Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CIVILWARS (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Paris 1
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Each year, civil wars cause hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, ecological disruptions, regional instability. These conflicts encompass many players and their effects are felt not only at the regional level but also within Western societies (refugees, terrorism, sectarian tensions). Despite this, no systematic comparison of civil wars have been conducted using a qualitative method. Social scientists are struggling to understand these breakdowns of the social order, which are fertile from a theoretical perspective because they de-trivialize the social functioning. In civil war, the partial or total institutional collapse marks the end of the (imperfect) monopoly of the state with regards to violence and justice, challenges the social and ethnic hierarchies and also provokes fluctuation of the economic and social capital. Accordingly, we will address three questions. First, the sudden and non-anticipated reconfiguration of modes of accumulation and conversion of capitals and the relationship between social fields. Next, the formation of competing institutions by politico-military movements involved in the construction of an alternative political order. Finally, individual adaptations to risks and uncertainty affecting the ability of actors to anticipate the consequences of their actions and reassess their own values and engagement. The implementation of this program of comparative sociology of civil wars will draw on extensive fieldwork. This requires an adapted methodology for researchers faced with unpredictable situations, where quantitative methods fall short. Prosopography, semi- or unstructured interviews and participant observation are therefore prioritised. The creation of an interdisciplinary team of sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists will be able to carry out research based on thick description, following 25 years of experience by the PI in collecting data and supervising researchers in areas afflicted by civi

Mots-clés : civil wars,social capital,state monopoly,ethnic conflict
Projet ERC : PAIDEIA (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Politecnico di Milano — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : POLIMI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1296445.0 €

Earth is inhabited by an energy hungry human society. The Sun, with a global radiation at the ground level of more than 1 kW/m^2, is our largest source of energy. However, 45% of the total radiation is in the near infrared (NIR) and is not absorbed by most photovoltaic materials. PAIDEIA focuses on two main advantages aiming to enhance the capacity of solar energy conversion: i) plasmon assisted hot carriers extraction from NIR plasmonic materials; ii) linewidth narrowing in plasmonic nanoparticle films that enhances the lifetime of hot carriers and, thus, boosts the efficiency of light driven carrier extraction. Instead of metals, which operate mostly in the visible region, we will make use of doped semiconductor nanocrystals (DSNCs) as hot electron extraction materials possessing a plasmonic response tunable in the range 800 nm – 4000 nm. Three different innovative architectures will be used for improved device performance: i) improved Schottky junctions (DSNC/wide band gap semiconductor nanocomposites); ii) ultrathin devices (DSNCs/2D quantum materials); iii) maximized interface DSNC/semiconductor bulk hetero-Schottky junctions. By combining both concepts in advanced architectures we aim to produce a solar cell device that functions in the NIR with efficiencies of up to 10%. A tandem solar cell that combines the conventional power conversion efficiency, up to ~1100 nm, of a commercial Si solar cell (~20%) with the new PAIDEIA based device is expected to reach a total power conversion efficiency of 30% by extending the width of wavelengths that are converted to the full spectral range delivered by the Sun. PAIDEIA has a deeply fundamental character impacting several areas in the field of nanophysics, nanochemistry and materials processing and, at the same time, having a high impact on the study of solar energy conversion. Finally, PAIDEIA will provide answers to the fundamental questions regarding the physical behaviour of plasmonic/semiconductor interfaces.

Mots-clés : fabrication of nanocomposites for solar energy,semiconducting nanostructure films,plasmonic material,semiconductor junctions
Projet ERC : USMILE (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2702750.0 €

