Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : ENCOUNTER (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of York — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 415664.0 €

Human history is punctuated by episodes of large-scale diffusion of new ideas and people that lead to era-defining transitions in past societies. Investigating what promotes these events, how societies react to these, and what are their long-term consequences is a key to understand the fundamental drivers of cultural change. ENCOUNTER will push forward this research agenda by investigating the Jomon-Yayoi transition, a demic and cultural diffusion event that led the predominantly hunting, gathering, and fishing-based communities of the Japanese islands to adopt rice and millet farming during the 1st millennium BC. The continental migrants who triggered this transition event did not bring just a new economy, but also new technology and culture, deeply impacting the indigenous society. The transition was however not uniform, as different regions responded to the new culture in different ways. Some immediately adopted the new cultural repertoire to its full extent, others embraced only certain elements, and still others resisted for over 1,000 years, generating cultural, linguistic and genetic clines that are still tangible today. ENCOUNTER will investigate this pivotal moment in Japanese prehistory, seeking to determine why the indigenous inhabitants responded so differently to the arrival of the new culture. It will examine the dynamics of this transition by: synthesising one of the richest archaeological records available in the world; combining new and old lines of evidence across different disciplines, including organic chemistry, palynology, and material culture studies; and developing a suite of computational techniques to reconstruct patterns of demographic change and cultural diffusion. It will question the existing narrative that farming is inevitable and instead put new emphasis on the incumbent hunter-gatherer populations to understand their motivations to change subsistence strategies with respect to their environment settings and cultural affinities.
Projet ERC : SYNCOG (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Edinburgh — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1414300.0 €

Human language is incredibly diverse: languages differ at all levels of linguistic structure from phonetics to syntax. But behind these differences there are intriguing similarities, patterns that reappear across many languages, and others that rarely crop up. A foundational goal of linguistics is to distil a set of principles explaining the shared features of our languages by appealing to properties of the human cognitive and linguistic system. While many such principles have been formulated, throughout the history of the field, little direct behavioural evidence has been offered for them. Indeed, the connection between common features of language systems and cognition is controversial in the broader community of scientists studying language from different perspectives. Longstanding debates center around whether such constraints exist, what features of cognition they might reflect, and if they are specific to language. Recent methodological innovations have carved out a path for progress by allowing linguists to investigate hypothesized constraints on language directly, using laboratory language learning experiments. In phonology, this has led to game-changing advances–expanding the empirical data available, and leading to new theories and models of the phonological grammar and how it is learned. The overarching goal of this project is to jumpstart a parallel transformation in syntax. I will undertake the first large scale experimental investigation of cognitive constraints underlying syntax. The rich body of behavioral data generated will provide evidence for theoretically significant constraints, the cognitive factors they are grounded in, the cognitive domains they apply in, and how they change over development. The data will be used to develop state-of-the-art computational models, galvanizing progress towards a unified account of how cognition shapes core aspects of the world's languages.

Mots-clés : cognitive science,cognitive biases,syntax,morphology
Projet ERC : INCLUSION (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Bilkent University — Pays : Turquie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1347000.0 €

Human migratory flows are currently at an unprecedented scale. The majority of these flows concern forced displacements, turning into long-term settlements in host countries, making ethnic diversity a permanent feature of our societies. Managed incorrectly, rapid changes in ethnic composition can harm host communities’ social capital and give ways to ethnic conflicts and polarization. Given that immigration will remain an inevitable global reality for the foreseeable future, designing and implementing inclusive social policies emerge as pressing policy imperatives. Leveraging the power of public education, the overarching goal of the proposed study program is to offer evidence-informed policy actions to help build ethnically diverse communities characterized by tolerance and inclusion rather than conflict and segregation. The proposal builds on a decade long research agenda to implement and test two uniquely designed educational interventions, one mitigative, the other preventative in nature. These interventions will involve two large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to be run in parallel for four consecutive years. The first study concerns a unique educational action to mitigate ethnic tensions and conflict in at-risk post-primary schools. The second study involves a pedagogical transformation intervention targeting primary school children who will progress into the post-primary schools targeted in the first study. Both RCTs are novel with respect to the content and delivery of the interventions, comprehensiveness of outcomes to be measured, sample size, and long-term follow-up opportunity. The results of this research program will: (i) generate much-needed evidence to design effective educational policies aiming at building social cohesion in communities afflicted by mass migratory flows, (ii) unravel for the first time the causal role of public education in raising tolerant and inclusive generations, free from ethnic conflict and segregation.

