Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : AsthmaPhenotypes (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
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 : 1067832.0 €

Fifteen years ago it was widely believed that asthma was an allergic/atopic disease caused by allergen exposure in infancy; this produced atopic sensitization and continued exposure resulted in eosinophilic airways inflammation, bronchial hyper-responsiveness and reversible airflow obstruction. It is now clear that this model is at best incomplete. Less than one-half of asthma cases involve allergic (atopic) mechanisms, and most asthma in low-and-middle income countries is non-atopic. Westernization may be contributing to the global increases in asthma prevalence, but this process appears to involve changes in asthma susceptibility rather than increased exposure to “established” asthma risk factors. Understanding why these changes are occurring is essential in order to halt the growing global asthma epidemic.This will require a combination of epidemiological, clinical and basic science studies in a variety of environments. A key task is to reclassify asthma phenotypes. These are important to: (i) better understand the aetiological mechanisms of asthma; (ii) identify new causes; and (iii) identify new therapeutic measures. There are major opportunities to address these issues using new techniques for sample collection from the airways (sputum induction, nasal lavage), new methods of analysis (microbiome, epigenetics), and new bioinformatics methods for integrating data from multiple sources and levels. There is an unprecedented potential to go beyond the old atopic/non-atopic categorization of phenotypes. I will therefore conduct analyses to re-examine and reclassify asthma phenotypes. The key features are the inclusion of: (i) both high and low prevalence centres from both high income countries and low-and-middle income countries; (ii) much more detailed biomarker information than has been used for previous studies of asthma phenotypes; and (iii) new bioinformatics methods for integrating data from multiple sources and levels.

Mots-clés : asthma,epidemiology,phenotypes
Projet ERC : PathEVome (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : James Hutton Institute — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 337719.0 €

Filamentous plant pathogens (fungi and oomycetes) cause the most devastating crop diseases and thus significantly threaten global food security. Essential components of their virulence arsenal are proteins called cytoplasmic effectors that are delivered inside plant cells to suppress immunity. One of the major scientific challenges in this field is understanding how effectors are secreted and translocated into host cells; a question that is hotly debated. An exciting breakthrough in my laboratory revealed that cytoplasmic effectors accumulate in extracellular vesicles (EVs), implicating this as a delivery route. This critical discovery establishes a vital need to address: • What proteins reside in EVs and how do EVs traffic them between pathogen and host cells? • How are EVs formed and how are effectors packaged into them? • What are the routes for uptake of cytoplasmic effectors into host cells and how do they reach their destination? Each question will be answered by a corresponding workpackage (WP) that brings challenging, innovative approaches to the study of molecular plant pathology. In WP1 proteomics and transgenic approaches will allow the EV proteome to be determined and high-throughput automated electron microscopy will resolve the 3-dimensional organisation of the interface between plant and pathogen. In WP2, new molecular cell biological approaches and genome editing will facilitate an understanding of effector secretory routes and EV biogenesis. In WP3, fusion or endocytosis of EVs with plant cells will be studied and the endocytic routes to delivery of effectors to their final destination will be defined. PathEVome will develop a ground-breaking understanding of effector delivery from filamentous pathogens to the inside of living plant cells. It will provide tools and approaches beyond the current state-of-the-art in infection cell biology that can be broadly adopted to study the roles of vesicular transport in causing disease.

Mots-clés : cell biology,molecular transport systems,microbiology
Projet ERC : Filmcolors (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : University of Zurich — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UZH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2913143.75 €

