Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : feelware (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : King Juan Carlos University — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : URJC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Virtual reality (VR) and Human-computer interaction (HCI) are becoming available industrial technologies. However, to date, they miss support for touch interaction or haptics. While there are attempts to introduce various tactile/haptic interfaces in the market, these interfaces hardly take off, arguably because of technical barriers to integrate them and develop convincing applications. The *feelware* project will break these barriers and will ease the adoption of tactile/haptic interfaces in VR and HCI applications. *feelware* is sustained on recent research carried out in the ERC Consolidator Grant *TouchDesign*, which formulates the command of tactile/haptic interfaces as a computational design problem. This approach creates a middleware layer between the VR/HCI application and the interface device, effectively simplifying integration. The results of *TouchDesign* have been demonstrated on diverse interfaces (thimbles, exoskeletons, ultrasound arrays), showing the success to provide a unifying middleware. The *feelware* project will aid in the setup of a market-ready software solution, which can be embedded in third-party application-development environments (e.g., game development software), and can be coupled to diverse tactile/haptic interfaces. Developers will integrate such interfaces in a modular way, and will obtain touch interaction quick and easy. Prior to this proposal, we have verified market interest on the proposed software solution. Major global players in the software field are working on VR/HCI projects, including haptics. But they all handle device integration through dedicated, complex, low-level solutions, which do not facilitate massive adoption by application developers. Our proposed solution could play a key role in future developments. A major action in the project will be to determine the best business model (i.e., b2b or b2c), and plan further development steps accordingly.

Mots-clés : haptics,virtual touch,vr applications
Projet ERC : ADMIRE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Dhitech distretto tecnologico high-tech scarl — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Dth
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 31250.0 €

Virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality are beginning to transform the way we explore and acquire information from the macroscopic world around us. At the same time, recent advances in holographic microscopy are providing new tools for the 3D imaging of physical and biological phenomena occurring at the micron scale. Project ADMIRE will combine this two emerging technologies into the first prototype of an AugmenteD MIcro-REality system for the immersive exploration and the quantitative analysis of three-dimensional processes at the micron scale. The core of the proposed system will be the three-axis holographic microscope (3DHM) developed within the ERC Project SMART to investigate fast 3D dynamics of swimming bacteria. ADMIRE project will transform 3DHM from a laboratory technique, targeted to a specific application and operated by highly specialised researchers into a general purpose instrument composed of a compact add-on module for commercial optical microscopes and a virtual reality interface allowing for a direct and intuitive use. Through the ADMIRE Holographic Microscope (ADMIRE-HM) the user will be “shrunk” a million times and virtually sent into a live 3D reconstruction of the real microscopic world contained in the glass slide. There he will find himself surrounded by micro-particles or moving cells that could be inspected from multiple directions and characterized by shape parameters (e.g. size, volume, aspect-ratio) or dynamical features (e.g. flagellar motility, sedimentation velocity, transport in a flow) obtained by means of simple and direct gestures. The expected outcome of the project is to bring to a development stage TRL 6-7 a technology that could change the way we experience the microscopic world in basic research, biomedical applications and education.

Mots-clés : holographic microscopy,virtual reality,3d imaging
Projet ERC : ADMIRE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Sapienza University of Rome — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 17500.0 €

Virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality are beginning to transform the way we explore and acquire information from the macroscopic world around us. At the same time, recent advances in holographic microscopy are providing new tools for the 3D imaging of physical and biological phenomena occurring at the micron scale. Project ADMIRE will combine this two emerging technologies into the first prototype of an AugmenteD MIcro-REality system for the immersive exploration and the quantitative analysis of three-dimensional processes at the micron scale. The core of the proposed system will be the three-axis holographic microscope (3DHM) developed within the ERC Project SMART to investigate fast 3D dynamics of swimming bacteria. ADMIRE project will transform 3DHM from a laboratory technique, targeted to a specific application and operated by highly specialised researchers into a general purpose instrument composed of a compact add-on module for commercial optical microscopes and a virtual reality interface allowing for a direct and intuitive use. Through the ADMIRE Holographic Microscope (ADMIRE-HM) the user will be “shrunk” a million times and virtually sent into a live 3D reconstruction of the real microscopic world contained in the glass slide. There he will find himself surrounded by micro-particles or moving cells that could be inspected from multiple directions and characterized by shape parameters (e.g. size, volume, aspect-ratio) or dynamical features (e.g. flagellar motility, sedimentation velocity, transport in a flow) obtained by means of simple and direct gestures. The expected outcome of the project is to bring to a development stage TRL 6-7 a technology that could change the way we experience the microscopic world in basic research, biomedical applications and education.

