Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : UNRAVEL (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
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 : 1496955.0 €

Earth climate research crucially depends on measurements of the atmospheric distribution of CO2, which is largely obtained using satellites. But satellites cannot directly measure CO2—they capture photographs at different wavelengths that must be mathematically processed to obtain this information. Current methods for solving this inverse problem are unaware of many aspects of the images including topography, cloud shape, shadowing, etc. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified the resulting errors as the main cause of discrepancies between different climate sensitivity models. This proposal in the area of computer graphics introduces methods for inverting the physics of light at unprecedented scales that will address these inaccuracies. However, the scope of our contribution extends far beyond climate modeling: it will have a revolutionary impact on all scientific disciplines that involve the analysis of images, including biology, computer vision, architecture, and many others. In this project, - we will establish the first framework for inverting light simulations with billions of parameters. To demonstrate its generality, and to realize the impact of this framework, we will specialize it to three areas: - we will develop the first invertible atmospheric optics simulator for earth climate monitoring that accounts for 3D structures, addressing severe inaccuracies of current methods. - we will create an invertible virtual microscope that will open the door to fundamentally new reconstruction techniques in the area of biology. - we will design architectural light simulations that are able to adapt buildings so that they make ideal use of naturally available daylight. To achieve these goals, we must unravel the messy physics of light to either reveal or control the properties of visible and invisible objects. Our approach will solve this impossible-seeming problem at large scales with substantial impact across disciplines.

Mots-clés : computer graphics,differentiable rendering,inverse rendering,atmospheric optics,microscopy,architecture,automatic differentiation
Projet ERC : Sea2Cloud (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
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 : 1999329.0 €

Earth, as a whole, can be considered as a living organism emitting gases and particles in its atmosphere, in order to regulate its own temperature (Lovelock, 1988). In particular oceans, which cover 70% of the Earth, may respond to climate change by emitting different species under different environmental conditions. At the global scale, a large fraction of the aerosol number concentration is formed by nucleation of low-volatility gas-phase compounds, a process that is expected to ultimately determine the concentrations of Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN). Nucleation occurrence over open oceans is still debated, due to scarce observational data sets and instrumental limitations, although our recent findings suggest biologically driven nucleation from seawater emissions. Marine aerosol can also be emitted to the atmosphere as primary particles via bubble bursting, among which living microorganisms are suspected to act as excellent ice nuclei (IN) and impact clouds precipitation capacities. The main goal of this proposal is to investigate how marine emissions from living microorganisms can influence CCN, IN and ultimately cloud properties. We will investigate the whole process chain of gas-phase emissions, nucleation and growth through the atmospheric column, and impact on the CCN population. We will also quantify marine primary bioaerosol emissions and evaluate how they impact IN and cloud precipitation capabilities. Experiments will be performed in the Southern Hemisphere, especially sensitive to the natural aerosol concentration variability. We will use an original approach of field mesocosms enclosing the air-sea interface, to link marine emissions to the biogeochemical properties of natural seawater, combined with ambient aerosol measurements simultaneously at low and high altitude sites. At last, a modelling study will help merging process studies and ambient measurements, and assess the role of biologically driven marine emissions on cloud properties.
Projet ERC : FEAR (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : RWTH Aachen University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RWTH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 818750.0 €

Earthquakes are one the most significant hazards for human society, and at the same time, they remain the most elusive. Advancing our ability to understand their occurrence and intensity is of paramount importance for efforts to make society more resilient to the risk posed by catastrophic earthquakes. Progress in further understanding of earthquake physics is hindered by the lack of appropriate experimental facilities for observing the earthquake process at close distance and further advances will depend on the possibility to perform controlled experiments of fault stimulation and earthquake initiation at relevant depths and pressures. A new deep underground experimental facility is being constructed in the Bedretto tunnel in the Swiss Alps, offering a unique opportunity to perform fault stimulation and earthquake nucleation experiments on a scale and depth not available until now. FEAR will conduct the first-ever program to: (i) perform controlled 50-100 m scale fault stimulation experiments in basement rock at over 1'000m depth, (ii) pre-condition the stress distribution on the fault to perform real-time tests of different physical source and forecasting hypotheses, (iii) deploy data-driven approaches and real-time modelling to conduct structured prospective forecasting experiments, (iv) integrate and validate results from deep-underground experiments, experimental rock-deformation laboratories, numerical physics and dynamic modeling, and observations from natural earthquakes. The ERC Synergy framework enables to bring together the key complementary competences in Europe and to integrate them into a coherent program.

