Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : DYNAMICE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499186.0 €

The loss of ice mass from polar and high-elevation regions is a significant contributor to global sea level rise and affects climate and biosphere changes. Due to its importance, a better understanding of the dynamics of ice sheets is considered a priority for scientific advancement by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. DYNAMICE aims to enhance our understanding of ice sheet dynamics and ice mass loss by investigating the coupled flow dynamics of polar ice and the deforming mantle below, with a focus on the role of anisotropic viscosity for determining deformation rates. Ice and olivine, the main building crystals of ice sheets and the mantle, respectively, are two of the most anisotropic crystals on Earth. This means that individual crystals have preferred slip systems, along which it is easier to deform them. Depending on the deformation direction with respect to the mean orientation of crystals in both ice and mantle rock, the bulk viscosity can vary by a few orders of magnitude. Such variations in viscosity can greatly affect the flow of ice from ice divides to the sea, as well as the mantle’s viscous response to the unloading of deglaciated ice. As a result, spatial differences in ice texture can locally enhance or slow down ice flow, leading to some areas with faster than average ice loss and others where ice is stabilized. Moreover, in locations where ice loss is fast, and where mantle textures are favourably oriented, the viscous response of the mantle can be fast enough to uplift the ice and slow further ice loss, potentially stabilizing the ice sheet. Hence, anisotropic viscosity might play a critical role in the interplay between ice and mantle dynamics. In DYNAMICE, I will implement a framework to infer anisotropic viscosity from both ice and mantle textures in a numerical flow model. This will open new avenues for understanding solid earth and cryospheric dynamics, and their critical interactions that affect the future of Earth’s ice sheets.
Projet ERC : WAGE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499985.0 €

All over the globe, women in the work world receive, on average, 20% less than their male counterparts (United Nations, 2022). In countries explicitly committed to eliminating the gender pay gap (GPG), such as those in Europe, women still earn, on average, 13% less than men do (Eurostat, 2022). This is regardless of the fact that countries with persistent GPGs have deployed a strategic institutional measure to raise the wage floor of feminised work sectors and reduce the GPG – namely, collective bargaining.  The overall aim of WAGE is to theorise the gendered nature of collective bargaining by investigating the past, the unruly present and the possible future of regulated collective bargaining processes in three key countries: Germany, Norway and Sweden. Moreover, the project’s research design will involve gathering data at the sectoral level of the metal sector and nursing and will use ethnographic research methods. To realise its overall aim, WAGE will accomplish the following three research objectives:  1. Compare and synthesise existing histories of collective bargaining and the GPG in the three selected countries. 2. Uncover and analyse daily practices in collective bargaining rounds that result in wage increases in the male dominated metal sector and the female dominated nursing sector. 3. Document and explain how actors embedded in the male dominated metal and the female dominated nursing sector relate to the wage norm and sectoral gendered wage differentials.  Given the dearth of scholarship on the relationship between gendered wage differentials and collective bargaining processes from an inter-sectoral angle, this study will be the first to systematically use qualitative methods to explore the economic frontier between sectoral gendered wage differentials and collective wage formation, thereby contributing to the effort to achieve gender equity in practice.

Mots-clés : gender,gender equality,gendered wage differentials,undervaluation of female work,gender inequality,gender and work
Projet ERC : GETGOV (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499203.0 €

Ever since humans settled into communities, there have been political classes. A small elite governs, while the majority are governed. Historically, the governing elite has consisted of people from a narrow segment of society, such as aristocrats. However, the rise of democracy may have opened the path to power and changed the incentives of the leader to select governing elites from a broader segment of society. These elites may, in turn, opt for broad-based policies. Nonetheless, many voters today do not think that democracy has delivered on this promise. They indicate that their governments are captured by wealthy elites who do not care about them. So, does democracy result in more representative, diverse, and competent governing elites?  Research does not offer a clear answer to this question. GETGOV will make up for this deficit by investigating whether democracy has changed who govern us; and in turn how this impacts the decisions that are made.  To do so, it will build an unprecedented database, HistGov. HistGov will provide bibliographic information, such as gender and party affiliation, on individual governing elites globally from 1789 and onward. The project will break new theoretical ground by developing a model of how democratisation changes who governs us. An underlying notion is that democracy makes governing elites look more like the people they govern. Next, the project will use the new database to investigate whether more representative, diverse, and competent elites provide broad-based policies such as mass primary education and better outcomes such as economic growth.  This much-needed project will significantly improve our understanding of governing elites. We will know who they are, both historically and up to the present day. Furthermore, it will improve our understanding of why specific people govern us and how they impact our world. This is of pivotal importance in a world where many people feel that their political elites have failed them.

