Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : Space and Motion (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : UK Research and Innovation — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKRI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1495731.0 €

With this proposal I plan to dissect, at the genetic level, those circuits controlling goal-oriented movements in mice. In particular, we will focus on the very feature that makes goal-oriented movements so unique in the world of motor control, the spatial awareness of such movements, the fact that their execution is likely to obey a precise metric. I want to understand: (1) which neuronal circuits promote the initiation of targeted-movement and assess the genetic heterogeneity of these circuits. (2) Characterise the function of genetically identified circuit elements during movement execution, with the aim of understanding how the metric of motion is encoded. (3) Investigate how sensory maps and motor maps are aligned during development and probe their plasticity. In prospective (4), we aim to understand how changes in such circuits impinge on the development and evolution of innate behaviours such as predation. The French mathematician Henry Poincaré wrote that ‘The real space is motor space’. Embedded in this idea is the intimate relation between the perceptual encoding of space and motor execution. Accordingly, our research starts at the motor level and aims to move to the perceptual level.

Mots-clés : motor control,neural circuits,circuit tracing,goal oriented movements,spatial perception,sensory maps development,motor maps development,colliculus,behaviour
Projet ERC : UNITY (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Technical University of Denmark — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : DTU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2119637.0 €

Within optical quantum information processing, the quantum bits are encoded on single photons and their quantum mechanical properties are exploited to build new functionality. A prime example is the quantum computer, which can be built simply from single-photon sources and detectors, and simple optical components. However for scalable optical quantum computing involving hundreds of photons, the performance requirements for the single-photon source are daunting: the source must feature near-unity efficiency and near-unity indistinguishability simultaneously! Today, all known source designs suffer from inherent trade-offs between efficiency and indistinguishability and their performance is insufficient for scalable quantum computing. The project objective is to realize a source of single indistinguishable photons with performance of ground-breaking nature. The break-through lies in the simultaneous realization of near-unity efficiency and indistinguishability, a combination which overcomes the limitations of present state-of-the-art and ventures far into the regime of scalable quantum computing. As an expert in single-photon source engineering I find myself in a unique position to address this challenge. Since it is unknown how to design such a source, I will first establish a new understanding of the physics of the near-unity regime, where phonon-induced decoherence represents a main limitation for the indistinguishability. I will then advance state-of-the-art in optical engineering by proposing a novel design, where all physical parameters can be controlled independently. The modelling of the near-unity performance source is extremely demanding, and the analysis requires additional advances within optical simulations and open quantum systems theory. Once this is achieved, I will fabricate a prototype and test it in a multi-photon interference boson sampling experiment to unambiguously prove that scalable optical quantum information processing is indeed within reach.

Mots-clés : single photon source,quantum information technology,quantum dot
Projet ERC : MaMs3 (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : KTH Royal Institute of Technology — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KTH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Within the ERC Starting Grant project M&M´s we have developed several innovative fabrication and integration technologies for nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). In one of these research activities, our ERC team has invented and demonstrated a new methodology for parallel fabrication of electrically conductive electrode pairs separated by sub-2 nm wide gaps, enabling unprecedented fabrication of millions of such nanogap electrodes. To the best of our knowledge, there is no alternative technology available with comparable capabilities. We have identified next generation DNA sequencing using electron tunneling detection as a high-impact application that could be enabled by our nanogap electrode fabrication methodology. Sequencing of the genome of individual patients is vital to realize the potential of truly personalized medicine. However, current DNA sequencing technologies are still too slow and expensive for sequencing genomes for healthcare practice on a large scale. There is, therefore a critical need for a new sequencing platform that has the potential to sequence the full human genome within 1 hour for less than €100. DNA sequencing based on electron tunneling detection (quantum sequencing) is one of the most promising next-generation sequencing technologies that could reach this target. However, there currently is no technology available to fabricate, in a scalable fashion, large numbers of electrode pairs with 1-2 nm wide gaps that are integrated in nanopores. As a possible solution to this problem, our nanogap electrode methodology is addressing a potential multi-billion € market. In this ERC-PoC project we will develop business and IPR strategies for commercial exploitation of our nanogap electrode methodology. Furthermore, we will develop initial proof-of-concept demonstrations of DNA detection events using nanogap electrode devices, which will be important for attracting interest from industry and possible investors.