Earth system models are fundamental to understand climate change. Although they have improved significantly, considerable biases and uncertainties in their projections remain. Process parameterisations limit the models’ ability to simulate both global and regional Earth system responses, which are key for assessing climate change and its impacts on ecosystems and society. In recent years, the volume of data from high-resolution models and observations has substantially increased to petabyte scales. Concomitantly, the field of machine learning (ML) has quickly developed, promising breakthroughs in detecting and analysing non-linear relationships and patterns in large multivariate datasets. Yet, traditionally, physical modelling and ML have been often treated as two different worlds with opposite scientific paradigms (theory-driven versus data-driven). Thus, despite its great potential, ML has not yet been widely adopted for addressing the urgent need of improved understanding and modelling of the Earth system. USMILE will combine multi-disciplinary expertise in ML and process-based atmosphere and land modelling to completely rethink model development and evaluation. ML will further allow us to define novel observational constraints on Earth system feedbacks and climate projections. We will (1) develop ML algorithms to enhance Earth observation datasets accounting for spatio-temporal covariations, (2) deploy ML-based parameterisations and sub-models for clouds and land-surface processes that have hindered progress in climate modelling for decades, and (3) detect and understand modes of climate variability, multivariate extremes and uncover dynamical aspects of the Earth system with novel deep learning and causal inference techniques. USMILE will drive a paradigm shift in the current modelling of the Earth system towards a new data-driven physics-aware science and to an unprecedented reduction of uncertainties in projections.

Mots-clés : earth system modelling,climate projections,climate sensitivity,earth system feedbacks,earth system model evaluation,causal inference,anomaly detection,deep learning,recurrent neural networks,gaussian processes
Projet ERC : FEAR (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 11748500.0 €

Earthquakes are one the most significant hazards for human society, and at the same time, they remain the most elusive. Advancing our ability to understand their occurrence and intensity is of paramount importance for efforts to make society more resilient to the risk posed by catastrophic earthquakes. Progress in further understanding of earthquake physics is hindered by the lack of appropriate experimental facilities for observing the earthquake process at close distance and further advances will depend on the possibility to perform controlled experiments of fault stimulation and earthquake initiation at relevant depths and pressures. A new deep underground experimental facility is being constructed in the Bedretto tunnel in the Swiss Alps, offering a unique opportunity to perform fault stimulation and earthquake nucleation experiments on a scale and depth not available until now. FEAR will conduct the first-ever program to: (i) perform controlled 50-100 m scale fault stimulation experiments in basement rock at over 1'000m depth, (ii) pre-condition the stress distribution on the fault to perform real-time tests of different physical source and forecasting hypotheses, (iii) deploy data-driven approaches and real-time modelling to conduct structured prospective forecasting experiments, (iv) integrate and validate results from deep-underground experiments, experimental rock-deformation laboratories, numerical physics and dynamic modeling, and observations from natural earthquakes. The ERC Synergy framework enables to bring together the key complementary competences in Europe and to integrate them into a coherent program.

Mots-clés : earthquake nucleation,fault stimulation,underground laboratory,experimental rock deformation laboratory,earthquake source physics
Projet ERC : TECTONIC (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : INGV
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 856250.0 €

Earthquakes represent one of our greatest natural hazards. Even a modest improvement in the ability to forecast devastating events like the 2016 sequence that destroyed the villages of Amatrice and Norcia, Italy would save thousands of lives and billions of euros. Current efforts to forecast earthquakes are hampered by a lack of reliable lab or field observations. Moreover, even when changes in rock properties prior to failure (precursors) have been found, we have not known enough about the physics to rationally extrapolate lab results to tectonic faults and account for tectonic history, local plate motion, hydrogeology, or the local P/T/chemical environment. However, recent advances show: 1) clear and consistent precursors prior to earthquake-like failure in the lab and 2) that lab earthquakes can be predicted using machine learning (ML). These works show that stick-slip failure events –the lab equivalent of earthquakes– are preceded by a cascade of micro-failure events that radiate elastic energy in a manner that foretells catastrophic failure. Remarkably, ML predicts the failure time and in some cases the magnitude of lab earthquakes. Here, I propose to connect these results with field observations and use ML to search for earthquake precursors and build predictive models for tectonic faulting. This proposal will support acquisition and analysis of seismic and geodetic data and construction of new lab equipment to unravel earthquake physics, precursors and forecasts. I will use my background in earthquake source theory, ML, fault rheology, and geodesy to address the physics of earthquake precursors, the conditions under which they can be observed for tectonic faults and the extent to which ML can forecast the spectrum of fault slip modes. My multidisciplinary team will train the next generation of researchers in earthquake science and foster a new level of broad community collaboration.

