Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CHRoMa (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Studies of Cultures and Arts
Entité participante : Université de Milan-Bicocca — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UniMiB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1322375.0 €

In the Maghreb, raising ethno-nationalism excludes Blackness from the national body. These racial tensions build on a long history of social differentiation that political, public, and academic discourses tend to reduce to a Black/white dichotomy. CHRoMa explores these current dynamics in light of earlier histories of racial differentiation. By addressing Maghrebi lexicons, grammars, and genealogies of race, the project cross-fertilises three disciplinary fields: Critical Race Theories and Methodologies, recent anthropological reflections on race, and history literature on race in the Maghreb. The objective is to study today’s Maghrebi patterns of racialisation through a bottom-up approach that grounds the understandings of racial identities within specific cultural, social, political, and religious contexts. An innovative method that starts from people’s lived experiences will prevent an essentialised and a priori reading of racial identities. On a broader comparative level, the project considers racialised hierarchies and political and personal spaces of resistance to racial discrimination across Maghrebi geographies, histories, and societies. Three are the ground-breaking shifts 1) to develop an analytical approach that combines nuances of colour with other discriminatory factors, thus moving beyond the Black/White dichotomy 2) to promote a Maghreb-centred approach to the study of processes of racialisation 3) to strengthen the emergent field of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Critical Race Studies. The Maghreb is a privileged standpoint to narrate patterns of racialisation outside dominant Western thinking, as it is both a “post-colonial” and a “post-slavery” context. Case studies comprise the legacies of racialised slavery, the meanings of whiteness, racialised internal divisions within the “white” Amazigh population, the racialisation of Sub-Saharan migrants, and the new categories crafted by anti-racist activism.

Mots-clés : race,maghreb,swana studies,racism,colourism,tunisia,algeria,morocco
Projet ERC : AFROPRESS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497659.0 €

Sub-Saharan Africa is often bypassed in global histories and its print cultures seldom approached through a transnational lens. To recover a lost history of global engagement, AFROPRESS will turn to the subcontinent’s cultural and political magazines from the period 1918-68—a vast, yet slowly disappearing archive. These magazines played key roles in effecting change, from fuelling decolonisation to creating literary and artistic canons. AFROPRESS advances the hypothesis that magazines shaped this transformation through their global orientation, that is, the way they reached out, across borders within and beyond Sub-Saharan Africa, to Black internationalist and anticolonial networks. It will examine these dynamics in five countries: Congo-Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Africa and Madagascar. Recent efforts in digitising periodicals from these countries have created the perfect opportunity to explore these sources, often for the first time. To address gaps in the digital record, and to study the multifaceted nature of a range of periodicals, AFROPRESS will assemble a team with expertise in literary and periodical studies as well as art, book, social and political history. Its innovative strategy combines interviews with historical actors and research in diverse national and private archives across Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. In so doing, AFROPRESS will break new ground on three levels. (1) Analytically, it will be a milestone in our understanding of the globally interactive nature and agency of cultural and political magazines from Sub-Saharan Africa. (2) Methodologically, it will open up periodical studies to further interdisciplinary inquiry and develop a model of exchange triangulating periodical studies, world literature and postcolonial and African studies. (3) Empirically, it will recover little-known sources that demand scholarly engagement, serving as a prompt for further digitisation efforts.

Mots-clés : literary,cultural and political magazines sub saharan africa global exchange black internationalism 1918 68
Projet ERC : TRAJECT (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Brussel — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1440500.0 €