Mots-clés : social inclusion,inter ethnic cohesion,educational achievement,forced displacement,refugee integration
Projet ERC : ZooMWest (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Spanish National Research Council — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 952559.36 €

Human survival and success is substantially determined by the ability to move across the landscape and adapt. Consequently, ‘mobility’ is a crucial topic in historical and archaeological research. To overcome the seasonal scarcity of food and the related over-grazing of pastures, it is essential for animal husbandry to move across territories. However, the decision to allow or deny rights of way to mobile people and livestock depends on political judgements. How might these shape animal husbandry production, and society? The period between the Late Bronze Age and Late Antiquity in the Western Mediterranean witnessed the development of complex societies with a high territorial component, the Roman conquest, and the decline of the Western Roman Empire. Animal husbandry reflects human decisions regarding the management of resources, and the study of livestock rearing in specific geographical locations is possible through the isotopic analysis of ancient animal teeth. Consequently, we can analyse whether the nucleation of power occurring during the Bronze and Iron Ages, the centralization in Roman times and the later re-fragmentation in Late Antiquity transformed animal husbandry production. Crucially, we can then understand how political systems and decisions shaped human mobility through investigating animal production. ZooMWest brings together isotopic chemistry, ancient DNA, zooarchaeology and geospatial analysis through four related work packages. Other than elucidating long term debates in archaeology –did transhumance exist in prehistoric Europe?–, this multidisciplinary and innovative project will create an open-access database of strontium and oxygen stable isotopes of the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. This database will enable us to refine geographic provenance to any discipline assessing the origin of matter, including geology, forensic studies, and the alimentary industry, as strontium and oxygen are present in many molecules, including organic tissues.

Mots-clés : zooarchaeology,geographic information systems  gis,stable isotopes,ancient dna
Projet ERC : ZooMWest (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 246759.64 €

Human survival and success is substantially determined by the ability to move across the landscape and adapt. Consequently, ‘mobility’ is a crucial topic in historical and archaeological research. To overcome the seasonal scarcity of food and the related over-grazing of pastures, it is essential for animal husbandry to move across territories. However, the decision to allow or deny rights of way to mobile people and livestock depends on political judgements. How might these shape animal husbandry production, and society? The period between the Late Bronze Age and Late Antiquity in the Western Mediterranean witnessed the development of complex societies with a high territorial component, the Roman conquest, and the decline of the Western Roman Empire. Animal husbandry reflects human decisions regarding the management of resources, and the study of livestock rearing in specific geographical locations is possible through the isotopic analysis of ancient animal teeth. Consequently, we can analyse whether the nucleation of power occurring during the Bronze and Iron Ages, the centralization in Roman times and the later re-fragmentation in Late Antiquity transformed animal husbandry production. Crucially, we can then understand how political systems and decisions shaped human mobility through investigating animal production. ZooMWest brings together isotopic chemistry, ancient DNA, zooarchaeology and geospatial analysis through four related work packages. Other than elucidating long term debates in archaeology –did transhumance exist in prehistoric Europe?–, this multidisciplinary and innovative project will create an open-access database of strontium and oxygen stable isotopes of the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. This database will enable us to refine geographic provenance to any discipline assessing the origin of matter, including geology, forensic studies, and the alimentary industry, as strontium and oxygen are present in many molecules, including organic tissues.

