Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : EUROpest (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2354750.0 €

Born from years of interdisciplinary collaboration, EUROpest aims to articulate the complex ways in which social-ecological systems shape epidemics. It builds on resilience and actor-network theories to advance its own eco-bio-social paradigm that embraces a multi-causal understanding of disease transmission and disease impacts on human societies and ecosystems. While striving to develop and validate a general theoretical model, it takes the well-documented and highly diverse world of late medieval and early modern Europe as its laboratory – investigating its interconnected climatic, cultural, demographic, economic, ecological, and pathogenic history. With regard to the latter, EUROpest assumes malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis and enteric diseases were major components of a disease baseline over which the most devastating disease, plague (Y. pestis), occurred. EUROpest will carry out regional case studies – from Spain to Lithuania, Greece to England – selected on the basis of available and procurable written, scientific and archaeological data. It will holistically consider the contexts of plague outbreaks identified in those regions, to understand how context both facilitated outbreaks and also shaped them, and their short- and medium-term impacts. EUROpest combines archival source analysis with archaeology, archaeogenetics, paleoecology and paleoclimatology, and subjects case studies to novel human-supervised machine-learning to identify the causal role of factors influencing regional outbreaks. As the contemporary imagination is guided in its understanding of epidemic disease by the outbreaks of the past, EUROpest’s contribution will be critical to developing more nuanced and realistic scenarios of future pandemics, academic as well as popular. With EUROpest PIs already engaging policy makers, the mathematical precision of the eco-bio-social analysis EUROpest proposes will help design more successful and targeted interventions for future pandemic response.

Mots-clés : adna studies,palaeogenomics,environmental history,interdisciplinary history,disease history,climate history,plague,smallpox,machine learning in historical applications
Projet ERC : RECAP (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2935000.0 €

The epoch of Reionization marks the last major transition of the Universe: approximately 400.000 year after the Big bang, the neutral intergalactic medium, mainly composed of hydrogen atoms, started to be ionized by high-energy radiation from the first cosmic sources, stars, galaxies. The onset, timeline and topology of the Reionization process are all tightly linked to the nature of the sources of ionizing radiation: by identifying and studying them we can gain fundamental insights into what shaped the evolution of the universe, from the smooth matter distribution of early times, as revealed by the CMB, to the wealth of structures, like galaxies and clusters of galaxies that formed at later epochs. Our project will exploit the critical synergies in expertise of the 4 PIs and their teams, from the modeling of the intergalactic medium ionization and metal enrichment, to detailed observations of the ionizing sources, to shed light on their properties, their environment and the complex energy and baryon exchange between them and the intergalactic medium. We will exploit new extensive datasets coming from state-of-the-art facilities, such as the recently launched JWST, present and future VLT instrumentation and ALMA. To support and drive the interpretation of these new observations, we will develop a novel algorithm to model a self-consistent non-equilibrium 3D multi-frequency radiative transfer through H, He, metals and dust and produce both large scale and zoomed-in simulations that can be readily compared to real data. The proposed research aims at making fundamental steps to decode the mysteries of Cosmic Dawn and solve some of the puzzles in our current theories of early galaxy formation.

Mots-clés : epoch of reionization intergalactic medium
Projet ERC : CeLEARN (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3499776.0 €

Cells continuously sense and interpret the external signals coming from their time-varying environments to generate context-dependent responses. This is true for the entire tree of life, ranging from bacteria and unicellular eukaryotes to neurons forming networks in the developing brain. Identifying the fundamental principles and underlying mechanisms that enable cells to interpret their complex natural surroundings and adequately respond remains one of the fundamental questions in biology. Conceptual views so far have been mainly guided by molecular biology descriptions, suggesting that cells are controlled by a genomic program executing a pre-scripted plan. Our goal is to develop an alternative conceptual framework: cells generate internal representations of their external ‘world’, which they utilise to actively infer information about it and predict changes, in order to determine their response. We will formalise this concept in a theory of single-cell learning, by combining information theory concepts to quantify the predictive information from the internal cell representations, with dynamical systems theory to explain how these encodings are realised. We will interrogate experimentally systems across all scales of biological organization: bacteria (B. subtilis), single-cell organisms (Paramecium, Tetrahymena) and neuronal cell culture models. By studying them in a comparative manner, we aim at identifying generic molecular mechanisms through which single-cell learning is realised. The acquired understanding will enable us to address in vivo how single neurons during D. melanogaster development learn to form, stabilize or eliminate axonal branches, to generate stereotyped synaptic patterning under highly-variable conditions. We argue that providing a broader and generic definition of learning will serve as a unifying framework, linking disparate areas and scales of biology, and offering a basis for addressing fundamental biological questions.

