Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : RECONCILE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université Charles de Prague — Pays : Rép. Tchèque — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999784.0 €

Constitutionalism provides a shared-meaning space, in which the idea of rights has served to emancipate individuals. This rights-based constitutionalism is in decline. It has ossified, became isolated from politics, and alienated from people in the West and faced difficulties to take roots in other cultural backgrounds. The problem is that the rights-based constitutionalism is unable to foster collective identity due to its conceptual limitations. Populist movements (secular and religious alike) thrive on this failure and forge a collective identity around simplified and homogenized cultural characteristics, which trumps individual rights and leads to exclusion and social injustice. The solution is to develop the integrative function of the constitution. So far, all attempts, primarily constitutional patriotism, failed. It requires nothing less than a new theory of constitutionalism (call it identity constitutionalism), which connects the philosophical tradition of intersubjectivity, discursive theories of constitutionalism, and social-cognitive perspective on identity construction. I claim that such constitution-based collective identity is possible if constitution becomes central to political discourse. It happens under three conditions: (1) if constitution is perceived as authentic (constitutional authenticity), (2) creates a shared-meaning space for communication by incorporating major sources of local and global morality (normative compatibility) and (3) motivates actors to prefer constitutional speech over nationalist and religious ones through an adversarial institutional setting (institutional adversariality). To prove the hypothesis, I will research constitutions’ discursive centrality and the sense of community among citizens in four European (secular and Christian) and four Middle Eastern and North African (Islamic) countries through a hybrid methodology combining supervised computational analysis of political discourses and quantitative survey research.

Mots-clés : constitutionalism identity european union middle east and north africa comparative constitutional law islam christianity human rights international law
Projet ERC : SensingDEEP (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université Charles de Prague — Pays : Rép. Tchèque — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1996250.0 €

Deep-sea fishes are known for extraordinary adaptations including enhanced sensory systems. They have eyes often modified in shape, anatomy or at the molecular level. Fascinatingly, some deep-sea fishes have evolved unique vision to potentially see colours. Here I propose to study functional evolution of this visual system, and to target the crucial question – can deep-sea fish see in colours? To perceive light, vertebrate retina has two types of photoreceptor cells, the rods for dim-light vision and cones for daylight colour vision. Many deep-sea fish lack cones, which makes them colour blind. The novel visual system based purely on multiple different rod opsins possibly overcomes this limit, and it is not found in any other vertebrate. In SensingDEEP I aim to “zoom” into the level of single rod/cone cells to understand deep-sea molecular adaptations of vision. I will target species with 1) the novel multiple-rhodopsin visual system and test if it has a potential to serve for colour discrimination. With multiple rhodopsins expressed in the retina, single-cell transcriptomics will either reveal rod cells sensitive to different colours, or alternatively, “superpowerful” rods sensing along the entire light spectrum. Both options would be unique among vertebrates. Further I aim to focus on the deep-sea species with 2) challenged rod and cone cell identity with mismatch of molecular machinery of both (rod and cone) types. Lastly, I will also test 3) how rare these extreme adaptations are in deep-sea fish diversity using the high-quality whole-genome sequencing. In the species with multiple rhodopsins, I will specifically focus on their genomic architecture and gene regulation by applying single-cell multiomics. SensingDEEP combines modern genomic tools with rare and unique samples. Given that vertebrate eye is a conserved structure, the deep-sea fish with extreme adaptations will, therefore, serve as a model to explore (and push) the limits of vertebrate vision.

Mots-clés : vision,deep sea,fish,adaptation,rhodopsin,molecular evolution,gene duplication,rod,cone,retina,extreme environment,deep ocean
Projet ERC : REALLYCREDIBLE (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Fondation nationale des sciences politiques — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FNSP
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1197632.0 €

Applied economists routinely evaluate the effect of economic policies. For instance, what is the effect of raising the minimum wage on employment? Angrist & Pischke (2010) argue that applied economics has recently experienced a "credibility revolution'': by switching to transparent methods to evaluate policies, applied economists have increased the credibility of their findings, and the impact of their work. In the first part of this proposal, I show that the credibility revolution is not complete. Two-way fixed effects regression, a policy-evaluation method used in as many as 26% of the most-highly cited papers recently published in the American Economic Review, relies on the assumption that the policy's effect is constant, across units and over time. In most applications, this assumption is not credible. Therefore, I propose a series of new differences-in-differences estimators, that do not rely on this constant effect assumption, and that can be used in virtually all the applications where two-way fixed effects regressions have been used. In the second part of this proposal, I argue that the credibility revolution's focus on unbiased estimators may be hard to defend, as variance also matters. I explore two ways of trading-off bias and variance. The first amounts to combining an unbiased and a biased but potentially more efficient estimator of the same parameter. The second amounts to deriving the minimax estimator of the policy's effect, under the assumption that this effect cannot be larger than a (potentially large) constant B. Finally, the third part investigates the potential impact of the ``credibility revolution''. Specifically, I will run a randomized controlled trial to measure the effect of following an online course presenting policy evaluations, in two very different populations: policy makers and members of the general public, focusing on individuals with a low trust in institutions in that second group.

