Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : FUNCOMP (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : University of Oulu — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Oulu
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Electroceramics are key materials in all electronics. These ceramic components are used for example in sensing of force, acceleration, and humidity, in energy harvesting, and in frequency tuning of antennas and filters. They are also used for miniaturization and packaging of electronics systems and devices. The main disadvantage of electroceramics is that the fabrication requires relatively high investments and it consumes significant amount of energy due to high sintering temperatures (850-2000 oC). This also makes limitations in contacting and an integration with other materials. However, in the last few years realization of electroceramic components with room temperature fabrication (RTF) has become possible. Our ERC project “Printed Electroceramics with Ultimate Compositions” led to extremely interesting discoveries and opens up a totally new horizons to fabricate functional composites at room temperature. The new finding to use densification process of ceramics at room temperature and post-processing at very low (120 °C) temperature opened a utilization pathway for successful multimaterial system integration.We demonstrated that RTF is feasible for realization e.g. dielectrics based on Li2MoO4 ceramics and its composites while new endeavors in integration will be done in this proposed PoC project. Three main application areas, namely wireless 5G, IoT and automotive are all eagerly looking for new approaches for integration, packaging and sensing. In this Proof-of-Concept we will focus on utilization steps to evaluate RTF composite technology in e.g. accelerometer and antenna components so that the first industrially applicable prototypes and samples can be manufactured and demonstrated.

Mots-clés : electroceramics,ultra low temperature ceramics,functional materials,sensors,energy harvesters,room temperature densification
Projet ERC : PhenomeNal (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : Université de Strasbourg — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNISTRA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999882.0 €

Elucidating the causes of the awesome phenotypic diversity observed in natural populations is a major challenge in biology. It is now clear that the understanding of traits is not only hampered by non-heritable factors such as the environment and epigenetic variation, but also confounded by the lack of complete knowledge concerning the genetic components of traits. More than a century after the rediscovery of Mendel’s law, the genetic architecture of traits still resists generalization. First, this is increasingly evident as shown by recent genome-wide association studies, where identified causal loci explained relatively little of the heritability of most complex traits, leading to the “missing heritability”. Second, we also have recently shown that monogenic mutations can display a significant, variable and continuous phenotypic expression, called expressivity, across different genetic backgrounds. Altogether, these observations clearly indicate that a better understanding of the genetic architecture of traits requires a deeper knowledge of the variability of the phenotypic effect of genetic variants across an entire population. In the frame of the Phenome'N'al project, I plan to marry classical but high-throughput genetic methods with new approaches based on population genomics to connect the phenotypic and allelic landscape by taking advantage of the powerful budding yeast model system. With our recent completion of the whole genome resequencing of over 1,011 natural isolates (http://1002genomes.u-strasbg.fr/), plus the accompanying phenotyping efforts, we have currently one of the best understanding of the natural genetic and phenotypic diversity of any eukaryote model system to date. These datasets will lay the foundation of Phenome'N'al, which aims to dissect the inheritance, expressivity and genetic interactions hidden behind the phenotypic landscape of an entire natural population.

Mots-clés : genotype phenotype,genome evolution,genetic diversity,evolution,yeast
Projet ERC : DeepEmbryo (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
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 : 1957751.0 €

Embryogenesis is archetypal of a self-organized process, where the emergence of a complex structure stems from the interaction of its elementary parts. Progress in imaging and molecular genetics allow us to delve into embryos at unprecedented spatiotemporal resolutions, but extracting biophysical information from this complex multidimensional data is a highly technical challenge. As a result the principles of multicellular self-organization remain far from understood. DeepEmbryo proposes to fill this gap by pioneering the use of deep learning to reverse-engineer early embryo development directly from high-resolution 3D microscopy movies. Focusing on four animal groups (mammals, ascidians, nematodes and annelids), the project will combine physical modeling and machine learning to tackle three fundamental questions from a unique transversal perspective: Q1 What are the forces shaping early embryos? Using convolutional neural networks, I will develop an automated method to directly infer cell forces from membrane-labeled images of embryos. Q2 How do cells coordinate forces, division and signaling? Regarding cells as dynamical systems, I will model them with minimal neural networks and design a multi-agent embryo model able to learn by reinforcement the fundamental feedback controls between mechanics and fate. Q3 What principles ensure developmental robustness? Using deep generative models, I will infer intra-specie developmental variability to identify robust developmental traits and mechanisms. Using dropout techniques as virtual analog to genetic knockout, I will produce experimentally testable new predictions, refining my inaugural virtual embryos. Pioneering a new field at the frontier of developmental biology, artificial intelligence and physics, DeepEmbryo will uncover the fundamental engineering principles of early embryogenesis, with far-reaching implications in multi-agent modeling, evolutionary biology, physical inference and tissue engineering.

