Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : EXCITATOR (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 66345.0 €

The overall objective of EXCITATOR is to transfer the methods developed in the F-TRACT ERC project (f-tract.eu) around the concept of active probing of brain states with the industrialization goal to make them applicable for fast drug discovery in animal models. The industrialization process will be prepared in collaboration with Synapcell SAS, a biotechnology company that provides the biopharmaceutical industry with innovative drug discovery programs. EXCITATOR has one scientific objective (O), which requires achieving one proof-of-concept (PoC): • O – Cortical excitability as a read-out for drug screening. Electrodes will be inserted in the cortex and deep brain structures of rodents in control conditions. Under the acute challenge of drugs injected in animals, the changes of oscillatory power and cortical excitability as quantified in responses to micro-stimulations will be monitored. Our main scientific goal is to demonstrate that intracranial EEG (iEEG) responses to micro-stimulations will be more sensitive than standard iEEG power analysis to quantify the effects of drugs. • PoC – Automatised active probing platform for drug screening: For an industrial use, we will need to automatize the iEEG data recording and processing in animal models. In practice, we will transfer the most relevant functionalities of the FTRACT technology that relies on a human database with automatic data processing. Experimentally, some constraints related to small animals will need to be solved, like defining electrode configurations that maximize neural responses and minimize stimulation artefacts. Eventually, we aim at delivering an innovative and fully integrated drug screening platform from iEEG responses to micro-stimulations.

Mots-clés : neurostimulation,signal processing,electrophysiology,animal models,drug testing,brain
Projet ERC : ICLUb (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: Biological Mechanisms, Structures and Functions
Entité participante : University of Glasgow — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1771592.59 €

The overall objective of this proposal is to understand, on an atomic level, the mechanism of activation and regulation of the Fanconi Anemia (FA) DNA repair pathway. Homozygous mutations in the FA pathway lead to Fanconi Anemia, a devastating childhood genome instability disorder, typified by bone marrow failure and a high predisposition to cancers. The FA pathway is required for the repair of DNA interstrand crosslinks (ICLs), the hallmark of many cancers and FA. ICL repair is poorly understood on a biophysical and mechanistic level. The FA pathway is regulated by ubiquitin, in a cycle of monoubiquitination and deubiquitination of FANCD2. Despite considerable advances in our understanding of the genetics of the pathway, there is strikingly little known on a mechanistic and chemical level concerning how the ubiquitin signal is assembled, recognised and disassembled. We will define, on an atomic level, the site-specific monoubiquitination and deubiquitination cycle of FANCD2 in its entirety. We will determine the mechanism of FANCD2 monoubiquitination, identify and characterise currently unknown readers of the monoubiquitin signal, define the role of the core complex in the modification of FANCD2, and the requirements for removal of the signal. To tackle this ambitious work we will determine the atomic level three-dimensional structure of key complexes in the modification cycle, and develop a novel method for producing large quantities of stably modified FANCD2. The results of our work will represent a major breakthrough in our knowledge and understanding of the regulation of a critical DNA repair process, will provide a model for understanding mechanisms of monoubiquitination, and will open up both therapeutic potential and new pathways for research into the cause and cure of FA, cancers, and aldehyde-induced liver or bone marrow failure.

Mots-clés : ubiquitin,posttranslational modification,fanconi anemia
Projet ERC : LIQUISWITCH (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting 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 : 1492828.0 €