Mots-clés : earthquakes,machine learning,prediction
Projet ERC : MARIX (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Utrecht University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1093115.0 €

Earth’s geochemical evolution was shaped by an enormous microbial metabolic diversity. One of the urgent scientific grand challenges is to decipher the key geochemical pathways involved in those 4 Gy of evolution, with the ultimate aim to obtain a truly predictive understanding of the response of the Earth System to global change. Rapid advances in geochemistry and microbiology have revealed the unique and critical role of sharp redox transitions in marine environments as prime sites for the removal of toxic ammonium and the greenhouse gas methane. Yet, the redox reactions, microbial players, and key controls remain largely unexplored. Our ERC synergy project MARIX will unite the complementary expertise required to gain a fundamental and mechanistic understanding of the geochemistry of these redox zones and the complex in-situ microbial interactions that together strongly impact our environment. By combining highly innovative fieldwork, cutting-edge laboratory experiments and state-of-the-art modeling for a range of carefully selected and representative coastal ecosystems we will: 1. Unravel the geochemistry and novel microbial pathways that remove methane and ammonium through oxidation with metal-oxides. 2. Determine the impact of the novel microbial pathways of methane and ammonium oxidation on the dynamics of nutrients, oxygen and other key elements. 3. Develop innovative gene-centric biogeochemical models for coastal sediments and overlying waters, to improve projections of the impacts of eutrophication and climate change. MARIX will bring together two outstanding and complementary groups located within easy travel distance, allowing excellent synergistic coupling of infrastructure, personnel and resources on a daily basis. Our project will lead to major breakthroughs in the understanding of the key role that microorganisms play in modulating Earth’s biogeochemistry with far-reaching implications for a wide range of research fields.

Mots-clés : eutrophication,deoxygenation,geochemistry,redox reactions,discovery,methane,anammox,nitrogen cycle,nitrification,ocean,sediment,climate change,field studies,fuel cell,nitrogen removal,wastewater,ammonium,earth science,new microorganisms
Projet ERC : EPHEMERAL (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Institut Mines-Télécom — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : IMT
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 225000.0 €

Earth’s lower atmosphere is oxidative and its chemistry consists of reactions of short-lived chemical compounds called radicals, controlling the abundance of key compounds, such as of ozone and greenhouse gases. In spite of decades of investigation many atmospheric observations indicate that important aspects of this radical chemistry remain ill-understood, in particular in the reactions of the multitude of organic radicals present in the atmosphere, peroxy radicals (“RO2”) and Criegee Intermediates (“CI”). Detailed investigations of these reactions have been limited for over 50 years by instrumental challenges, in particular by the lack of technique detecting individual radicals (”speciation”). Recently, the Nozière group achieved an important milestone by developing the first technique, based on Chemical Ionization Mass Spectrometry or “CIMS”, speciating the volatile RO2 that are important for the atmospheric oxidation cycles. The objective of EPHEMERAL is to solve key questions in atmospheric radical chemistry by overcoming the long-standing instrumental challenges with cutting-edge developments based on this new technique. Three strategic directions will be pursued: - in laboratory, the detection of CI will be investigated and gas-phase reactions of RO2 and CI studied, - an instrument will be built to detect individual RO2 and CI in the atmosphere, thus achieving a historical milestone, - the reactivity of these radicals at/with surfaces will be investigated in laboratory, assessing for the first time the role of clouds and aerosols in the oxidation cycles and setting the bases for next-generation challenges. The fundamental knowledge and atmospheric observations resulting from this project will dramatically improve the understanding of the oxidation cycles and the predictions of the atmospheric chemical composition, from the regional to the climate scale. EPHEMERAL will thus place Europe at the leading edge in the discipline, scientifically and technologically.
Projet ERC : EcoImmuneCosts (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : Lund University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Eco-immunology targets one of the great challenges in biology and medicine - how the immune system has evolved to optimize protection and minimize immunopathology (incl. autoimmune) costs. A primary target of my proposal is to study low-virulent pathogens causing mild infections, which for long have been considered harmless. Recent research suggests that this notion is false and that seemingly harmless pathogens entail delayed (‘hidden’) fitness costs. However, the mechanisms mediating these costs are still unknown. I will experimentally test if accelerated telomere degradation is a causative mechanism through which small immune costs can accumulate and be translated into senescence and reduced Darwinian fitness. Another key target is immune costs, which may be ‘hidden’ because of sexually antagonistic effects, and I will study how this may affect immune gene variation, immune costs and Darwinian fitness. These aspects are central for advancing our understanding of the evolution of disease resistance and immune function, incl. immune over-reactions (autoimmunity). My project exploits a comprehensive 32-year study of great reed warblers to analyze selection patterns in the wild (Fig. 1a), and uses established captive songbird set-ups to conduct carefully designed experiments. The exceptional quality of the long-term data set, together with cutting-edge techniques to measure and manipulate parasite infection, telomere length, oxidative stress and immune gene diversity, provides exciting opportunities to conduct research that previously was unfeasible, pushing the rapidly growing field of eco-immunology (Fig. 1b) to new frontiers. The work integrates theory and methods of evolutionary ecology, immunology and molecular biology, and has broad significance including for e.g. epidemiology and ageing research. I envision my research to change how we look upon causes, consequences (and precautions) of mild infectious, autoimmune and degenerative diseases.