Mots-clés : zooarchaeology,geographic information systems  gis,stable isotopes,ancient dna
Projet ERC : PERFORM (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Philipps University of Marburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1429800.0 €

Human visual perception is one of the best-studied areas of research on the human mind. However, 99% of that research is concentrated on the central region making up less than 1% of our visual field. This is the region that gets mapped onto the fovea, where vision is best. However, information from the peripheral parts of a scene is highly important. Mediated by attention and eye movements, it is essential for guiding us through our environment. In the brain, the foveal and peripheral parts of the visual field undergo vastly different processing regimes. Since objects normally do not change their appearance, whether we view them foveally or peripherally, our visual system must integrate and calibrate peripheral information before an eye movement with foveal information after an eye movement. We are planning to address these processes in four series of experiments. First, we will study the perception of basic visual features, such as orientation, numerosity and colour across the visual field and their integration in peripheral and foveal vision across eye movements. Second, we will investigate how this integration is supported by attention and memory resources. Third, since the integration requires learning and plasticity, we will track changes across the life span and study how healthy subjects can learn to compensate for artificial changes of peripheral and foveal vision. And fourth, we will explore whether we can manipulate the integration process for the optimal guidance of eye movements in complex natural search tasks. The project will provide insights how the brain achieves a stable and homogeneous representation of the visual environment despite the ever changing sensory input and the inhomogeneity of processing across the visual field. We will reveal the basic learning mechanisms that allow a continuous calibration of peripheral and foveal vision, and that could be used in the long run for behavioural training of patients suffering from vision impairments.

Mots-clés : perception,eye movements,attention,learning,memory,development,aging
Projet ERC : ReSEED (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Coimbra — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1326335.0 €

Humanity is facing a huge challenge: how to feed a growing population in a sustainable way? Scientists from different fields are looking for answers and ReSEED aims to assist such endeavours. Solutions depend on one key issue: seeds. We can have appropriate soil, climate or technologies, however without proper seeds it is impossible to guarantee food production. As historiography has given little attention to the role of seed varieties, there are many gaps in scientific knowledge. I argue that long-term historical analysis is critical to provide the best answers to current questions. ReSEED examines the changing connections between seeds, environment and human action, the triangle that has always underpinned agriculture, since the 18th century. The main objectives are as follows. 1) To map geographical changes in local crop distribution, paying attention to the new seeds made available by Columbian Exchange. 2) To outline which were the social networks supporting the circulation and cultivation of edible seed varieties, and at later date, checking how they articulated with state services. 3) To identify human factors that contribute to reducing, increasing, maintaining or restoring regional agro-biodiversity. 4) To assess the impacts of national and international decisions on local management of the triangle, mainly on farmers’ innovation. 5) To re-examine the long-term dynamics behind various European agricultural modernization itineraries. Based on innovative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodologies, I build robust empirical research on the case of Iberian Peninsula in connection to empires, which allows thorough comparisons with other regions in Europe and beyond. ReSEED promotes strategies for win-win environmental/society outcomes, linking edible seeds to places and to innovations needed for food production. This is crucial to better understand how historical experiences can contribute to create solutions that ensure sustainable futures.

Mots-clés : food production,new seeds,historiography,regional agro biodiversity,sustainable futures
Projet ERC : PIQUaNT (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Heriot-Watt University — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2050758.0 €

