Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : ALTER e-GROW (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and R egeneration
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 : 3050054.8 €

ALTER e-GROW aims to identify the mechanisms underlying the development of tri-dimensional (3D) tissues in multicellular organisms. Many physical factors influence the shape of an organism growing from a single cell or a small group of cells: the direction of growth along the x, y and z axis; when and how rapidly growth occurs, and whether the region of growth is diffuse or localised. An almost infinite number of combinations of these factors are possible. Most animals and land plants grow in 3D from the onset of embryogenesis. Other multicellular organisms, however, grow in 3D later in their development; for example, by emergence of a 3D bud from a single row of cells (as in mosses) or by aggregation of hyphae (as in fungi). The large phylogenetic distances between current model organisms complicate the investigation of the mechanisms underlying this diversity of 3D growth strategies. Brown algae, by contrast, display all of these 3D growth modes in a single clade, making them a unique subject for investigation of the mechanisms. Moreover, their independent and recent evolution when compared to the other clades suggests that they have developed divergent 3D growth mechanisms. In this project, my team will observe and quantify parameters of 3D growth in four species of brown algae, each representative of one of the main types of 3D growth mechanisms also found in animals, plants and Fungi. Then we will build dynamic mathematical models that describe these mechanisms by integrating quantitative data on cell shape, cell wall thickness and stiffness, cytoskeleton organisation, turgor and cell–cell tension in dynamic 3D growth simulations, and test them by comparing the 3D growth pattern of wild type algae and genetic mutants. Thus, this project will pioneer what is currently a ‘black box’ of knowledge about the development of brown algae, examining how these organisms raise multicellular structures in 3D space.

Mots-clés : brown algae,3d growth,quantitative imaging,modelling,mechanics,orientation of cell division,anisotropy,cell axis,genome editing,single cell transcriptomics,cell wall,actin filaments,spindle,confocal microscopy,
Projet ERC : HotCores (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université de Lille — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2435665.0 €

The Earth’s inner-core (IC) is 1220 km radius planet within the Earth, made of solid iron (Fe) crystallizing from the outer core (OC) as the Earth cools down. The IC affects our life at the surface; its growth provides a major source of energy for maintaining the Earth’s magnetic field. One may view the IC as a freezing ball of Fe floating at the center of the OC, but seismic exploration reveal structures of increasing complexity, raising fundamental questions on the history and internal dynamics of the IC. Geophysical observations unearth the IC as it is today. Understanding the history of the IC and the effect of the IC on the global Earth dynamics, however, requires a reconstruction based on today’s observations and knowledge of the physical properties of the IC Fe alloy, how they could affect IC dynamics, and their relation with present-day geophysical observables. There are significant knowledge gaps and outdated principles regarding the underlying physical properties of the IC Fe alloy. The IC temperature is close to melting, and the IC might even be partially molten. How does temperature affect of the mechanical properties of the IC Fe alloy? What is the effect of temperature and partial melting on seismic observables such as wave travel time and attenuation? This is poorly known and it hinders our interpretation capability of the ever-growing body of geophysical observations. In HotCores, advanced high pressure and/or high temperature experiments will be performed on Fe alloys and analogues. I propose to reenact key events of the history of the IC in the laboratory, as Fe crystallizes at the inner-outer-core boundary, as the IC grows and dynamically evolves to its present state, and as we see it today through the lenses of geophysical exploration. What is the structure and dynamics of the IC? How will the IC evolve in the future? HotCores aims at providing the mineralogical foundation that will help solving these mysteries.