The overall vision of the project is to demonstrate methods for switching friction and adhesion – such as “switch off friction” or “switch on adhesion” – reversibly and with remote control. My hypothesis is that fluids confined to nanofilms between solid objects can be designed to dramatically alter their surface properties under the influence of applied fields, and so can be used to switch friction, lubrication or adhesion in a controlled and reversible way. The emphasis of the project is on creating well-defined model experiments, with high resolution in both film thickness and interaction forces, in order to reach a fundamental understanding of the new concepts and mechanisms involved. The novelty lies in both the newly-proposed mechanisms of switching friction and adhesion interactions, and the new instrumentation constructed to detect and analyse the forces. The new methodologies necessary for these pioneering experiments involve two new versions of a Surface Force Balance (SFB) providing molecular-resolution (0.1nm) control and measurement of interfacial liquid films, controlled application of electric and magnetic fields, and ultra-sensitive measurement of friction and adhesion. Notably, one of these new instruments will have macroscopic graphene electrodes for confinement of liquid nanofilms (0 – 100nm) between atomically smooth electrodes. The wide range of ‘switchable’ liquids studied will include polyelectrolytes, magnetic fluids, ionic liquids and self-assembled systems. Ultimately, this project will change the way we think about surface interactions into something we can ‘switch and control’.

Mots-clés : nanotribology,lubrication,surface forces,nano friction,adhesion,friction
Projet ERC : L2STAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : BCBL
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 800000.0 €

The overarching goal of L2STAT is to understand L2 literacy acquisition by bringing together, for the first time, recent advances in the neurobiology of statistical learning (SL), a detailed statistical characterization of the world’s writing systems, and neurally-plausible general principles of learning, representation, and processing. L2STAT aims to provide a new theoretical framework that considers L2 learning and SL a two-way street: SL, on the one hand, tunes learners to the regularities of a new linguistic environment, and on the other hand, L2 environment shapes learners’ sensitivity to its specific types of statistical properties. The project will focus on the assimilation of reading skills in four novel linguistic environments, and investigate how exposure to their distinct writing systems shape, in turn, SL. L2STAT is an interdisciplinary project that launches in parallel five mutually informative research axes: 1) we employ advanced methods from computational linguistics and machine learning to precisely characterize the statistics of four highly contrasting writing systems (English, Spanish, Hebrew, Chinese). 2) We study the learning that results from biologically-inspired computational models that are exposed to these statistics, to generate a priori predictions regarding what statistical properties can (or cannot) be learned, and how neural mechanisms constrain the representations learned during L2 literacy acquisition. 3) We develop psychometrically reliable behavioral tests of individuals’ capacities to extract regularities in the visual and auditory modalities. 4) We use state of the art neuroimaging techniques including EEG, MEG, fMRI to probe the neurobiological underpinning for detecting regularities in the visual and auditory modalities. 5) We conduct behavioral experimentation in four sites (Israel, Spain, Taiwan to track literacy acquisition longitudinally in the four different languages.

Mots-clés : statistical learning,l2 literacy acquisition,writing systems
Projet ERC : CIRCOMMUNICATION (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: Biological Mechanisms, Structures and Functions
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999945.0 €

The overarching objective of this interdisciplinary project is to elucidate mechanisms through which billions of individual clocks in the body communicate with each other and tick in harmony. The mammalian circadian timing system consists of a master clock in the brain and subsidiary oscillators in almost every cell of the body. Since these clocks anticipate environmental changes and function together to orchestrate daily physiology and behavior their temporal synchronization is critical. Our recent finding that oxygen serves as a resetting cue for circadian clocks points towards the unprecedented involvement of blood gases as time signals. We will apply cutting edge continuous physiological measurements in freely moving animals, alongside biochemical/molecular biology approaches and advanced cell culture setup to determine the molecular role of oxygen, carbon dioxide and pH in circadian clock communication and function. The intricate nature of the mammalian circadian system demands the presence of communication mechanisms between clocks throughout the body at multiple levels. While previous studies primarily addressed the role of the master clock in resetting peripheral clocks, our knowledge regarding the communication among clocks between and within peripheral organs is rudimentary. We will reconstruct the mammalian circadian system from the bottom up, sequentially restoring clocks in peripheral tissues of a non-rhythmic animal to (i) obtain a system-view of the peripheral circadian communication network; and (ii) study novel tissue-derived circadian communication mechanisms. This integrative proposal addresses fundamental aspects of circadian biology. It is expected to unravel the circadian communication network and shed light on how billions of clocks in the body function in unison. Its impact extends beyond circadian rhythms and bears great potential for research on communication between cells/tissues in various fields of biology.