Mots-clés : credibility revolution differences in differences bias variance trade off impact evaluation education
Projet ERC : UNEQUALED (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Fondation nationale des sciences politiques — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FNSP
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1862332.0 €

Project UNEQUALED aims to study educational constraints faced by individuals at a stage when they are planning their future investments in human capital. Despite its importance, understanding the determinants of educational choices has been a longstanding challenge for two important reasons. First, it requires broad, representative, data. Secondly, because the environment in which individuals’ educational plans are formed, and adjust, is typically endogenous to their characteristics. I will tackle these issues using large interventions on nationally representative samples of individuals.  Different parts of project UNEQUALED target specific questions that will help construct an overall picture. The project will seek to understand, and quantify, the role of the different barriers in leading to unequal learning and opportunities and the effects of easing the constraints. Specifically asking: Can the easing of technological constraints reduce learning inequality? What role does ICT access and training play for distance learning? Does differential social exposure within the classroom impact student outcomes? Can role models help an individual reach their goal? How important are psychological (or socio-emotional) barriers for achievement?  I will address each part using detailed micro longitudinal data, but at a macro level (large scale, nationally representative samples). I plan to combine economic concepts with field interventions, experiments and rich econometric and computer sciences tools to analyse big datasets and to causally estimate the impact of the components that drive the adjustment in educational plans, and, ultimately, how these factors into later educational outcomes. All projects will aim to capture the short and long-run impacts. To carry off this ambitious research project, I will work with a large and interdisciplinary network of researchers specializing in economics, statistics, computer science, management science, and public policy.

Mots-clés : education,inequality,socio economic status,gender,role models,segregation,technology
Projet ERC : ECOSOCIAL (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Consolidator grants)
Entité participante : Fondation nationale des sciences politiques — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : FNSP
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999145.0 €

The goal of ECOSOCIAL is to examine empirically the historical evolution of political cleavages and socioeconomic inequalities, with a multidisciplinary perspective and the use of granular local level data and cutting-edge statistical methods. Who turns out to vote? Who do the poor and the rich vote for, and how has this changed in the long run? Why and when did the left-right voting pattern break down in Western democracies? What can the past teach us about democratic backsliding? While there is plenty of evidence on the rise of Europe’s far right and the emergence of multi-elite party systems, we lack a quantitative analysis of the long-term changes in the structure of political cleavages. The gap in the literature comes from the fact that it mostly relies on survey data, which do not allow us to go far back in time. An alternative is the reliance on local-level granular information, but inferring individual voting behavior from aggregate data may lead to ecological fallacies. ECOSOCIAL will help fill this gap, by exploiting the historical depth of existing electoral data while offering novel solutions to the ecological inference problems. Its novelty will be to put today’s transformations into a longer historical perspective – which crucially will allow us to better understand them and their consequences. ECOSOCIAL will advance the existing research in four steps. First, I will provide the first comprehensive quantitative study of US elections between 1788-2024, considering both Presidential votes and primaries. Second, I will propose novel econometric solutions to overcome ecological fallacies. Third, I will apply this new methodology to six European countries, thereby enhancing our understanding of partisan realignments in Western democracies. Finally, I will construct historical series of the evolution of social capital going back to the 19th century, so as to investigate whether the explanatory power of this factor has gained importance in recent years.

Mots-clés : election socioeconomic inequalities social capital voting behavior partisan realignment political cleavage democratic backsliding enfranchisement ecological inference random forest algorithms
Projet ERC : FROM STONE TO HOME (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Pise — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 53910.0 €

This project explores the emergence of value and wealth as a concept in human history. Social and economic changes accelerated during the Neolithic, but until now it remains unclear what triggered inequality in these communities. Thus, the project aims to nuance how inequality evolved in human history. To approach this key question the study will investigate social and economic transformations initiated by the appearance of polished stone tools (axes, adzes, chisels and wedges) recovered from Neolithic sites, burials, households and quarries from the 7th to the 4th millennium BC in the Aegean. The project hypothesis is linking the Neolithic human awareness of raw material availability and biographies of polished stone tool assemblages with the abstract concepts of the different kinds of value and wealth in these communities. The project will pursue its objectives by initiating four work packages which will, for the first time, document and compare polished stone tools made of rare (jadeitite, nephrite, omphacitite or eclogite) and common (serpentinite, andesite, basalt, gabbro and hematite) raw materials from sites, burials and households in selected synchronic and diachronic case studies. By revealing the location of previously unknown raw material sources and quarry sites of polished stone tools, the project will be able to discover the interrelations between local, regional and superregional exchange networks. Through techno-morphological, use-wear and contextual analysis of polished stone tools, it will be possible to qualify and quantify the different stages of the studied objects, from procurement, manufacture and usage to the final deposition. The data from the polished stone tool assemblages will be related to other materials (lithics, ceramics, bones, shells, obsidian, flint, copper and gold) from the studied sites, burials and households, in order to identify new aspects related to the value of objects and fluctuations in wealth and inequality.

