Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : DeepInternal (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2466940.0 €

Unsupervised visual inference can often be performed by exploiting the internal redundancy inside a single visual datum (an image or a video). The strong repetition of patches inside a single image/video provides a powerful data-specific prior for solving a variety of vision tasks in a “blind” manner: (i) Blind in the sense that sophisticated unsupervised inferences can be made with no prior examples or training; (ii) Blind in the sense that complex ill-posed Inverse-Problems can be solved, even when the forward degradation is unknown. While the above fully unsupervised approach achieved impressive results, it relies on internal data alone, hence cannot enjoy the “wisdom of the crowd” which Deep-Learning (DL) so wisely extracts from external collections of images, yielding state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Nevertheless, DL requires huge amounts of training data, which restricts its applicability. Moreover, some internal image-specific information, which is clearly visible, remains unexploited by today's DL methods. One such example is shown in Fig.1. We propose to combine the power of these two complementary approaches – unsupervised Internal Data Recurrence, with Deep Learning, to obtain the best of both worlds. If successful, this will have several important outcomes including: • A wide range of low-level & high-level inferences (image & video). • A continuum between Internal & External training – a platform to explore theoretical and practical tradeoffs between amount of available training data and optimal Internal-vs-External training. • Enable totally unsupervised DL when no training data are available. • Enable supervised DL with modest amounts of training data. • New applications, disciplines and domains, which are enabled by the unified approach. • A platform for substantial progress in video analysis (which has been lagging behind so far due to the strong reliance on exhaustive supervised training data).

Mots-clés : computer vision,video analysis,natural image statistics,image priors,unsupervised deep learning,image synthesis,self similarity,super resolution,blind deblurring,video segmentation,patches
Projet ERC : SBSI (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Until recently it was believed to be impossible to perform optical imaging with resolution beyond the fundamental resolution limit. However, in the past few years, our team was able to algorithmically enhance the resolution of optical imaging, bringing it to below one fifth of the optical wavelength. This achievement is based on the prior knowledge that the image is “sparse”, that is, the image can be represented in a compact form in an appropriate mathematical basis. The purpose of this PoC is to develop an algorithmic platform – a software demonstration prototype - that would lead to commercialization of two (closely connected) applications: (1) Improving the resolution of Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), used in the micro-chip industry for defects detection; (2) Improving high-resolution florescent microscopy (STORM) by reducing the number of exposures (iterations) required.
Projet ERC : HYMEFCECS (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Until recently it was believed to be impossible to produce hydrogen through water electrolysis systems, without an electrochemical oxygen production process and without a membrane. However, in the past few years, our team was able to develop a new technological configuration which divides the water splitting process into two phases : (1) an efficient electrochemical hydrogen production followed by a (2) spontaneous chemical oxygen production phase. By eliminating the inefficient electrochemical water oxidation reaction (OER) we achieve a significant increase in hydrogen production efficiency. Furthermore, reducing the danger of mixing hydrogen and oxygen eliminates the need for a membrane. A membrane-free system enables high pressure hydrogen production without the risk of gas mixture or membrane failure. Moreover, as the membrane failure is the main cause for malfunctions and offline times of alkaline and PEM electrolyzer, our technology improves system reliability and energy efficiency. The purpose of this PoC is to further develop our basic lab prototype to demonstrate two potential commercial applications:(1)Power to Gas (P2G) storage of renewable energy (demonstrating the ability to produce hydrogen with high efficiency and under high peaks) and (2) On-site hydrogen production for hydrogen refuelling stations (demonstrating purity and durability under high-pressure). Furthermore, HYMEFCECS, will include an in-depth user requirements analysis (combining business, economic and technical inputs); devising a proper business model and business plan per two target markets, financial forecasting, Intellectual Property and an Investor Toolkit.