Mots-clés : cell learning and memory,information theory,synaptic targeting,recurrent networks,transient dynamics,aneural systems
Projet ERC : RevLogRedux (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 442615.0 €

Bad arguments have never been in short supply. The same holds for the scholarly interest they have elicited both in their own right and as a cautionary tale about everything that can go amiss when we argue. This is hardly surprising. Asking what is wrong with flawed arguments is tantamount to investigating the very rules and principles of argumentation – only in reverse. Fallacy Studies have flourished in recent years (especially under the label of «critical thinking»). Without notable exception, the ever-growing literature on argumentative failures suffers from a conspicuous lack of interest in medieval fallacy theory – arguably one of the most creative stages in the whole history of argumentation theories. The standard story is that after Aristotle got off to a tentative start, the study of fallacies lay dormant until people at Port Royal and John Locke revived it. RevLog Redux will show that this narrative is misleading and will replace it with a new account which will bring to bear the full resources of medieval treatments of illegitimate argumentative moves within and across the Latin West and the Greek East, as well as in the Arabic and the Hebrew traditions. In an unprecedented attempt to explore how medieval authors discussed fallacies, RevLog Redux will lay the groundwork for more conscious and historically sound ways to describe, classify and theoretically assess the laws and flaws of argumentation. To that end, RevLog Redux will develop an integrated computational infrastructure to manage the wealth and complexity of data, information and knowledge the project is expected to produce: namely, AskSten (as in «Ask Sten Ebbesen»), a multi-layered virtual research environment whose digital archive, knowledge base, Semantic Web architecture and on-line deployment will dramatically enhance the formal expressivness and coherence of the project’s findings. AskSten will also include a curated open access Encyclopaedia of Illegitimate Argumentative Moves.

Mots-clés : medieval philosophy,history and analysis of logic and argumentation,cross cultural medieval intellectual history
Projet ERC : MALINCA (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
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 : 4625520.75 €

In the recent years, proof assistants have shown their astounding ability to tackle the complete formalisation of large pieces of mathematics, with the celebrated certifications of the Feit-Thompson theorem, of the Kepler conjecture, and more recently, the resolution of Scholze liquid tensor challenge. We believe that the time is ripe to demonstrate that they can tackle mathematics in the flexible and semi-formal way it is created and exchanged by the mathematicians. To that purpose, we aim to develop proof assistant technologies of an entirely new nature, including a formal language and a foundational approach to mathematical meaning, with the versatility necessary to represent the dynamic linguistic structures to be found in the daily practice of mathematics. The result will be a linguistic front-end that will allow mathematicians, and scientists in general, to express in proof assistants their proofs and computations the semi-formal way they think of them. Three research tracks stand out: the mathematical and linguistic foundations; formalisation of real-world vernacular mathematics into a high-level language of representation (Godement challenge); new techniques and software tools, based on natural language processing, to automate the formalisation process. The translation in the machine of semi-formal mathematics needs to go beyond the traditional view that reduces reasoning to logic, and requires to understand the dynamics of the discursive linguistic process which underlines mathematics. Building on advances of linguistics, mathematical logic, programming language semantics and machine learning, we will contribute significantly to the rise of a new generation of proof assistants, integrating at their heart a linguistic layer and automated guidance tools for mathematical proofs, theorems and definitions. The resulting high-level manipulation of concepts will lead to novel research outcomes supporting the daily activity of mathematical scientists.

