Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MAGICON (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Université de technologie de Delft — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TU Delft
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499407.0 €

In MAGICON I propose a completely new philosophy for developing and designing concrete. I aim to conceptualize a strategy based on materials genome engineering that combines Experimental tools, Computational tools and Digital data. The MAGICON philosophy should make it possible to select and combine ingredients for concrete that result in optimized properties and behaviour. The need for reinventing concrete comes from the urge to use greener and more environmental friendly binder systems and alternative aggregate particles mainly from recycled materials to work towards a circular economy. The quality and, short and long term performance of concrete is governed by the interplay of binder and aggregates. Especially the connection between both, called Interfacial Transition Zone (ITZ), determines mechanical and transport properties of the composite. The ITZ is actually the finger print of the material and forms the basis in the MAGICON framework to redesign new concretes. To be able to characterize the ITZ and incorporate the results in the design philosophy the following challenges that never have been tried before should be overcome: (1) Develop a method to produce small scale samples including particles, matrix and ITZ which are representative for the composite, including its eigenstresses that are always present in all the phases. (2) Develop testing techniques for measuring mechanical and transport properties and the combined effect of mechanics and transport on the small scale samples. (3) Develop smart technologies for improving ITZ properties. (4) Understand, predict and tailor the results of the microscale testing by using deterministic models for upscaling. (5) Develop a strategy for creating data-sets from experiments, combined with smart numerical modelling that feed into ML systems for validating the behaviour of new sustainable concrete.

Mots-clés : concrete,sustainability,materials,performance
Projet ERC : Ubi-Wan (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Technion - Institut de technologie d'Israël — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Neurodegenerative diseases share similar hallmarks such as protein aggregation, suggesting that impaired protein degradation may be a common denominator. The major cellular pathways mediating protein degradation are the Ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) and autophagy, both regulated by ubiquitin signaling. However, aside from specific mutations in familial neurodegeneration cases, an early cause for failing ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis remains unclear. This proposal will test our unconventional hypothesis that dysregulated ubiquitin signaling is an early event in mechanisms of neurodegeneration, linking together numerous disease hallmarks. Towards this goal, we present groundbreaking findings that a mutated UPS protein resulting from a non-heritable transcription frameshift and present in the brains of neurodegenerative patients, particularly Alzheimer's disease (AD), is sufficient to trigger disease hallmarks in 3-D human neuronal cultures. This unique set-up replicates the main pathological hallmarks of AD without relying on any of the known genetic causes or risk factors. Utilizing this novel model, we have identified a previously unknown enzyme active site in a key neuroprotective protein, which now allows us to study the role of ubiquitin signaling in disease pathology. Specifically, this proposal seeks to understand both the source of disease-related ubiquitin signaling deterioration and its impact on neurons, by: 1) Studying the mechanisms that trigger disruption of ubiquitin signaling in neurons. 2) Understanding the consequences of altered ubiquitin signaling in human neuronal models of AD. 3) Searching for mechanisms of neuroprotection mediated by key enzymes of the UPS. The outcome will develop new models of neurodegeneration, improve methods to study ubiquitin signaling in neurons, and yield a mechanistic understanding of UPS components in neuronal health and disease. Furthermore, the results will pave the way for developing new treatment approaches.

Mots-clés : alzheimer s disease,proteostasis,proteasome,ubiquitin,autophagy,aging,proteolysis,deubiquitination,neurodegeneration,protein aggregates,stem cell models,3d neural models
Projet ERC : XXL-NMR (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
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 : 2500000.0 €