Mots-clés : earthquake nucleation,fault stimulation,underground laboratory,experimental rock deformation laboratory,earthquake source physics
Projet ERC : EPHEMERAL (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
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 : 2670244.0 €

Earth’s lower atmosphere is oxidative and its chemistry consists of reactions of short-lived chemical compounds called radicals, controlling the abundance of key compounds, such as of ozone and greenhouse gases. In spite of decades of investigation many atmospheric observations indicate that important aspects of this radical chemistry remain ill-understood, in particular in the reactions of the multitude of organic radicals present in the atmosphere, peroxy radicals (“RO2”) and Criegee Intermediates (“CI”). Detailed investigations of these reactions have been limited for over 50 years by instrumental challenges, in particular by the lack of technique detecting individual radicals (”speciation”). Recently, the Nozière group achieved an important milestone by developing the first technique, based on Chemical Ionization Mass Spectrometry or “CIMS”, speciating the volatile RO2 that are important for the atmospheric oxidation cycles. The objective of EPHEMERAL is to solve key questions in atmospheric radical chemistry by overcoming the long-standing instrumental challenges with cutting-edge developments based on this new technique. Three strategic directions will be pursued: - in laboratory, the detection of CI will be investigated and gas-phase reactions of RO2 and CI studied, - an instrument will be built to detect individual RO2 and CI in the atmosphere, thus achieving a historical milestone, - the reactivity of these radicals at/with surfaces will be investigated in laboratory, assessing for the first time the role of clouds and aerosols in the oxidation cycles and setting the bases for next-generation challenges. The fundamental knowledge and atmospheric observations resulting from this project will dramatically improve the understanding of the oxidation cycles and the predictions of the atmospheric chemical composition, from the regional to the climate scale. EPHEMERAL will thus place Europe at the leading edge in the discipline, scientifically and technologically.
Projet ERC : KaraimBible (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Uppsala University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 296750.0 €

Eastern European Karaims are the sole representatives of Karaite Judaism in Europe. Their native tongue is a severely endangered Turkic vernacular listed on the UNESCO Atlas of the Worlds’ Languages in Danger. Due to many historical events, including World War II and the Soviet era, the cultural heritage of this intriguing ethnic minority suffered great losses. At the same time, since its investigation requires a rare combination of unique linguistic and palaeographic skills merely a fraction of its surviving written heritage has entered scholarly circulation. In particular, no comprehensive edition of the Karaim Hebrew Bible exists, even though nearly 100 Karaim Biblical texts have been discovered to date. The project will construct a digital edition of the entire Karaim Bible, almost exclusively based on unedited texts in Hebrew script (15th–20th cc). It will be used as a tool to deliver the first linguistic and palaeographic descriptions of the oldest, still unedited records of Karaim as well as reconstruct the way in which the Karaim Bible was created. Combining traditional and computer-aided research methods will provide essential data on the early history of the Karaim language and ethnicity. The edition will be a highly complex instrument interconnected with a dictionary, which is an absolute novelty in the field. The edition will contain the first ever comprehensive Karaim translation intelligible to present-day native-speakers. The texts will be treated according to the principles of textual criticism and translated into English. If permitted, facsimiles will be provided. One exciting aspect of the enterprise is that it will offer a virtual unification of the Karaim translations of one of the most important and influential works in world literature. Such a task is of fundamental importance and is crucial to sustaining an endangered culture, given that an awareness of the oldest Bible translations is an important component of European national identities.