Mots-clés : holographic microscopy,virtual reality,3d imaging
Projet ERC : NOISYDECISIONS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Radboud University Nijmegen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Virtually anything we sense, think and do is uncertain. For instance, when driving a car, you often need to determine how close you are to the car in front of you. It is near impossible to estimate this distance with absolute certainty – but it is possible to guess and even to estimate the uncertainty associated with that guess. Accordingly, we reduce speed when driving at night, because we realize perceived distance is more uncertain in the dark than on a sunny, clear day. How do we infer that visual information is less reliable at night? How does the brain represent knowledge of sensory uncertainty? How do we decide to reduce speed? The overall aim of this proposal is to investigate the neural basis of perceptual decision-making under uncertainty. I will concentrate on three major research questions. First, I aim to establish the degree to which sensory uncertainty is represented in human visual cortex. Second, I will examine whether observers are aware of this uncertainty when making decisions. Third, I will investigate the sources of noise that cause the uncertainty in our perceptual decisions. I will address these questions using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in combination with a novel analytical method to analyzing fMRI data that I recently developed. This novel approach allows me to characterize, on a trial-by-trial basis, the uncertainty in cortical stimulus representations, and to address unresolved issues regarding the neural mechanisms of human perceptual decision-making. The results from this project will provide important new insights into the neural basis of perceptual decisions, with profound implications for theories of cortical visual function. Given that mechanisms of visual decision-making likely resemble the mechanisms underlying other forms of decisions throughout the brain, the proposed research will also provide a basis for understanding choice under uncertainty in general.

Mots-clés : bayesian theories,visual perception,fmri,fmri decoding methods,perceptual decision making
Projet ERC : NanoVirus (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Université Catholique de Louvain — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998125.0 €

Viruses are a major class of pathogens that infect a variety of organisms. Infection is a multistep process that involves the concerted action of both virus and host cell machineries. The first steps of virus infection include cell binding, cell entry and release of the viral genetic material. Entry pathways are largely defined by the preliminary interactions between viruses and their receptors at the cell surface. Those interactions determine the mechanisms of virus attachment, uptake, and, ultimately, penetration into the cytosol. Elucidating the complex interplay between viruses and their receptors at the cell surface is an essential step towards establishing a full picture of the infection process. Currently, a crucial challenge in virology is to develop a quantitative method to decipher the entry pathways of a virus, thus allowing the probing of the kinetics and energetic parameters of the interactions established between the virus and the cell surface. While current methods successfully describe the entry pathways, they fail in identifying in a quantitative manner the key steps such as energy intensive and high-affinity steps. To overcome this limitation, the ambition of this ERC proposal is to combine the latest generations of atomic force microscopes (AFM) with confocal laser scanning microscopes (CLSM). This will allow us to investigate and quantitatively characterize the early steps of single virus entry directly on living cells. At the frontiers of nanotechnology, biophysics and biology, this project aims at pushing the limits of AFM to enable us to better understand the molecular mechanisms of virus entry. This project will have strong scientific and medical impacts. In virology, it will significantly improve the understanding of the mechanisms of virus infection. In medicine, the new method will help us and other researchers to screen new compounds that are targeting viral infection.
Projet ERC : PALVIREVOL (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999805.0 €