The cell is a collection of dynamic molecular machines. NMR spectroscopy is the method of choice to observe, at atomic resolution, complex conformational changes, transient interactions and dynamics of proteins. Introduction of methyl specific labelling technology has enabled solution NMR studies of protein assemblies of several hundred kDa. However, this strategy is mostly restricted to symmetrical and thermostable protein assemblies, precluding applications to large medically relevant biological complexes. The increases of linewidths and the high number of signal overlaps hamper the NMR spectra analysis of most hetero-oligomeric large assemblies studied at room temperature. In this project, we will develop two complementary concepts to significantly simplify both NMR spectra and corresponding site specific analysis. We will build a multi-site specific labelling method enabling observation of NMR signals only for the sites of interest in a large protein complex. We will invent a combinatorial strategy to reduce the time required for site-specific identification of each individual NMR signal from a few months to a few hours. New 1H-frequencies edition schemes will be introduced to enhance significantly the NMR spectra’s resolution of very slow tumbling biological particles. These groundbreaking NMR methods will be validated using therapeutic antibodies (150 kDa), ribosome (2.4 MDa) samples, and will be used directly to capture the mechanisms of ATP-fueled human chaperonin (1 MDa) in complex with the aggregation prone form of Huntingtin. This project will provide new technological breakthroughs to push biological applications of NMR significantly beyond its current boundaries. We anticipate that the simplification of the NMR analysis resulting from the new developed NMR routes will transform the solution NMR spectroscopy in a very competitive method to study large medically relevant biomolecular assemblies and molecular machines, so far considered as untargetable.

Mots-clés : nmr spectroscopy,large protein assemblies,isotopic labelling,cell free
Projet ERC : TransCorr (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Fundatia noua europa — Pays : Roumanie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NEC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2494813.0 €

Politicians, scholars, and popular writers between 1750 and 1850 routinely characterized South-East-Central Europe as a corrupt political space. A wide range of foreign observers portrayed graft, nepotism, and bribery as endemic. Indigenous critics echoed many of these assessments. Regional insiders and outsiders alike mobilized commentaries on “corruption” for their own political, professional, and personal ends, claiming they could run more honest and efficient administrations, military regimes, and commercial operations than those in power. These notables linked “corruption” to the region's supposed cultural backwardness and economic under-development. In doing so, public figures naturalized notions of “corruption,” making it appear both widespread and organic in the region—popularizing tropes that have endured right down to the present. Yet, “corruption” is a historically specific concept. TransCorr seeks to construct a history of the idea of “corruption” in Central-South-East Europe in conjunction with the rise of modernity. It demonstrates how in the context of new ideas about modernity emanating from West Europe, regional leaders reframed a host of traditional customs and practices as corrupt. It examines how Great Power attempts to transform these borderlands into formal and informal imperial provinces further entrenched novel understandings of “corruption”, often pejoratively associating them with the Ottoman legacy. By tracing out this history, TransCorr reveals a genealogy of ideas, discourses, and attitudes that continue to inform analyses of and discussions within the region today. The project brings the study of this geographic area into greater dialogue with a global story of modernization and aligns the region’s historiography with new innovations in the scientific literature. It also reframes contemporary debates on patronage and graft, and reconfigures broader understandings of center-periphery relations within the region and across the continent.

Mots-clés : corruption transnational history south east europe informal empire modernity and modernization state building age of revolutions
Projet ERC : CIRCLE-3D (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Birmingham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499711.0 €

The high speed and accuracy of photopolymer additive manufacturing methods are enabling the transition of their use from prototyping to production. While these manufacturing methods have advanced significantly over recent years, this has not been matched by developments in photopolymer resin technology, which remains based on petrochemical sourced materials and produces waste that cannot be recycled. CIRCLIPO will deliver high modulus, photocurable polymers for application in production scale circular additive manufacturing. The materials design leverages renewably sourced, Lipoic acid, to generate materials that can be printed, and then depolymerised at the end of their useful life to recreate virgin resin that can be reprinted in a highly efficient closed-loop manner – eliminating waste. Targeting bio-based monomer sources and green manufacturing processes, CIRCLIPO will deliver materials that offer comparable or better mechanical properties to the market-leading resins. Beyond these advances, CIRCLIPO will also offer unique opportunities to sustainably exploit the potential of 3D-printed multimaterials. This will be achieved by enabling on demand production and recycling of mixed plastic multimaterials in a sustainable manner. CIRCLIPO will uniquely provide sustainable materials and production methods that will ensure that production-scale additive manufacturing is part of a truly sustainable and circular plastic economy, and avoid the environmental damage that results from unsustainable resins, wasteful processes and non-recyclable printed plastics. Finally, CIRCLIPO will evaluate the economic potential and environmental impact of the materials using technoeconomic analysis and life cycle analysis, which will also be used to guide materials and process development.

