Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SPINCAD (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Delft University of Technology — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU Delft
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1449983.0 €

Unexpected physical phenomena occurring in materials often result from the complex interplay between spins on the atomic scale. The field of quantum magnetism aims to capture the rich emergent physics that arises when multiple spins interact. While experimental techniques are available to probe the global quantum magnetic properties of materials, they fail to reveal the role of local features such as individual defects or phase boundaries. I propose to use custom-designed spin lattices created by low-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) to probe spin correlations locally at the atomic scale, providing the ultimate tool to trace particle-like excitations (spinons) as they propagate. Since these excitations exist on timescales that are much too short to be accessed directly in real time, I will introduce ‘spinon traps’: atom-built detector bits that record the presence of a spinon and store this information immediately on the atomic scale, to be read out at a later time. This approach opens the possibility to study emergent material properties as a function of system size and test theories for quantum magnetism that were previously experimentally inaccessible. Based on preliminary experiments in my group that indicate the feasibility of SPINCAD, I will realize and demonstrate the spinon trapping technique by employing it to the study of attractive interactions between spinons, which may be forged independently through atom manipulation. In addition, I will observe the motion of spinons through two-dimensional frustrated spin lattices. Being the first technique to perform local injection and readout of excitations in custom-designed spin structures, SPINCAD will generate a long-lasting synergy between the fields of theoretical quantum magnetism and experimental surface science.

Mots-clés : atom manipulation,spin chains
Projet ERC : GLOBESCAPE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498106.0 €

Unprecedented urbanization is threatening landscape diversity, bringing along new social and environmental problems. Standardized business centers, single family residential areas and shopping malls displace highly productive agricultural land, while the culture and lifestyles of local communities become absorbed into the sphere of globalization. This dramatic uniformisation is nurtured by the ever increasing global human migration. People are losing their sense of place and their motivation to initiate change. Uniformed international landscapes start dominating peri-urban areas. The result is a tremendous increase in fragility of these new landscapes of the twenty-first century, calling for an active and creative landscape shaping process to secure the long-term provision of critical ecosystem services. Up until now, however, models and tools developed in land system science have not caught up with the needs to understand and ultimately foster humans’ capacities to shape their landscapes. This project will contribute to a next generation of tools and methods to foster the development of resilient landscapes. I suggest linking design and probabilistic modeling in a collaborative landscape development tool to enable the transformation of spaces into places. This unconventional approach is necessary to deal with the probabilistic nature of landscapes. Landscapes can only be defined by including the observer – a concept severally neglected in today’s research efforts. Anchored in four peri-urban case studies, the interdisciplinary experimental and modeling work will have impact far beyond predicting transformation pathways of peri-urban landscapes under increased globalization. The resulting methods and tool will redefine the status quo of current geodesign tools, promote novel ways of deliberative decision-making and governance, and ultimately support humans to intentionally transform peri-urban landscapes.

Mots-clés : pe6  scientific computing,simulation and modelling tools,pe8  civil engineering,architecture
Projet ERC : SoMMoR (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499750.0 €

Untethered mobile milli/microrobots would have a radical impact in medicine. Such untethered tiny machines could access smaller regions inside the body, remain inside the body for long durations as semi-implantable medical devices, and enable diagnostic and therapeutic medical operations in hard or currently not possible to reach regions inside the body with minimal or no invasion. While many groups have been working intensely on creating such new machines for potential medical applications, there are still many significant challenges that must be addressed: 3D design, fabrication and materials of safe and multi-functional medical mobile robots down to tens of micrometer size scale, robust locomotion of these robots inside the complex human body, precise navigation control under medical imaging modalities, integrating diagnostic and therapeutic medical functions to them, and demonstrating their clinically relevant medical applications in in vivo animal models. To address these challenges, we propose to create new soft-bodied mobile milli/microrobots with medical functions and sizes down to tens of micron scale to address the above challenges of untethered miniature robots. Such shape-programmable tiny soft machines will be created from biocompatible magnetic soft composite materials, will be actuated by external magnetic fields or gradients, will have multimodal robust locomotion capability, integrated medical functions and safe interactions inside the human body, will be tracked by real-time medical imaging systems, and will be demonstrated in clinically relevant active local cargo (e.g., drug) delivery, remote heating-based coagulation and hyperthermia, and deliberate vessel and tube clogging applications. Research tasks of the robot design, fabrication and materials, robot actuation, locomotion and control, robot medical functions, and robot characterization and in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo testing will be performed to achieve our research objectives.

