Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : Q-PHOTONICS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

A variety of classical optical systems exhibiting rich and complex matter-like behavior have been explored in recent years. Unfortunately in the optical regime, photons – the fundamental constituents of light – do not interact strongly with one another, and therefore cannot be used for studying many-body effects. It is only in the extreme regime of quantum nonlinear optics where effective interactions between photons are made strong. In an atomic gas, strong long-range interactions can be achieved by coupling photons to interacting atoms. First experiments have indicated the formation of a two-photon bound state via this mechanism. The main goal of the proposed research is to develop an optical system based on atomic interactions that realizes quantum many-body physics with optical photons subject to a rich variety of model problems. The proposed method relies on reconfigurable, optically-induced, three-dimensional, structures, which are fully compatible with the underlying atomic process. These structures enable the spatial compression of photons for enhancing the interactions, wave guiding for one-dimensional confinement in long media, and a rich variety of two-dimensional potentials with tunable interactions, from nearly-free photons to various tight-binding models with a controllable level of disorder. Optically-induced structures also offer advantages to optical quantum information, enabling better gate fidelities due to stronger nonlinearities and multimode coupling for processes such as photon routing. Our method has the potential to realize quantum gases and fluids of interacting photons. We can manipulate the effective mass and the band structure, control the potential landscape, and tune the scattering length in the system from attractive to repulsive. In particular, we intend to study few-photon bound states, quantum solitons, Luttinger liquids of photons, and Wigner crystallization in one and two dimensions.
Projet ERC : CogSoCoAGE (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Kent — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1488028.0 €

A vital part of successful everyday social interaction is the ability to infer information about others (e.g. their emotions, visual perspective, and language). Development of these social skills (termed Theory of Mind, ToM) has been linked to improvements in more general cognitive skills, called Executive Functions (EF). However, to date very little is known of how this link varies with advancing age, and no model exists to explain the relationship. Thus, the key aim of the proposed research is to systematically explore the cognitive basis of social communication and how this changes across the life-span. The research will address three complementary objectives: (1) to what degree can variations in ToM ability across the life-span be accounted for by changes in EF skills, (2) how do ToM ability and EF skill change over time in different age groups (using longitudinal methods, i.e. test-retest of the same participants), and (3) can ToM ability be enhanced through training specific EF skills, and how do these training effects differ across the life-span. Contrary to traditional studies of social communication, I will employ an interdisciplinary approach that links theory and practice from cognitive, social, developmental, and clinical (neuro)psychology to study the relationship between ToM and EF across a broad and dynamic age range (10 to 80+ yrs old). I will use cutting-edge combinations of techniques (eye-tracking and EEG) and paradigms, alongside sophisticated statistical methods to track the timecourse of social understanding, and model how it relates to EF and more general cognitive/social skills (eg. IQ, language) within and between individuals. This research will open up new horizons in ToM research by developing an intervention programme to enhance the quality of social communication in older adults (thus improving their mental health and well-being), which has the potential to be applied in other individuals with social communication deficits (eg. autism).

Mots-clés : theory of mind,executive functions,ageing,training and transfer,eye tracking and eeg,interdisciplinary
Projet ERC : MINEQ (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : CERCA Institution — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CERCA;I-CERCA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1046000.0 €

A voluminous body of research has documented how sexual minorities experience discrimination and stigma in society. At the same time, we know surprisingly little about the extent to which these processes lead to different socioeconomic and family outcomes for sexual minorities. This project will be the first to systematically document cross-national and cross-temporal differences in the socioeconomic and family outcomes of sexual minorities and investigate the conditions under which opportunities vary. To achieve this goal, the project will innovate by exploiting information on sexual orientation that has recently been incorporated in several large-scale representative surveys. This breakthrough allows the project to answer foundational questions regarding inequality of opportunity experienced by sexual minorities, on many occasions for the first time. For instance, the project will document social mobility patterns and the partnering dynamics of sexual minority individuals. The project will also study the outcomes of minority groups that have often been overlooked, such as bisexual individuals and individuals identifying as sexual minorities from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The second part of the project consists of studying the mechanisms that pose obstacles for sexual minorities to attain outcomes in life. Can gender egalitarianism reduce inequality of opportunity experienced by sexual minorities? How large is the impact of hate crimes and legislation on the family life of sexual minorities? Contextual information on regional differences in attitudes, hate crimes and laws will be compiled and connected to surveys to document their relationship to socioeconomic achievements and the family life of sexual minorities. The principal investigator will form a multi-disciplinary team consisting of a postdoctoral researcher (five years), a data technician (two years) and a doctoral student (four years).

