Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : LIBRAD (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Institut universitaire européen de Florence — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2422908.0 €

LIBRAD investigates how populists in government reshape executive governance to implement illiberal policy changes. By covertly manipulating the machinery of government, populists erode pluralistic standards, reduce accountability, and politicize the civil service to advance their illiberal agenda. Bureaucrats play a crucial role in this context. Populists both fear them as potential saboteurs of their ambitions and simultaneously need to rely on them to push their agenda. To systematically examine the role of democratic bureaucracies when populists attempt to undermine liberal policymaking, LIBRAD analyses the performance and governance of populist governments at the subnational level in the European Union across areas such as health, education, law enforcement, and migration. It identifies how populists transform government organizations using a novel executive governance framework, advances an innovative group-based theory of bureaucratic behaviour in morally complex situations, and develops a new interactionist perspective on civil service ethics. By empirically examining populist rule at the subnational level in EU member states and analysing executive transformations in a selected subsample, LIBRAD seeks to understand when bureaucrats resist to or comply with illiberal demands. The project combines theory testing on the impact of populist rule with theory generation, providing a new interactionist explanation for bureaucratic behaviour. Additionally, LIBRAD will offer practical recommendations to increase administrative resilience against illiberal state deformations and provide insights on enhancing democratic legitimacy through executive organizational reform.

Mots-clés : public administration,democratic backsliding,populism,illiberal rule,regional government,subnational governance,european union
Projet ERC : AI STORIES (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université de Bergen — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

AI STORIES is premised on the hypothesis that narrative archetypes fundamentally structure the output of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI). Large language models (LLMs) like GTP-4 are trained on vast quantities of text and images and generate new texts that are statistically similar to the training data. The scientific consensus acknowledges that LLMs replicate and sometimes exacerbate historical biases in their training data.  AI STORIES proposes that LLMs are also affected by a deeper bias: that of the narrative structures in the social media posts, news stories, marketing blurbs and novels the models are trained on. If this is the case it will deeply impact how we use and apply AI, and how we think about bias and cultural diversity in AI models. Currently available LLMs are largely trained on English-language texts, with a heavy weighting towards the United States. When they generate texts in non-English languages they may succeed in producing grammatically correct texts, but if my hypothesis is correct, their deeper content will be fundamentally structured by the stories that dominate in the training data. This is a threat to cultural diversity that goes well beyond the purely linguistic.  AI STORIES applies the humanities’ deep knowledge of narrative to AI research by developing and testing this hypothesis. We will apply narratology to understand the narrative structures of LLM’s training data. We test the hypothesis by training LLMs on specific kinds of narratives, then using prompt engineering and both qualitative and computational narratological analysis to reverse engineer the structures of AI-generated output. Three comparative case studies will look specifically at Scandinavian, Australian and either Indian or Nigerian stories.  The overall objective is to develop a narratology of AI, and to leverage the findings to ensure that policymakers, developers, educators and other stakeholders can use our research to direct the future of AI.

Mots-clés : artificial intelligence,narrative,narratology,digital humanities,datasets,digital culture,literary studies,internet studies,critical dataset studies,ai bias,large language models,llms,machine learning,computational narratology,chatgpt,gpt,cultural heritage
Projet ERC : C-FORS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2023956.0 €

The notion of construction figures centrally in mathematics and other formal sciences. An idealized, infinitary constructional approach is successfully applied to set theory, which provides the foundation for contemporary mathematics. C-FORS aims to develop new, similarly groundbreaking applications of the constructional approach. This will be the largest concerted effort to date to develop a foundation for the study of intensional entities, e.g. propositions and properties, where a variety of paradoxes still arise, with no agreed-upon solution—nearly a century after set theory received its proper foundation.  However, infinitary constructions are poorly understood, and there is no known way to apply the constructional approach to intensional entities. C-FORS aims to overcome these limitations by developing a critical but liberal conception of construction inspired by my increasingly popular potentialist metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics, and by using two theoretical tools developed by me, inspired by constructive mathematics, but only recently generalized so as to overcome various limitations and thus permit novel applications. C-FORS makes a range of groundbreaking applications of these tools, thus achieving a lasting impact on several disciplines. In philosophy, I provide radical alternatives to the currently fashionable use of typed languages and exotic non-classical logics. In the foundations of mathematics, I develop a pioneering constructional approach that retains the strength of set theory, while incorporating insights from the constructive tradition. I launch a rigorous approach to constructed entities in formal ontology. In formal semantics, I develop novel theories of propositions and properties, and a new logical foundation for the study of nominalization and group formation. Overall, C-FORS offers pioneering interdisciplinary research where philosophy and logic yield—and are themselves constrained by—novel applications to the formal sciences.