Older people who die from serious chronic disease typically experience long periods (months or years) of illness and complex fluctuations in their physical health and in their social, psychological, and existential well-being. This project will conduct a mixed-method, inter-disciplinary investigation of these end-of-life trajectories. It responds to the long-standing scientific challenge of identifying commonalities in end-of-life trajectories across groups of people, without masking important inter-individual differences. Its central aim is to gain understanding of what is generalisable and what is individually specific in older people’s end-of-life trajectories and in the circumstances that shape them. This project applies a novel methodological and analytical framework, examining trajectories through two distinct scientific lenses: a structured quantitative approach known from the biomedical sciences to capture fluctuations in a standardised way, and an experience-focused qualitative approach from the humanities to study the subjective stories and meanings behind changes in health. In a convergent mixed-methods investigation, this work combines 1) a large quantitative longitudinal study and 2) a serial narrative interview study; both with older people (70 years or over) with serious chronic illness who are nearing the end of life. The results of these two methods will be integrated through triangulation and by systematically threading key findings from one method across to the other. This work will lead to a fundamental re-thinking of how we examine, understand, and categorise end-of-life trajectories. It will reveal the full extent of their complexity and indicate possibilities and limits of generalisation. These novel insights will propel scientific advances towards achieving a good end of life in ageing societies. They will also drive methodological innovation beyond my field, balancing the perspective of the researcher and the researched.

Mots-clés : end of life trajectories,older people,longitudinal research,mixed methods research,narrative research
Projet ERC : FELICITAS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499574.0 €

FELICITAS revolutionizes the way we think about preferences, skills, and other latent personal attributes (PSAs), estimates their heterogeneity along with its determinants, and provides policy implications.  PSAs are key drivers of a myriad of decisions which combine to create an individual’s life story. Differences in PSAs, together with constraints and luck, underlie inequalities in outcomes. Knowledge of PSAs is essential for policymakers to design effective public policy. Self-knowledge of PSAs is crucial for individuals to sort into occupations, activities, and relationships which enable them to flourish.  However, unobserved PSAs are only noisily revealed by observed behavior. I develop a decision model which separately identifies noise due to imperfect self-knowledge and endogenous effort. I quantify their respective roles in different choice settings, de-bias estimates of PSAs, and assess their importance in essential life outcomes.  I use these insights, along with an innovative discrete choice framework in which respondents choose between pairs of realistic life stories, to provide causal estimates of distributions in preferences (valuations) for policy-relevant life outcomes (longevity, health, family structure) in the United States and in Europe. I link the estimated heterogeneity to culture, demographics, and other PSAs.  Finally, I examine a new latent personal attribute - an individual's propensity to perceive time in a distorted manner. In a twist to received wisdom that time flows faster when one is engaged in a more enjoyable activity, I propose that utility obtained from an activity can be inferred using differences between “felt” and elapsed time. I conjecture that the perceived duration of a task may both be the relevant decision variable, which reflects an individual's exerted effort on a task, and a determinant of required hourly wages. If empirically validated, we obtain a cardinal measure of utility which will transform its measurement.

Mots-clés : measurement error structural model of decision making heterogeneity latent skills and preferences cognitive and non cognitive skills subjective time perception effort self knowledge
Projet ERC : BifurCAT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université Johannes-Gutenberg de Mayence — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : JGU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1292564.3 €

Endergonic catalysis converts low-energy substrates into high-energy products. Such reactions are highly desirable in academia and industry as they allow the transformation of abundant starting materials into complex products. However, endergonic reactions are impossible by classical catalysis, since the reverse reaction to the starting materials always dominates. Nature found an amazing way to drive endergonic reduction reactions catalytically by coupling an energetically uphill reduction to a separate, energetically downhill reduction. This strategy is called electron bifurcation and has been discovered with quinone- and flavin-dependent enzymes. No artificial catalysts capable of electron bifurcation have been realised to date. In BifurCAT, I propose the design, realisation, and application of molecular electron bifurcation catalysts. The key to achieving this goal is the precise localisation of two designed, organic redox sites in close proximity. This mimics the enzymatic strategy of splitting two electrons of a medium-potential reductant into a strongly reducing electron at the expense of a second, weakly reducing electron at separate redox sites. Electron bifurcation allows using environmentally benign, abundant, organic reductants such as formic acid or ascorbic acid to drive energetically uphill one-electron reductions at the strongly reducing redox site. Currently, these reactions require super-stoichiometric, rare-earth metal reductants or constant irradiation. I propose to demonstrate the utility of this new approach by applications in reductive incorporation of carbon dioxide into organic substrates and challenging dearomatisation reactions, which both lead to highly sought-after compounds for the preparation of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and precursors to organic materials. BifurCAT has the aim to change our view on energetically “impossible” reactions and to provide a resource- and energy-conserving, alternative strategy inspired by nature.