Mots-clés : proof assistants,linguistic of mathematics,intelligent proof search,smart mathematics technology
Projet ERC : COGNECTOMICS (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Société Max-Planck pour le développement des sciences — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Société Max Planck
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 6664840.0 €

Intelligent behavior is based on internal models of the world that enable mental simulations and strategic planning. A leading model to study such “cognitive maps” are networks of place cells and grid cells in the mammalian hippocampal-entorhinal system. These neurons are active at defined locations and collectively represent a physical environment as a low-dimensional topographic map in neural activity space. However, a mechanistic understanding of the underlying computations and their biological implementation remains elusive. Using new methods for brain-wide activity imaging during behavior, members of our team discovered an abundance of place cells in the telencephalon of zebrafish. We will combine this approach with volume electron microscopy to reconstruct large-scale connectivity in the same brains at synaptic resolution and with transcriptomic profiling to identify molecular cell types, taking advantage of small brain size. The joint analysis of network connectivity and population dynamics will allow us to determine how functional properties of place cells are established by interactions between specific subsets of neurons across brain areas, and how network structure constrains population activity to topographically organized attractor manifolds. The results will disambiguate computational models that make conflicting assumptions about network connectivity. We will further explore the emergence of cell types during development and the concomitant structural and functional maturation of neuronal circuits. The relevance of cognitive maps for neuronal computations and behaviors involving internally generated predictions will be explored by activity measurements in a virtual reality and by functional manipulations of genetically targeted neurons. Capitalizing on the unique combination of expertise among team members, this project is expected to fundamentally advance our mechanistic understanding of biological and potentially artificial intelligence.

Mots-clés : cognitive map,connectomics,transcriptomics,neuronal network,neuronal connectivity,neuronal dynamics,zebrafish,place cell
Projet ERC : UltiMatePV (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Synergy grants)
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 : 3306720.0 €

The transition towards a society powered by 100% renewable energy necessitates the widespread de-ployment of photovoltaics. This poses a challenge due to the limited availability of resources and space. To address this, breakthrough technologies that consume fewer resources and achieve higher conversion efficiencies than the dominant silicon technology are required. The overarching goal of UltiMatePV is to re-invent the modern solar cell and open the gate to a new generation of resource-saving photovoltaic technology with highest conversion efficiencies. Enabling light-trapping beyond the Lambertian limit, based on schemes such as multi-resonant photonics, will allow for the realiza-tion of higher efficiency solar cells with typically 10x less use of semiconductor materials and thus reduce the required resources tremendously. This strongly reduced device thickness will also lead to confinement of the photo-generated charge carriers. The resulting increase of the carrier concentration will open the door for the realization of the worldwide first efficient hot-carrier cell, in which most of the carriers can be extracted before they thermalize. A new generation of devices based on the three currently relevant types of semiconductor absorbers (Si, III-V, perovskite) will be researched, account-ing for, e.g., the new requirements in terms of compatibility with resonant optical structures and ultra-low interface defect density. The unique complementary consortium of experimental, theoretical and modelling teams will overcome the Shockley Queisser limit for single junction solar cells with both ultrathin multi-junction and hot-carrier solar cells, enabling the first experimental proof of effects pre-dicted theoretically. We aim for a solar cell with an efficiency of 40%, requiring 10 times less semi-conductor material than classical devices, while paving the way to a broader range of other optoelec-tronic devices.

Mots-clés : photovoltaics,ultrathin photonics,perovskite,hot carrier
Projet ERC : NEMESIS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
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 : 1976078.0 €

Relevant partial differential equations (PDEs) problems of the 21st century, including those encountered in magnetohydrodynamics and geological flows, involve severe difficulties linked to: the presence of incomplete differential operators related to Hilbert complexes; nonlinear and hybrid-dimensional physical behaviors; embedded/moving interfaces. The goal of the NEMESIS project is to lay the groundwork for a novel generation of numerical simulators tackling all of the above difficulties at once. This will require the combination of skills and knowledge resulting from the synergy of the PIs, covering distinct and extremely technical fields of mathematics: numerical analysis, analysis of nonlinear PDEs, and scientific computing. The research program is structured into four tightly interconnected clusters, whose goals are: the development of Polytopal Exterior Calculus (PEC), a general theory of discrete Hilbert complexes on polytopal meshes; the design of innovative strategies to boost efficiency, embedded into a general abstract Multilevel Solvers Convergence Framework (MSCF); the extension of the above tools to challenging nonlinear and hybrid-dimensional problems through Discrete Functional Analysis (DFA) tools; the demonstration through proof-of-concept applications in magnetohydrodynamics (e.g., nuclear reactor models or aluminum smelting) and geological flows (e.g., flows of gas/liquid mixtures in underground reservoirs with fractures, as occurring in CO2 storage). This project will bring key advances in numerical analysis through the introduction of entirely novel paradigms such as the PEC and DFA, and in scientific computing through MSCF. The novel mathematical tools developed in the project will break long-standing barriers in engineering and applied sciences, and will be implemented in a practitioner-oriented open-source library that will boost design and prediction capabilities in these fields.