Mots-clés : democracy,governing elites,political science,quantitative data,social background,sociology,political history,public administration
Projet ERC : CONNECTS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Grenade — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496563.0 €

In our everyday lives, we rely on existing relations among elements in our environment (i.e., semantic information) to interact efficiently with the world. This information can either be used to facilitate understanding by exploiting redundant (congruent) evidence or to signal out salient stimuli by highlighting unexpected (incongruent) elements. This duality raises fundamental questions about how and when our brains utilize stored semantic knowledge as its influence seems to vary depending on the specific cognitive domain. This seemingly paradoxical state represents a cognitive puzzle that questions whether the presence of (in)congruent contextual information in a given situation has a positive or negative impact on how we perceive, process, and remember information.  CONNECTS seeks to address the paradoxical effects of semantic congruity across various cognitive domains by providing a unified framework. The proposed framework builds on the Transfer Appropriate Processing principle and brings it to a neural representational level. By examining the transformations of neural representations, it is possible to quantify the degree of overlap in cognitive computations as a measure of appropriate transfer. Thus, CONNECTS dissolves the paradox by proposing that performance would be optimal when the required cognitive computation is oriented towards the same stimulus properties emphasized by the semantic (in)congruity of the stimulus. This proposal not only reconciles conflicting evidence on specific domains but also provides a domain-agnostic framing of the conundrum that ensures its integrative aim.  CONNECTS combines a solid theoretical foundation with cutting-edge neuroscientific techniques. The project's multi-method approach, including behavioural, neural (fMRI and EEG), and computational data from artificial neural networks. This approach offers a comprehensive exploration of the phenomenon which is a core requirement for a unifying framework.

Mots-clés : semantic congruity object processing scene processing memory encoding neuroimaging
Projet ERC : INSPIRE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Trente — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Systems in nature are extremely robust, despite huge uncertainties and variability. Studying their nonlinear dynamic behaviour is challenging, due to their complexity and the many parameters at play, but crucial to understand important phenomena, such as cellular dynamics, onset of diseases, epidemic spreading.  Parameter-dependent simulations can predict the behaviour of natural systems case by case. Yet, the exact models and parameter values are poorly known, while qualitative behaviours are often preserved even with huge parameter variations, because they rely on the system interconnection structure. Parameter-free structural approaches can check whether a property is preserved for a whole family of uncertain systems exclusively due to its structure. However, when an expected property fails to hold structurally, novel approaches are needed to understand why, which system features prevent it, which key parameters must be finely tuned to enforce it.  INSPIRE will develop a unifying framework to analyse and control families of uncertain dynamical systems in biology and epidemiology, which integrates for the first time structural, robust and probabilistic methods, tailored to the peculiarities of natural systems. The project will provide: i) methodologies to assess (practically) structural properties and unveil the mechanisms that enable/prevent a property, identifying the key parameters or motifs; ii) control paradigms that leverage such an insight to guarantee a desired global property through targeted local interventions; iii) scaling and aggregation approaches that exploit the properties of subsystems to mitigate computational complexity.  The project outcomes, a mathematical theory as well as algorithms to analyse and control complex uncertain systems in nature, will strongly support the analysis and design of biomolecular feedback systems with a desired behaviour, the identification of therapeutic targets, the prediction and control of epidemic phenomena.