Mots-clés : additive manufacturing for soft materials lipoic acid polymers circular photopolymers
Projet ERC : SAGMOS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1535000.0 €

Generative modeling, the automatic generation of examples such as texts, images, music, and molecules that are similar to those in a given dataset, is a central task in artificial intelligence. Mathematically, this task is framed as the problem of sampling from an unknown distribution, which is accessible only through a limited set of examples drawn from it. The size and quality of this set can vary greatly depending on the application. The algorithms that have propelled generative modeling to fame are known for their substantial data and computational resource requirements, often necessitating vast amounts of both to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The goal of this project is to investigate the mathematical properties of generative modeling algorithms to better understand their strengths and weaknesses, enhance their efficiency, and design new methods. The mathematical challenge in generative modeling lies in successfully integrating techniques from various areas of mathematical statistics and probability theory: dimension reduction, nonparametric estimation, manifold learning, sampling, optimal transport, stochastic calculus, etc. Investigating the mathematical properties of this pipeline requires a deep analysis of these methods and their interactions to solve the overarching problem. Such analysis is key to exploring multiple facets of generative modeling algorithms, including precision, robustness, creativity, and computational traceability. Our focus will be on obtaining interpretable statistical guarantees that highlight the impact of sample size, intrinsic and ambient dimensions, noise level, and contamination rate on precision, creativity, and running time. These guarantees are essential in AI to ensure the reliability of the resulting algorithms and enhance their trustworthiness, explainability, and frugality. We will pay special attention to stability and robustness properties, particularly against model misspecification, noise, and outliers.

Mots-clés : diffusion processes,nonparametric estimation,sampling,dimension reduction,theoretical guarantees
Projet ERC : SELFiE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Capital Region of Denmark — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : RH
Type d'entité : Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 329250.0 €

Our capacity for self-awareness is often considered a defining feature of human consciousness and in adulthood allows us to imagine how others see us, recollect our past and contemplate our future. Our work has shown that in infancy, the emergence of a self-representation profoundly changes developing cognition. Yet, there are currently no mechanistic accounts of how it could develop, and empirical investigation within contemporary developmental science is surprisingly absent. In the current proposal, I put forward the first mechanistic account of the development of a self-representation, drawing upon recent data from cognitive neuroscience. This new account articulates a biological foundation that captures the idea that it is in detecting oneself as the target of another person’s attention that a concept of self emerges. I propose a pathway through which caregiver communicative cues towards infants – particularly direct gaze – give rise to a belonging to the body feeling state via their modulating effect on the heartbeat and its afferent cortical representation. Motivated by a bias to seek the targets of others’ gaze, a concept of self emerges from filling a placeholder target with this feeling state. This theory will be tested in 4 interlinked projects. Project 1 examines the longitudinal relationship between early interoception and a conceptual self-representation; Project 2 tests the novel hypothesis that direct gaze alerts infants to their interoceptive signals and Project 3 builds on this to test the claim that early in life, infants encode direct gaze as 'about me' which then fosters the inclusion of new self-related events in a reinforcing loop. Project 4 adds a crucial cross-cultural comparison capitalizing on natural variability in caregiving to test the model described in this proposal. This project seeks to fill a crucial gap in our understanding of development, essential for any theory that seeks to fully explain human consciousness.

Mots-clés : self representation,self awareness,self concept,infants
Projet ERC : IDEO-YEMEN (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Studies of Cultures and Arts
Entité participante : Académie autrichienne des sciences — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ÖAW
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2283297.0 €

