Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : AfricanNeo (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Uppsala University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

The spread of farming practices in various parts of the world had a marked influence on how humans live today and how we are distributed around the globe. Around 10,000 years ago, warmer conditions lead to population increases, coinciding with the invention of farming in several places around the world. Archaeological evidence attest to the spread of these practices to neighboring regions. In many cases this lead to whole continents being converted from hunter-gatherer to farming societies. It is however difficult to see from archaeological records if only the farming culture spread to other places or whether the farming people themselves migrated. Investigating patterns of genetic variation for farming populations and for remaining hunter-gatherer groups can help to resolve questions on population movements co-occurring with the spread of farming practices. It can further shed light on the routes of migration and dates when migrants arrived. The spread of farming to Europe has been thoroughly investigated in the fields of archaeology, linguistics and genetics, while on other continents these events have been less investigated. In Africa, mainly linguistic and archaeological studies have attempted to elucidate the spread of farming and herding practices. I propose to investigate the movement of farmer and pastoral groups in Africa, by typing densely spaced genome-wide variant positions in a large number of African populations. The data will be used to infer how farming and pastoralism was introduced to various regions, where the incoming people originated from and when these (potential) population movements occurred. Through this study, the Holocene history of Africa will be revealed and placed into a global context of migration, mobility and cultural transitions. Additionally the study will give due credence to one of the largest Neolithic expansion events, the Bantu-expansion, which caused a pronounced change in the demographic landscape of the African continent

Mots-clés : holocene human history,neolithic,africa,development of farming,human migration,human population genetics,human demographic history
Projet ERC : One-EG (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Imperial College London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149997.0 €

The standard method of diagnosing sleep disorders involves the patient attending a sleep clinic overnight where he/she is hooked by trained specialists to bulky, uncomfortable wired sensors, and monitored during sleep; preferably supervised because the sensors tend to get de-attached and require repositioning. The raw signals are subsequently manually analysed by a medical expert, this taking over 2 hours. Occasionally, for certain diseases the patient is sent home with an ambulatory system which is able to provide a very limited amount of information and is only relevant to some disorders. The main limitation of ambulatory sleep monitoring is that neurophysiological channels (EEG, EMG and EOG) cannot be used in practice. These are however the only ones that can provide full information about the different sleep phases as well as certain sleep biomarkers which are indicative of disease. The lack of neurophysiological channels is due to the unpractically high number that is required to identify sleep phases (specifically REM) and the associated difficulty on attaching them. Additionally, they are very uncomfortable for the user because the sensors (electrodes on different places on the head) are connected by wires to bulky and heavy boxes which impair the quality of sleep. This project will use state-of-the-art signal processing and hardware design techniques resulting from the PI’s ERC Starting Grant to create a novel, ultralow power, tiny, user friendly, and- for the first time- single channel EEG wearable technology for automatic monitoring of sleep, and diagnosis of sleep disorders. The technology will represent a major breakthrough because of, amongst others: 1. Its size− over 20 times lighter and 50 times smaller than any other existing system. 2. Its ease of use and comfortability, facilitated by the fact that will be just one-channel EEG. 3. Its accuracy in automatic sleep analysis, comparable to multiple channel (i.e. non wearable) systems.
Projet ERC : COSMIC-LITMUS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : University of Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 120055.01 €