Mots-clés : interconnections of nonlinear dynamical systems structural analysis of dynamical networks structural input output influences robustness analysis of biological systems randomized algorithms for the analysis of uncertain systems monotone systems and positive impulse response systems control theoretic methods for systems biology
Projet ERC : VenomEvolvability (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499971.0 €

Understanding the ability of species to adapt to their environment, or their evolvability, is central to evolutionary biology. Most traits are complex in that their phenotype results from the contributions of many genes with small, sometimes non-additive effects. While quantitative genetics has been instrumental in showing that short term evolvability depends on additive genetic variation, it ignores details of the molecular underpinnings of phenotypic characters that are crucial for the production and maintenance of additive genetic variation, and therefore evolvability at longer time scale. This impacts our understanding of evolvability and calls for model traits that enable the integration of quantitative and molecular genetics. Venoms are great model systems for this purpose. They are convergent sets of traits well-suited for comparative studies, and their phenotypes result from the combined actions of a relatively small number of secreted, functionally repurposed proteins, or toxins, that can be identified, characterised, and quantified. This project focuses on the venoms of Neuroptera, which venoms remain unstudied despite providing a unique opportunity among venomous animals to combine omics techniques, and comparative molecular and morphological evolution with evolutionary quantitative genetics. This multidisciplinary approach will elucidate the genetic and evolutionary mechanisms that underlie the emergence of venoms as complex evolutionary novelties and identify the molecular properties that facilitate or constrain their evolution across micro- and macroevolutionary timescales. Thus, the project will test central hypotheses about venom evolvability, but it is also likely to yield novel bioactive molecules with potential use as molecular tools and agrochemical leads. It will also establish venom as model systems that enable integration of quantitative and molecular genetics, thereby addressing a major methodological challenge in evolutionary biology.

Mots-clés : venom,toxin,evolvability
Projet ERC : LOOP (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Rome « La Sapienza » — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499928.0 €

Computing impacts every aspect of modern science and society. Von-Neumann computers are inefficient in addressing important combinatorial optimizations widespread from networks to artificial intelligence. Finding alternative paradigms to tackle these intractable problems is now vital as digital hardware approaches its ultimate performance limit. A promising strategy maps the optimization in spin models implemented on a physical setup that evolves as a spin system to the solution. This fascinating scheme has recently attracted huge interest, leading to various electronic and optical Ising machines that, however, remain challenging to scale and speed up.  LOOP is an experimental proposal that aims at creating ultrafast optical hardware for combinatorial optimization by exploiting the polarization of light. The optical polarization is a new ingredient in computing that is absent in electronics. The original idea is to use the polarization as an ultrafast nonlinear oscillator that encodes the spin. We demonstrate the concept by controlling polarization bifurcation in third-order nonlinear crystals by electro-optics, enabling a low-power computing mechanism that operates at picosecond. The main goal is the realization of a polarization Ising machine that solves NP-hard optimization problems with thousands of spins in microseconds. The all-optical machine operates orders-of-magnitude faster than state-of-the-art digital and analog hardware. The scheme is fully parallel and scalable by combining polarization dynamics with spatial light modulation. Moreover, the vectorial nature of the polarization allows to surpass the binary operation of Ising machines. We exploit orbits on the Poincaré sphere to realize an ultrafast XY machine for continuous optimization, opening a new direction in optical computing. LOOP is an interdisciplinary program that spans from nonlinear optics to complex science to establish a new computing paradigm for optimization in the post-Moore’s law era.

Mots-clés : optical computing
Projet ERC : TOHR (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Rome « La Sapienza » — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1423364.0 €

Humans are particularly rhythmic animals. Why did the human sense of rhythm develop? Many hypotheses try to explain the origins of our acoustic rhythm capacities, but few are empirically tested, compared, and comparatively investigated. This project searches for the evolutionary roots of human rhythmicity, breaking new ground through three concerted approaches. First, I zoom in on key rhythmic properties: isochrony, an even occurrence of events in time, and meter, a relative accentuation of events. Second, I compare hypotheses on rhythm origins, selecting the most relevant ones to music and speech and testing them against each other. Third, I target rhythm precursors in other species as predicted by these alternative hypotheses. I test four hypotheses, which propose that 1) gait or 2) breathing control, and the ability to 3) learn new sounds or 4) sing in a chorus are evolutionary precursors to human rhythm. I will use different measures including behavior, electrophysiology, gait tracking, breathing, and computational modeling to test whether the four features above predict rhythmic capacities. Comparative animal work is needed to test whether similar evolutionary pressures lead to similar rhythmic traits. I will collect data from humans and four more species. I will test seals, displaying vocal learning, and porpoises; both mammals have developed breathing control. I will also test siamangs, displaying rhythmic locomotion, and indris; both primates naturally sing in choruses, a rare trait in non-human mammals. Finding rhythm in other species will provide a test bench to reconstruct the origins of human rhythm. Resting on my background in bioacoustics and mathematics, the project expands in new challenging directions, such as neurophysiology of marine mammals, automated gait analyses, and biomusicology. In brief, I will show which species have rhythm, and why humans evolved to be such chatty, rhythmic creatures.