The stellar rise of the Yemen’s Houthis (Ansar Allah) is not just a story of military conquest but also of ideological innovation, which has transformed northern Yemen and reshaped power relations in the Middle East. Despite their importance, the unanswered question of what the Houthis “really” want still looms large in academic debates and political circles. This project will transform our understanding of the Houthis by analysing their massive ideological output and triangulating it with a vast corpus of unexplored indigenous sources and findings from digital (remote) fieldwork. As the first study of its kind, this project pursues three primary objectives: (1) Provide unprecedented insights into Houthi ideology and its interplay with Yemen’s social, intellectual, historical, religious, and institutional frameworks, including its foreign inspirations, media, and symbolic and ritual expressions. (2) Explore Houthi ideology’s dual nature as both a normative discourse and an everyday practice, offering empirically informed understandings of how ideology operates and impacts local communities, and (3) use Houthi ideology as a case study to develop a novel “agential” and multiscalar theoretical approach to the study of ideology within social and cultural anthropology, and related fields.  The results of this project will redefine the anthropology of ideology and provide unparalleled insights into the Houthi phenomenon. Its innovative theoretical and methodological contributions will advance social and cultural anthropology, enhancing its relevance and providing novel approaches and tools for studying emerging ideologies in similar contexts globally. On a trans-disciplinary level, the results will inform and revise diplomatic, political, and humanitarian efforts to better understand the crisis in Yemen and develop tailored, sustainable solutions.

Mots-clés : yemen,anthropology of ideology,social history,intellectual history,houthis,zaydism,religion,governance
Projet ERC : MELCART (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Materials Engineering
Entité participante : École polytechnique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : X
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1589442.5 €

As living beings move, touch, or grow, the tissues within them are subject to mechanical stresses that act over minutes, hours, or days. These efforts play a critical role at all stages of life, from early embryonic development to homeostasis in adult tissues or disease progression. Mechanobiology has emerged in response to this realization and has led to many discoveries on mechanosensitive pathways in individual cells. However we are still very far from relating the single-cell behavior to the response within a real tissue that contains mixtures of cell types which are organized in complex 3D structures. In this project we will expand mechanobiology to 3D tissues by developing a new class of micro-devices, based on soft robotics and metamaterials, for active mechanical forcing of spheroids and organoids. We will couple this active forcing with multiscale cytometry methods that we have pioneered, in addition to concepts from many-body soft matter physics. This will allow us to understand how the rheological responses of individual cells add up to result in the global tissue rheology. The outcome is a new paradigm to probe phenotypic changes, e.g. the epithelial-mesenchymal transition in a cancer model or the cellular differentiation and 3D organization in a maturing organoid. Conversely we will map how global mechanical stresses are transferred to individual cells that in turn respond to the forces locally. This will allow us to engineer dynamical forcing strategies to guide the biological response of specific populations within a complex co-culture. When applied to developing organoids this will lead to strategies to mature individual cell types, in view of using them for cell therapy. In the case of cancer models we will identify mechanosensitive pathways that can be targeted by drugs to treat real tumors. By working on the joint cutting edge of technology, physics, and biology, we will manipulate in vitro models with real impact on human health.

Mots-clés : microfluidics,organoids,cancer,mechanobiology
Projet ERC : PLANETES (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
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 : 2263106.5 €

The project's objective is to develop PLANETES, a pioneering ground-based interferometric system, engineered to transform the study of exoplanet atmospheres through high-contrast observations. The primary goal is to significantly enhance the dynamic range of optical interferometry, enabling the observation of exoplanets via their reflected stellar light. Other objectives include investigating the atmospheric composition of known exoplanets and identifying potential protoplanets. The strategy involves setting up a laboratory bench to scrutinize and address the current limitations observed with the GRAVITY instrument at the VLTI. These enhancements will then be deployed at the Paranal Observatory to examine the multitude of exoplanets anticipated from forthcoming Gaia spacecraft data releases. PLANETES is set to be the first ground-based instrument capable of observing exoplanets via reflected light, offering a contrast range of 10 million at less than 100 milliarcsecond. It will significantly surpass the detection and characterization capabilities of current ground-based instruments. In addition to fostering significant advancements in exoplanetary research, this project encompasses the development of a ground-breaking 4-million-pixel infrared camera. This device, equipped with a very low read noise and low dark current detector, will unveil new potential in high-contrast astronomical instrumentation. For the first time, it will allow to simultaneously have a good spectral resolution and high sensitivity, representing a significant leap in the field. This pioneering technology will set the stage for future instruments, yielding broad advantages to the scientific community at large.

Mots-clés : long baseline optical interferometry direct detection of exoplanets