :
- Space structures gmbh (Allemagne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Organismes privés (hors enseignement), subvention : 159460.8 €
Projet PCCDX (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Chemistry
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The acute toxicity and radioactivity of actinide compounds complicate experimental studies of the “soup” of nuclear waste produced in nuclear reactors. This motivates research into computational approaches for determining molecular properties and reactivity of actinide compounds. Unfortunately, the computational resources required by standard quantum chemistry methods grow exponentially with system size, an effect known as the curse of dimension. Since the actinide-containing molecules of relevance to nuclear chemistry contain hundreds of electrons, innovative new approaches that break the curse of dimension must be developed. One such approach models many-electron molecules as collections of noninteracting electron pairs, called geminals. Standard geminal methods are inappropriate for actinide chemistry, however, and must be extended to include (i) computationally efficient ways to account for relativistic effects, (ii) correlations between electrons beyond electron-pairing effects (weak correlation), (iii) electronically excited states, and (iv) the description of unpaired electrons. Specifically, weak correlation will be captured using Coupled Cluster-type approaches, excited states are accessible through an Equation-of-Motion formalism, and open-shell extensions will use generalized quasi-particles as building blocks for the electronic wavefunction. The extended geminal models thus developed will provide the first direct, atomistic, and quantitative computational model for understanding nuclear waste reprocessing and will provide the essential insights that are needed to guide the synthesis of new actinide compounds that can be used to separate actinides from the other components in the “soup” of nuclear waste. The developed models will be robust, computationally cheap, and black-box-like and can be used in many other areas of chemistry and materials physics like lanthanide and transition-metal chemistry, biochemistry, and semiconductor physics.

Mots clés : electron correlation, geminals, relativistic effects, excited states, actinide chemistry, open shell molecules, coordination chemistry, coupled cluster theory

Participants :
- Nicolaus Copernicus University (Pologne) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 146462.4 €
Projet IMACTIS (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2019)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The aim of IMACTIS is to stimulate European citizens into using social network images in a way as to manage their identities in a critical manner. Digital media have profoundly changed the meaning of identity through two different shifts pertaining to social interaction. On the one hand, experience-based communication such as the acts of liking, following, and sharing, together with the diffusion of representations such as selfies, point of view shots, and live videos, have led to the dissemination of instinctive forms of identity expression. On the other hand, the profiling of people’s social and political circles (Facebook), entertainment tastes (Netflix), service or product needs (Amazon and AdSense), and even of their sexual partners (Grindr and Tinder), has led to the delegation of behavioural identity management to algorithms. The main hypothesis of IMACTIS is that in order to link experiential representations with algorithmic management in the current communication environment, a reflexive and conscious narrative identity based on one’s own visual archives is required. By approaching images as an everyday language, I will develop two axes of research built on a semio-rhetorical perspective: 1) I will study, by means of big data computer science methods, the heterogeneous and complex European visual cultures to be found on social media: the ethnic and physical variety of people and places, and the most used configurations and themes. 2) I will build another, more complex set of visual corpora, that of found footage videos belonging to the fiction, information, and ludic macro-genres. These corpora will serve as an experimental field: the narration strategies built upon the reuse of visual archives will be adapted to identity narrations on social networks. The resulting repertory of rhetorical strategies will aim to exploit the positive diversity embedded in European Union identity, as stated in the official motto “United in Diversity.”

Mots clés : semiotics, rhetoric, social network, identity, images, archive

Participants :
- University of Liège (Belgique) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 166320.0 €
Projet TRAPRODIG (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2015)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : CLOSED

The aim of the TRAPRODIG project is to analyse cultural and literary trauma processing in the framework of digital memory studies, particularly in relation to the similarities and differences of collective trauma processing and trauma literature in modern democracies and dictatorships; with a special trans-cultural focus on the case of Hungary as a post-socialist country with unresolved twentieth century collective traumas and on life narratives of Hungarian migrants in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom. The interdisciplinary scientific goal of the project is to introduce the concept of “digital (cultural and literary) trauma processing” and develop the scientific field of “digital trauma studies” at the intersection of digital memory studies and cultural trauma studies; based on the outcomes of the two way knowledge transfer in the training-through research of the applicant, who is an expert on literary and cultural trauma studies, at the leading research centre of cultural and digital memory studies at the University of Amsterdam. The TRAPRODIG project is of clear relevance to the Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions programme as it will contribute to a better understanding of the link of current cultural developments to the collective traumas of the past in post-socialist countries; it draws attention to the voices of contemporary migrants within the European cultural framework; and it will also add significantly to the mapping of trauma literature and life narratives in Europe by analysing how the 21st century digital environment influences both personal and collective trauma processing in local, national and trans-national communities within Europe.

Mots clés : cultural and literary trauma studies, digital memory studies, migration studies, post soviet studies, social media studies

Participants :
- University of Amsterdam (Pays-Bas) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 177598.8 €
Projet WABP (Horizon 2020, appel à projets 2020)
Action : Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
Panel : Social Sciences and Humanities
Statut du projet : SIGNED

The aim of the WABP project is to analyse the work of sign language interpreters-performers who translate a hearing-centric music world into a visual one by transposing songs and live concerts into sign language. WABP seeks to identify ways in which interpreters-performers embody nonverbal elements of a text (rhythm, timbre, etc.), which I call “patterns of performativity”. The findings of the project will inform the training of future sign language interpreters who wish to specialise in this specific translation practice, thus contributing to an increased participation of the D/deaf and hard-of-hearing, one of the most under-served minorities, in the arts. While in audio-visual translation Accessibility is a prolific area of research, no Translation Studies scholar has yet analysed sign language interpreting in music, both as an actual performance and as a translation practice, to allow D/deaf and hard-of-hearing to experience the multiplicity of the semiotic signs in songs and music performance events. WABP addresses this gap in the scholarship, and will thus contribute to the advancement of Translation Studies. Working across disciplines, I will identify patterns of performativity which enable interpreters-performers to translate music into an entirely visual art form fully accessible to the D/deaf and hard-of-hearing people, in the awareness that it takes a hearing Theatre Translation scholar to identify patterns of performativity, but only the D/deaf community can decide if those patterns meet their needs in relation to entertainment activities such as music and concert attendance. WABP will be therefore carried out in collaboration with the local D/deaf community to ensure that the project findings will increase Translation Studies scholars' understanding of what constitutes equal access to and full enjoyment of music and music performance events for the D/deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

Mots clés : translation studies, stage translation, sign language interpreting, performance studies, performativity, accessibility, music and live concerts

Participants :
- Cardiff University (Royaume-Uni) — Coordinator, beneficiary, Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire, subvention : 224933.76 €