Mots-clés : early embryogenesis,deep learning,agent based modeling,multicellular self organization,reverse engineering,morphogenesis,biological physics,physical inference,image analysis
Projet ERC : CAESAR (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : University of Twente — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Emerging technologies, like self-driving cars, drones, and the Internet-of-Things must not impose threats to people, neither due to accidental failures (safety), nor due to malicious attacks (security). As historically separated fields, safety and security are often analyzed in isolation. They are, however, heavily intertwined: measures that increase safety often decrease security and vice versa. Also, security vulnerabilities often cause safety hazards, e.g. in autonomous cars. Therefore, for effective decision-making, safety and security must be considered in combination. The CAESAR project will develop an effective framework for the joint analysis of safety and security risks. The successful integration of safety and security faces three challenges: 1. The complex interaction between safety and security, mapping how vulnerabilities and failures propagate through a system and lead to disruptions. 2. The lack of efficient algorithms to compute system-level risk metrics, such as the likelihood and expected damage of disruptions. Such metrics are pivotal to prioritize risks and mitigate them via appropriate countermeasures. 3. The lack of proper risk quantification methods. Numbers are crucial to devise cost-effective countermeasures. Yet, objective numbers on safety and (especially) security risks are notoriously hard to obtain. The CAESAR project will address these challenges by novel combinations of mathematical game theory, stochastic model checking and the Bayesian, fuzzy, and Dempster-Schafer frameworks for uncertainty reasoning. Key outcomes: • An effective framework for joint safety-security analysis • Scalable algorithms and diagnosis methods to compute safety-security risk metrics • Stochastic model checking in the presence of uncertainty CAESAR will not only yield breakthroughs in safety-security analysis, but also for quantitative analyses in other domains. It will make decision making on safety-security easier, more systematic, and transparent.

Mots-clés : stochastic model checking,safety and security engineering
Projet ERC : EMPORIGIN (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Durham University — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499829.0 €

Empathy – sharing and understanding others’ emotions and thoughts – is a defining feature of what it means to be human. However, we lack knowledge about the origins of empathy and to what extent its sub-components reflect species and cultural universals. Studying infants and great apes enables us to identify the developmental and evolutionary origins of empathy and the extent of its human uniqueness. Until now, it has largely been assumed that infants and great apes lack the capacity for empathy. However, this claim may reflect a lack of adequate methodologies and research attention, leaving infant and great ape empathy underestimated. Now, combining novel techniques to investigate empathy comparatively (thermal-imaging, pupillometry and eye-tracking) with longitudinal observations and innovative experiments, EMPORIGIN will overcome this issue to provide the first comparative investigation of empathy development in humans and bonobos, our closest living relatives. Rich datasets on bonobo (wild and semi-captive) infant development and caregiver interactions will be compared to those from human infants in two small-scale, traditional societies – Vanuatu and Samoa. Both societies show distributed-caregiving but vary in societal structure and emotional expressivity. Using a cross-species and cross-cultural approach, EMPORIGIN will deliver step-change insights into empathy development that go far beyond the State-of-the-Art. We will test the hypothesis that humans and bonobos share a core capacity for empathy, but humans diverge in a greater motivation to ameliorate others’ emotional states and a capacity for reciprocal emotional exchange. These capacities could lead to a cascade of human-unique forms of sharing and co-operation. Combining approaches across biology, psychology, ethology and anthropology, EMPORIGIN will advance our understanding of the origins of empathy, one of our most remarkable capacities, and challenge current perspectives about its human uniqueness.

