Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : RIBOTICS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Université d'Aarhus — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2829725.0 €

Biomolecular nanotechnology aims at using the self-assembly principles of nature to create nanostructures and nanomachines for applications in biotechnology, medicine, and materials science. Advanced nanodevices, that sense inputs, do basic computations, and actuate functionality or movement within their nanoscale environment, are referred to as “nanorobots”. With advances in methods for prediction and design of RNA and protein structure, there is now a big opportunity to create complex biomolecular nanorobots. However, it is not clear how to combine multiple functional motifs and how to design the dynamical energy landscapes of molecular machines. In the RIBOTICS research proposal, I will address this challenge by the construction of RNA origami robots that sense, compute, and actuate in cellular environments with the goal of providing components for RNA-based synthetic regulation of living cells. To achieve this goal, we will: (1) Establish a platform for design and characterization of RNA origami robots by developing computer-aided design software and using advanced cryo-electron microscopy and tomography methods, (2) Develop genetically encoded RNA origami robots for control of gene expression and spatial organization of enzymes for metabolic engineering, (3) Develop xenonucleic acid (XNA) origami robots by studying the effects of chemical modifications on structure and function of RNA motifs for applications in controlled gene delivery and biosensing, (4) Develop RNA circuits for control of RNA origami robot systems in cells to develop RNA-based signal transduction pathways for control of metabolism and biosynthesis in S. cerevisiae yeast. If successful, this project will provide a better understanding of the design principles for biomolecular function and provide a general platform for the development of RNA robot and circuit technology in cell systems for broad applications in biotechnology and medicine.

Mots-clés : rna nanotechnology,rna synthetic biology
Projet ERC : RaRiE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 457777.5 €

Until recently, the study of penal systems has focused mainly on their most severe or repressive features, but these systems often do great harm when aiming to do good, not least by expanding the scale, reach and intensity of penal control. For example, recent research suggests that ‘rehabilitation’ has become focused on managing risks rather than enabling reintegration and that, in consequence, it often hurts and harms those that it claims to help. By examining evidence from three countries that are often considered ‘progressive’ (the Netherlands, Norway and Scotland), the RaRiE project will help us better understand whether and where rehabilitation lives up to its ideals, and to creatively, critically and comparatively interrogate its development and prospects, its coherences and contradictions, its rhetoric and its realities, its pitfalls and its possibilities. Through a new approach that I call Dialogical Comparative Penology (DCP), building on the interdisciplinary approaches that I have used in a series of innovative, high-impact research projects, RaRiE will provide a uniquely comprehensive analysis of the nature and impact of rehabilitation in these three nations. It will also develop new tools and metrics for critically assessing rehabilitative systems and practices, to better direct their future development. In and through dialogue with policymakers, senior leaders in prison and probation systems, practitioners, activists and people with lived experience of rehabilitation, RaRiE will help to improve the fairness and effectiveness of European penal systems. RaRiE’s ambition -- the ‘step-change’ it offers – lies both in developing a new approach to comparative penology, and in using that new approach to reshape how rehabilitation is understood and developed in Europe.

Mots-clés : criminology,penology,criminal justice,corrections,punishment,rehabilitation,reintegration
Projet ERC : CRYPTO-AI-FUTURE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Estonian University of Life Sciences — Pays : Estonie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EMÜ
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Terrestrial resurrection cryptogams, including mosses, lichens, algal and cyanobacterial films and crusts, are conspicuous photosynthetic organisms growing on soil, rocks, plants and artificial surfaces. They dominate multiple ecosystems worldwide, but the estimates of cryptogam share in global productivity are uncertain and the impact of climate change on their contribution to global carbon sink is unknown. Several cryptogams are strong emitters of organic volatiles, and due to huge surface area, they can play a major role in air oxidative status and in vegetation-climate feedbacks, but they are currently neglected due to difficulties in gauging their activity. The project hypothesizes that due to extremely large CO2 diffusion limitation, cryptogam productivity responds more strongly to the rise of atmospheric CO2 than that of vascular plants. Because of the direct effect of CO2, cryptogam photosynthetic activity and rate of colonization of as yet unoccupied surfaces increase, resulting in greater cryptogam share in global productivity and air cleansing in future CO2-richer world. The project creates novel high-throughput AI methods to functionally characterize cryptogam covers, and uses unique instrumentation and methodology to assess CO2-responsiveness of photosynthesis and volatile exchange across cryptogams, and estimates cryptogam share under current and future conditions using an array of AI and process based models. The project (1) advances ecological theory by developing the first combined economics and stress response spectrum for photosynthetic organisms, and pioneers in providing the quantitative estimates of (2) alteration of cryptogam productivity in future climates and (3) global cryptogam volatile release and air cleansing under current and future climates, and (4) expects to demonstrate that the high CO2-responsiveness of cryptogam physiological activity is slowing down the CO2-saturation of global productivity and the rate of global change.

