Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : BINGO (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1995750.0 €

The next wave of smart applications in our society will need embedded devices (robots, wearables, etc.) with increased intelligence at much reduced energy and latency cost. Compared to current embedded platforms, up to 1000x efficiency gains could be achieved through tight processor-algorithm co-optimization. However, due to the slow development cycle of processor chips (many months to years) in comparison to algorithms (hours to weeks), this co-optimization today merely boils down to selecting algorithms which run well on mature, available hardware. As these processors and their tooling have been optimized for mature algorithms, not the inherently best algorithm “wins”, but the one that happens to best fit the available “old-school” hardware platforms. This “hardware lottery” holds back innovation, severely impacts embedded AI execution efficiency, and narrows the market to a few large companies.  The BINGO vision to break this innovation deadlock is to enable heterogeneous compute platform customization for a given AI workload in a matter of days (100x faster), through rapid selection and assembly of prefabricated co-processor chiplets. This needs breakthroughs in:  a.) A library of embedded-AI-optimized co-processor chiplets, surpassing the SotA in terms of dataflow heterogeneity for improved efficiency (100x over CPU); and inter-operability in heterogeneous chiplet meshes on a reusable “breadboard” interposer.  b.) Rapid cost models and workload schedulers for beyond-SotA heterogeneous platform customization: automatically deriving the optimal chiplet combination for an application, assemble it and deploy, all in a few days.  Optimizing across the disciplines of chip design, computer architecture, scheduling, and AI fits perfectly to my expertise gained at KU Leuven, imec and Intel. It will stimulate a surge of embedded AI innovations, enable efficient execution of new algorithms, and bring the EU back at the forefront of chip design and embedded AI research.

Mots-clés : chip let design,interposer,hardware acceleration,digital design,edge devices,machine learning,edgeai,tinyml,low power processors,heterogeneous multi core
Projet ERC : FatVersusBile (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Hôpital de l'Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : OUH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 511320.0 €

The obesity epidemic has caused a surge of metabolic-dysfunction associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), an important cause of morbidity and mortality. This also leads to other liver diseases presenting with steatotic (fatty) liver as a “second hit”, with unpredictable impact on clinical outcome. In the present project, I will use the co-existence of two different liver diseases to study how the gut microbiome interacts with steatosis and autoimmunity. Both MASLD and primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), an autoimmune disease of the bile ducts, are more common in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) than in the population, suggesting they are driven by gut microbial activity (gut signals). However, MASLD and PSC co-exist less frequently than expected, appearing to protect against each other. Separate gut signals could therefore influence these conditions, and a driver of one disease could even protect against the other. Studies of PSC-MASLD-IBD provide a unique window to define how gut signals interact to cause and drive liver health, which would be of great importance in MASLD and PSC, where few effective therapies are available.  I have in the ongoing ERC Starting Grant StopAutoimmunity shown that PSC is associated with large changes in microbial functions, motivating the novel hypothesis that distinct gut-derived signals drive autoimmunity of the bile ducts and steatotic liver disease. I will use an extensive set of methods established in my group to define the gut signals acting in PSC and MASLD and liver health. I have available unique cohorts and materials from these conditions, and experimental models based on human microbiome. The expected outcomes include the first detailed description of this clinical problem and the identification of distinct gut signals driving and protecting against steatosis and biliary autoimmunity, serving as basis for diagnostic and prognostic tools, and new targets relevant for trials to prevent and treat liver disease.
Projet ERC : RESILIENT RULES (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université de Saragosse — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2627380.0 €