Mots-clés : soft robotics,microrobotics,mobile robotics,medical robotics,magnetics,functional micro,nanomaterials
Projet ERC : AGRELITA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Université de Lille — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499202.0 €

Until now the reception history of ancient Greece in pre-modern Western Europe has focussed almost exclusively on the transmission of Greek texts. Yet well before the revival of Greek’s teaching, numerous vernacular works, often illustrated, contained elaborate representations of ancient Greece. AGRELITA will study a large corpus of French-language literary works (historical, fictional, poetic, didactic) produced from 1320 to the 1550s in France and Europe, before the first direct translations from Greek to French, as well as the images of their manuscripts and printed books. It thus aims to challenge one of the great narratives that still prevails in European history: that the revival of interest in ancient Greece only took place through the first direct contacts with Greek works. It will change our perception of the Renaissance. The study of these works and their illustrations (text and image’s dialogue and powers of each) will analyze the representations of ancient Greece from the unexplored perspective of the elaboration of a new memory. It will reveal its structure, its meanings, and the various uses that authors made of it with respect to national, regional or European communities they depicted in their works. It will allow to better understand how, at a time which inherited negative preconceptions about the Greeks, Europe nevertheless began to claim ancient Greece as one of its legacies; and lead to a reassessment of the role played by Greece in Western European identities shaping processes. This promises considerable advances in our understanding of the new representations of these communities in this period. AGRELITA also aims to contribute to a general reflexion on the formation of heritages and identities. Its results will provide new insights on our perception on the issue of identity building, at different levels, local, national and European. They will be able to irrigate the research on modern times in history, sociology, memory and European studies.

Mots-clés : literary studies,medieval and early modern french literature,ancient greece,classical reception studies,book history,text and image,cultural memory studies,national,regional and european identities
Projet ERC : Niche4NbS (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Urbanization is emerging as one of the major environmental global issues of the 21st century, with strong implications on the health of humans and natural ecosystems. Nature-based Solutions (NbS), broadly defined as cost-effective solutions that are inspired and supported by nature to simultaneously provide several environmental and social benefits, has shown promise in addressing this challenge. However, NbS implementation and assessments often rely on a one-size-fits-all approach, although interventions that maximize one benefit can have no influence on, or even negatively affect others. Furthermore, the current pathways from NbS to various benefits do not rely on a deep understanding of the underlying processes and functional relationships. As a result, the current use of NbS relies on broad targets that exhibit considerable risk of falling short of their objectives, eroding public support in their wake. This project will address these shortcomings by developing and demonstrating a widely applicable, theory-grounded, approach for understanding trade-offs and identifying optimal planning scenarios that maximize co-benefits. Using a mechanistic approach we will assess the effectiveness of NbS across domains in a way that allows mapping, upscaling and predicting NbS implementation outcomes. Innovative use of the ecological niche concept and a set of nature dose-response experiments will enable spatially-explicit multidimensional modelling of biodiversity and health and well-being measures. This will allow us to predict how NbS influence where species will be, and where people will be healthy and happy, equipping us with the tools to achieve coexistence of multiple benefits and social justice. Niche4NbS will demonstrate how to plan NbS that delivers co-benefits and provide planners with a robust tools to identify optimal planning solutions. Beyond the fundamental value Niche4NbS will push the European Commission along its path towards becoming a world leader in NbS.