Humanity’s reliance on the rapid and free flow of information cannot be understated. Over the last two decades, control over the spectral, temporal, and spatial structure of light has led to a massive increase in optical data transfer rates via signal multiplexing. For example, the simultaneous encoding of information in 84,236 spatial and frequency channels was recently used for achieving a record 10 Petabit/sec data transmission rate. As quantum technologies mature, so will the needs of a quantum infrastructure that relies on the efficient and noise-robust transfer of information. Precise control over the photonic degrees of freedom (DOFs) of space, time, and frequency offer the potential to enable similar breakthroughs for the fields of quantum communication and networking, and in parallel unlock key functionalities for quantum imaging and sensing with light. PIQUaNT will develop methods for the coherent control and measurement of the high-dimensional position-momentum and time-frequency DOFs of a photon, and drive forward the creation of techniques for combating sources of noise that inhibit the long-distance transfer of multi-mode quantum information. PIQUaNT will in turn apply these techniques in demonstrations of noise-resilient, high-capacity entanglement distribution in multiple photonic DOFs over commercially available multi-mode and multi-core fibres. Through the realisation of a prototype entanglement-based high-dimensional quantum communications network, PIQUaNT will serve as a blueprint for the future development of noise-robust quantum information networks that saturate the information carrying capacity of a photon.

Mots-clés : entanglement,spatial modes,temporal modes,quantum communication
Projet ERC : IDDISC (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Saarland University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496875.0 €

Humans adapt the content and form of their utterances to different interlocutors (students vs. colleagues vs. granny), and monitor the level of understanding in their conversational partner. Today's NLP systems are however largely blind with respect to individual variation in language comprehension, which in turn leads to misunderstandings and lack of naturalness in the interaction. The vision of IDDISC is to enable individualised language interaction with computer systems, such that information or explanations generated by a system will fit the user and the situation, by explicitly modelling their state of understanding. This project will break completely new ground by addressing individual differences in comprehension at the pragmatics and discourse level, i.e. with respect to the inferred meaning that goes beyond the literal meaning of an utterance. This vision requires ground-breaking contributions at the intersection of individual differences research, language processing models and statistical methods: (a) we will develop innovative models that can predict inferences based on specific cognitive properties of an individual and their domain knowledge; (b) we will undertake foundational research on the factors that lead to individual differences in pragmatic inferences; (c) we will contribute to new statistical modelling techniques for quantifying similarities between individuals, as well as new methods for modelling inference variation in the NLP pipeline; (d) we will test the success of adaptation to individual characteristics in practical applications. This project will make it possible to reduce the risk of misunderstandings, and enable adaptation of automatically generated language (e.g., explanations, summaries) to specific users. The new statistical methods and crowd-sourcing paradigms developed as part of this project will open the door to other researchers for investigating individual differences in all areas of language processing.

Mots-clés : natural language generation,cognitive modelling,individual differences,pragmatics,discourse inference
Projet ERC : ANTHROPOID (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : University Hospital of Basel — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : USB
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 461217.29 €

Humans diverged from our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and other great apes, 6-10 million years ago. Since this divergence, our ancestors acquired genetic changes that enhanced cognition, altered metabolism, and endowed our species with an adaptive capacity to colonize the entire planet and reshape the biosphere. Through genome comparisons between modern humans, Neandertals, chimpanzees and other apes we have identified genetic changes that likely contribute to innovations in human metabolic and cognitive physiology. However, it has been difficult to assess the functional effects of these genetic changes due to the lack of cell culture systems that recapitulate great ape organ complexity. Human and chimpanzee pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) can self-organize into three-dimensional (3D) tissues that recapitulate the morphology, function, and genetic programs controlling organ development. Our vision is to use organoids to study the changes that set modern humans apart from our closest evolutionary relatives as well as all other organisms on the planet. In ANTHROPOID we will generate a great ape developmental cell atlas using cortex, liver, and small intestine organoids. We will use single-cell transcriptomics and chromatin accessibility to identify cell type-specific features of transcriptome divergence at cellular resolution. We will dissect enhancer evolution using single-cell genomic screens and ancestralize human cells to resurrect pre-human cellular phenotypes. ANTHROPOID utilizes quantitative and state-of-the-art methods to explore exciting high-risk questions at multiple branches of the modern human lineage. This project is a ground breaking starting point to replay evolution and tackle the ancient question of what makes us uniquely human?

Mots-clés : single cell genomics,stem cell biology,3d organoids,human evolution