Mots-clés : sexual orientation,inequality of opportunity,social mobility,family dynamics,partnering
Projet ERC : ACADEMIA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Czech Academy of Sciences — Pays : Rép. Tchèque — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : AVČR;CAS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1260485.0 €

ACADEMIA proposes a pioneering study of a neglected corpus of manuscripts stemming from the practice of quodlibetal debates held at Faculties of Arts of European universities, flourishing from the 14th to the early 16th century. As prescribed by the university statutes, dozens of professors participated periodically in these unique collective works of the Middle Ages, which encompassed all the disciplines pursued at the university, from logic to medicine to theology. The PI hypothesises that the professors presented at the hitherto mostly ignored quodlibets their recent scientific innovations, which they then published in the first collective volumes of European academia. The PI thus proposes a novel theoretical framework for understanding the quodlibets: they stand at the origin of the modern concept of science as a collective intellectual enterprise, similar to modern conferences and the subsequent dissemination of results. This makes them and their written form critical for understanding European intellectual and scientific traditions, both past and present. ACADEMIA’s ambition is to establish the corpus of these debates as a new field of study through an extensive examination of manuscripts, thus filling a substantial gap, radically extending the fields of the history of universities and intellectual history, and reconstructing the roots of the modern practice of fostering collective science. A complex analysis of the corpus will bring about a substantial change in our understanding of medieval practices of the production and sharing of knowledge. Aiming to examine the quodlibets as a phenomenon successively interconnecting European intellectual space, ACADEMIA focuses on fourteen universities at which the PI has identified the tradition so far and on their mutual relations and development. ACADEMIA employs an interdisciplinary team and an innovative combination of approaches from history, codicology, palaeography, philology, hermeneutics and Digital Humanities.

Mots-clés : medieval universities,transmission of knowledge,fostering science,quodlibeta,commentaries,faculty of arts,palaeography,codicology,philology,hermeneutics,prosopography,digital humanities
Projet ERC : AFRIGOS (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Edinburgh — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2491364.0 €

AFRIGOS investigates the process of 'respacing' Africa, a political drive towards regional and continental integration, on the one hand, and the re-casting of Africa's engagement with the global economy, on the other. This is reflected in unprecedented levels of investment in physical and communications infrastructure, and the outsourcing of key functions of Customs, Immigration and security agencies. AFRIGOS poses the question of how far respacing is genuinely forging institutions that are facilitating or obstructing the movement of people and goods; that are enabling or preventing urban and border spaces from being more effectively and responsively governed; and that take into account the needs of African populations whose livelihoods are rooted in mobility and informality. The principal research questions are approached through a comparative study of port cities, border towns and other strategic nodes situated along the busiest transport corridors in East, Central, West and Southern Africa. These represent sites of remarkable dynamism and cosmopolitanism, which reflects their role in connecting African urban centres to each other and to other global cities. AFRIGOS considers how governance 'assemblages' are forged at different scales and is explicitly comparative. It works through 5 connected Streams that address specific questions: 1. AGENDA-SETTING is concerned with policy (re-)formulation. 2. PERIPHERAL URBANISM examines governance in border towns and port cities. 3. BORDER WORKERS addresses everyday governance emerging through the interaction of officials and others who make their livelihoods from the border. 4. CONNECTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE looks as the transformative effects of new technologies. 5. PEOPLE & GOODS IN MOTION traces the passage of people and goods and the regimes of regulation to which they are subjected. AFRIGOS contributes to interdisciplinary research on borderland studies, multi-level governance and the everyday state.

Mots-clés : border management,regional economic communities,informality,bureaucracy,customs,trade,migration,urbanism,everyday life,commodities,multi level governance,global assemblages,infrastructure
Projet ERC : ATLOMY (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
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 : 1498205.0 €

ATLOMY sets out to break through the textual boundary of ancient anatomical writings and produce a groundbreaking integrative atlas of Greco-Roman anatomical ideas, terminology, and research. Its historical scope will stretch from the Classical period to the High-Roman Empire – from our earliest extant Greek medical works to the pinnacle of Greco-Roman medical and anatomical research. It will focus on the authors whose works and ideas had the most long-lasting formative role in the history of anatomy and biology: key medical writers of the fifth to the third centuries BCE (e.g. Hippocratic authors and the Alexandrian anatomists); Aristotle (fourth century BCE); and Galen of Pergamum (second century CE). Based on rigorous philological and historical analyses of the sources, ATLOMY’s team of classicists, historians, modern anatomists, digital artist, and software developer, will create a long-desired lexicon of ancient anatomical terms, re-enact ancient anatomical dissections, and develop a high-end, digital visual atlas presenting three-dimensional reconstructions of the body as perceived by the different authors. Based on the novel results of these analytical, empirical, and digital clusters of research, we shall compose in-depth interpretive studies of anatomical theories and research in ancient Greece and Rome. This integrative visual and textual map and analysis will substantially advance our understanding of ancient ideas of the body and of empirical methods of scientific research in ancient times. Moreover, it will enable the growing audience of Greco-Roman medical and philosophical writings to engage with these sources in a deeper and more informed manner, thus enhancing studies in related fields. More broadly, ATLOMY will offer a tight-knit interdisciplinary heuristic model for the study of the history of science, one which offers means for bridging the disciplinary gap between historians and classicists and the natural scientists whose works we study.