The standard model of cosmology is impressively consistent with a large number of observations. Its parameters have been determined with great accuracy with the Planck CMB (cosmic microwave background) mission. However, recently local determinations of the Hubble constant as well as ob- servations of strong and weak gravitational lensing have found some tension with Planck. Are those observations first glimpses at a crack in the standard model and hints of an evolving dark energy com- ponent? With this ERC Consolidator Grant I will answer these questions by greatly increasing the robustness of one of those cosmological probes, the weak lensing effect of the large scale structure of the Universe also called cosmic shear. In order to reach this goal I will concentrate on the largest outstanding source of systematic error: photometric redshifts (photo-z). I will exploit the unique combination of two European imaging surveys in the optical and infrared wavelength regime, an additional narrow-band imaging survey with extremely precise photo-z, and spectroscopic calibration data from a recently approved ESO large program on the VLT. Using angular cross-correlations and machine-learning I will calibrate the photo- z in a two-stage process making sure that this crucial systematic uncertainty will keep pace with the growing statistical power of imaging surveys. This will yield an uncertainty on the amplitude of the clustering of dark matter that is smaller than the best constraints from the CMB. I will also apply these methods to ESA’s Euclid mission launching in 2020, which will fail if photo-z are not better understood by then. If the discrepancy between lensing and CMB measurements holds this would potentially result in a revolution of our understanding of the Universe. Regardless of this spectacular short-term possibility I will turn cosmic shear – one of the most powerful cosmological probes of dark energy – into a litmus test for our cosmological paradigm.

Mots-clés : weak gravitational lensing,cosmic shear,photometric redshifts
Projet ERC : CosmicExplorer (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1296935.0 €

The standard model of cosmology postulates ingredients that are not present in the standard model of particle physics – dark matter, dark energy, and a primordial origin for cosmic structure. Their physical nature remains a mystery. In the past few years, it has become clear that formidable modelling and data analysis challenges stand in the way of establishing how these ingredients fit into fundamental physics. Starting in 2023, we have an opportunity to uncover the physical underpinning of the cosmological model, using a new window on the universe opened by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Just in its first year, LSST will see more of the universe than all previous surveys combined. By repeatedly mapping huge sky areas, it will create the first motion picture of our universe. The resulting catalogues will contain billions of galaxies and other, more exotic objects such as the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave sources. This project aims to turn these catalogues into physical insight by solving three pressing challenges: (1) the formidable computational expense of accurately modelling this complex data; (2) the need to tease out subtle signals from (possibly unknown) systematics; (3) capturing the rich information in the “cosmic web” of galaxies tracing the large-scale structure of the universe, inaccessible by standard analysis methods. I will achieve these aims through a unique approach, combining innovative data emulation techniques to accelerate forward-modelling, a ground-breaking ‘explainable artificial intelligence’ approach to scientific discovery, and advanced hierarchical Bayesian methods to achieve not just precision (small error-bars) but accuracy (unbiased results). The combination of the unique tools I will develop, and LSST’s new view of the universe, opens up a vast discovery space. I will explore this space with the aim of achieving a breakthrough in our understanding of physical cosmology.

Mots-clés : survey cosmology,bayesian methods,machine learning,dark matter,dark energy,early universe
Projet ERC : SpeedInfTradeoff (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1515801.0 €

The starting point of this research proposal is a recent result by the PI, making progress in a half century old, notoriously open problem. In the mid 1960’s, Tukey and Cooley discovered the Fast Fourier Transform, an algorithm for performing one of the most important linear transformations in science and engineering, the (discrete) Fourier transform, in time complexity O(n log n). In spite of its importance, a super-linear lower bound has been elusive for many years, with only very limited results. Very recently the PI managed to show that, roughly speaking, a faster Fourier transform must result in information loss, in the form of numerical accuracy. The result can be seen as a type of computational uncertainty principle, whereby faster computation increases uncertainty in data. The mathematical argument is established by defining a type of matrix quasi-entropy, generalizing Shannon’s measure of information (entropy) to “quasi-probabilities” (which can be negative, more than 1, or even complex). This result, which is not believed to be tight, does not close the book on Fourier complexity. More importantly, the vision proposed by the PI here reaches far beyond Fourier computation. The computation-information tradeoff underlying the result suggests a novel view of complexity theory as a whole. We can now revisit some classic complexity theoretical problems with a fresh view. Examples of these problems include better understanding of the complexity of polynomial multiplication, integer multiplication, auto-correlation and cross-correlation computation, dimensionality reduction via the Fast Johnson-Linednstrauss Transform (FJLT; also discovered and developed by the PI), large scale linear algebra (linear regression, Principal Component Analysis - PCA, compressed sensing, matrix multiplication) as well as binary functions such as integer multiplication.