Viruses are ubiquitous, obligate intracellular parasites that have had a pervasive influence on the evolutionary history of life. Despite being extensively studied due to their role in disease, very little is known about their long-term evolution, since they do not form a geological fossil record. The new field of paleovirology is the study of ancient viruses, which in the genomic age has been facilitated by discoveries of endogenous viral elements (EVEs). EVEs are the remnants of viruses that have heritably integrated into the genomes of their hosts and we were the first to discover that viruses of all genome types can endogenise. This genomic fossil record contains information about viral/host interactions that would be impossible to recover from contemporary viral sequences. We will develop novel methodologies to exploit this data source in order to quantify how viral transmission dynamics vary between organisms and over time, and to identify the factors that determine this. While most EVEs are non-functional relics, they are sometimes captured and repurposed by their hosts to serve a beneficial function as antiviral genes. These remarkable examples indicate an important role for virus to host gene flow in evolution, and we will determine the nature and extent of this phenomenon. This gene exchange is mirrored in viruses that capture host genes to evade immune responses. We will integrate bioinformatics, evolutionary, and experimental techniques, to elucidate the evolutionary processes underlying virus-host gene flow in both directions, and to determine the molecular features that impact host immunity and viral pathogenicity. Now is the time to pursue this research, given the unprecedented availability of genomic data and the emergence of paleovirology. Our results will greatly improve our understanding of viral cross-species transmission, as well as the role of gene flow on the evolutionary arms race between viruses and their hosts over geological timescales.

Mots-clés : paleovirology,virus,host gene exchange
Projet ERC : CHUbVi (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : University of Bristol — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1934729.34 €

Viruses such as Influenza A (IAV) and others remain one of the greatest threats to human health and society. Despite their danger and widespread prevalence, the molecular mechanisms of how they infect mammalian hosts and evade the immune system remains poorly understood. Recent studies from our team implicate two common proteins – HDAC6 and unanchored ubiquitin chains – in host cells as key mediators of viral entry via the aggresome processing pathway. This discovery offers a new line of investigation for understanding and preventing viral infections. By identifying the pathways and interactions involved in this infection process, we will provide new molecular targets for the development of broad-spectrum antiviral compounds. Multidisciplinary studies by a team consisting of a molecular biologist, a virologist, and a chemical biologist will use a diverse set of tools to validate these pathways and gain fundamental knowledge about their regulation. To achieve this, detailed studies on the exact nature of the ubiquitin chains needed to activate HDAC6 will allow the development of biochemical and cellular assays of Influenza A infection and enable the determination of the precise mechanism and the downstream cellular pathways necessary for viral infection. The chemical synthesis of labeled ubiquitin chains will support detailed structural studies and a clear understanding of how they are formed and packaged into infectious viral particles. The strong possibility that numerous other virus types also utilize this pathway will be tested with life-threatening agents of current concern including Zika, Dengue, Ebola, and MERS viruses. By demonstrating – with both biological approaches and small molecule compounds – that blocking these cellular processes in cells and animal models reduces viral infection, this project will provide a wealth a novel insights and the basis for the development of a new generation of anti-viral therapies.

Mots-clés : ubiquitin chains,hdac6,influenza virus,aggresome pathway,proteasome,stress granules,proteostasis
Projet ERC : HybridRetina (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Bar-Ilan University — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BIU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499582.0 €

Vision restoration in patients with outer retinal degenerative diseases, such as Age-related Macular Degeneration and Retinitis Pigmentosa can be achieved by bypassing the degenerated photoreceptors and the electrical stimulation of the relatively well-preserved inner retina through electrode implants. Although current retinal prostheses have been shown to provide useful vision in blind patients, the obtained visual acuity and quality are still relatively low. Several challenges cannot be addressed with the current retinal prosthetic technologies. First, increasing the electrode density for achieving high visual acuity is limited by the distance between the electrodes and the target neurons. Second, electrical stimulation by the current technologies is not selective for specific retinal circuitry (e.g. ON and OFF pathways). Finally, retinal neurons are stimulated by pulsed rather than in a continuously graded potential fashion, which provides the photoreceptors with an unrivalled dynamic range and sensitivity in natural vision. Here we propose a paradigm shift toward sight restoration with a hybrid retinal prosthesis aimed at overcoming the aforementioned limitations. The hybrid implant is composed of a very high density electrode array (pixel distance of 15µm) coupled with neurons to create a tight neuron-electrode coupling. Following implantation of the hybrid prosthesis, the neurons integrate and synapse with the host retinal circuits. Upon patterned electrical stimulation of the neurons by the electrodes, the host bipolar cells are activated while preserving the natural vision circuits. The ultimate electrode-neurons proximity allows for the significant increase in pixel density, the low charge neural activation, and the continuous graded potential activation. This research can advance our knowledge in the retinal field and in other neural prosthetics and if successful, it will enable future vision restoration with unprecedented resolution.

