Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CARPE (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499010.0 €

The concepts of Randomness and Expansion are pervasive throughout Mathematics and its applications to many areas of Science and Engineering. The mathematical study of Expansion can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and of Probability to the analysis (e.g. by Fermat and Pascal) of games of chance. In the modern era, both concepts are influential in many areas of Mathematics (this proposal will emphasise Combinatorics and Probability, and also touch on Analysis, Geometry, Topology, Number Theory and Theoretical Computer Science). Within Science and Engineering, topics related to the mathematical problems covered in this proposal include Approximation Algorithms (Counting and Sampling), Statistical Physics (Magnetism, Lattice Gases, Polymer Models), Mathematical Biology (Epidemiology), Control Theory and Fluid Flow. My recent and ongoing research has generated several exciting new ideas and methods. The most recent of these, the Cluster Expansion Method (work with Matthew Jenssen), is a far-reaching program to apply a classical tool from Statistical Physics to developing methods for describing the typical structure of models such as random homomorphisms from a discrete torus. Another exciting recent technique, Global Hypercontractivity (work with Noam Lifshitz, Eoin Long and Dor Minzer), is a structural refinement of the classical hypercontractivity theorem; we will generalise many of its applications to Mathematics and Computer Science and give several new applications, e.g. in Extremal Combinatorics (via the Junta Method). I will also develop new Absorption techniques to answer constructive mathematical questions that seem beyond the reach of Randomised Algebraic Construction (a method I developed to solve Steiner's 1852 question on the Existence of Designs).

Mots-clés : random structures,isoperimetry,expansion,phase transitions,hypercontractivity,extremal combinatorics
Projet ERC : ToothPic (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Polytechnic University of Turin — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 139526.0 €

The continuously growing amount of photos posted and distributed over the Internet poses several important problems related to improper use of images, such as exploiting them for commercial purposes, re-posting others’ photos without consent or infringing copyright, posting photos containing unethical or illegal contents, and so forth. Camera identification, which refers to identifying which digital imaging sensor has shot a given picture, exploiting the fact that each sensor leaves a unique fingerprint in all pictures, is a key ingredient in the solution to the aforementioned problems. The ToothPic project aims at validating a breakthrough camera identification technology developed during ERC starting grant “CRISP”. This technology is based on a novel compressed fingerprint format and outperforms state-of-the art techniques by orders of magnitude in terms of storage requirements and identification speed. As a consequence, it enables the deployment of camera-identification services on an unprecedented scale, paving the way for application to popular image sharing and social media sites. The proof-of-concept will consist in a very high-speed implementation of the camera identification core functionality, which will be used to validate the capability of the proposed technology to handle scenarios involving 100+ millions of sensor fingerprints, in real time and at a low cost. A set of demo applications, including a public search engine, taking as input a camera fingerprint or a photo and returning a list of photos acquired by the same camera, will also be implemented in order to raise a broad public interest and attract industries and venture capitalists. Upon successful validation, a European start-up company named “ToothPic” will be created to commercialise the proposed technology.

Mots-clés : camera identification,social networks,large scale systems,compressed sensing
Projet ERC : AMPHIBIANS (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : University of St Andrews — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999524.0 €

The current trend in biophotonics is to try and replicate the same ease and precision that our hands, eyes and ears offer at the macroscopic level, e.g. to hold, observe, squeeze and pull, rotate, cut and probe biological specimens in microfluidic environments. The bidding to get closer and closer to the object of interest has prompted the development of extremely advanced manipulation techniques at scales comparable to that of the wavelength of light. However, the fact that the optical beam can only access the microfluidic chip from the narrow aperture of a microscopic objective limits the versatility of the photonic function that can be realized. With this project, the applicant proposes to introduce a new biophotonic platform based on the all optical manipulation of flexible photonic metasurfaces. These artificial two-dimensional materials have virtually arbitrary photonic responses and have an intrinsic exceptional mechanical stability. This cross-disciplinary project, bridging photonics, material sciences and biology, will enable the adoption of the most modern and advanced photonic designs in microfluidic environments, with transformative benefits for microscopy and biophotonic applications at the interface of molecular and cell biology.