Mots-clés : infinity,predicativity,intuitionistic logic,properties,propositions,proper classes,intensionality,hyperintensionality,paradox,grounding,nominalization,group formation,formal ontology
Projet ERC : MIGMOBS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Institut universitaire européen de Florence — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : EUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 482337.0 €

MIGMOBS investigates how borders and hierarchies are maintained between “the West and the Rest”, even as those who are internationally mobile sometimes succeed in challenging the “birthright lottery” - i.e. that citizenship at birth most determines someone’s chances in life. It asks: How does changing categorisation of subordinate populations worldwide in terms of “migration”, “free movement”, and “minorities” relate to these in- and between- country inequalities? It echoes critical migration, mobilities and borders scholars who argue that late capitalism in liberal democracies continues to advance through an ever more sophisticated differentiation and management of population – at the border as well as internal to states. Such work, though, has not adequately examined variation regionally, or across historical shifts in political economy: from post-war liberalism, through neoliberalism, to the era of COVID and beyond. MIGMOBS thus explores in unprecedented empirical breadth and detail how states reproduce sovereign power in an otherwise porous world: selecting and extracting wanted or recognised movers as “immigrants”, brutally excluding many other “migrants”, while simultaneously rendering fluid and untroubling a vast range of banal “mobilities” such as tourism and business travel. Mapping physical, virtual and non-human mobilities, the project details demographic and social connections over time between 21 states. This quantitative comparative historical work underpins co-productive ethnographic case studies rethinking a range of archetypal “migration systems” in and from Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. These investigate how subordinate populations resist the categories, statuses and borders imposed upon them. With the pandemic’s impact on border crossings and transactions, new modes of classification and accreditation suggest an increasingly precise biometric control of movement and behaviour: a new phase of late capitalism I call “viral liberalism”.

Mots-clés : migration,mobilities,global inequality,inequalities,development,borders,diversity,liberalism,racism,globalisation,governmentality,transnationalism,decolonial thought,political demography,mixed methods
Projet ERC : SOUNDSPACE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université autonome de Barcelone — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2100804.0 €

Processions were quintessentially performative acts that infused a sense of identity among the urban community by linking the emblematic topography of the city and creating performative spaces of enhanced ritual activity and distinctive auditory landscapes. The premise of Soundspace is that hermeneutic study of the procession as performance affords insight into the dynamic workings of society and the experience of urban life. It aims to go beyond this to assess the impact of urban ritual on participants and ear-witnesses through analysis of the social and cultural processes that lay behind that experience, and of the perceptual discourses that gave it meaning and significance for all those present. The procession formed a moving intersensory experience that also mobilised the emotions of the urban community: but how did this work in practice in the historical past? How can the historian enter into the performative moment to understand the emotional impact of sound in acoustic space? The project aims to interrogate the multi-faceted relationship between sound, space and society by scrutinising the interstices between collective experience, social expectations and memory through the prism of historical sound studies, an umbrella term here used to combine a cross-disciplinary approach—urban studies, sensory history and history of the emotions—and DH tools: Virtual Reality, digital cartography and semantic discourse analysis. It will forge a new theoretical framework by combining concepts of acoustic and emotional communities to analyse the social and cultural processes involved in the preparation, performance, reception and impact of the procession and the prevailing discourses that forged the significance of processional expression for the urban community. The main objective is to open up new ways to explore the impact of intangible but key features of processions such as acoustic space, soundscape competence, density of sensory experience and emotional response.

Mots-clés : urban ritual procession acoustic space urban soundscape soundscape competence historical sound studies early music listening to the past sensory history history of the emotions emotional discourses material culture shared knowledge virtual reality digital cartography semantic analysis
Projet ERC : NewPC (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université de Bergen — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Parameterized Complexity (PC) provides an approach to moving beyond classic worst-case analysis of algorithms by focusing on multivariate algorithms whose performance is influenced by several parameters beyond input size. While it has been successful in various algorithmic domains, particularly those involving discrete objects like graphs, sets, matroids, or Boolean formulas, PC remains underutilized in areas involving geometric and algebraic objects such as points, vectors, linear spaces, or matrices. This project seeks to revolutionize the PC field by developing novel multivariate algorithms for continuous optimization problems involving such objects. The performance of these algorithms—whether measured by approximation ratio, probability error, or running time—is highly sensitive to multiple parameters.  The main challenge in advancing parameterized complexity to these new domains is the need for suitable algorithmic and complexity tools. To address this challenge, the NewPC project proposes to revisit and revise fundamental methods for handling geometric and algebraic objects—such as dimension reduction, sampling, sketching, clustering, and coresets—through the conceptual questions of PC, including determining proper parameterization, quantifying the distance from triviality, and identifying when kernelization is possible. In short, the proposed Research Program can be summarized as:  Questions of PC + Geometric Methods = New Horizons  The proposed research will open new horizons in parameterized complexity by  - Advancing multivariate approximation and lossy kernelization, both emerging areas within parameterized complexity.  - Establishing multivariate algorithmic analysis as the standard tool for designing provably correct and efficient algorithms in domains such as computational geometry, machine learning, robust statistics, and optimization—areas where the classical worst-case algorithmic analysis often falls short.