Mots-clés : solar energy conversion,photo electrochemical cell  pec,safe hydrogen production
Projet ERC : Urban Sharing (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Lund University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999948.0 €

Urban sharing of assets has emerged as a prospective solution to sustainability challenges faced by cities. But, its sustainability potential and institutionalisation pathways have not been systematically examined. Urban Sharing aims to examine, test and advance knowledge about urban sharing organisations (USOs) across 5 cities from 5 continents: Amsterdam, Toronto, São Paolo, Seoul and Melbourne by undertaking a novel multi- and inter-disciplinary study with three objectives: 1. DESIGN: To examine how USOs are designed and operate and how they vary in different city contexts 2. PRACTICES: To study the sustainability impacts of USOs and how they vary across cities 3. PATHWAYS: To advance theoretical understanding of institutionalisation pathways of USOs across cities Using a combination of methods, including case studies, mobile research labs, interviews, expert panels, in-situ field work, Urban Sharing will provide: 1. Unique international empirical evidence about design and operations of USOs across five cities that creates foundation for further research on emerging phenomenon of urban sharing, 2. A sustainability assessment framework to evaluate economic, environmental and social impacts of USOs that helps USOs and cities operationalise their sustainability ambitions, 3. Advanced theoretical understanding of institutionalisation pathways of USOs in diverse cities bridging disparate sciences: organisational, institutional and sustainability. This will produce a step-change in scholarship, open up new horizons for further research on urban sharing and new avenues for fostering sustainability in society. The PI’s skills and commitment to the project and level of staffing (3 seniors, 1 post-doc and 2 PhD students) will be complemented by a prominent Advisory Group. Detailed pilot work has proven the methodological feasibility of this research.

Mots-clés : institutionalisation,organisation,sustainable consumption and production,neo institutional theory,institutional entrepreneurship
Projet ERC : GutBCells (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : Weizmann Institute of Science — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1375000.0 €

Vaccination is widely used to prevent human diseases by inducing the formation of cellular and antibody-mediated immune responses for induction of long lasting immunological memory. Although most studies focus on immune responses elicited against injected immunizations, the simplest delivery of a vaccine regimen is by oral administration. The cellular and molecular components of the antibody immune response in peripheral lymph nodes in response to immunization are well described, however, much less is known about the dynamics of immune cells in gut associate lymphoid tissues (GALT) and adjust intestinal mucosal tissues. In the proposed research plan I will implicate intravital in vivo imaging for analysis of the cellular component of the antibody immune response in intestinal tissues. My goals are: 1. To track germinal center (GC) T cells for prolong time periods in peripheral lymph nodes and GALT and determine if they enter the memory compartment. For this purpose I will develop a new photoactivation method for permanently labeling immune cells and fate tracing of their daughter cells. 2. To examine T-B interactions and their regulation by intraceullar signaling pathways in GALT and to determine where and when class switch recombination to IgA takes place. For this purpose I will use intravital imaging of fluorescent reporter mice. 3. I will analyze the dynamics of plasma cell migration from Peyer’s patches to the mucosa by implementing state of the art photoactivation and imaging techniques that allow prolonged cell tracking. I will also use photoactivation approaches for sorting plasma cells from specific intestinal layers and perform gene expression analysis. 4. I will develop a new method to study dynamics and fate of B cells specific for commensal microbes in the GC, memory and plasma cell compartments. This research plan will extend our knowledge of the antibody immune response in intestinal tissues towards the future design of improved oral vaccinations.

Mots-clés : antibodies,germinal center,b cells,payer s patches,plasma cells
Projet ERC : BETASCREEN (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Karolinska Institutet — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : KI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149365.0 €

Validation of an in vivo translational medicine approach for the treatment of diabetes and diabetes complications To develop new drugs for treatment of diabetes, there is an immediate need for an in vivo approach allowing the assessment of β-cell function and survival in the living organism non-invasively, longitudinally and at single-cell resolution. We therefore transplant pancreatic islets into the anterior chamber of the eye (ACE) of mice for functional microscopic imaging. In the ACE islets become vascularized and innervated, and various aspects of β-cell function and survival can be readily imaged. Functional studies demonstrate that engrafted islets in the eye serve as representative reporters of endogenous islets in the pancreas of the same animal. We have extensively in vitro tested fluorescent biosensors that reflect key-events in β-cell function and survival. Following intraocular transplantation of human islets expressing biosensors in their β-cells into healthy or diabetic mice, they will allow non-invasive, longitudinal in vivo monitoring of 1) Ca2+ handling, 2) functional β-cell mass, 3) apoptosis and 4) proliferation. Based on the in vitro tested biosensors, the major objective is to establish a robust pharma-industry in vivo platform for validating newly developed diabetes treatment lead-compounds in early drug development. This screening service shall be performed on a commercial basis. The milestone of this proposal, to be achieved within 18 months, is the validation of the in vivo platform for testing the effects of new potential diabetes medicines on human β-cell function and survival in normal and diabetic mice.