Mots-clés : photonic metasurfaces,optical tweezers,microfluidics,biohphotonics
Projet ERC : TEMPDEP (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Exeter — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499997.5 €

The cycling of carbon between the biosphere and the atmosphere is mediated by its transformation and flux through ecosystems. Atmospheric CO2 is fixed by photosynthesis, exchanged between organisms via their interactions, and re-emitted to the atmosphere through the by-products of their metabolism (CO2). These metabolic processes are inherently temperature dependent, and consequently there is potential for elevated rates of respiration (CO2 production) in a warmer world to further accelerate global warming. However, large uncertainties about the magnitude of any response exist, owing to limited understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the temperature dependence of ecosystem metabolism. I approach this problem from a new perspective, by proposing that interactions between evolutionary processes, which influence the frequency and variance of metabolic traits within populations, and ecological interactions between populations, which shape the structure and dynamics of communities, constrain the overall temperature dependence of metabolic fluxes at the ecosystem-level. I will ask: How do differences in thermal responses and the nature of ecological interactions between species influence the temperature response of an ecosystem? What is the rate and magnitude of thermal adaptation? Does coevolution in a community affect thermal adaptation? How do differences in thermal responses and turnover in species composition affect the temperature dependence of ecosystems? I will answer these questions with an array of experiments that recombine microbes isolated from a long-term freshwater warming experiment (+4°C for 10 years) in communities in the laboratory. This project will break new ground in understanding how patterns and processes at the ecosystem-level emerge from the dynamics of populations and communities over ecological and evolutionary timescales. At the same time, it will contribute substantially to understanding carbon cycle responses to global warming.

Mots-clés : carbon cycle,ecosystems,metabolic theory,thermal biology
Projet ERC : CapBed (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : University of Minho — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499940.0 €

The demand for donated organs vastly outnumbers the supply, leading each year to the death of thousands of people and the suffering of millions more. Engineered tissues and organs following Tissue Engineering approaches are a possible solution to this problem. However, a prevascularization solution to irrigate complex engineered tissues and assure their survival after transplantation is currently elusive. In the human body, complex organs and tissues irrigation is achieved by a network of blood vessels termed capillary bed which suggests such a structure is needed in engineered tissues. Previous approaches to engineer capillary beds reached different levels of success but none yielded a fully functional one due to the inability in simultaneously addressing key elements such as correct angiogenic cell populations, a suitable matrix and dynamic conditions that mimic blood flow. CapBed aims at proposing a new technology to fabricate in vitro capillary beds that include a vascular axis that can be anastomosed with a patient circulation. Such capillary beds could be used as prime tools to prevascularize in vitro engineered tissues and provide fast perfusion of those after transplantation to a patient. Cutting edge techniques will be for the first time integrated in a disruptive approach to address the requirements listed above. Angiogenic cell sheets of human Adipose-derived Stromal Vascular fraction cells will provide the cell populations that integrate the capillaries and manage its intricate formation, as well as the collagen required to build the matrix that will hold the capillary beds. Innovative fabrication technologies such as 3D printing and laser photoablation will be used for the fabrication of the micropatterned matrix that will allow fluid flow through microfluidics. The resulting functional capillary beds can be used with virtually every tissue engineering strategy rendering the proposed strategy with massive economical, scientific and medical potential

Mots-clés : capillary bed,angiogenesis,3d printing,laser photoablation,cell sheet engineering,adipose derived stromal vascular fraction,microfluidics
Projet ERC : Desert Networks (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499844.0 €