Mots-clés : neolithic,stone tools,aegean,value,wealth
Projet ERC : CoStaMM (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université Loránd Eötvös — Pays : Hongrie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1839769.0 €

The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory of the strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions, describing the elementary particles of nature at microscopic length scales. The precise theoretical predictions of the Standard Model are put to the test in contemporary and future high-energy particle collider experiments. Besides explaining matter around us in the present, the Standard Model also predicts the distant past of our Universe, by describing the behavior of particles at temperatures as high as it used to be just fractions of seconds after the Big Bang. The relics of the cosmological phase transitions in this era of our Universe are actively sought for via their gravitational wave signatures in current and future observatories. Most of the relevant features of hot Standard Model matter are non-perturbative, implying that a first-principles treatment is only possible via computer simulations of the underlying field theories on space-time lattices. This proposal will use such large-scale lattice field theory simulations to determine the properties of cosmological phase transitions and thus significantly improve our understanding of how the early Universe cooled down and became the world that we know today. Specifically, we will perform the first full physical simulations of hot, electrically charged strongly interacting matter. We will also substantially improve on existing calculations of the weak and electromagnetic interactions at high temperature. The computational effort of the combined treatment of these forces is immense – we will overcome these challenges by employing optimized algorithms and cutting-edge technologies including machine learning methods. For both systems, we will determine the nature of the high-temperature transition and analyze the induced gravitational wave spectrum. Our results will provide the most accurate description of Standard Model matter in the early Universe.

Mots-clés : quantum field theory,lattice gauge theory,lattice quantum chromodynamics,thermal field theory,phase transitions and critical phenomena,monte carlo algorithms,high performance computing,cosmological phase transitions
Projet ERC : BeInf (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université d'Hambourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1968500.0 €

The innovative BeInf project interrogates the connected histories of Ethiopic and Syriac Christianity in their various complexities and nuances. It accomplishes this task through a series of five discrete, but complementary case studies addressing: 1. Aramaic loanwords in Ethiopic; 2. the so-called Nagran Episode, in which the sixth-century Aksumite ruler Kaleb intervened on behalf of Syriac Christians who were being persecuted in the Arabian peninsula; 3. the Ethiopic Abba Gärima Gospels, including especially their illumination programs; 4. the hagiography of the Nine Saints, who are alleged to have brought about a “second christianisation” of Ethiopia in the late fifth and early sixth centuries; 5. the Ethiopic reception of Syriac literature. BeInf’s innovation is multifaceted. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together methods that are traditionally categorized as distinct and disconnected, including especially art history, linguistics, manuscript studies, philology, textual studies, and history. In addition, it rejects area studies and unites fields that have traditionally been isolated and siloed off in problematic ways. Finally, it proposes to move beyond influence as an analytical category for analysing connections, contacts, exchanges, and the actors and cultural brokers responsible for them and instead adopts a methodological and theoretical stance inspired by “connected history”, especially in the sense of histoire croisée. With these innovations, BeInf is positioned to make significant, long-lasting contributions to the field of Ethiopic Studies, both in content and in concept, while also serving as a paradigm-shifting model for other projects in the humanities addressing areas of inquiry that have traditionally been dominated by ill-framed questions of influence and that are primed to move beyond influence to explore connected histories with all their nuance, complexity, and texture through a multi-disciplinary approach.
Projet ERC : QuNIm (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université de l'Insubrie — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1979704.0 €

Many pioneering advances in medicine and biology require observation of the microscopic world with high resolution and without damaging the specimen. One of the most widespread techniques is multiphoton fluorescence microscopy, which allows full 3D imaging via optical sectioning, i.e., imaging of planes within the sample without the need for physical slicing. This technique has a major limitation, however: the penetration depth and the signal-to-noise ratio are not sufficient for imaging deep within tissue, preventing functional imaging of, e.g., neuronal or cardiac activity beyond superficial layers.  QuNIm aims to transform the field of nonlinear imaging and microscopy by exploiting the unique properties of entanglement, a quantum mechanical superposition of two or more photons that behave like single particles. Two quantum-correlated photons are absorbed in a nonlinear process as a single particle, an event 10 billion times more probable than the absorption of two classical photons. QuNIm will apply, for the first time, the innovative concepts of spatiotemporal and multimode entanglement, super-Poissonian fluctuations, and macroscopic quantum beams to deliver a ground-breaking imaging technique. It will maintain the strengths of standard nonlinear imaging (e.g., multiphoton microscopy, boasting high resolution, 3D imaging and molecular specificity using fluorophores/photoproteins) while increasing its penetration depth and removing the drawbacks (complex ultrashort pulsed lasers, lengthy scanning procedures, and phototoxicity).  QuNIm will further extend the limit of deep-tissue imaging while at the same time enhancing the contrast and reducing the laser intensity (mitigating tissue damage), delivering a transformative impact in different fields. For example, in neuroscience, this will allow imaging of, e.g. sub-cortical brain regions fundamental for important studies into learning, memory and degenerative neural conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

Mots-clés : quantum correlation,entanglement,spatiotemporal coherence,multiphoton absorption,nonlinear imaging