Mots-clés : biodiversity conservation,urban ecology,sustainable planning,systematic conservation planning,ecological niche modelling,nature dose response
Projet ERC : QUANTEDA (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
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 : 149999.75 €

User-Friendly Software For the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data My objective is to produce a powerful, flexible, and user-friendly text analytic software tool called Quantext that has a graphical user interface and requires no programming experience. This tool would run entirely as a web application and require only a modern web browser for usage. The backend would run on the open-source quanteda text analysis library written in R and C++ that I developed in ERC-2011-StG-283794-QUANTESS, Quantitative Analysis of Text for the Social Sciences. My proposal is to harness the power of quanteda, combined with server-side data storage and processing, to make text analytics easy for end users with no programming skills. I am seeking funding for a 18-month period to develop a prototype web application where all of the storage and processing of texts is performed on a cloud server, and a user pays for access to this through a web-based user account. All of the software functionality would be built into a web interface using Javascript-based tools, mimicking a traditional desktop application but not requiring any user installation, with all processing done in the cloud. I would develop this proof of concept on a “freemium” model, with the “free” part dominating the first 18 months, as we developed the core scaffolding for the interface and built the server functionality for user accounts, authentication, text storage, and ultimately, a payment system. If this can be demonstrated to be fast, robust, and intuitively usable by non-technical testers, I would follow the proof-of-concept stage with an immediate commercialization plan, including marketing, vastly improving the website, and specifically targeting the functionality offered by existing tools aimed at the same market.

Mots-clés : text analysis,quantitative text analysis,text mining,data science,big data,software
Projet ERC : VIVA (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : Karolinska Institutet — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1750000.0 €

Vaccination is the most effective strategy to prevent infectious diseases but despite years of research there are no vaccines against variable pathogens such as HIV-1. Contrary to what is required for non-variable pathogens, vaccines against genetically variable pathogens need to elicit antibodies specific for conserved epitopes to protect against the majority of strains. These antibodies are termed broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). bNAbs against the genetically variable HIV-1 surface protein Env are highly somatically mutated and develop in a fraction of infected individuals, but have thus far failed to be elicited by vaccination. For a vaccine to elicit antibodies against a specific epitope of a variable pathogen, it needs to specifically expand rare precursor cells in the presence of a polyclonal B cell response that bind other parts of the same antigen. Furthermore, it needs to guide the rare precursor cells through repeated germinal center reactions to induce high numbers of somatic mutations, a critical characteristic for the potency of HIV-1 bNAbs. To develop such vaccines, we need to understand the regulation of antigen-driven affinity maturation of B cells in a polyclonal immune system in response to complex antigens. To study this, we will perform immunization experiments of wild type mice, adoptively transferred to include a limited pool of naïve B cells from novel HIV-1 Env-specific human antibody knock-in mice. In contrast to conventional antibody knock-in mice that have been used to study B cell activation previously, naïve precursor B cells from these knock-in mice are specific for a complex pathogen-derived antigen. Detailed characterization of the immune responses that develop in response to Env- and non-Env-based antigens, will enable us to generate vaccines that more efficiently drive protective immune responses against variable pathogens such as HIV-1 and Influenza, as well as potential emerging diseases.

Mots-clés : b cell,germinal center reaction,hiv 1,broadly neutralizing antibodies,vaccine
Projet ERC : Antibodyomics (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1492586.0 €

Vaccines and immunodiagnostics have been vital for public health and medicine, however a quantitative molecular understanding of vaccine-induced antibody responses is lacking. Antibody research is currently going through a big-data driven revolution, largely due to progress in next-generation sequencing (NGS) and bioinformatic analysis of antibody repertoires. A main advantage of high-throughput antibody repertoire analysis is that it provides a wealth of quantitative information not possible with other classical methods of antibody analysis (i.e., serum titers); this information includes: clonal distribution and diversity, somatic hypermutation patterns, and lineage tracing. In preliminary work my group has established standardized methods for antibody repertoire NGS, including an experimental-bioinformatic pipeline for error and bias correction that enables highly accurate repertoire sequencing and analysis. The overall goal of this proposal will be to apply high-throughput antibody repertoire analysis for quantitative vaccine profiling and discovery of next-generation immunodiagnostics. Using mouse subunit vaccination as our model system, we will answer for the first time, a fundamental biological question within the context of antibody responses - what is the link between genotype (antibody repertoire) and phenotype (serum antibodies)? We will expand upon this approach for improved rational vaccine design by quantitatively determining the impact of a comprehensive set of subunit vaccination parameters on complete antibody landscapes. Finally, we will develop advanced bioinformatic methods to discover immunodiagnostics based on antibody repertoire sequences. In summary, this proposal lays the foundation for fundamentally new approaches in the quantitative analysis of antibody responses, which long-term will promote the development of next-generation vaccines and immunodiagnostics.