Mots-clés : lichens,mosses,photosynthetic carbon gain,volatile emission,air reactivity,global change,leaf economics spectrum,pattern recognition,artificial intelligence
Projet ERC : GRAPPA (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2497701.0 €

"De gustibus et coloribus non disputandum est." With this slogan philosophers and lay people alike have dismissed all attempts to understand taste, color perception, or aesthetic preferences. Sense of beauty may just be too individual and too complex to qualify as target of scientific inquiry. Yet, since Fechner (1876), empirical aesthetics has studied the factors determining people’s aesthetic responses to art works and objects, scenes or events encountered in everyday life. Most accounts focus either on high-level concepts such as style, meaning and personal associations, or on low-level statistical properties. While the latter are supposed to be universal and biologically determined, the former are subject to cultural influences, art expertise and individual experiences. Progress in this tradition has reached its limits, which this project overcomes by investigating how Gestalts Relate Aesthetic Preferences to Perceptual Analysis (GRAPPA). Its pioneering working hypothesis is that the way perceivers organize their sensory inputs into meaningful entities (Gestalts) provides the missing link between the two traditional sets of explanations. This hypothesis is fleshed out and tested in a coherent research program linking aesthetic preferences for images of paintings and everyday photographs to general principles of perceptual organization as well as to specific aesthetic concepts like composition, balance and visual rightness. New data from online studies with large samples of images and participants will be analyzed with state-of-the-art computational methods (machine learning) to reveal the critical mid-level factors. This will yield a model to predict aesthetic preference, which will be tested in well-controlled psychophysical and behavioral experiments (e.g., eye-movement recording) and validated also in ecologically richer settings (e.g., in galleries and art museums) and in unconventional cross-over collaborations with contemporary artists.

Mots-clés : empirical aesthetics,psycho aesthetics,perceptual organization,gestalt,image,visual art
Projet ERC : MINDSHARING (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499105.0 €

Imagine ordering a drink at a diner, pointing at an empty glass as an attentive waiter passes by. How did you select that particular gesture, and how could the waiter possibly interpret it as you intended? As any other signal we use to communicate daily, that gesture is highly ambiguous outside its context of use. How can human communication work by using referentially flexible and contextually dependent signals? MINDSHARING argues that interlocutors are communicatively effective because they jointly control their interaction-specific shared context. MINDSHARING integrates computational, developmental, and cognitive neuroscience to understand how that control is algorithmically defined, culturally acquired, and neurally implemented. First, using context-sensitive neural networks, MINDSHARING identifies communicative control parameters during interactive multi-turn linguistic and non-verbal referential games, then assesses the value of those parameters as potential communicative universals across worldwide cultures. Second, using prospective longitudinal studies, MINDSHARING identifies the socio-cultural experiences that influence the acquisition of communicative abilities during ontogenetic development. Third, using concurrent brain stimulation and imaging in communicating dyads, MINDSHARING tracks and perturbs the neural dynamics of communicative control parameters as dyads continuously adjust their shared context to novel communicative challenges. MINDSHARING provides a novel causal account of a foundational element of human society, the ability to communicate with referentially flexible signals. MINDSHARING brings computational, cultural, and neurocognitive explanations into the inter-personal space where communication is used and where it is learned. MINDSHARING will deliver what existing accounts have not delivered yet, multi-level causal explanations of the multi-level human ability to communicate with referentially flexible and contextually dependent signals.

Mots-clés : human referential communication social neurocognition experimental semiotics
Projet ERC : MakingSense (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499527.0 €

To interact effectively with the complex dynamic and multisensory world (e.g. traffic) the brain needs to transform the barrage of signals into a coherent percept. This requires it to solve the causal inference or binding problem - deciding which signals come from common sources and integrating those accordingly. Doing so exactly (i.e. optimally) is wildly computationally intractable for all but the simplest laboratory scenes. It is unknown how the brain computes approximate solutions for realistic scenes in the face of resource constraints. This ambitious interdisciplinary project combines statistical, computational, behavioural and neuroimaging (3/7T-fMRI, MEG/EEG, TMS) methods to determine how, and how well, the brain solves the causal inference problem in progressively richer multisensory environments. The key hypothesis is that observers compute approximate solutions by sequentially selecting subsets of signals for perceptual integration via attentional and active sensing mechanisms guided by the perceptual tasks they are executing, their prior expectations about the world’s causal structure, and bottom-up salience maps. I will build parallel normative/approximate Bayesian and transformer network models of these processes and combine those with behaviour and neuroimaging to unravel the neurocomputational mechanisms.  The project will develop a novel computational and neuromechanistic account of causal inference in more realistic multisensory scenes, addressing fundamental questions about binding, inference and probabilistic computations. By bringing lab research closer to the real world it will radically alter our perspectives - shifting from near-optimal passive perception in simple scenes to active information gathering in the service of approximate solutions in more realistic scenes. It has the potential to inspire new AI algorithms and drive transformative insights into the perceptual difficulties older and clinical populations face in the real-world.