Mots-clés : evolution of music biomusicology evolution of speech timing comparative cognition animal communication
Projet ERC : AGENTS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Institute of Science and Technology Austria — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ISTA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498216.0 €

The identification of the first galaxies in the early Universe has been an expanding frontier of observational astrophysics. Reionization marks the last major phase transition of matter in the Universe and its completion had crucial impact on the formation of the smallest galaxies. Reionization is therefore the first landmark of the influence that feedback from star formation had on structure formation. While reionization roughly encapsulated the first Gyr of cosmic time, the precise timing, topology and the sources of ionizing photons are unknown. Did reionization proceed rapidly or gradually and was it driven by rare bright galaxies, or numerous faint ones? The main limitation to our understanding is our little knowledge of the properties of galaxies in the early Universe. Now, thanks to the long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), this field can transition into the study of the characteristics of these first galaxies and the assessment of their impact on their environment. With its new technical capabilities, JWST will enable the identification of thousands of faint galaxies in the early Universe and enable the measurement of the detailed properties of their stellar populations and interstellar medium. My StG will benefit from my early access to JWST to obtain a complete census of the young galaxy population with emission-line surveys in the first 3 Gyr of cosmic time. I will use unprecedented observational techniques in survey fields that enable direct measurements of the connection between galaxies and intergalactic gas. Based on a multi-angled approach, I will assess the role of young galaxies as agents and tracers of reionization. My team will measure the total ionizing budget from young galaxies in the early Universe and self-consistently trace the topology and timing of reionization on global and local scales. This project will yield a legacy that paves the way for future endeavours with the Extremely Large Telescopes and the Square Kilometre Array.

Mots-clés : high redshift galaxies,intergalactic medium,reionization,emission line galaxies,early universe,lyman alpha emission
Projet ERC : AFROPEA (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Centres des sciences humaines de Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : GWZ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499500.0 €

How is Europe imagined by African, African European, and African diasporic writers? The research project argues that there is a temporarily and spatially expansive, only partially known Black literary tradition engaging with Europe in subjective and aesthetically innovative ways. This tradition has not yet been studied from a perspective anchored in literary studies. The project proposes a new, literature specific, and comparative approach by employing transcultural appropriation as a heuristic lens. This will allow focusing on the following aspects: 1) On literary strategies of transcultural appropriation, i.e. on ways of imaginatively building Afropean worlds, shuffling hierarchies, reversing (neo-)colonialist discourse, rewriting modernity, and employing a rhetoric of property. 2) On literary references to (neo-)colonial logics of property, heritage, and belonging, i.e. on ways of revealing and questioning the European foundations that forced Black people into the position of being “appropriated” or excluded from claims of ownership since colonialism and slavery. The goal is to develop a new perspective on Europe-related Black literature that challenges the reactive dependency and balances the Anglo- or Francocentric orientation associated with the framework of “writing back”. This will be achieved by studying texts written in minor and midsize European languages; depicting middle, eastern, and provincial parts of Europe; revealing gray areas beyond dominator vs. dominated; disclosing “forgotten” colonial histories; and addressing Europe as a unity. The scholarly impact is threefold: 1) The focus on a Black, multilingual, heterogeneous Europe will revise research on Europe in comparative literature. 2) The literature specific methodology will bring a missing disciplinary perspective to African European studies. 3) The utilization of an explicitly transcultural, theoretically refined concept of appropriation will challenge ongoing scholarly and cultural debates.

Mots-clés : europe african european studies african and african diasporic literature rhetoric of appropriation