Mots-clés : parameterized complexity,algorithms
Projet ERC : DC-PGE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Université technologique de Dresde — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU Dresden
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2386205.0 €

Genome editing in human therapies has the potential to revolutionize modern medicine. With numerous clinical trials underway and the recent approval of the first genome editing therapy, the field is rapidly advancing. However, there is a consensus that clinical genome editing tools must be efficient, precise and safe. Current tools predominantly rely on host cell DNA repair pathways to complete the editing process, which poses a risk for unintended editing events. Host cell DNA repair independent, fully programmable editing tools represent a new class of genome editing technologies, significantly expanding the potential for delivering life-saving therapies to patients. Genome editing tools that fulfil these characteristics are enzymes that recombine DNA. While there has been some success in engineering these enzymes to recognize and act on therapeutically relevant targets, their time-consuming and labour-intensive generation has hindered widespread implementation. DC-PGE aims to address this shortcoming. We have recently demonstrated that recombinase activity can be conditioned by internally fusing a zinc-finger DNA-binding domain into the enzyme's coding sequence, thereby making the enzyme activity contingent on zinc finger DNA binding. This pioneering discovery presents a genuine opportunity to develop next generation and best-in-class genome editing enzymes. DC-PGE aims to i) build a platform to apply DNA-binding conditioned precision genome editing to DNA-recombining enzymes, ii) develop a pan-recombinase system for immediate targeting of virtually any genomic sequence and iii) apply the technology to correct the genetic cause of MECP2 duplication syndrome at nucleotide precision. DC-PGE will serve as a foundation for advancing innovative treatments and improving patient outcomes. Our unique approach lies in combining different disciplines and cutting-edge technologies with the potential to transform the field of genome editing and elevate it to the next level.

Mots-clés : personalized medicine,directed molecular evolution,bioengineering
Projet ERC : CATCH (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : USC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2494173.0 €

Fifty-six years ago, historian Lynn White Jr. published his “J’accuse” against the Judeo-Christian tradition, blaming it for fostering a culture that exploited nature. Half a century later, Pope Francis published an environmental manifesto, positioning himself as a champion against climate change. Has the Catholic Church (CC) embraced environmentalism? What have been its key environmental interventions, turning points, and internal and external frictions? CATCH will provide the first comprehensive environmental history of the CC from the 1960s—when Vatican II intertwined with the hopes of the 1960s—to the 2000s, with the election of Bergoglio. Scholars have explored the intersection of religion and the environment from theological and philosophical perspectives, leaving historical relationships unexamined. This oversight is significant given the CC's global influence, including its participation in major environmental conferences and its potential impact on 1.5 billion people. In what ways has the CC shaped environmental visions, politics, and realities? CATCH aims to address this gap by researching the Church’s environmental engagement across multiple scales. Globally, it will examine its role in environmental governance at international conferences and UN debates. Regionally, it will analyze the CC’s diverse experiences of engagement with environmental issues through case studies in South and North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The PI, with a strong background in environmental history and political ecology, will lead this groundbreaking research. The team will include 5 PhD students, 1 postdoc, and 1 research assistant, supported by 4 senior researchers—each an expert in one of the case studies—and an ethical advisory board with two leading theologians. The project will produce 5 PhD dissertations, a monograph, an edited volume, a special issue, 13 peer-reviewed articles, an open-access oral history repository, and a documentary.

Mots-clés : catholic church environment environmental global governance liberation theology catholic grassroots organizations antiwar antinuclear movement environmentalism
Projet ERC : BACtheWINNER (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : University College Cork — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2302431.25 €

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an ongoing global crisis exacerbated by lack of discovery of novel antimicrobials and absence of investment/innovation in pipelines by the pharmaceutical industry. New alternatives that are target-specific and do not cause collateral damage to the microbiome would revolutionise human and animal health. Bacteriocins are small antibacterial peptides produced by bacteria that are gene-encoded and can be narrow or broad spectrum. They have potential for development of new antimicrobial molecules through discovery and protein engineering resulting in potent, targeted antimicrobials. They have many possible applications including treatment of gut and topical infections, and microbiome editing. However, basic research issues stand in the way of their exploitation including low production levels often in unsuitable hosts, resistance development in bacterial targets, and inadequate potency/inhibition spectrum. The main aim of BACtheWINNER is to develop bacteriocins as novel antimicrobials by solving these challenges through combining and innovating state-of-the-art technologies in peptide bioengineering and molecular genetics, which will lay the foundation for the generation of this new family of therapeutics that target WHO and CDC priority pathogens and undesirable microbiota. To achieve this, a four-phase bacteriocin discovery and development pipeline will be implemented which takes new and existing bacteriocins and improves them through bioengineering, develops optimal combinations, (over-)produces them in desirable hosts, and validates their use in preclinical models of human infection and disease. This will pave the way for their development as precision microbiome tools and antimicrobials against AMR pathogens. We bring together unique expertise necessary to deliver this project by combining bacteriocin and microbiome research with genetic manipulation of food and gut bacteria.

Mots-clés : bacteriocin,microbiome,bioengineering,