Mots-clés : empathy,great ape,bonobo,infant,development
Projet ERC : TIMBER (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Copenhagen — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCPH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1472199.0 €

Empirical evidence for the history of the exploitation of the timber resource in Northern Europe is stored in the material record. Archaeological finds, art-historical objects and built heritage have provided us with an extensive dataset of precisely dated wood from heritage contexts. This material is the key to details about the usage, condition and availability of the timber resource and details of trade in timber, including the maritime timber trade, from c. AD 1100 to 1700. Tree-ring studies provide not only the precise felling date for the trees used, but also allow the identification of the tree’s region of origin. However, there are gaps in the material evidence, and other analysis techniques will be explored to supply answers where the tree-ring evidence falls short. Through study of archival material (such as merchant-books and letters, customs rolls, legal and administrative records), along with targeted analysis of historical timber, the history and dendro-archaeology will be combined to study resource availability, ownership, logistics, economics, market mechanisms and politics of trade in timber as a bulk building material. Using both tried and trusted methods that I have refined, incorporating a holistic approach, and developing a range of innovative new procedures including my recent break-through in non-invasive analysis methods, key archaeological structures will be examined. These key constructions are spread throughout the period under examination and each represent a different piece of the timber resource and timber trade puzzle, either temporally or geographically. These specific cases will make it possible for me to investigate specific, but contrasting questions on the regionality, chronology and geography of the maritime timber trade in Northern Europe, over a period of six centuries. Combining the material and historic records and applying a range of analysis techniques this project will transform our understanding of the past timber trade.

Mots-clés : resource exploitation,material analysis,provenance,precise chronology
Projet ERC : QUATERMAIN (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : University of Bristol — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149918.0 €

Enantiopure quaternary amino acids, carrying two carbon-based substituents at the α carbon, are one of the most important groups of modified α amino acids, of great commercial value in the development of new pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. Certain of these quaternary amino acids are readily available by stereoselective α alkylation of available amino acids, but not those functionalized by the addition of α-aryl groups. In this project, we propose to develop an industrially scalable, practical method for the synthesis of α-arylated quaternary amino acids in enantiomerically pure form by streamlining, optimization and scale-up of a reaction we discovered while working on the synthesis of quaternary amino acids as conformational controllers within an ERC-funded Advanced Grant. The method is operationally simple and employs only inexpensive commodity chemicals as precursors. It uses no chiral auxiliary or catalyst, and exploits both structure and stereochemistry of the starting amino acid to make the quaternary amino acids in enantiomerically pure form. It avoid the use of transition metals, freeing the method from the potential problems associated with their toxicity, cost and volatility of supply. The nearest competitive methods are either limited in scope to electron-deficient aryl rings, or they employ toxic and expensive transition metal catalysts. Interest in the method has been garnered from the fine chemical, pharmaceutical and agrochemical industry, but further work on scale-up and practical issues are needed for the technology to become industry-ready. In parallel with this main thrust of the project, we will carry out preliminary work on related chemistry, developing a new, simple route to analogues of arogenate into a practical method for the synthesis of a new agrochemical targets of potentially very great commercial interest. The ready availability of these compounds will offer significant potential for future agrochemical innovation.

Mots-clés : amino acid,peptide,synthesis,quaternary,aromatic,chemistry,agrochemical,pharmaceutical,medicinal,arogenate,biosynthesis,tyrosine
Projet ERC : CHAOS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2007500.0 €