Mots-clés : ancient medicine,ancient philosophy,ancient science,body,digital humanities,dissection,empirical observation,history of anatomy,re enactment,scientific method,theory practice,veterinary
Projet ERC : AbioEvo (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ESPCI PARIS-PSL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Abiogenesis, the transition from non-living to living matter, is at the core of the origin of life question. However, the dynamical processes underlying abiogenesis remain unknown. The AbioEvo project aims to test the hypothesis that RNA-catalysed RNA recombination, if coupled with template-based mechanisms, provides a gradual route for the emergence of evolution by natural selection, starting from collective autocatalysis, toward template-based replication. Indeed, recombination allows both self-reproduction and shuffling of other sequences, thus, once combined with templating, provides the basic ingredients of reproduction, heredity and variation required for Darwinian evolution. The project decomposes the problem into five steps: (WP1) the study of molecular-level mechanisms to generate and stabilize novel sequences by recombination and templating; (WP2) collective dynamics integrating these mechanisms into the properties of reproduction with heredity, variation, and selection, in order to establish proof-of-concepts of evolutionary modes; (WP3) viability thresholds of recombination-based replicators from increasingly random substrates; (WP4) conditions for open-ended evolution toward template-based replication; (WP5) experimentally informed theoretical estimates of the probability of the proposed evolutionary transitions. The project would provide first demonstrations of evolution by natural selection in a purely chemical system, gradual and experimentally accessible paths from oligomers to template-based replication, and a method to evaluate prebiotic plausibility from sequence-to-function relationships, kinetics and evolutionary dynamics.

Mots-clés : origin of life,rna world,microfluidics,recombination
Projet ERC : StressNetAdapt (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : Technical University of Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : TUM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 559703.74 €

Abiotic stresses, such as drought or salt stress, affect plant growth and threaten the capacity to feed a growing world population. Understanding and altering how plants deal with stress will be critical for society’s adaptation to a changed climate. I propose a novel systems-biology based approach to identify biotechnological targets based on comparison of interaction and signalling networks of evolutionary related species that show differential abiotic stress tolerance. Similar to most crops, Arabidopsis thaliana is an abiotic-stress sensitive glycophyte whereas several close relatives are stress tolerant. This constitutes an opportunity to understand how plant stress-signalling networks are modified by evolutionary processes to adapt to novel environmental conditions. Biological processes are mediated by physically and functionally interacting proteins. Especially stress response networks are rewired when plants adapt to new environmental conditions. I aim to experimentally map the abiotic stress networks of four closely related brassicaceae: A. thaliana, A. lyrata, A. halleri and E. salsugineum. Novel conceptual advances in interactome mapping and a state-of-the art interactome mapping pipeline will be exploited to ensure direct alignability of the resulting reference networks. In addition the dynamic signalling events under drought stress will be analysed. Using a combination of network alignment, graph theoretical and statistical analyses, data integration, and literature-informed criteria a ranked candidate list of stress response regulators will be assembled. These will be genetically and biotechnologically validated. First level candidates will be tested in Arabidopsis thaliana and evaluated with respect to stress tolerance and overall biomass production. The most promising targets will then be transferred to Brassica napus to evaluate the performance in a commercially relevant crop.

Mots-clés : protein protein interaction network,interactome,binary interactions,yeast 2 hybrid,protein interactions,network,arabidopsis thaliana,eutrema salsugineum
Projet ERC : MULTIMAG (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Tampere University — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

About 30 % of all the electrical power generated passes through a power electronic converter, and the proportion is expected to rise to 80 % in 10-15 years. The amount of electricity annually wasted due to the losses in such systems in the EU corresponds to at least billions of euros. A major part of these losses arises in passive magnetic components, such as inductors and transformers, which are also the largest and heaviest components of a power electronic device. The physical phenomena related to the power losses in the magnetic cores of these components are not properly understood at the moment. In addition, the engineering community is currently lacking efficient modeling tools for analyzing the losses in the windings of such components at high frequencies. Improvement of high-frequency magnetic components would require accurate understanding of the power loss mechanisms. However, the device-level losses are affected by physical effects taking place in the microscopic grain and domain structures and very thin conductors, which are often subject to geometrical uncertainties. Accurate geometrical models cannot be used for analyzing the devices due to the impossibly large computational burden. In MULTIMAG, we will address these challenges by establishing a set of new multiscale numerical modeling tools, which will provide insight into the origin of the power losses and make it possible to perform statistical analysis of the electromagnetic behaviour of such components. The application potential of these new numerical tools will be demonstrated by designing working prototypes of emerging power electronic devices, such as a solid-state transformer and a wireless power transfer system. We will also develop inverse problem approaches for identifying the models from available catalog data, lowering the threshold for adopting the models into use. As the outcome, new means for improving the energy efficiency and power density of power electronic devices will arise.

Mots-clés : eddy currents,electromagnetism,finite element analysis,inductors,power electronics,power losses,stochastic models,transformers