Institutional diversity is considered as important as biological diversity for our long-term survival. Broadly defined as the variety of rules, norms, and strategies that societies use to govern shared resources (e.g., grazing land, forests, irrigation waters), it could enhance our ability to sustainably manage them and to cope with new and unexpected disturbances such as climate change. Surprisingly, a global quantification of institutional diversity and a full understanding of the process by which institutions adapt to new conditions are lacking, partly due to the absence of tools for the quantification of institutional diversity. This knowledge gap prevents us from responding to key questions for global sustainability such as: How much institutional diversity is there? How is it globally distributed, how is it evolving? And, more importantly, is institutional diversity and the evolution of institutions increasing our capacity to sustainably manage natural resources in our rapidly changing world? With a focus on small-scale agricultural systems across the world, RESILIENT RULES will apply a novel approach by adapting tools used in life sciences for the study of biological diversity to quantify institutional diversity and respond to the following aims: (1) To study global patterns of institutional diversity and the large-scale association between diversity of agricultural institutions and key environmental and social drivers; (2) To analyse the evolution of agricultural institutions; (3) To assess the contribution of institutional diversity to long-term resilience to global changes. This innovative interdisciplinary study of the spatial and temporal patterns of global institutional diversity is of major societal importance, since it will help understand the role of diversity for resilient governance of resources, create new data on agricultural institutions around the world, and open up new research opportunities in quantitative institutional diversity.

Mots-clés : common pool resources,diversity,institutional analysis,institutional grammar,resilience,rules,social ecological systems
Projet ERC : GREEN SPECIES (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Milan — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : PoliMi
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999398.0 €

Space assets offer services of social and economic benefit for the humankind and enable monitoring the condition of our planet. As recognised by the UN and space agencies, space missions for Earth observation, geolocation, telecommunication, science, and technology contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. As our lives become more and more interconnected thanks to satellites and space is more easily accessible, Space can be seen as the extension of our planet biosphere. As such, long-term sustainability of space activities will be possible only if a change of behaviour is put in place by space faring nations. The growth of space debris is following an exponential trend, which is typical of many other environmental stressors of Earth system trends. Immediate actions are needed to mitigate the increasing risk of collisions and enable the future use of Space as a common. In GREEN SPECIES project I will devise a new interdisciplinary framework for the modelling of the space debris population, and the forecast of its evolution. A probabilistic space debris model will be devised for the overall space debris environment. All uncertainties of physical, economic, and political nature will be modelled, and the forecast of future launch traffic and compliance to guidelines included via economic approaches and evidence theory. As unique feature, the project will incorporate the management of the debris environment through a robust time-delayed controller, applied to the space debris model, described as a complex dynamical system. Ideal feedback control actions will be transformed into policies and guidelines, via quantitative indicators, assessing both the environmental impact and the social and economic benefit of space missions. Policies will act as the actuator of a real controlled system. GREEN SPECIES will propose the first economic model for a revenue system for Sustainable Space by leveraging approaches from the management of the global climate.

Mots-clés : space debris modelling space debris mitigation space sustainability space traffic management space debris evolution space debris index space missions global development goals
Projet ERC : POSTNORM (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Institut universitaire européen de Florence — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1842000.0 €

Why have once successful left-wing parties in Poland nearly died out by 2015 (Grzymala-Busse 2019)? Why has Portugal been one of the last countries in Western Europe to see a radical right party in the national parliament? Why are right-wing individuals more likely to protest in Eastern Europe than left-wing individuals (Kostelka and Rovny 2019)? POSTNORM proposes a theory postulating that these seemingly unrelated patterns are the product of a single process: the rejection of the ideological brand of the past authoritarian regime. Through novel survey experiments, POSTNORM will examine how in new democracies, the ideological associations with the old regime serve as a focal point for norms that govern what are appropriate political positions for voters and parties: in democracies following left(right-)wing dictatorship, voters and political elites avoid associating themselves with the left(right) respectively. POSTNORM further derives a set of testable expectations about how this bias shapes both the demand- and the supply side of party competition. The bias colors citizens’ ideological preferences; perceptions about parties’ stances in these issues; national identity; political discussions; the supply of new parties; post-transition party names and pro-grammatic stances; and party elite discourse. POSTNORM will deliver a parsimonious new theory that will help make sense of heterogeneity in political competition across new democracies

Mots-clés : norms,left right ideology,bias,parties voters identity communism military regimes
Projet ERC : LifeLU (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université du Bosphore — Pays : Turquie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1982800.0 €