Mots-clés : biomimetic catalysis sustainable chemistry
Projet ERC : Harmony (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1624911.0 €

Visual data association aims to find task-specific mappings involving visual data. Two significant examples are the mapping of physics models to complex scenes for planning overtaking manoeuvrers in autonomous driving, or matching collections of 3D shapes for medical analysis. Despite the high relevance of visual data association, its progress has not kept pace with the revolutionary developments fuelled by recent deep learning advances: existing data association machinery lacks theoretical guarantees (e.g. global optimality, or structure such as geometric consistency in 3D shape matching) that are critical for high-stakes settings, or suffers from poor scalability. Moreover, current procedures fall short of understanding complex interconnections across different observable entities (collections of e.g. objects or scenes). The vision of Harmony is to tackle these shortcomings by harmonising the complex interconnections between observable entities and underlying fundamental principles (e.g. geometry, or physics). This research direction is challenging, largely unexplored and will require to break substantially new ground at conceptual, algorithmic and practical levels simultaneously. Harmony is organised into four complementary challenges: Challenge A addresses global optimality and scalability for 3D shape matching; Challenge B addresses structure and dynamics inference from static images; Challenge C addresses non-linear synchronisation in data collections defined over graphs; Challenge D will exploit synergies and cross-fertilise insights across Harmony. Overall, Harmony will benefit both researchers and practitioners by providing solutions to more complex tasks in practically relevant settings (e.g. geometrically consistent medical shape analysis, or physics-based scene understanding).

Mots-clés : shape matching shape analysis correspondence problems matrix synchronization geometry processing
Projet ERC : EXTENDED (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499728.0 €

Quantum field theory (QFT) is the formalism that underlies modern particle and condensed matter physics. Standard perturbative methods in QFT have been extraordinarily successful in explaining physical phenomena involving weakly-interacting quantum fields. On the other hand many fundamental phenomena, including phase transitions and nuclear interactions, are described by strongly coupled QFTs for which perturbative techniques are insufficient and a rigorous, predictive theoretical formulation is lacking. Heuristic arguments indicate that a full non-perturbative formulation of QFT must include extended degrees of freedom (a prototypical example being the flux tubes that bind quarks inside the nucleus).  My proposal describes a novel approach for studying extended objects in a wide range of QFTs, based on two recent conceptual breakthroughs: first, my research on a special class of theories (the six-dimensional SCFTs) has brought to light a rich algebraic structure that captures the properties of its stringlike excitations; and second, new developments in mathematics and physics point to the existence of a vast generalization of this structure, which is perfectly suited to describe the extended objects of a much wider range of QFTs.  This program is organized along three directions: analyze the families of QFTs that can be studied by string-theoretic and geometric methods, and gradually uncover the algebraic structures that describe their extended degrees of freedom; exploit these algebraic structures to obtain novel principles that govern the dynamics of strongly-interacting QFTs; and determine the new mathematical structures that arise from the combination of the geometric and algebraic description of the extended objects.  An ERC starting grant will allow me to undertake this ambitious project whose pursuit will lead to a much deeper understanding of extended degrees of freedom, or their role in QFT, and of the mathematical structures that describe them.