Mots-clés : circadian clocks,metabolism,oxygen,entrainment
Projet ERC : PlasticityOfMind (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : VU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999998.0 €

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a paradigm shift in cognitive neuroscience: from the traditional view of the brain as an information-processing organ to conceptions of the brain as an information-generating system, which continuously tests competing hypotheses about the world. This perspective, which resonates with action-oriented views of perception and cognition, assigns crucial importance to action: because the brain lacks direct access to the outside world, predictions can only be tested by generating information through action. Thereby, perception is strongly shaped by predictions about the sensory outcomes of actions, and may even constitutively rest on action. Goal-directed cognitive processes are similarly understood as internal predictive activity serving information generation, but covertly and over longer time scales (they are mental actions). Yet, the vast majority of human cognitive neuroscience studies has so far left the observer in a passive state, simply correlating externally-triggered neural activity to external task manipulations, and thus leaving it unclear how self-generated (mental) actions influence how we learn to perceive the world around us at the neural level. This ERC project aims to address this gap in knowledge using an innovative combination of psychophysics, neuroimaging, virtual reality, and modelling in healthy individuals, Huntington patients, and expert meditators. The research program comprises four projects, investigating 1) how we learn to predict the sensory outcomes of our actions and how this shapes perception; 2) the hypothesis that perception constitutively rests on action; 3) the plasticity of the higher-order cognitive operations that comprise mental actions; and 4) the control that people may exert over such mental actions. This promises to provide an integrative framework for understanding the neural mechanisms and plasticity of action-oriented perception and cognition, with clear clinical implications.
Projet ERC : CLOUDMAP (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : University of Luxembourg — Pays : Luxembourg — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2491266.0 €

The past thirty years have seen cryptography move from arcane to commonplace: Internet, mobile phones, banking system, etc. Homomorphic cryptography now offers the tantalizing goal of being able to process sensitive information in encrypted form, without needing to compromise on the privacy and security of the citizens and organizations that provide the input data. More recently, cryptographic multilinear maps have revolutionized cryptography with the emergence of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), which in theory can been used to realize numerous advanced cryptographic functionalities that previously seemed beyond reach. However the security of multilinear maps is still poorly understood, and many iO schemes have been broken; moreover all constructions of iO are currently unpractical. The goal of the CLOUDMAP project is to make these advanced cryptographic tasks usable in practice, so that citizens do not have to compromise on the privacy and security of their input data. This goal can only be achieved by considering the mathematical foundations of these primitives, working "from first principles'', rather than focusing on premature optimizations. To achieve this goal, our first objective will be to better understand the security of the underlying primitives of multilinear maps and iO schemes. Our second objective will be to develop new approaches to significantly improve their efficiency. Our third objective will be to build applications of multilinear maps and iO that can be implemented in practice.

Mots-clés : fully homomorphic encryption,multilinear maps,obfuscation
Projet ERC : DefenseAgainstPhage (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

The perpetual arms race between bacteria and phage resulted in the evolution of efficient phage-resistance systems. Such systems, including restriction enzymes and CRISPR-Cas, have a major influence on the evolution of both bacteria and phage, and have also proven invaluable as molecular tools. We recently showed that the bacterial immune system is much richer than originally thought. We discovered the CBASS system (Cohen, Nature 2019), prokaryotic viperins (Bernheim, Nature 2020), and additional defense systems widespread in microbes (Doron, Science 2018). These discoveries relied on the observation that defense systems are organized in defense islands - areas in bacterial genomes where multiple defense systems are clustered together. Mining defense islands resulted in the discovery of new defense systems, but our preliminary results suggest that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that dozens of new defense systems remained undiscovered in microbial defense islands. In this project we will use new genomic approaches, together with analyses of massive genomic and metagenomic datasets, to systematically map the molecular capabilities encoded within the anti-phage “defensome”. The project combines computational genomics, synthetic biology, and deep genetic and biochemical experiments to discover, validate, and study the properties of new defense systems, as well as mechanisms used by phages to mitigate defense. Specific focus will be given to retrons, microbial elements that produce chimeric molecules where RNA and DNA are covalently attached. We discovered that retrons function in anti-phage defense, and plan to decipher the mechanism by which the RNA/DNA hybrid provides defense. Based on the enormous impact that antiviral systems had on modern molecular biology (e.g. RNAi, CRISPR-Cas), we envision that deciphering the mechanism of new systems could yield not only major discoveries on phage-bacteria interactions, but also new and exciting molecular tools.