Proteins play a key role in biological processes that govern and maintain life. Although they are three-dimensional entities, they can be represented in textual form as sequences of amino acids that largely determine their structures and functions. By analogy with natural (human) languages, we can consider proteins as written with a language, which we refer to in this proposal as the "language of life". Natural languages can be read and understood by humans. However, we cannot yet understand the language of life. We do not even know what the vocabulary is, i.e., what the basic language units are (analogous to words in human languages). Textual representation of proteins has enabled the application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques to the study of proteins, and breakthrough results have been achieved in various downstream tasks such as protein structure prediction. However, these efforts remain only at the "processing level" of the language of life. The main goal of this project is to go beyond the level of language processing and open new research horizons for understanding the language of life. Using my expertise in NLP and bioinformatics, I will pursue the following objectives: (i) develop innovative methods to determine the language units (i.e., the vocabulary) of the language of life; (ii) identify the characteristics of this language as well as its variability among species; (iii) develop novel methods to identify and characterize the functions of the language units. This research will lay the foundation for a new field of research, molecular language understanding, which aims to develop methods for understanding the messages encoded in molecular sequences. The ultimate goal of this project is to decipher the language of life, which will lead to groundbreaking consequences for understanding life and health, and will shed light to the development of novel prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for diseases.

Mots-clés : bioinformatics,natural language processing,machine learning,protein sequence analysis,protein function prediction
Projet ERC : MeMe-BONDS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université de la Sarre — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998966.0 €

The increasing demand for environmentally friendly reagents to perform sustainable processes has become of paramount relevance for modern academia and industry. Transition metal-based catalysts are long-established players in many important chemical transformations, given their ability to cleave and form chemical bonds with facile oxidation state changes. Their high cost and/or toxicity, however, have prompted the search for potential replacements. The past decades brought fascinating discoveries of main-group-based species exhibiting low-oxidation states and/or metal–metal bonds with excellent and tunable reducing properties. Nonetheless, despite formidable efforts invested in broadening the scope, existing examples are restricted to Mg-containing molecules, while other s-block metal-metal bonds remain unaccomplished. MeMe-BONDS will address this challenge by engineering novel sustainable reductants based on hitherto unknown s-block bonds stabilized by tunable electronic interactions. This breakthrough will be possible by combining the steric shielding provided by commonly used ligands with the introduction of a σ-acceptor functionality to tame the inherent reactivity of formed radical intermediates. This innovative metal-ligand interaction will allow for the precise incorporation of one or two extra electrons, resulting in a unique electronic structure, which - under suitable conditions - will afford the new s-block metal–metal bonds. Tandem experimental and computational methods will enable a fundamental understanding of the electronic structures and their interplay with the nature of the substituents. The properties and reactivity of these novel bonds will be thereby tuned, opening the door for application in small molecules’ activation and as electronically versatile catalysts. The output of this project will enrich the synthetic chemistry toolbox and pave the way for more environmentally friendly chemical processes.

Mots-clés : s block,main group chemistry,low valent,oxidation state,chemical bonding
Projet ERC : GemOmics (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Université Eberhard Karl de Tübingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999973.0 €