Mots-clés : non perturbative methods in quantum field theory supersymmetric qfts superconformal field theory geometric engineering topological string theory
Projet ERC : SIMTWIN (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497275.0 €

Digitisation has an impact on even the most fundamental concepts in medicine and public health, including our ideas of health and illness, embodiment, vulnerability and controllability. Among the emerging technologies driving this paradigm shift is that of Digital Twins (DT), which presents exceptional challenges to healthcare governance, raising ethical and societal issues of which our understanding is still rudimentary. DT may be empowering but could also exacerbate the vulnerability of both individual patients and the population at large. There are substantial gaps in our understanding of whether these new forms of artificial intelligence-driven health simulations provide new ways of engaging with experiences of human vulnerability, or whether they in fact introduce new forms of harm. In this context, SIMTWIN will be the first project systematically identifying and examining the ethical and societal implications of the use of DT in healthcare. In doing so, SIMTWIN will promote our understanding of and practical approaches to new forms of simulation and prediction of health trajectories. SIMTWIN’s central objective is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the normative challenges implied in order to develop an integrated theory of health simulations. In proposing an empirically-based and normatively robust framework for an ethical and societal assessment of this technology, SIMTWIN will enable the design of practical modes of controllability for the use of DT in health.  At a moment in history in which our societies find themselves facing crucial decisions on how to approach the complex issues raised by the dual, simultaneously transformative and disruptive character of health simulations, SIMTWIN promises ground-breaking insights into the associated normative and societal challenges and key orientations for a robust and innovative governance framework.
Projet ERC : MLCat (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1583643.75 €

Transition metal-catalyzed C-H functionalization replaces an inert carbon-hydrogen bond with a functional group, expediently altering the properties of the parent molecule to access new classes of compounds. Although the C-H functionalization represents a green chemistry approach as it precludes the need for pre-functionalized starting materials, there are still two main sustainability shortcomings with most current methodologies. The first challenge is achieving functionalization of specific C-H bonds without affecting other C-H sites in the molecule. A widely employed strategy to control the selectivity of metal-catalyzed C-H bond functionalization reactions has relied upon the covalent attachment of directing groups (i.e., pyridine, oxime, diazo) to the parent molecule. The requisite installation and removal of directing groups make the overall transformation less appealing from an atom- and step-economy perspective. The second challenge is to substitute commonly used precious transition metals with more benign earth-abundant alternatives. The proposed research program will address these shortcomings by developing an innovative and more efficient way for selective metal-catalyzed functionalization of aromatic and aliphatic C-H bonds without pre-attaching a directing group. The proposed strategies will rely on the design of multifunctional ligands capable of simultaneous binding to the substrate and the transition metal catalyst. The proposed approach will take advantage of the ability of Cr(0) to form an pi-arene complex and activate the aromatic and benzylic C-H bonds. Addressing these challenges associated with C-H activation technology would have the power to unlock many industrial applications, such as valorizing fine chemicals and modifying complex natural products, drug leads, or polymers.

Mots-clés : catalytic reactions,ligands,c h functionalization,transition metal catalysis
Projet ERC : MEGEO (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Université rhénane Frédéric-Guillaume de Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496833.0 €

Research in political economy has documented a vast number of different “media effects” suggesting that the media can have a profound impact on a range of economically & politically relevant outcomes. Yet, the existing empirical work is significantly skewed towards a few countries, raising concerns about the generalizability & broader cross context relevance of the empirical findings. Further, given the predominant focus on individual countries and its politics, this implies limited attention is devoted to the frictions between national media, national politics and transnational policy making in the myriad of areas that require collective and coordinated global action. To what extent the primarily national media has concrete effects undermining global policy making across a broad range of areas - or on the specific issue of climate change - is an important empirical question that requires both suitable data and suitable research designs. MEGEO will deliver on both dimensions and in the process catalyse research across multiple disciplines. The overarching objectives of MEGEO are: 1) To develop & make available a comprehensive and consistent novel data resource measuring what national media reports on and how and to what extent other countries are represented in each other's media 2) To characterize the extent to which national media may affect policy making in domains with clear transnational relevance that has previously been mostly ignored 3) To quantify the extent to which skewed reporting on foreign countries may have tangible economic & political impacts The work is organized across three work packages that will provide a systematic "Topology of Media Focus" across countries; answer the question of "What, where and why does news spread to?; study "(How) Does National Media Shape Transnational Politics?"; and explore "(How) Does National Media Affect Cross Border Economic Activity?" using a range of novel applications and leveraging proprietary secondary data.

Mots-clés : political economy,media