Mots-clés : iron,earth core,viscoelasticity,high pressure,deformation,plasticity,anisotropy,extreme conditions
Projet ERC : GREENWATCH (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) constitutes a communication system that enables comprehensive and continuous monitoring of the effects of human activity on Earth’s ecosystems, thus potentially facilitating the green transition to sustainable forms of social life. But the scope and the scale of the necessary monitoring simultaneously entails surveillance, not only of natural and built environments, but of persons and their actions as well, extending far beyond the online tracking of citizens and consumers which over the past decade has generated widespread public debate and motivated substantial legislation regulating digital infrastructures in the European Union and beyond.  The GREENWATCH project anticipates and assesses the ethical dilemmas that follow from green surveillance: What kinds and which degrees of surveillance will the present human cohort be prepared to accept in the coming decades to ensure the livelihood of the species centuries and millennia into the future? Comparing the three world regions driving the development of IoT – Europe, the United States, and China – the study maps the empirical scenarios being projected for IoT as part of the green transition; theorizes the process of green surveillance as information feedback to national and international systems of governance as well as to individual citizens, consumers, and corporations; and evaluates both the scenarios and the practice of surveillance against the background of classic philosophical traditions of local and global social justice, complemented by recent conceptions of climate justice and environmental justice. Through IoT, Earth is sending a message that the human species is obliged to respond to, across ideological and civilizational divides, for survival and, at best, individual and collective human flourishing (eudaimonia).

Mots-clés : internet of things,green transition,europe,united states,china
Projet ERC : ANGLE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2488832.0 €

The world is an increasingly angry place. Fueled by economic turmoil, conflict, climate collapse and culture wars, outbursts of collective anger are visible online, on the streets, and in various political forums. These outpourings of visible, collective ire, what we call ‘amplified anger’, have been historically condemned in mainstream public discourse as anti-democratic, uncivil attacks on human co-existence. But for the people engaged in these acts of rage, anger is often seen as a fully legitimate, necessary response to injustice, oppression or crisis. There is an urgent need to study the sources and rhetorics of legitimation that allow this amplified anger to flourish, be voiced, and spread within and across contemporary communities. ANGLE (anger, legitimised) will study how communities that feel their anger has been delegitimised seek to perform, communicate and justify this volatile emotion. Composed of four interconnected work packages (Fury, Venom, Rage and Wrath), the project will explore gendered, postcolonial, post-conversion and neo- religious iterations of anger in specific cultural sites across the globe. It uses a novel two-fold methodology: fieldwork and participant observation to access and study the localised ‘anger worlds’ of particular communities; and textual analysis to study print and online spaces where discourses of amplified anger intermingle to create wider, transnational ‘anger arenas’. ANGLE’s analytical framework will provide critical empirical insights into the dynamics of global political action. Through the innovative concept of the ‘grammar of anger’, we will compare the legitimation, transmission and ethics of amplified anger across local and global political sites. We will advance EU’s research environment by consolidating empirically informed anger studies, building an international consortium of anger scholars, and creating a significant repertoire of knowledge on the economic, cultural and political impact in the 21st century.

Mots-clés : anger,legitimisation,world politics
Projet ERC : MoPo (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499678.0 €

Key developments in contemporary politics share a tendency of moralization. People moralize politics when they judge each other and assess them as good or bad people. A moralizing politics of judging others and a counter-politics of reacting to being judged can be found in phenomena such as cancel culture, esteem of work, accusations of fake news, and climate shaming. The existing literature tends to focus on the detrimental effects of using moral language in politics, for example, as a catalyst of polarization. MoPo takes a step back and seeks to understand the meaning and value of social practices of moral responsibility ascriptions. The idea is that moralized politics must be approached as having roots in people’s deep and ineradicable concern with how they are regarded and treated by other people. Moreover, judging others is not only something we cannot stop doing as human beings but also integral to the democratic ideal. Democracy is an ideal for how citizens should regard and hold each other mutually accountable. Judging others is necessary to demonstrate commitment to and upholding this ideal. At the same time, judging others can create unproductive hostility and make people feel inferior. The challenge that MoPo addresses is to understand when the human propensity to judge others is pernicious versus beneficial for democracy and to answer how we can transform it into a resource that strengthens democracy. The project does so through a research design that combines insights from moral and political philosophy and four case studies of moralizing politics (Cancel Culture, Dignity of Work, Fake News, and Climate Shaming). MoPo breaks new ground by comprehensively rethinking the idea of moralizing politics, creatively integrating philosophical analysis and research into practices of moral judgment in different areas and arenas, and by theorizing how practices of judging others can be channeled into improving (rather than undermining) democracy.