Mots-clés : multisensory audiovisual integration,multisensory audiovisual perception,bayesian causal inference,normative and approximate bayesian inference,perceptual inference,audiovisual,bayes optimal,attention,binding,neuroimaging,fmri,meg,eeg,laminar analyses
Projet ERC : PowerOfSize (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Setting Over the last decades, anthropogenic pressures on the environment have dramatically intensified and diversified. Nowadays, we have to deal with 100,000+ pollutants, species and sites. To set the right priorities among these environmental problems and to select the best alternatives among sustainable solutions, proper assessment tools are urgently needed.  Relevance While several models are available, application to thousands of cases is severely limited by data gaps due to financial, ethical, disciplinary and other constraints. As an alternative, missing information can be obtained by linking parameters to size (e.g., catchment area, organism weight). While scaling has been proven valuable for a few parameters, relationships have been derived in a mono-disciplinary context only.  Objectives Following the urgent scientific and societal needs, the overall aim of PowerOfSize is to obtain a cross-disciplinary suite of mechanistic and statistical relationships for environmentally relevant parameters (quantities) in assessment models as a function of size and other descriptors, underpinned by overarching scaling principles. Based on research gaps and policy priorities, we focus on pollutants, covering emission and fate in catchments and cities, accumulation in organisms and effects on communities.  Methods, expected results and impact Based on information from reviews, databases and articles, we will derive empirical and theoretical relationships for rate, time, density and other quantities Y (parameters) as a function of city, catchment, organism and community size X, covering, e.g., water in catchments, materials in cities, blood in organisms and biomass in communities as well as the pollutants they generate, carry and degrade. Identifying overarching principles based on shared system characteristics (e.g., dimension), the integrated suite obtained 1) profoundly advances our understanding and 2) crucially reduces data-hungriness of assessment tools.

Mots-clés : allometric scaling scaling relationships power law cross disciplinary catchment area body size size spectra scaling in hydrology scaling in cities scaling in toxicokinetics scaling in biology scaling in ecology
Projet ERC : INTERPHON (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed Matter Physics
Entité participante : Université Radboud de Nimègue — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3250000.0 €

For almost two millennia people are looking for the philosophers' stone, dreaming to be able to change material properties at will. While turning lead to gold might just have become a reality, even though only a few atoms at a time, in a broader sense we are still very far from this. To make this dream come true, INTERPHON challenges the existing ideas and understanding of the interactions between light and matter, developing a research area at the junction of nonlinear optics, phononics and ultrafast magnetism, and aiming at ultrafast and energy-efficient manipulation of materials by using the crystal lattice as a mediator. Thus, glass can be made into a magnet; antiferromagnets to ferromagnets, paraelectric into ferroelectric, by exciting matter with long-wavelength light. This fundamentally new approach to steering magnetic and electric order by ultrafast excitation at the frequencies of optical phonons has been made possible by my group’s latest work. It will involve a controlled deformation of the crystal lattice and is non-thermal (thus energy-efficient), precessional (hence ultrafast) and potentially universal (since the lattice is found in all crystalline materials). Interestingly, it does not involve any absorption of light by the very same phonons! Instead, light will communicate with matter in an interactive way, so that matter reciprocates by changing the very resonance used for excitation. To realize this, INTERPHON will develop novel research methods using short and intense pulses of an infrared-to-THz-range free electron laser. Therefore, gaining control over the microscopic crystalline lattice could actually be the key to realizing a phononic philosopher’s stone, capable of inducing ultrafast phase transitions and permanently switching macroscopic order. When successful, this will strongly advance the frontiers of knowledge in both out-of-equilibrium physics of solids and nonlinear optics, with a potential for novel emerging technologies.

Mots-clés : ultrafast magnetisation dynamics all optical switching nonlinear optics magnetism ferroelectricity
Projet ERC : MENBELONG (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Victoria — Pays : Canada — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UVIC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 483210.0 €

The successful integration of migrant populations requires that individuals who permanently relocate to a host country develop a sense of belonging. This involves not only economic and legal integration, but also the sharing of values, practices, and social networks with others. Single men form the largest group within global migration flows but face the harshest challenges to successful integration and belonging. They are frequently viewed as taking away opportunities from citizens and are deprioritized in social services in favour of families and women. They are also often stereotyped as hypersexualized or criminal. In the face of these obstacles, single migrant men create a range of unique belonging strategies that take place outside family networks and formal integration processes. Yet existing migration research tends to focus on the experience of women and families and the integration of specific groups of migrant men (usually Muslim) in Western democracies. As a result, we know very little about how single migrant men develop a sense of belonging outside of these restricted contexts. In this project, I investigate single migrant men’s experiences of belonging across five countries that have experienced abrupt, large-scale migration flows and that have different gender equality levels and integration policies. These groups include Syrians in Türkiye, Mexicans in Canada, Turks in Germany, Myanmarese in Thailand, and Venezuelans in Chile. My team includes country experts from the disciplines of migration studies, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and community mental health with expertise in archival research, experimental surveys, interviews and photovoice. I draw on these perspectives to develop a theory of migrant belonging. This comprehensive approach will impact theories of migration and gender by providing intersectional and international insights into how single migrant men develop a sense of belonging in the face of serious challenges.

Mots-clés : masculinity,intersectionality,belonging,stigma,mixed methods research,non eu countries