Mots-clés : fourier transform,lower bounds
Projet ERC : DIMO6FIT (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Sheffield — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497000.0 €

The status quo of particle physics after the first data taking at the Large Hadron Collider is: a light Higgs particle has been discovered that is perfectly compatible with the electroweak Standard Model (SM). While this is undoubtedly a historic step in particle physics, it is not entirely satisfactory, as in its current state the SM leaves many questions unanswered. If the Standard Model of today is just the low energy theory of more complex phenomena, then these phenomena will become manifest in modifications of the cross sections and differential distributions of known processes. These modifications can be described by higher dimensional operators, which are general extensions of the SM and can be tested using precision measurements of diboson production processes. The DIMO6Fit project will focus on measuring those production processes most sensitive to the new physics effects, using innovative analysis techniques aimed at significantly reducing the debilitating limitations in current measurements. I will set up a novel combined global fit for determining the higher dimensional operators coherently based on the LHC measurements. The full determination of the higher dimensional operators will be the first global precision test of general extensions to the SM. The ERC Starting Grant will make it possible to bring together a team that will conduct more efficient measurements then today at the ATLAS experiment, that will establish the framework for new precision tests, and will generate results of yet unforeseeable potential. With DIMO6FIT I will establish an exciting programme aiming at determining the higher dimensional operators, which will help uncover new physics and elucidate its nature. These novel studies will form a unique and significant contribution to the understanding of the fundamental interactions of known and possibly yet unknown particles.

Mots-clés : test of the standard model,diboson measurement,electroweak physics,atlas,new physics in precision measurements
Projet ERC : AgePhagy (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149872.0 €

The steeply increasing ageing population, and accompanying rise of age-related diseases will soon have profound societal and economic effects, making ageing research increasingly important and outcome of this grant impactful. Our most promising way to improve health in the elderly is by replicating decades of genetic finding in model organisms of healthy long-lived mutants to pharmacological approaches. This will enable transition of these findings to clinical trials. In the CancerPhagy project, we showed that genetic upregulation of autophagy, major cellular degradation pathway, increased lifespan, which we aim to mimic by pharmacological treatment. To this end, we developed the CellAge epigenetic clock, which is based on DNA methylation and which is the first clock that accurately detects subtle ageing changes in human primary cells in vitro upon a short anti-ageing drugs treatment, as shown using rapamycin and trametinib. This differentiates our clock from other available epigenetic clocks which are designed to accurately determine human age in years. By connecting the CellAge clock to autophagy drug library we will test the commercial viability of our anti-ageing drug assessment platform. To further validate our CellAge clock as a robust human ageing biomarker, we will combine its outputs with longevity assays in vivo in Drosophila. The final outcome will be an innovative and accelerated discovery platform for sought after anti-ageing/geroprotector drugs, which we will in this first instance test autophagy modifier drugs. Throughout the project we will closely collaborate with our industrial collaborator, GSK and UCL Business, which will assure we maximise the potential of our platform. Our ultimate goal is to uncover novel autophagy modifiers with anti-ageing properties and to launch the CellAge clock as the most advanced platform for expedited discovery of anti-ageing compounds.

Mots-clés : autophagy,ageing,epigenetic,epigenetic clock,pharmacology,anti ageing drug,lifespan,health span
Projet ERC : MOS100PC (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : University of Warwick — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999338.0 €