Film is in essence colored light projected onto a screen. Its aesthetics are thus highly determined by the material properties of film and the optical configuration of the cinematic apparatus. To this day, however, there is no systematic study of the relationship between the technology and aesthetics of film colors, despite the fact that, following the digital turn in film production and distribution, the understanding of this relationship is more essential than ever before. Over 200 film color processes were developed since the invention of film. They are presented on the Timeline of Historical Film Colors, which will be an integral part of the project. The groundbreaking nature of this project lies in a truly interdisciplinary research design with a novel methodology to explore the interaction of technological advances and limitations with film color aesthetics, identifying diachronic patterns of stylistic means. To this end it develops a tool through recent advancements in digital humanities for crowd-sourcing of color analyses of large groups of films. In-depth studies of technical papers and scientific measurements of film colors will investigate the technical basis of films’ aesthetic appearance. These insights will be applied to the digitization and restoration of historical films to explore and disseminate the results. While every serious art restoration connects scientific analyses with art-historical and aesthetic investigations, a similar approach is rarely applied to film. In summary, the present research proposal capitalizes on the principal investigator’s preceding studies to bridge the gap between technology and aesthetics. With the methods described here, the results will trace previously hidden roots of aesthetic developments of film colors. While the project is ambitious, it builds on a sizable methodological foundation to optimize risk management and guarantee significant advances in the understanding of film colors.

Mots-clés : film,film history,film technology,film narration,film aesthetics,film analysis,film perception,digital humanities
Projet ERC : SHADOKS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : École normale supérieure PSL — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : ENS PSL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 290062.5 €

Filtering and water purification rely traditionnally on the concept of passive sieving across properly decorated nanopores. Such basic separation principle contrasts with the highly advanced membrane processes existing in Nature, which harness the full subtleties of active transport across channels. This involves advanced functions like ionic pumps, ultra-high selective channels, or voltage-gated nanopores, which all play a key role in many vital needs and neuronal functions. The Shadoks project aims at developing the concept of artificial ionic machines, based on active nanofluidic transport. This is an experimental project targeting a fundamental proof of concept. It moreover involves a strong theoretical counterpart, essential to experimental advances and prototyping. I will investigate a wealth of strongly non-equilibrium transport phenomena occurring at the nanoscales, taking advantage of our unique know-how in building nanofluidic heterostructures, in particular made of carbon and boron-nitride. I target ionic Coulomb blockade, on/off voltage-gated nanopore, ionic pumps, dynamical osmosis. These processes allow to tune ionic fluxes against the gradients and induce out-of-equilibrium charge separation, hereby conceiving active sieving as a novel route for separation and desalination. Those new building blocks will subsequently be assembled to create advanced bio-inspired membrane functionalities. We will use ionic pumps to store and deliver charge carriers on demand, akin to the triggered electric shock of the electric eel. Furthermore we use the active nanofluidics building blocks to mimic a basic machinery of neuronal processes. I target in particular to build an artificial dendritic spine, as an ionic information transmitter. As an ultimate goal, this is a route towards elementary neuronal computational processes based on the artificial ionic machines.

Mots-clés : nanofluidics,active transport,separation and desalination
Projet ERC : INFOMAK (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : CERCA Institution — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CERCA;I-CERCA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 767500.0 €

Financial markets play an essential role in allocating an economy’s resources to their most productive use, fostering investment, employment, innovation, and growth. While there is substantial evidence that financial markets are plagued with information asymmetries and its perils, we do not have a good understanding of what economic conditions may foster such information asymmetries, or how they interact with aggregate investment decisions, liquidity in asset markets, or economic fluctuations. In order to fill this gap, the goal of this proposal is twofold: The first component focuses on understanding the drivers of information asymmetries. To do this, first, I will develop novel microeconomic frameworks where the degree of information asymmetries and the quality of assets is endogenously determined by agents’ decisions to produce complex financial products (project 1) or to trade in opaque markets (project 2). Second, I will construct a novel dataset of financial products’ attributes to explore the drivers of asset quality and complexity in the data and to test the predictions of my theoretical frameworks. The second component explores how information asymmetries, through their effect on financial markets, interact with aggregate outcomes, such as market liquidity and investment. To do this, I will develop novel macroeconomic frameworks where I embed my insights on complexity (project 4), and opacity and asset quality (project 5) into dynamic, general equilibrium settings.