Mots-clés : turkology,textual criticism,cultural heritage of endangered languages
Projet ERC : HEED (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : University of Glasgow — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1351092.0 €

Economic determinants, such as income and employment, are key drivers of population health and health inequalities, but have rarely been included in modelling studies to inform policy. This innovative project will develop the Health Equity and its Economic Determinants (HEED) model to investigate the impacts of taxation and social security policies on population health and mortality across Europe. There are 4 phases: 1) creating effect estimates for model inputs, 2) developing the model, 3) trialling policy simulations in one European country (UK), and 4) Europe-wide policy simulations. In phase 1, we will use causal approaches to analyse longitudinal data (the UK Household Longitudinal Study and Swedish registers), to estimate effects of changes in household income and employment status on health status (SF-12), mental health (GHQ-12 and psychotropic medications), life satisfaction and all-cause mortality. In phase 2, we will build a microsimulation policy model based on a representative synthetic UK population. We will develop projections for one, five and 10-year time periods, accounting for pre-existing demographic, epidemiological and economic trends. We will validate HEED by comparing projections with data not used in model construction. In phase 3, we will model the health equity impacts of alternative income tax and social security policies, developed with policymakers. Probabilistic sensitivity analyses will test key model assumptions and uncertainties. In phase 4, we will adapt the microsimulation model for implementation across a further 23 European Union countries. We will populate the model using available survey and demographic data to study impacts on levels of and inequalities in all-cause mortality, self-rated health, depression (PHQ-9) and life satisfaction over one and five years. Ex-ante impacts of reforms, as well as contemporaneous policy swaps, will be investigated to understand how best to reduce health inequalities across Europe.

Mots-clés : mesh terms  health status disparities,social welfare,computer simulation,epidemiology
Projet ERC : IDED (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Université Libre de Bruxelles — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ULB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1376916.0 €

Economists study inheritance and demographics in isolation, overlooking the feedback effects between the two. This is surprising given that other social scientists have typically related inheritance schemes to family structures. The general objective of this proposal is to understand the implications of these interconnections for the process of economic development. First, I will create new databases for European countries between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries and for Sub-Saharan African countries during the past century until today. These will allow to cover demographic transitions, a crucial stage in the development process in which drastic demographic changes occur, and the period before. These databases will allow establishing facts relating inheritance schemes, family structures and demographic variables. Second, I will propose structural models of inheritance, family structures, marriage and fertility in order to rationalize these facts. These models will assess the importance of the relationship between inheritance and demographics when studying the effect of inheritance on economic outcomes. The databases and structural models will provide answers to specific applied research questions: (i) The Demographic Transition: Was the French Revolution responsible for the demographic transition? What were the relevant channels (partible inheritance and inclusion of women)? How did the abolition of primogeniture affect the elites’ demographic transition? (ii) The European Marriage Pattern: how did its characteristics; late marriages and high life-long celibacy, vary across inheritance systems? Which one of these was most beneficial for gender empowerment? (iii) Sub-Saharan Africa’s demographic transitions: Can the harmonization of inheritance practices reactivate stalling demographic transitions? How does land scarcity affect the relationship between inheritance practices, family structures, and demographics?

Mots-clés : economic development,inequality,inheritance,demographic transition,female empowerment
Projet ERC : VISIRday (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : University of Bayreuth — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1487636.61 €

Efficient daytime cooling without the need for a heat engine is an essential technology to lower our overall energy consumption. Nature offers a chance to off-load heat directly into the cold outer space via the so-called “sky window”: a spectral range from 8 – 13 µm, where our atmosphere is transparent. Concomitantly, solar radiance influx needs to be minimized by scattering and reflection, which would counteract the radiatively removed energy. VISIRday aims to provide ground-breaking new materials and concepts to emit thermal energy directly into this transparent sky window. A radically holistic approach is necessary to understand and design the optical properties of nano- and mesostructured materials over the entire spectral range (300 nm – 20 µm), with the mid-IR sky window being fully emissive, and all other spectral wavelengths being fully reflective. I will therefore combine top-down direct write lithography with intricate bottom-up colloidal self-assembly to device hierarchically structured systems fully addressing these stringent optical properties. A new material class – surface phonon polariton supporting nano- and mesoparticles – with adjustable absorption properties in the mid-IR range, will take a leading role as novel colloidal building block. In combination with polymers and metallic nanostructures my team will demonstrate hybrid structures with finely adjusted and even externally tuneable optical properties. Simulations based on finite element modelling to conceive optimum design rules will complement the experimental work. Inspired by examples from nature, namely white beetles and the Saharan silver ant, I will push the fundamental insights towards novel technologies such as radiative daytime cooling paints and fibres. I am convinced that this project provides the urgently needed materials and concepts to add radiative daytime cooling to the existing mix of green energy technologies.