Mots-clés : nanogap electrodes,electron tunneling detection,dna sequencing,nanopore sequencing
Projet ERC : SENSO-eAXON (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Pompeu Fabra University — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Within the eAXON project, which is funded by an ERC CoG, we are developing a technology for neuroprosthetics which consists of wireless microstimulators whose operation is based on rectification of galvanically conducted bursts of high frequency current. In addition to the microstimulators technology, we have conceived and protected a technology for the development of implantable sensing systems with an unprecedented level of minimal invasiveness. The sensing technology consists of a very thin implant and an external unit able to wirelessly interrogate the implant for obtaining measurements related to physical or chemical magnitudes in the implant or in its vicinity. In contrast to previous implantable sensing technologies, our technology allows the implementation of thread-like implants; flexible and very thin (diameter < 1 mm). Such level of miniaturization is possible because our technology avoids the need of bulky components within the implants (e.g. batteries or coils) for power and communications. The proposed PoC project is essentially intended to pave the way for a spin-off company aimed at further developing and clinically validating the technology for a specific clinical need.

Mots-clés : active implantable medical devices,sensors,minimally invasive,continuous monitoring,biosensors
Projet ERC : MedPub (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1497684.0 €

Without written transmission, the communication of any learned topic from ancient and medieval times, from theology and philosophy to medicine, science and history, would be snapped and broken. Transmission relies on the fact of ‘publication’. But what does ‘publishing’ mean in the context of a manuscript culture, in which books were copied slowly and singly by hand? What did it mean to ‘publish’ a book in Western Europe in the Middle Ages? MedPub attempts to understand in breadth and depth, for the first time, the medieval act of publishing. The question it seeks to answer is how did Latin authors publish original works during the period from c. 1000 to 1500. The project’s research hypothesis is that publication strategies were not a constant but were liable to change, and that different social, literary, institutional, and technical milieux fostered different approaches to publishing. The act of publishing, therefore, evolved over time, reacting to changes in the wider world. This is a new proposition and opens a new field of study. Results from the project will make a major contribution to our perception of medieval Latin literature—which is the largest surviving body of evidence for the Middle Ages—and even medieval European societal dynamics. The time-frame, c. 1000–1500, embraces Latin literary culture in its high-medieval maturity and its more complex late-medieval developments, ending with a transitional period characterized by the co-existence of the manuscript book and the printed book and witnessing the emergence in Europe of what was to become modern publishing.
Projet ERC : WoWA (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
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 : 1454735.0 €

WoWA studies female experiences of architecture as recorded in documentary writing drawn from specific regions in South America and Europe between 1700 and 1900. While architectural histories often focus on male-dominated processes of design and production, this project takes a new stance by unearthing women’s contributions to the architectural sphere through writing and editing. While not part of the canon, articles, travelogues, domestic manuals, or pamphlets authored by women in the period consistently featured descriptions of or commentary on buildings and cities, but these have never been examined collectively by architectural historians. Through a combination of macro and micro research, close and distant reading, geographical mapping and tracing of experience, WoWA addresses this gap opening up a new corpus and presenting architecture’s past through the female eye. I suggest that, by exploring women’s writing, we can uncover female agency within architecture in a period that has thus far been considered as male governed. I believe that architectural history as a discipline has to look beyond the production of buildings to processes of reception and appropriation in order to fully understand the past of the built environment as experienced and shaped by colonised groups, such as women. Over a period of dramatic social, political, technological, and architectural transformations on both sides of the Atlantic, WoWA explores specific case studies of women documenting both everyday experiences of built spaces as well as canonical architectural events. Interdisciplinary in method and scope and employing feminist approaches focusing on modes of writing, voice, and subjective experience, the team of PI, Postdoc, and PhD will expose female publics of architecture in and between Chile, Peru, Argentina, Britain, and German-speaking Europe a time of industrialisation, colonisation and revolution, nation building and independence, historicism and professionalisation.