Mots-clés : information asymmetries,economic fluctuations,complexity,opacity,learning,regulation,credit cycles
Projet ERC : ANT (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1438745.0 €

Finite automata are fundamental objects in Computer Science, of great importance on one hand for theoretical aspects (formal language theory, decidability, complexity) and on the other for practical applications (parsing). In number theory, finite automata are mainly used as simple devices for generating sequences of symbols over a finite set (e.g., digital representations of real numbers), and for recognizing some sets of integers or more generally of finitely generated abelian groups or monoids. One of the main features of these automatic structures comes from the fact that they are highly ordered without necessarily being trivial (i.e., periodic). With their rich fractal nature, they lie somewhere between order and chaos, even if, in most respects, their rigidity prevails. Over the last few years, several ground-breaking results have lead to a great renewed interest in the study of automatic structures in arithmetics. A primary objective of the ANT project is to exploit this opportunity by developing new directions and interactions between automata and number theory. In this proposal, we outline three lines of research concerning fundamental number theoretical problems that have baffled mathematicians for decades. They include the study of integer base expansions of classical constants, of arithmetical linear differential equations and their link with enumerative combinatorics, and of arithmetics in positive characteristic. At first glance, these topics may seem unrelated, but, surprisingly enough, the theory of finite automata will serve as a natural guideline. We stress that this new point of view on classical questions is a key part of our methodology: we aim at creating a powerful synergy between the different approaches we propose to develop, placing automata theory and related methods at the heart of the subject. This project provides a unique opportunity to create the first international team focusing on these different problems as a whole.

Mots-clés : automata theory,transcendence,algebraic independence,mahler s method,subspace theorem,diophantine geometry,arithmetics in characteristic p,g functions,enumerative combinatorics,decidability
Projet ERC : LIPA (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : University of Warsaw — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UW
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1768125.0 €

Finite-state devices like finite automata and monoids on finite words, or extensions to trees and infinite objects, are fundamental tools of logic in computer science. There are tens of models in the literature, ranging from finite automata on finite words to weighted automata on infinite trees. Many existing finite-state models share important similarities, like existence of canonical (minimal) devices, or decidability of emptiness, or a logic-automata connection. The first and primary goal of this project is to systematically investigate these similarities, and create a unified theory of finite-state devices, which: 1. covers the whole spectrum of existing finite-state devices, including settings with diverse inputs (e.g. words and trees, or infinite inputs, or infinite alphabets) and diverse outputs (e.g. Boolean like in the classical automata, or numbers like in weighted automata); and 2. sheds light on the correct notion of finite-state device in settings where there is no universally accepted choice or where finite-state devices have not been considered at all. The theory of finite-state devices is one of those fields of theory where even the more advanced results have natural potential for applications. It is surprising and sad how little of this potential is normally realised, with most existing software using only the most rudimentary theoretical techniques. The second goal of the project is to create two tools which use more advanced aspects of the theory of automata to solve simple problems of wide applicability (i.e. at least tens of thousands of users): 1. a system that automatically grades exercises in automata, which goes beyond simple testing, and forces the students to write proofs 2. a system that uses learning to synthesise text transformations (such a search-and-replace, but also more powerful ones) by using examples

Mots-clés : automata,tree automata,monoids,logic in computer science,profinite words,transducers
Projet ERC : CRYOMAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of Warwick — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496439.0 €