Viruses manipulate their host cells to replicate and spread. This manipulation is based on the activity of virus-encoded proteins, limited due to restrictions in genome size imposed by the viral cycle. How the action of these few proteins results in the massive cell reprogramming observed during the infection remains enigmatic. Geminiviruses are plant viruses causing diseases in crops worldwide. Recent results obtained in our lab using the geminivirus Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) indicate that the proteome of this species, so far believed to encompass 6 proteins, is far more complex than anticipated: the TYLCV genome contains additional open reading frames expressed during the infection and giving rise to new proteins, and viral transcripts are spliced and generate new protein variants. Therefore, the number of viral proteins exceeds double that previously accepted. In addition, we have found that this higher complexity is further increased by the association of viral proteins in an intricate network of intra-viral interactions, which enable novel protein localization and function, leading to an expansion of their interactome and functional spaces. Our results imply that, to get a complete overview of the molecular and functional landscape of plant-geminivirus interactions, the strategies traditionally used, based on the analysis of a limited number of viral proteins in isolation, need to be revisited. Here, we propose to apply a combination of genomic, interactomic, and functional approaches to generate a comprehensive map of the virus/host cell intersection with unprecedented resolution. We will perform a comparative analysis of different geminivirus species, and translate these emerging concepts to independently evolved viral families. The conceptual and practical enlargement of the virus/host interface elucidated in this project has the potential to re-shape the theoretical framework and experimental approaches in the study of virus/host interactions.
Projet ERC : GENE-TUNE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative B iology : from Genes and Genomes to S ystems
Entité participante : Université de Vienne — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Uni Wien
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999968.0 €

Enhancers are the central regulators of temporal and spatial gene expression patterns, but how enhancers control their target genes from vast distances remains enigmatic. Individual enhancers do not work in isolation but are embedded into the genomic context, often together with other enhancer elements. The synergy arising from multiple enhancers can activate a target gene across distances that the individual elements cannot bridge. Therefore, the synergy of enhancers plays an essential role in gene regulation, but the nature of this synergy and how it affects gene expression is not understood. We have recently established a unique synthetic platform that allows for the efficient interrogation of individuals and combinations of enhancers from different distances to a target promoter. We aim to refine this platform by incorporating large-scale analysis to decode distance-dependent activation and enhancer synergy patterns. This rich dataset will form the foundation for our deep-learning approaches to determine the sequence constraints underlying enhancer synergy. Furthermore, we will map the 3D genome changes and examine the role of loop extrusion in synergistic gene activation. In addition, we will determine the activation kinetics at the promoter to reveal how multiple enhancers together control burst kinetics. Finally, we will examine how the addition of other regulatory elements, such as promoters or transposable elements, shape enhancer-promoter communication. We follow a bottom-up reductionist approach to study gene regulation: we will build gene regulatory landscapes and explore how enhancers navigate the genomic context to activate a target promoter. Ultimately, my mission is to unravel the mechanistic relationship among synergistic enhancers in activating distant target genes, complementing genomics and deep learning endeavours for a comprehensive understanding of gene regulation.
Projet ERC : EVOCAT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Vienne — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Uni Wien
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1960640.0 €

Linguistic categories serve as cognitive tools for humans to organize, understand, and navigate the complex world around them. Categorizers - elements that formally mark lexical categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives - belong to the core building blocks of the mental lexicon. However, it is still unclear how and why new categories and categorizers arise and how their function changes over time. Bridging the gap between disciplines, the EVOCAT project aims to unravel this puzzle by uncovering the underlying principles that govern the formation, representation, and evolution of linguistic categories. Based on a large-scale quantitative and qualitative analysis of categorization morphology in the ancient Indo-European (IE) languages and their descendants, EVOCAT’s goal is to uncover how categorizers shape the mental lexicon, how they change over time, and how their evolution can be exploited for the purposes of phylogenetic reconstruction. The project's core hypothesis is that the rise and development of new categorizers proceeds via strictly directional reanalysis of morphological material, which predicts that categorizers develop in a uniform manner cross-linguistically and that this development gives rise to meaningful isoglosses that distinguish different subbranches of related languages from one another. This hypothesis will moreover be tested against data from non-IE languages with a comparable time span of attestation to show that it truly holds cross-linguistically. Discovering regularities and establishing universals in the domain of the mental lexicon will lead to ground-breaking insights into the nature of the categorial building blocks of human grammar. This ambitious project will provide the crucial empirical and theoretical basis for further research at the interface of language change, comparative reconstruction, linguistic theory, and psycholinguistics, and ultimately for our understanding of a core aspect of the human language faculty.

Mots-clés : language change,word structure,morphosyntactic change and reanalysis,comparative indo european reconstruction,indo iranian,subbranching,phylogeny,historical linguistics,theoretical linguistics