The stellar population near the Sun, which contains the brightest specimens of almost all types of stars and planets, is a key research area that remains poorly explored. The spacecraft Gaia has provided, for the first time, a near complete census of stars and white dwarfs within 100 pc, but a full understanding of the local stellar population is still a major challenge. From this project and my involvement in the next generation multi-object spectroscopic surveys 4MOST and WEAVE, I will obtain medium resolution optical spectroscopy of all stars within 100 pc. I will also conduct theoretical development to improve our understanding of how white dwarf and low-mass star evolve. Modelling the combined astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data for these 400,000 stellar objects, including crucial sub-samples of wide binaries as well as white dwarfs with well constrained ages, I propose a novel and ambitious method to improve our knowledge of single and binary stellar evolution with a particular focus on stellar ages. This will unlock the enormous potential of using stellar remnants as cosmic clocks to trace the local stellar formation history for the Galactic disk, halo and associated clusters, which will help to comprehend the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Milky Way on a larger scale. The assembly of galaxies like our own is itself paramount to understand the evolution of the low redshift Universe. I will also study evolved planetary systems that are currently being accreted in the convection zone of their white dwarf hosts, providing a direct and unique window into the beginning and evolution of rocky planet formation in our Galaxy. The project will be at the forefront of the stellar revolution triggered by Gaia and multi-object spectroscopic surveys, as well as major forthcoming and deeper surveys such as LSST and Euclid.
Projet ERC : TOPVAC (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Aalto University — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2159191.0 €

The structure of relativistic quantum vacuum (RQV) in our Universe is one of the main challenges in modern physics. We plan to advance our understanding of the vacuum structure and on this basis treat the most important unsolved problems in physics, such as the cosmological constant problem (why the measured vacuum energy is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than estimates from the zero point motion) and the hierarchy problem (why the masses of the known particles in the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics are much smaller than the Planck energy). The quantum vacuum shares many common properties with topological matter. The goal of the proposal is to concentrate both theoretical and experimental efforts in the investigation of connections between the topological quantum matter and RQV, to enhance understanding of topological condensed-matter systems especially in the ultra-low-temperature regime, and to apply this experience to solution of problems in SM & cosmology. As a condensed-matter system we shall use superfluid phases of liquid 3He – unique topological materials, which are the most close to SM and gravity: Superfluid 3He-A, where the low-energy excitations are topologically protected Weyl fermions, gauge bosons, and gravitons, is similar to the vacuum of SM above the electroweak transition. The fully gapped topological superfluid 3He-B with its Higgs bosons is the counterpart of SM vacuum in its broken symmetry phase. In particular, theory of relaxation of dark energy will be accompanied by experimental study of resonant decay of coherent states of non-equilibrium superfluid vacuum. Determination of the topological classes of the quantum vacua of SM including the vacua with Majorana fermions will be accompanied by experimental studies of Majorana fermions on the boundaries of topological superfluids and in cores of quantized vortices. Theory of extra Higgs bosons in SM will be accompanied by experimental study of light and heavy Higgs modes in 3He-B.

Mots-clés : topological matter,superfluid 3he,majorana fermions,relativistic quantum vacuum,cosmological constant
Projet ERC : EFMA (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : University of Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Cambridge
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1334109.0 €

The subject of this proposal lies at the crossroads of analysis, additive combinatorics, number theory and fractal geometry exploring equidistribution phenomena for random walks on groups and group actions and regularity properties of self-similar, self-affine and Furstenberg boundary measures and other kinds of stationary measures. Many of the problems I will study in this project are deeply linked with problems in number theory, such as bounds for the separation between algebraic numbers, Lehmer's conjecture and irreducibility of polynomials. The central aim of the project is to gain insight into and eventually resolve problems in several main directions including the following. I will address the main challenges that remain in our understanding of the spectral gap of averaging operators on finite groups and Lie groups and I will study the applications of such estimates. I will build on the dramatic recent progress on a problem of Erdos from 1939 regarding Bernoulli convolutions. I will also investigate other families of fractal measures. I will examine the arithmetic properties (such as irreducibility and their Galois groups) of generic polynomials with bounded coefficients and in other related families of polynomials. While these lines of research may seem unrelated, both the problems and the methods I propose to study them are deeply connected.

Mots-clés : spectral gap,random walks on groups,local limit theorem,bernoulli convolution,self similar measure,furstenberg boundary measure,generic polynomial,irreducibility of polynomials