Mots-clés : architectural experience,women s history,representation,print cultures,the public sphere,colonial and post colonial history,transnational history,nation building
Projet ERC : WOLBAKIAN (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999500.0 €

Wolbachia are arguably the most prevalent intracellular bacteria in animals, infecting filarial nematodes and up to 66% of arthropod species. Wolbachia are maternally transmitted and can induce a large range of strong phenotypes on their hosts. However, very little is known on how they induce these phenotypes and how they interact with the host at the molecular level. One main difficulty with this system is that Wolbachia have been genetically intractable. We will study how Wolbachia confers protection to viruses, a phenomenon that is currently being applied to fight dengue and Zika viruses. We also aim at understanding how these endosymbiont titres are regulated, a crucial aspect of their biology. We will identify host and Wolbachia genes that regulate these processes by performing classical genetic screens in Drosophila and develop a new method to perform a forward genetic screen in Wolbachia. Our previous analysis of natural variants of Wolbachia will also be extended in order to identify alleles associated with differential growth and antiviral protection. We will characterize candidate Wolbachia genes, from the previous analysis and current results in the lab, by performing a new method to obtain loss-of-function mutants in target Wolbachia genes. We will also focus on putative effector proteins of Wolbachia with the purpose of identifying cellular location, induced phenotypes, and host interacting proteins. Drosophila genes will be characterized by classical genetic methods in this model organism. The identification and characterization of Wolbachia and host genes involved in antiviral protection and Wolbachia proliferation will provide key insights to these basic biological problems. Moreover, the knowledge generated and new Wolbachia variants may have an application in the fight against arboviruses transmitted by mosquitoes and human diseases caused by filarial nematodes.

Mots-clés : host microbe interactions,endosymbionts,wolbachia,drosophila,innate immunity,antiviral protection,insect
Projet ERC : WorkFREE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : Opendemocracy limited — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 75000.0 €

WorkFREE builds on the widespread empirical observation that everywhere people who are stuck in indecent, exploitative or ‘unfree’ work nevertheless choose that work because doing so represents their best available option, and asks a simple yet potentially revolutionary question: What happens if we just give them money? It will answer this question by creating a world-first social experiment. This will involve a community in the Indian city of Hyderabad typically associated with indecent or exploitative work – waste picking. Members of this community will receive 18 months of unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) and also engage in Participatory Action Research (PAR) with the WorkFREE team. WorkFREE will thus become the first project anywhere to combine research on cash transfers (CTs), PAR and labour (un)freedom. It will also innovate methodologically, employing a unique combination of ethnography, surveys, and participatory qualitative techniques. This will allow the WorkFREE team – myself (the PI), the in-country Research Manager, a post-doctoral evaluation specialist, two anthropology PhD students, and a number of junior researchers at the project’s Indian partner research university – to answer a question at the heart of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): What can cash transfers contribute to the fight for decent work? It will further enable the co-creation of grounded theory around concepts central to the SDGs, including freedom, slavery, consent, coercion, vulnerability, exploitation, emancipation and (in)decent work. This, in turn, could call into question prevailing, hegemonic theorisations of these concepts, along with mainstream approaches to generating those theorisations and the policies with which they are associated. In this way, WorkFREE will push the empirical, theoretical and political boundaries at the intersection of development studies, labour studies, social theory and social policy. Given its focus and approach, it will also contribute to cognate debates around Social Protection (SP) and Unconditional Basic Income (UBI), positioning Europe at the forefront of contemporary efforts to achieve social justice in globalised market society.