Mots-clés : retinal prosthesis,retinitis pigmentosa,age related macular degeneration
Projet ERC : LIGHTUP (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Turin — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNITO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1054564.37 €

Visual awareness affords flexibility and experiential richness, and its loss following brain damage has devastating effects. However, patients with blindness following cortical damage may retain visual functions, despite visual awareness is lacking (blindsight). But, how can we translate non-conscious visual abilities into conscious ones after damage to the visual cortex? To place our understanding of visual awareness on firm neurobiological and mechanistic bases, I propose to integrate human and monkey neuroscience. Next, I will translate this wisdom into evidence-based clinical intervention. First, LIGHTUP will apply computational neuroimaging methods at the micro-scale level, estimating population receptive fields in humans and monkeys. This will enable analyzing fMRI signal similar to the way tuning properties are studied in neurophysiology, and to clarify how brain areas translate visual properties into responses associated with awareness. Second, LIGHTUP leverages a behavioural paradigm that can dissociate nonconscious visual abilities from awareness in monkeys, thus offering a refined animal model of visual awareness. Applying behavioural-Dynamic Causal Modelling to combine fMRI and behavioral data, LIGHTUP will build up a Bayesian framework that specifies the directionality of information flow in the interactions across distant brain areas, and their causal role in generating visual awareness. In the third part, I will devise a rehabilitation protocol that combines brain stimulation and visual training to promote the (re)emergence of lost visual awareness. LIGHTUP will exploit non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in a novel protocol that enables stimulation of complex cortical circuits and selection of the direction of connectivity that is enhanced. This associative stimulation has been proven to induce Hebbian plasticity, and we have piloted its effects in fostering visual awareness in association with visual restoration training.

Mots-clés : blindsight,visual awareness,cortical blindness,striate cortex,fmri,computational neuroimaging
Projet ERC : LIGHTUP (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : KUL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 165000.0 €

Visual awareness affords flexibility and experiential richness, and its loss following brain damage has devastating effects. However, patients with blindness following cortical damage may retain visual functions, despite visual awareness is lacking (blindsight). But, how can we translate non-conscious visual abilities into conscious ones after damage to the visual cortex? To place our understanding of visual awareness on firm neurobiological and mechanistic bases, I propose to integrate human and monkey neuroscience. Next, I will translate this wisdom into evidence-based clinical intervention. First, LIGHTUP will apply computational neuroimaging methods at the micro-scale level, estimating population receptive fields in humans and monkeys. This will enable analyzing fMRI signal similar to the way tuning properties are studied in neurophysiology, and to clarify how brain areas translate visual properties into responses associated with awareness. Second, LIGHTUP leverages a behavioural paradigm that can dissociate nonconscious visual abilities from awareness in monkeys, thus offering a refined animal model of visual awareness. Applying behavioural-Dynamic Causal Modelling to combine fMRI and behavioral data, LIGHTUP will build up a Bayesian framework that specifies the directionality of information flow in the interactions across distant brain areas, and their causal role in generating visual awareness. In the third part, I will devise a rehabilitation protocol that combines brain stimulation and visual training to promote the (re)emergence of lost visual awareness. LIGHTUP will exploit non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in a novel protocol that enables stimulation of complex cortical circuits and selection of the direction of connectivity that is enhanced. This associative stimulation has been proven to induce Hebbian plasticity, and we have piloted its effects in fostering visual awareness in association with visual restoration training.

Mots-clés : blindsight,visual awareness,cortical blindness,striate cortex,fmri,computational neuroimaging