Mots-clés : moral philosophy,ethics,deliberative democracy
Projet ERC : CIRCAMET (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Université de Copenhague — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : KU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 750000.0 €

Type 2 diabetes is a global epidemic, with prevalence of >500 million. The current obesogenic environment, favoring high caloric foods and physical inactivity, is a major driver of this epidemic. An evolutionarily conserved mechanism by which environmental factors impact whole body physiology is through internal biological clocks and the control of circadian rhythms. This machinery is a transcription/translation feedback loop that anticipates day/night cycles to optimize organismal physiology. However, the underlying mechanisms regulating metabolic rhythmicity and its role in type 2 diabetes pathogenesis remain enigmatic. Cellular energy sensors relay information about the environment to the circadian clock machinery, but the extent to which this biology can be modified to improve systemic metabolism is unknown. We will uncover mechanisms that underpin the relationship between the circadian clock, energy sensors, and metabolism and their dysfunction in type 2 diabetes. Our overarching hypothesis is that synchronizing energetic stressors to the molecular circadian clock may maximize the health benefits on metabolism. We will elucidate the mechanism by which the timing of energetic stressors acts on peripheral tissues controlling energy homeostasis. We will study temporal dynamics of cell and organ physiology, rather than snapshots in time. We will integrate “omics” analyses with rigorous physiological phenotyping of genetically modified mouse models, and clinical investigations in people with type 2 diabetes to temporally resolve dynamic networks of transcription, protein signaling, and metabolites, which synchronously control metabolism. In doing so, we will come closer to understanding the dynamic changes that occur with metabolic dysfunction. The work has the potential to make a breakthrough in clarifying underlying mechanisms for molecular regulation of metabolic rhythmicity, how this is perturbed in type 2 diabetes, and ultimately, insight into new treatments.

Mots-clés : circadian biology,type 2 diabetes,insulin resistance,endocrinology
Projet ERC : UNSEEN (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
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 : 2108656.0 €

The optics of disordered media with subwavelength high-contrast resonant inhomogeneities is a fascinating research topic emerging at the interface between the physics of waves in complex media and nanophotonics. UNSEEN explores and exploits unconventional wave-interference phenomena in disordered metasurfaces towards a new application: the creation of brand-new visual appearance. Our perception of objects is completely determined by how they scatter light. Color is crucial, but other attributes, such as texture, gloss for reflective surfaces, clarity for transmissive ones, illumination directivity also largely influence appearance. Although this perception plays a key role in virtually all fine and applied arts, appearance engineering has been so far applied only to materials structured at length scales significantly larger than the wavelength; this is because the link between nanostructure morphologies and appearance is very complicated for subwavelength scale resonant inhomogeneities. UNSEEN bridges, for the first time, the fertile environments of optical metasurfaces and visual appearance in an original and cross-disciplinary way. At the forefront of optical modelling and characterization, we will develop new tools in nanophotonics, which will merge nanoscale electromagnetism, mesoscale multiple scattering, and macroscale ray-tracing rendering. The tools will allow us to understand the complicated relation between morphology and appearance, to harness the manifold degrees of freedom offered by disordered metasurfaces and to discover clues to design novel appearance. We will then use available state-of-the-art nanofabrication and develop new characterization setups to produce and observe metasurfaces with novel appearances, and further study their most promising applications: luxury goods, document security, and head-up display.

Mots-clés : nanophotonics,optical metasurfaces,plasmonics,mie resonance,multiple scattering,wave in random media,colloidal chemistry,rendering
Projet ERC : CRACK THE ROCK (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
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 : 2360718.75 €