The desert is a paradox: it is at the same time arid and rich in resources, a margin and an interface. Far from being a no man’s land, it is a social space of linked solidarities. The “Desert Networks” project aims to explore the reticular organisation of such a zone by focusing on the southern part of the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Located between the Nile and the Red Sea, it has always been a tantalizing region for Egypt and beyond. Its ancient remains are admirably preserved and ancient sources about and from the region itself are numerous. Yet, the history of its occupation and appropriation remains a static and compartmentalized one. Therefore, the ambition of the project is to cross disciplinary borders and achieve an epistemological break by working for the first time in and on the Eastern desert as a dynamic object, both from a long-term perspective (mid-second millennium BC - late third century AD), and by analysing the patterns and functions of the different networks that linked its various nodes using the connectivity theory that reshaped scholarly paradigms for the Mediterranean in the 2000s. As the head of the French Eastern Desert mission, the PI will co-ordinate a multidisciplinary team. For the first time, the project will gather all the data unearthed in the region over 300 years, as well as the expected data from the excavations conducted by the project, in a database linked with a GIS. A collaborative and online open access map of the Eastern Desert will be created and will serve for the spatial analyses and rendering of the real, economic and social networks in the area. These networks evolved over time and through a shifting geography, as people experienced different perceptions of space. By assessing all these facets and confronting the archaeological material and written evidence, our final objective is to write a new history of the Eastern Desert from Pharaonic to Roman times, focusing on its networks and evaluating their meaning.

Mots-clés : archaeology,ancient history,egypt,eastern desert,red sea,new kingdom,graeco roman period,communications networks,economic networks,social networks,greek papyrology,pottery
Projet ERC : COSMOS (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2124965.0 €

The desire to “freely suspend the constituents of matter” in order to study their behaviour can be traced back over 200 years to Lichtenberg’s diaries. From radio-frequency ion traps to optical tweezing of colloidal particles, existing methods to trap matter in free space or solution rely on the use of external fields that often strongly perturb the integrity of a macromolecule in solution. Recently, I invented the ‘electrostatic fluidic trap’, a “field-free” principle that supports stable, non-destructive confinement of single macromolecules in room temperature fluids, representing a paradigm shift in a nearly century-old field. The spatio-temporal dynamics of a single electrostatically trapped molecule reveals fundamental information on its properties, e.g., size and electrical charge. The charge of a macromolecule is in turn a strong function of its 3D conformation - the molecular basis of biological function. I now aim to develop a new platform to study 3D macromolecular structure and temporal conformation by measuring the electrical charge of a single trapped molecule in real time, using both optical microscopy and electrical detection. Beyond the conformational dynamics of a single molecule, we will also examine interactions between two or more molecules, and the detection of minute structural differences between closely related molecular isoforms. We will further develop a novel approach to electrical transport measurements on single molecules aimed at generating for the first time a catalog of ‘electrical signatures’ for biomolecules in solution. The ability to experimentally link electrical charge and molecular structure will not only open up a new physical dimension in our understanding of macromolecules, but also advance the development of ultrasensitive, high-throughput molecular sensors for biomedical detection and analytics, potentially enabling an optical or electrical “single-snapshot” read-out of the proteome or transcriptome of a single cell.

Mots-clés : single molecule trapping,nanoscale electrostatics,molecular electrometry
Projet ERC : QBH Structure (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CEA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2462659.0 €

The detection of black-hole mergers in 2015 was a spectacular confirmation of General Relativity (GR). Yet, it is also in black holes that the fundamental conflict between GR and quantum mechanics (QM) is most acute. Black holes are known to have a vast entropy. Consistency with QM requires that the microstates giving rise to this entropy must be accessible at the horizon scale. However, GR coupled to field theory is incapable of supporting this horizon-scale microstructure! My work has shown that Microstate Geometries (MG’s), based in string theory and higher-dimensional field theory, have all the essential elements for supporting and encoding microstate data: MG’s are smooth, horizonless solutions in string theory that are identical to black holes on large scales but differ radically from the black holes of GR at the horizon scale. I propose to launch a new, extensive study of the MG paradigm, focussing on the, as yet, unexplored dynamics of the microstructure in MG’s: (i) How infalling matter is absorbed and diffused into excitations of MG’s; (ii) How the excitations of MG’s, and the MG’s themselves, decay into some form of Hawking radiation that carries the microstructure data to infinity, thereby preserving quantum unitarity; (iii) How the large-scale, collective dynamics of microstructure interacts with matter in the horizon region and, particularly, how microstructure dynamics influences accretion disks and black-hole mergers. Progress will be achieved by analyzing the energy transfer between infalling probes and MG’s, computing the resulting excitations of the MG and the drag on infalling objects. The results will be re-expressed in a hydrodynamic form that can be applied to simulations of astrophysical black holes. This proposal will thus solve the information paradox by providing a microscopic description of black-hole entropy at the horizon scale and this should lead to macroscopic, measurable signatures of the horizon-scale microstructure.