Mots-clés : modern slavery,unconditional cash transfers,participatory research,unfree labour,labour exploitation,social experiment,development,sdg 8
Projet ERC : Hot-Coal WM (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
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 : 1498957.0 €

Working memory (WM) is a fundamental cognitive capability. It refers to our ability to hold, select and manipulate several objects in mind simultaneously. It allows us to engage in flexible behavior and is tightly linked to fluid intelligence. This project will answer an essential, yet unsolved aspect of WM: How can primates use their WM in a generalized way and control what they think about? If you hear ‘apple’, ‘stone’ and ‘pear’ in sequence, and then you are asked to imagine the first fruit, how is it that you do not confuse apples with pears? There are many competing models of WM, but no biologically detailed models are capable of generalization. Neural networks can be trained to perform similar WM tasks as primates do, a major difference is that primates generalize their training. They can learn the task on a set of objects, then perform it on a novel set. Computational models typically rely on changing the connections between units to achieve the desired activity patterns to solve the task. Since these activity patterns depend on the objects held in WM, the training does not translate to novel objects. I propose a new solution to this problem, the Hot-Coal model of WM. It relies on a novel computational principle in which spatial location of information, rather than connectivity, is controlled by excitatory bursts to support cognition. I will explore this principle and test it in data. Preliminary tests suggest that the Hot-Coal theory is supported by electrophysiological data from primates. By implementing the theory in computational networks I aim to demonstrate the generalization mechanism and provide more detailed predictions. Finally, I will use the theory to resolve seemingly conflicting findings regarding the mechanisms underlying WM, by reproducing them in a single model. The new theory could constitute a significant advance in the mechanistic understanding of one of the most central and puzzling components of cognition.

Mots-clés : working memory,computational neuroscience,generalization,systems neuroscience,computational cognition
Projet ERC : BoneScreen (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Technical University of Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TUM
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Worldwide, an osteoporotic fracture occurs every three seconds; most of them in Europe, where the economic burden has been estimated at €37 billion per year and lost years of life surpass most major cancers. This is hard to comprehend, given that osteoporosis is a preventable, treatable disease, if diagnosed at an early stage. As current state-of-the-art screening methods are neither sufficiently available nor accurate, there is an urgent need for readily available and accurate screening systems. BoneScreen will fill this gap and provide a low-cost and accurate screening method, available for millions of patients. BoneScreen introduces a fully automated solution to evaluate existing computed tomography data of patients. BoneScreen will calculate volumetric bone mineral density (vBMD), the most reliable and accurate single predictor of a patient’s fracture risk. In contrast to existing methods, BoneScreen is fully automated; it is purely non-invasive and excludes any additional radiation dose or patient discomfort; it is fully calibrated, yielding high precision and allowing for the application of established diagnostic categories; it works for all vertebral levels, allowing for inclusion of scans with variable coverage. Additionally, the functionality of BoneScreen is easily extendable, e.g. for detecting fractures or metastasis. The overall goal of this proposal is to initiate the start-up process for a company commercializing the research developments to date. Specific objectives are to (1) increase the technology readiness level of our current research software to reliably work in different hospital environments; in particular we will include an automated calibration, allowing for accurate processing in >98% of cases; (2) increase the awareness of the possibilities provided by such a screening tool, both in the academic and non-academic radiology community; and (3) develop a strategy for marketing and securing IPR.

Mots-clés : osteoporosis,screening,fracture,life quality,computed tomography,artificial intelligence,machine learning,image processing,bone mineral density
Projet ERC : miniX (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Institute of Photonic Sciences — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ICFO;ICFO-CERCA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149831.0 €

X-rays are a prime analytical tool across a diverse range of areas in our modern economy—from fundamental physics and chemistry research, to the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries. In particular, sources of ultrafast coherent x-rays are expected to have a transformative impact in all of these areas due to their capacity to enable the study of interactions between charge carriers and atoms in gases, liquids and solids, in real-time, and with element specificity. Ease of use, compactness and price will prove vital for any new X-ray technology looking to find use in industrial applications. “miniX” will address all of these issues with the miniaturization of a laser-based soft x-ray source, designed for lay user operation and at low cost.

Mots-clés : ultrafast soft x rays,compact soft x ray source,x ray absorption