Mots-clés : diabetes mellitus pancreatic beta cell,in vivo imaging,drug screening,fluorescence microscopy
Projet ERC : QS2DM (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : University of Basel — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2317521.0 €

Van der Waals (vdW) materials are layered compounds that can be readily exfoliated down to the monolayer limit. Magnetic order has recently been observed in such atomic monolayers. This milestone discovery could launch a new era in nano-magnetism, in, which the exceptional cleanliness and tunability of these truly two-dimensional magnets may enable fundamental discoveries and novel technologies based on atomic-scale functional magnetic elements. Direct, quantitative sensing of nanoscale properties of these systems is a key ingredient for further progress. My group has recently demonstrated their power through the first nanoscale imaging of magnetism in atomic-scale vdW magnets. This major advance was enabled by quantitative, nanoscale magnetometry with a single spin - a unique quantum technology, which I have pioneered. I propose to leverage this progress to bring groundbreaking advances to the field of vdW magnetism. Non-collinear, engineered spin textures, such as Skyrmions of helimagnetism, offer a current frontier that I will address, with possibly far-reaching impact for the field of spintronics. I will further harness the high-frequency sensing capabilities of our quantum sensors to address microwave-domain spin-waves in vdW magnets. This completely uncharted domain offers insight into still poorly understood spin interactions and has technological potential through the field of "vdW magnonics", which I plan to establish. This challenging project combines advanced materials engineering with an emerging, and highly promising quantum sensing technology. It is thereby highly interdisciplinary and goes well beyond the state-of-the-art in the fields of vdW magnetism and quantum-sensing. I will thereby further strengthen Europe's position at the forefront of these flourishing research areas. My project requires a commitment of several years, a team of two graduate students and two postdoctoral fellows, and significant investment in instrumentation.

Mots-clés : 2d magnetism,van der waals crystals,spin textures,magnons,quantum sensing,nanoscale magnetometry
Projet ERC : Mathador (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IMDEA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999895.0 €

Verification of concurrent software is a notoriously difficult subject, whose complexities stem from the inability of the existing verification methods to modularize, and thus divide-and-conquer, the verification problem. Dependent types are a formal method well-known for its ability to modularize and scale complex mathematical proofs. But, when it comes to programming, dependent types are considered limited to the purely functional and terminating programming model. The grand challenge of this project is to remove the limitation and scale dependent types to support implementation of stateful concurrent programs, and their correctness proofs, simultaneously. By applying the modularizing power of dependent types to both programs and proofs, the project will obtain novel and scalable foundations for the field of concurrent software verification. Writing mechanized proofs of software, concurrent or otherwise, is generally considered infeasible. But if one chooses the right linguistic abstractions to express the proofs, we argue that it does not have to be so. This observation is supported by our encouraging preliminary results. The project will discover further novel linguistic abstraction that facilitate engineering of practically feasible formal proofs, and experimentally evaluate them by mechanically verifying extensive concurrent programs drawn from realistic applications, such as concurrent garbage collectors, OS kernels, and popular open-source concurrent libraries. The project is high risk because it proposes novel foundations for concurrent software verification, whose development requires deep intertwining of logic and program semantics theory, with significant hands-on implementation and experimentation with formal proofs. But it is also high gain, as scaling concurrent software verification is the most significant open problem of present-day programming languages and semantics research.