Mots-clés : optical spectroscopy,hierarchical structures,polymeric materials
Projet ERC : MEET (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Leibniz University Hannover — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 112500.0 €

Efforts to reconstruct the early Earth evolution lack critical information on the contents of mobile and volatile elements and their isotope signatures in the mantle and crust. Fortunately, this information is preserved in inclusions of melt in relicts of olivine from komatiites and picrites, and zircons from mafic and felsic rocks. In Aim I, we will use compositions and temperatures of primary mantle-derived melts reconstructed from the study of melt inclusions in olivine from komatiites and picrites to constrain the evolution of mantle composition. We will further study crust-formation, crust-mantle recycling, and crust-hydrosphere exchange based on composition of melt inclusions and host zircons. We will analyse a wide range of volatile elements and their isotopes in homogenized melt inclusions and the elemental and isotopic compositions of host olivines and zircons. The samples come from 24 localities of komatiites and picrites originating at different cratons between 3.7 and 0.06 Ga, and detrital and magmatic zircons with ages from 4.4 Ga to present. We will apply published and new models to constrain the temperatures and compositions of mantle and crustal sources. In Aim II, geodynamic modelling will relate our observations to the evolution of mantle convection, crustal production and recycling, and plate tectonics (PT). We will couple geodynamic modelling with surface and climate models and use derived geochemical proxies to test our hypotheses on the importance of surface processes in evolution of PT. We will thus address several fundamental issues: the rate of crustal growth and recycling through time; the cause and timing of the onset of large-scale subduction and PT, and factors controlling its evolution; concentration and origin of H2O and halogens in the deep mantle, and the extent (if any) of core-mantle interaction. MEET will, therefore, offer an unprecedented look at the evolution of Earth from 4.4 Ga to today, and from the atmosphere to the core.

Mots-clés : earth mantle,earth crust,geodynamics,melt inclusions,olivine,zircon,spinel
Projet ERC : MEET (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Leibniz Association — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : LG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 228120.12 €

Efforts to reconstruct the early Earth evolution lack critical information on the contents of mobile and volatile elements and their isotope signatures in the mantle and crust. Fortunately, this information is preserved in inclusions of melt in relicts of olivine from komatiites and picrites, and zircons from mafic and felsic rocks. In Aim I, we will use compositions and temperatures of primary mantle-derived melts reconstructed from the study of melt inclusions in olivine from komatiites and picrites to constrain the evolution of mantle composition. We will further study crust-formation, crust-mantle recycling, and crust-hydrosphere exchange based on composition of melt inclusions and host zircons. We will analyse a wide range of volatile elements and their isotopes in homogenized melt inclusions and the elemental and isotopic compositions of host olivines and zircons. The samples come from 24 localities of komatiites and picrites originating at different cratons between 3.7 and 0.06 Ga, and detrital and magmatic zircons with ages from 4.4 Ga to present. We will apply published and new models to constrain the temperatures and compositions of mantle and crustal sources. In Aim II, geodynamic modelling will relate our observations to the evolution of mantle convection, crustal production and recycling, and plate tectonics (PT). We will couple geodynamic modelling with surface and climate models and use derived geochemical proxies to test our hypotheses on the importance of surface processes in evolution of PT. We will thus address several fundamental issues: the rate of crustal growth and recycling through time; the cause and timing of the onset of large-scale subduction and PT, and factors controlling its evolution; concentration and origin of H2O and halogens in the deep mantle, and the extent (if any) of core-mantle interaction. MEET will, therefore, offer an unprecedented look at the evolution of Earth from 4.4 Ga to today, and from the atmosphere to the core.

Mots-clés : earth mantle,earth crust,geodynamics,melt inclusions,olivine,zircon,spinel