Mots-clés : phage,bacteriophage,anti phage,defense systems,crispr cas,anti crispr,defense islands,abortive infection
Projet ERC : Sense of Commitment (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Warwick — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1290965.0 €

The phenomenon of commitment is a cornerstone of human social life. Commitments make individuals’ behavior predictable in the face of fluctuations in their desires and interests, thereby facilitating the planning and coordination of joint actions involving multiple agents. Moreover, commitments make people willing to perform actions that they would not otherwise perform. For example, an investor may be willing to purchase government bonds because a central banker has made a commitment to maintaining that country’s currency. In general, social objects and institutions such as jobs, money, government and marriage depend for their origin and stability upon the credibility of commitments. Despite the crucial importance of commitment for characteristically human forms of sociality, it is not well understood how people identify and assess the level of their own and others’ commitments. The SENSE OF COMMITMENT will develop a theoretical framework for research on commitment, and create a suite of experimental paradigms for testing predictions generated by the theoretical framework. By focusing on joint actions involving pairs of agents, it will illuminate the fundamental mechanisms underlying large-scale human social phenomena. The SENSE OF COMMITMENT will generate basic scientific knowledge that will be relevant to many disciplines in the social sciences, cognitive sciences, and humanities. The insights gained will create a new perspective for: 1) social robotics, by specifying factors that will be useful in designing robots (e.g. for senior citizens’ homes and rescue operations) that participate in commitments with humans; 2) research on pathological conditions such as borderline personality disorder, in which individuals find it difficult to commit to or to rely upon others; 3) identifying factors relevant in sustaining people’s commitment to beneficial long-term programs (skills training for workers, exercise or rehabilitation programs for patients, etc.).

Mots-clés : joint action,trust,commitment,social interaction,embodied cognition,social robotics
Projet ERC : EMODHEBREW (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Hebrew University of Jerusalem — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : HUJI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1037669.08 €

The pioneering enterprise I propose is the study of a particular type of linguistic discontinuity – language revival – inspired by the revival of Hebrew at the end of the 19th century. The historical and sociocultural dimensions the revival have been studied before, but not its linguistic dimensions. My main aim is to construct a model of the linguistic factors which have shaped the revival of Hebrew. I expect this model to provide clues for the understanding of the process of language revival in general. For a language to be revived, a new grammar must be created by its native speakers. I hypothesize that the new grammar is formed by some of the general principles which also govern other better known cases of linguistic discontinuity (creoles, mixed languages, emergent sign languages etc.). The model I will develop will lay the foundation for a new subfield within the study of discontinuity – the study of language revival. I will start with careful work of documenting the development of the grammar of Modern Hebrew, in particular its syntax, something which has not been done systematically before. One product of the project will be a linguistic application for the documentation and annotation of the novel syntactic constructions of Modern Hebrew, their sources in previous stages of Hebrew and in the languages with which Modern Hebrew was in contact at the time of the revival, and the development of these constructions since the beginning of the revival until the present time. The linguistic application will be made available on the web for other linguists to use and to contribute to. The institution of an expanding data-base of the syntactic innovations of Modern Hebrew which comprises both documentation/ annotation and theoretical modeling which could be applied to other languages makes this an extremely ambitious proposal with potentially wide-reaching ramifications for the revival and revitalization of the languages of ethno-linguistic minorities world wide.

Mots-clés : the issues are theoretical in the fields of historical syntax and contact linguistics,and do not require knowledge or expertise in hebrew  there are no examples in hebrew within the proposal