Mots-clés : finite element methods,error analysis,finite element exterior calculus,hilbert complexes,efficient algebraic solvers,nonlinear pdes,magnetohydrodynamics,porous media flows,fluid structure interaction,virtual element methods,hybrid high order methods
Projet ERC : BATPROTECT (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3669203.75 €

The medical, financial, and emotional costs imposed by ageing and infectious diseases are major challenges for our societies. Strikingly, while past research has not provided solutions for extending human healthspan and preventing the harmful consequences of infections, nature has solved both problems in the only flying mammals – the bats. Among mammals, bats exhibit an exceptional longevity with little signs of age-related diseases. Despite being reservoirs for numerous deadly viruses, viral infections in bats are mostly asymptomatic due to unique immune system adaptations. The overarching goal of BATPROTECT is to achieve breakthroughs in our understanding of the molecular basis of bats’ extended healthspan and disease resistance to ultimately discover new directions to improve human healthspan and disease outcome. BATPROTECT integrates a team of world-leading experts in bat biology, genomics, immunology and gerontology to synergistically: (i) elucidate the molecular mechanisms that bats use to slow down expected ageing; (ii) identify the driving molecular mechanisms behind bats’ viral tolerance and limited age-related inflammation; (iii) uncover the genomic basis and evolution of extended healthspan and disease tolerance in bats; and, (iv) develop transgenic animal models to functionally validate the uncovered bat adaptations. We will generate 150 reference quality bat genomes, the novel immunological, bioinformatic, cellular and molecular tools required to take an integrative multi-omics approach and uncover the age and immune changes that occur in wild and captive bats across the ageing spectrum. We will identify the top regulators of longevity and immunity, using deep neural networks analyses, to functionally validate in our cellular systems and novel transgenic animal models- BatWorms and BatMice. Ultimately, we will provide a deeper understanding of extended healthspan and disease resistance and will pave the way for future therapeutics.

Mots-clés : bat biology,healthy ageing,antiviral responses,c elegans,genome sequencing,comparative gerontology,wildlife immunology,multi omics,ecology,evolution
Projet ERC : ROTTnROCK (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : University College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2249204.0 €

More than 10% of the world’s population are at risk to the direct impacts of volcanic eruptions. Volcano monitoring aims to detect and correctly interpret volcanic hazards and to provide early and accurate warnings of impending eruptions. Yet, despite technical and scientific advances, volcanoes still produce unexpected explosive eruptions or sudden flank collapses. Each year, such unpredictable events result in volcanic disasters that devastate unprepared communities and destroy unprotected infrastructures. Previous work by the PIs indicates that volcanic hazards are caused by hydrothermal alteration, which progressively and imperceptibly changes the chemical and physical state of rocks inside a volcano, creating a soft and unstable (or “rotten”) interior. However, the link between “soft” volcanoes and unpredictable volcanic events remains enigmatic. The ROTTnROCK project aims to achieve a ground-breaking advance in our understanding of hydrothermal alteration processes that act inside active volcanic systems. Specifically, we will identify where and at which scales alteration occurs (WP1), explore the chemical fingerprint of alteration and effects on rock properties and strength using laboratory methods (WP2), and develop 4D volcano stability simulations and, therefore, an innovative and optimised hazard assessment workflow (WP3). The ROTTnROCK project combines innovative approaches from traditionally distinct geoscience disciplines (remote sensing, mineralogy and chemistry, rock mechanics, and modelling). This project will revolutionise our understanding of hydrothermal alteration and its effects on volcano hazards, and pave the way for strategies to forecast and mitigate unexpected volcanic events caused by hydrothermal alteration and circumvent disasters at volcanoes worldwide.

Mots-clés : hydrothermal alteration,rock weakening,risk awareness