Mots-clés : software verification,concurrency,dependent type theory,hoare logic
Projet ERC : IMPACT (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, 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 : 1840000.0 €

Very little is understood of the physics governing the Giant Impact and the subsequent formation of the Moon. According to this model an impactor hit the proto-Earth; the resulting energy was enough to melt and partially vaporize the two bodies generating a large protolunar disk, from which the Earth-Moon couple formed. Hydrodynamic simulations of the impact and the subsequent evolution of the protolunar disk are currently based on models of equations of state and phase diagrams that are unconstrained by experiments or calculations. Estimates of the positions of critical points, when available at all, vary by one order of magnitude in both temperature and density. Here we propose to compute the thermodynamics of the major rock-forming minerals and rock aggregates, and use it to study the formation and evolution of the protolunar disk. For this we employ a unique combination of atomistic state-of-the-art ab initio simulations. We use large-scale density-functional theory (DFT) molecular dynamics to study bulk fluids, coupled with Green functions (GW) and time-dependent DFT techniques to analyze atomic clusters and molecular species. We compute the vaporization curves, position the supercritical points, and characterize the sub-critical and supercritical regimes. We construct equations of state of the rocks at the conditions of the giant impact that are beyond current experimental capabilities. We employ a multiscale approach to bridge the gap between atomic, geological sample, and planetary scales via thermodynamics; we simulate the thermal profile through the disk, the ratio between liquid and vapor, and the speciation. From speciation we predict elemental and isotopic partitioning during condensation. Plausible impact scenarios, features of the impactor and of the proto-Earth will be constrained with a feedback loop, until convergence between predictions of final Earth-Moon compositions and observations is reached.
Projet ERC : Connections (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : European University Institute — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : EUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 122200.0 €

Via our connections we learn about new ideas, quality of products, new investment opportunities and job opportunities. We influence and are influenced by our circle of friends. Firms are interconnected in complex processes of production and distribution. A firm’s decisions in a supply chain depends on other firms’ choices in the same supply chain, as well as on firms' behaviour in competing chains. Research on networks in the last 20 years has provided a series of tolls to study a system of interconnected economic agents. This project will advance the state of the art by further developing new applications of networks to better understand modern oligopoly markets. The project is organised into two sub-projects. In sub-project 1 networks will be used to model diffusion and adoption of network goods. Different consumers' network locations will summarise different consumers' level of influence. The objectives are to understand how firms incorporate information about consumers' influence in their marketing strategies—pricing strategy and product design. It will provide a rigorous framework to evaluate how the increasing ability of firms to gather information on consumers’ influence affects outcomes of markets with network effects. In sub-project 2 networks will be used to model how inputs—e.g., intermediary goods and patents—are combined to deliver final goods. Possible applications are supply chains, communication networks and networks of patents. The objectives are to study firms' strategic behaviour, like pricing and R&D investments, in a complex process of production and distribution, and to understand the basic network metrics that are useful to describe market power. This is particularly important to provide a guide to competition authorities and alike when they evaluate mergers in complex interconnected markets.

Mots-clés : economics of networks
Projet ERC : INTERRUPT_VIOLENCE (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
Entité participante : University of the Witwatersrand — Pays : Afrique du Sud — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Wits
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 91922.5 €

Violence Violence is an important societal challenge and associated with poor health outcomes across the life-course. Studies find consistent associations between childhood violence exposure and risk for victimisation and perpetration in adulthood, particularly across generations. Thus far, we lack an evidence-base to understand the underlying mechanisms of intergenerational violence transmission as well as potential for prevention in regions with high rates of interpersonal violence such as sub-Saharan Africa. This marks a major evidence gap and a compelling need. This study will use a mixed methods approach to develop the first-known empirically-generated theoretical framework on intergenerational violence transmission. It will do so using three approaches never utilised in the region: 1) using data from a 1-year longitudinal study of 1800 adolescents in South Africa (interviewed in 2010/11 and 2011/2012) it will re-trace original participants, re-interview them as young adults aged 20-27, recruit their children (n~211) and previous primary caregivers (n~540) and conduct in-depth qualitative work on a sub-sample of families to identify mechanisms of violence transmission across generations and genders, 2) it will investigate the effect of the prevalent structural risk factors poverty, poor service access and delivery and the HIV epidemic on violence transmission, and 3) it will examine the effect of protective interventions and policies using quasi-experimental methods. This study will transform our understanding of the causes, effects and potential prevention mechanisms of intergenerational violence transmission through cutting-edge social science research. This is an ambitious research agenda of a complex behaviour and is characterised by methodological and theoretical innovation never used in the region before. The methodology presents high risks balanced by the potential for ground-breaking scientific and social impact for violence research and prevention.

Mots-clés : violence,child abuse,intimate partner violence,intergenerational,family,health