Enantioselective Brønsted acid organocatalysis has the potential to revolutionize asymmetric synthesis. However, the commonly used chiral phosphoric acid catalysts are typically limited to certain, fairly reactive substrate classes such as imines. Recently, more active and stereoselective catalysts have been introduced, which rely on acidic N–H bonds, and which have significantly widened the scope of suitable substrates. Despite the considerable success of these catalysts, however, several important and highly attractive substrate classes still remain out of reach. The applicant’s group has now identified C–H acids as novel and highly promising candidates to tackle these long standing challenges. Here, a research program with three major goals is proposed: 1) broadly conceived synthetic studies will be undertaken, which are expected to give access to C–H acids with a wide range of acidity and steric confinement. 2) These C–H acids will be applied to address one of the most general limitations currently encountered in organocatalysis: The enantioselective conversion of small and unbiased substrates. 3) The developed C–H acids, which are expected to enable unprecedented acidities and catalytic activities, will be employed in the activation of increasingly less reactive electrophiles, for example aliphatic aldehydes but also esters and olefins, for which enantioselective organocatalytic reactions are currently very limited or even unknown. Overall, this research program will aim at the design, synthesis and application of C–H acids as platform for solving several long standing challenges in asymmetric organocatalysis. The introduction of C–H acids for organic synthesis is expected to enrich the toolbox of synthetic chemists in both academic and industrial laboratories.

Mots-clés : organocatalysis,asymmetric counteranion directed catalysis,enantioselective catalysis
Projet ERC : CELL-in-CELL (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Exeter — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 92212.24 €

Endosymbiosis is a key phenomenon that has played a critical role in shaping biological diversity, driving gene transfer and generating cellular complexity. During the process of endosymbiosis, one cell is integrated within another to become a critical component of the recipient, changing its characteristics and allowing it to chart a distinct evolutionary trajectory. Endosymbiosis was fundamentally important to the origin and evolution of eukaryotic cellular complexity, because an endosymbiotic event roots the diversification of all known eukaryotes and endosymbiosis has continually driven the diversification of huge sections of the eukaryotic tree of life. Little is known about how nascent endosymbioses are established or how they go on to form novel cellular compartments known as endosymbiotic organelles. Paramecium bursaria is a single celled protist that harbours multiple green algae within to form a phototrophic endosymbiosis. This relationship is nascent as the partners can be separated, grown separately, and the endosymbiosis reinitiated. This project will identify, for the first time, the gene functions that enable one cell to incubate another within to form a stable endosymbiotic interaction. To identify and explore which host genes control endosymbiosis in P. bursaria we have developed RNAi silencing technology. In the proposed project we will conduct genome sequencing, followed by a large-scale RNAi knockdown screening experiment, to identify host genes that when silenced perturb the endosymbiont population. Having identified candidate genes, we will investigate the localisation and function of the host encoded proteins. This project will significantly change our current understanding of the evolutionary phenomenon of endosymbiosis by identifying the cellular adaptations that drive these interactions, advancing our understanding of how these important moments in evolution occur and how core cellular systems can diversify in function.

Mots-clés : endosymbiosis,cell evolution,rna interference,organelle,algae
Projet ERC : CELL-in-CELL (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2397385.76 €

Endosymbiosis is a key phenomenon that has played a critical role in shaping biological diversity, driving gene transfer and generating cellular complexity. During the process of endosymbiosis, one cell is integrated within another to become a critical component of the recipient, changing its characteristics and allowing it to chart a distinct evolutionary trajectory. Endosymbiosis was fundamentally important to the origin and evolution of eukaryotic cellular complexity, because an endosymbiotic event roots the diversification of all known eukaryotes and endosymbiosis has continually driven the diversification of huge sections of the eukaryotic tree of life. Little is known about how nascent endosymbioses are established or how they go on to form novel cellular compartments known as endosymbiotic organelles. Paramecium bursaria is a single celled protist that harbours multiple green algae within to form a phototrophic endosymbiosis. This relationship is nascent as the partners can be separated, grown separately, and the endosymbiosis reinitiated. This project will identify, for the first time, the gene functions that enable one cell to incubate another within to form a stable endosymbiotic interaction. To identify and explore which host genes control endosymbiosis in P. bursaria we have developed RNAi silencing technology. In the proposed project we will conduct genome sequencing, followed by a large-scale RNAi knockdown screening experiment, to identify host genes that when silenced perturb the endosymbiont population. Having identified candidate genes, we will investigate the localisation and function of the host encoded proteins. This project will significantly change our current understanding of the evolutionary phenomenon of endosymbiosis by identifying the cellular adaptations that drive these interactions, advancing our understanding of how these important moments in evolution occur and how core cellular systems can diversify in function.

Mots-clés : endosymbiosis,cell evolution,rna interference,organelle,algae