The general idea that a rock mass cracks when the external stress-loading exceeds the rock strength, leading to catastrophic failure (critical cracking), is challenged when considering outcrop erosion. Many observations in the field and the laboratory evidence slow, incremental crack developments well below the yield stress of the material, for which repetitive stress load and fatigue induce progressive failure, also called sub-critical cracking. It is largely accepted that the weather (temperature changes, rain, frost) is a major source of stress cycles and slow cumulative damage, but the literature shows too limited quantitative field observations to confirm the mechanics behind rock outcrop cracking. Today, we cannot predict rockfalls nor quantify the relation between daily or seasonal weather forcings to rock crack production. And yet, rock fracturing plays a leading role in most surface processes, from landscape building to vegetation, hydrology and natural hazard prediction. There is an urgent need to reveal the mechanics of sub-critical failure within rock outcrops. Fracturing processes initiate and develop at small scales (from the grain size to a few mm), and meteorological forcing evolve over daily to seasonal time scales, but existing field observation tools hardly meet these scales. In order to lift this issue, the project will deploy an original active multisensory acoustic imaging technique on natural rock outcrops, to map and monitor stress changes and crack production (in m2/m3/time) over timescales ranging from a few hours to a few months, with a centimetric spatial resolution and a stress sensitivity down to a few kPa. Stress will be deduced from acoustic waves, thanks to the acousto-elasticity principle, allowing us to determine the physics of sub-critical cracking of rock outcrops in their natural environment. This work will pave the way for predicting rockfalls and, further, the impact of climate change on rock erosion.

Mots-clés : rock mechanics,acoustics,erosion processes,fatigue,cracking,rock weathering,geomorphology
Projet ERC : MOTRAN (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Universität für Bodenkultur. Vienne — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498551.0 €

Granular materials are omnipresent in our daily life. The same granular material can behave like solid and fluid, which poses a formidable challenge to the constitutive models and numerical methods. Traditionally, constitutive models for the solid- and fluid-like behaviour have been developed for the respective flow regimes in different engineering/scientific disciplines with hardly any intersections. A single constitutive model capable of describing the transient behaviour during phase transitions in both solid-like and fluid-like regimes is a challenging task with enormous application potential. MOTRAN takes on this challenge with a simple yet efficient ansatz by decomposing the stress rate into a frictional and collisional part, which gives rise to an unconventional constitutive model with the 2nd order strain rate similar to the acceleration of motion. It serves as an excellent classifier for steady and transient motions. This constitutive model is then augmented to include a length scale in micropolar continuum for multiscale analysis. Based on the mixture theory, the field equations are established in rate form for the first time and discretised by a multi-layer SPH model. For polydisperse granular flow with individual large particles, the SPH model is coupled with own developed Surface Mesh Represented DEM to simulate particles of arbitrary shapes. Advanced solution techniques are developed based on multi-GPU acceleration for high fidelity simulation of large-scale problems. The constitutive model is calibrated by laboratory experiments on natural granular materials and their transparent surrogate. The numerical model is validated by scaled model tests under elevated acceleration in centrifuge as well as real-world cases of our database. MOTRAN is an exciting endeavour with the potential to create a new paradigm that will revolutionise the way how transient granular flow is to be modelled.

Mots-clés : dense granular flow phase transition sph multiscale modelling hypoplastic model
Projet ERC : InfantSimulator (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : École des hautes études en sciences sociales — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EHESS
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2288375.0 €

How do infants learn their first language(s)? The popular yet controversial 'statistical learning hypothesis' posits that they learn by gradually collecting statistics over their language inputs. This is strickingly similar to how current AI's Large Language Models (LLMs) learn and shows that simple statistical mechanisms may be sufficient to attain adult-like language competence. But does it? Estimates of language inputs to children show that by age 3, they have received 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less data than LLMs of similar performance. And the gap grows exponentially larger with children's age. Worse, when models are fed with speech instead of text they learn even slower. How are infants so efficient learners? This project tests the hypothesis that in addition to statistical learning, infants benefit from 3 mechanisms that accelerate their learning rate. (1) They are born with a \textit{vocal tract} which helps them understand the link between abstract motor commands and speech sounds, and decode noisy speech inputs more efficiently. (2) They have an \textit{episodic memory} enabling them to learn from unique events, instead of gradually learning from thousands of repetitions. (3) They start with a \textit{evolved learning architecture} optimized for generalisation from few and noisy inputs.  Our approach is to build a computational model of the learner (an infant simulator), which when fed by realistic language input produces outcome measures comparable to children's (laboratory experiments, vocabulary estimates). This gives a quantitative estimate of the efficiency of each 3 mechanisms, as well as new testable predictions. We start with English and French that have both accessible large annotated speech corpora and documented acquisition landmarks and focus on the first three years of life. We then help building similar resources across a larger set of languages by fostering a cross-disciplinary community that shares tools, data and analysis methods.