Mots-clés : string theory,black hole information paradox
Projet ERC : LUDEME (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Maastricht University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1997244.0 €

The development of games goes hand in hand with the development of human culture. Games offer a rich window of insight into our cultural past, but early examples were rarely documented and our understanding of them is incomplete. While there has been considerable historical research into games and their use as tools of cultural analysis, much is based on the interpretation of partial evidence with little mathematical analysis. This project will use modern computational techniques to help fill these gaps in our knowledge empirically. I will represent games as structured sets of ludemes (units of game-related information), which will allow the full range of traditional strategy games to be modelled in a single software system for the first time. This system will not only model and play games, but will evaluate reconstructions for quality and authenticity, and automatically improve them where possible. This will lay the foundations for a new field of study called digital archaeoludology, which will involve addressing technical challenges that could yield significant benefits in their own right, particularly in artificial intelligence. The ludemic model reveals innate mathematical relationships between games, allowing phylogenetic analysis. This provides a mechanism for creating a family tree/network of traditional games, which could reveal missing links and allow ancestral state reconstruction to shed light on the gaps in our partial knowledge. Locating ludemes culturally provides a mechanism for creating interactive maps that chart the transmission of mathematical ideas across cultures through play. This project seeks to bridge the gap between historical and computational studies of games, to provide greater insight into our understanding of them as cultural artefacts, and to pioneer new tools and techniques for their continued analysis. The aim is to restore and preserve our intangible cultural heritage (of game playing) through the tangible evidence available.

Mots-clés : general game playing,cultural mapping of traditional and ancient games,strategy learning,transfer and explanation
Projet ERC : FireBar-Concept (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Centrale Lille Institut — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : CLI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 207050.0 €

The development of science and technology provides the availability of sophisticated products but concurrently, increases the use of combustible materials, in particular organic materials. Those materials are easily flammable and must be flame retarded to make them safer. In case of fire, people must be protected by materials confining and stopping fire. It is one of the goals of the FireBar-Concept project to design materials and assembly of materials exhibiting low flammability, protecting substrates and limiting fire spread. The objective of FireBar-Concept is to make a fire barrier formed at the right time, at the right location and reacting accordingly against thermal constraint (fire scenario). This fire barrier can be developed in several ways according to the chemical nature of the material and/or of its formulation: - Heat barrier formed by inherently flame retarded materials (e.g. mineral fibers, ceramic …) and exhibiting low thermal conductivity (note the assembly of those materials can also provide low thermal conductivity controlling porosity and its distribution) - Evolution of reactive radicals poisoning the flame and forming a protective ‘umbrella’ avoiding the combustion of the material - Additives promoting charring of the materials and forming an expanding carbonaceous protective coating or barrier (intumescence) - Additives forming a physical barrier limiting mass transfer of the degradation products to the flame The FireBar-Concept project is multidisciplinary and it requires expertise in material science, chemical engineering, chemistry, thermal science and physics. The approach is to make 5 actions linked together by transverse developments (3) according to this scheme: (i) fundamentals of fire barrier, (ii) multi-material and combination of concepts, (iii) modeling and numerical simulation, (iv) design and development of experimental protocols and (v) optimization of the systems.

Mots-clés : reaction to fire,resistance to fire,flame retardancy