Fish living in polar oceans have evolved an elegant, macromolecular, solution to survive in sub-zero water: they secrete antifreeze (glyco)proteins (AFGPs) which have several ‘antifreeze’ effects, including ice recrystallization inhibition (IRI) - they slow the rate of ice crystal growth. Ice crystal growth is a major problem in settings as diverse as oil fields, wind turbines, road surfaces and frozen food. Analysis of the process of cryopreservation, whereby donor cells are frozen for later use, has revealed that ice recrystallization is a major contributor to cell death upon thawing. Enhanced cryopreservation methods are particularly needed for stem cell storage to maximize the use of this currently limited resource, but also to enable storage of clinically transfused cells such as platelets and red blood cells. AFGPs have thus far not found application in cryopreservation due to their low availability from natural sources, extremely challenging synthesis, indications of cytotoxicity, but more importantly they have a side effect of shaping ice crystals into needle-shapes which pierces cells’ membranes, killing them. The aim of this ambitious project is to take a multidisciplinary approach to develop synthetic polymers as tunable, scalable and accessible bio-mimetics of AFGPs, which specifically reproduce only the desirable IRI properties. Precision synthetic and biological methods will be applied to access both vinyl- and peptide- based materials with IRI activity. The bio-inspired approach taken here will include detailed biophysical analysis of the polymer-ice interactions and translation of this understanding to real cryopreservation scenarios using blood-borne cells and human stem cells. In summary, this ambitious project takes inspiration from Nature's defense mechanisms that have evolved to allow life to flourish in extreme environments and will employ modern polymer chemistry to apply it to a real clinical problem; cryopreservation.
Projet ERC : OCEAN SENTINEL (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Fisheries are operating worldwide over nation’s Economic Exclusive Zones (EEZ) as well as over international waters. Information on the location of fishing is rarely known, especially in international waters, yet it is critical since in many oceanic sectors non declared and illegal fisheries are affecting negatively ecosystems through over exploitation and by catch of non-target species Knowledge about the distribution of fishing boats is fundamental for the regulation of fishing activities as well for the conservation of the oceans. I propose a New Concept of ocean surveillance based on new bio-logging technologies fitted on large foraging marine predators. The OCEAN SENTINEL Proof of this Concepts will (1) develop a logger called CENTURION that couple a XGPS platform detecting and locating radar emissions, with a satellite transmission system (Argos) that would send instantaneously the location of vessels to a receiving site, (2) deploy the logger on wide ranging animals used as platforms and (3) make available immediately the information obtained from the CENTURION logger through a website. The OCEAN SENTINEL programme will generate important social benefits by providing information to a wide range of beneficiaries, from governments or regional authorities managing EEZ and natural resources, regional or national fishing authorities, researchers and non-governmental organisation in conservation. The concept will be tested in the Southern Indian Ocean from Crozet and Kerguelen Islands where valuable and extensive fisheries operate in EEZs and over oceanic waters. This concept has the potential to be used in other areas where information on fisheries location is needed. The project will also lead to further discoveries on the relationship between seabirds and fisheries as well on the extent of fisheries in zones where surveillance by conventional methods is not possible.

Mots-clés : ocean surveillance,fisheries location,bio logging,seabirds
Projet ERC : COTOFLEXI (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Leibniz University Hannover — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499938.0 €

Flexoelectricity is the generation of electric polarization under mechanical strain gradient or mechanical deformation due to the electric field gradient (converse flexo). It is a more general phenomenon than the linear change in polarization due to stress, the piezoelectric effect. Flexoelectricity exists in a wider range of centrosymmetric materials especially nontoxic materials useful for biomedical application. It grows dominantly in energy density at submicro- or nanoscale enabling self-powered nano devices such as body implants and small-scale wireless sensors. Among the emerging applications of flexoelectricity, energy harvesters are the basic front devices of wide technological impact. Despite the advantages offered by flexoelectricity, research in this field is still in germination. Experiments are limited in measuring, explaining and quantifying some key phenomena. Materials engineering and engineering of strain are the key challenges to bring energy harvesting structures/systems to become a viable technology. Accomplishment of this task pressingly requires a robust modelling tool that can assist the development of flexoelectric energy harvesters. Hence, the aim of the project is to develop a computational framework to support the characterization, design, virtual testing and optimization of the next generation nano energy harvesters. It will be able to (1) predict the energy conversion efficiency and output voltage influenced by layout and surface effects of structures in 3D, (2) to virtually test the performance with various vibrational dynamic conditions, and (3) to break through current designs of simple geometry for flexoelectric structures by optimization considering manufacturing constraints. Innovative metamaterial/3D folding energy harvesters expectantly outperforming current piezoelectric energy harvesters of the same size will be manufactured and tested.

Mots-clés : isogeometric analysis,flexoelectric,nano energy harvester,piezoelectric,nano device