Mots-clés : eco immunology,life history,accumulating disease cost,telomeres and senescence,immune oxidative stress,immune gene diversity,transgenerational effect on immunity,sexual antagonism on immune genes
Projet ERC : HEED (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : Stockholm University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 33226.0 €

Economic determinants, such as income and employment, are key drivers of population health and health inequalities, but have rarely been included in modelling studies to inform policy. This innovative project will develop the Health Equity and its Economic Determinants (HEED) model to investigate the impacts of taxation and social security policies on population health and mortality across Europe. There are 4 phases: 1) creating effect estimates for model inputs, 2) developing the model, 3) trialling policy simulations in one European country (UK), and 4) Europe-wide policy simulations. In phase 1, we will use causal approaches to analyse longitudinal data (the UK Household Longitudinal Study and Swedish registers), to estimate effects of changes in household income and employment status on health status (SF-12), mental health (GHQ-12 and psychotropic medications), life satisfaction and all-cause mortality. In phase 2, we will build a microsimulation policy model based on a representative synthetic UK population. We will develop projections for one, five and 10-year time periods, accounting for pre-existing demographic, epidemiological and economic trends. We will validate HEED by comparing projections with data not used in model construction. In phase 3, we will model the health equity impacts of alternative income tax and social security policies, developed with policymakers. Probabilistic sensitivity analyses will test key model assumptions and uncertainties. In phase 4, we will adapt the microsimulation model for implementation across a further 23 European Union countries. We will populate the model using available survey and demographic data to study impacts on levels of and inequalities in all-cause mortality, self-rated health, depression (PHQ-9) and life satisfaction over one and five years. Ex-ante impacts of reforms, as well as contemporaneous policy swaps, will be investigated to understand how best to reduce health inequalities across Europe.

Mots-clés : mesh terms  health status disparities,social welfare,computer simulation,epidemiology
Projet ERC : CosTesGrav (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : University of Portsmouth — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1701132.5 €

Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (GR) is tested accurately within the local universe i.e., the solar system, but this leaves open the possibility that it is not a good description at the largest scales in the Universe. The standard model of cosmology assumes GR as a theory to describe gravity on all scales. In 1998, astronomers made a surprising discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, not slowing down. This late-time acceleration of the Universe has become the most challenging problem in theoretical physics. Within the framework of GR, the acceleration would originate from an unknown “dark energy.” Alternatively, it could be that there is no dark energy and GR itself is in error on cosmological scales. The standard model of cosmology is based on a huge extrapolation of our limited knowledge of gravity. This discovery of the late time acceleration of the Universe may require us to revise the theory of gravity and the standard model of cosmology based on GR. The main objective of my project is to develop cosmological tests of gravity and seek solutions to the origin of the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe by challenging conventional GR. Upcoming surveys will make cosmological tests of gravity a reality in the next five years. There are remaining issues in developing theoretical frameworks for probing gravitational physics on cosmological scales. We construct modified gravity theories as an alternative to dark energy and analyse “screening mechanisms” to restore GR on scales where it is well tested. We then develop better theoretical frameworks to perform cosmological tests of gravity that include non-linear scales by exploiting our theoretical knowledge of the models and our state-of-the-art simulations. This grant will exploit and develop the world-leading position of the group initiated by Kazuya Koyama at the University of Portsmouth funded by the ERC starting grant (2008-2013).

Mots-clés : modified gravity,tests of gravity,n body simulations