Mots-clés : diagnostics,infection,next generation sequencing,bioinformatics
Projet ERC : QTWIST (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : University of Manchester — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2880313.0 €

Van der Waals heterostructures, assembled from 2D materials, offer unprecedented opportunities for the material design by layer-by-atomic-layer construction of artificial solids. The potential of this approach is enormous, as demonstrated by the hundreds of patents and thousands of research publications appearing annually in the field. This proposal will explore a new avenue in design of quantum solid state systems by employing a mutual rotation between adjacent crystalline planes, “twist”, to pattern their properties on the nanometre length scale. This opportunity has emerged due to my recent pioneering work with twisted layers of transition metal chalcogenides and ground-breaking technological achievements in ultra-high vacuum fabrication instrumentation. I will transform the emerging field of “twistronics” by the in-situ fine-tuning of moiré superstructure and making pioneering studies of novel quantum and strong correlation phenomena in 2D materials accessible for the first time. In particular, I will explore different regimes of lattice reconstruction in 2D semiconductors to engineer and study (1) quantum many-body states of electrons and (2) design confined quantum states defined by piezoelectric and pseudomagnetic nanotextures in semiconducting and charge density wave 2D materials. Moreover, we will create and study world-first twisted heterostructures with (3) superconducting and (4) superconducting and magnetic 2D materials, aiming to create strong periodic nanotextures of their electronic states. The realisation of my ambitious research programme is only possible due to our unique world-first UHV-technology which will allow assembly of high-quality twisted van der Waals heterostructures, and which we will develop to enable new dynamic twist-angle studies and local magnetic flux measurements. The potential impact of this proposal is ground-breaking for both fundamental science and nanotechnology, opening up a new route for nanoengineering of solids.

Mots-clés : 2d materials,superlattice,quantum materials
Projet ERC : trainABL (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : University of Cologne — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 508166.34 €

Vertical exchange in the atmospheric boundary is primarily due to turbulence, but turbulence may cease locally as a consequence of stable density stratification. This state of turbulence intermittency challenges traditional geophysical approaches to represent turbulent mixing. Field observations of the phenomenon are hard to obtain because of broad-scale interacting processes. Existing numerical approaches based on bulk turbulence closures reach their limits because they neglect the relevance of large-scale intermittency for turbulent mixing. Hence, process-level insight to turbulence intermittency in the atmospheric boundary layer is lacking which has dramatic consequences for the forecast of minimum temperature, of frost and fog situations, and of the potential for wind-power extraction. trainABL recognizes the geophysical phenomenon of turbulence intermittency in the atmospheric boundary layer as a fluid mechanics problem. A virtual-lab approach based on direct numerical simulation yields an appropriate turbulence-resolving representation of the intermittently turbulent atmospheric boundary layer. The quantitative insight into large-scale intermittency offered by direct numerical simulation in combination with large-eddy simulation and observational data allows to transfer the emerging physical understanding to the geophysical range of parameters. This paves the avenue towards a novel turbulence mixing representation based on factorization of the turbulent flux into a reference flux and pre-factor accounting for large-scale intermittency. trainABL will thus provide a first physically consistent turbulent mixing parametrization that acknowledges the importance of turbulence intermittency, covers the entire vertical range of the atmospheric boundary layer, and is valid for all regimes of stratification.

Mots-clés : planetary boundary layer,numerical simulation,turbulent mixing,turbulence parameterization,stratified turbulence,scale adaptive,similarity theory