Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : RESOLUTION (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Hohenheim — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 349905.0 €

Europe was the continent where Neanderthal and Anatomically Modern Human (AMH) interacted in a supposed time window of up to five millennia around 40,000 years ago (40 ka BP). The fate of our species versus the demise of Neanderthals, the geospatial timing of this process, the behavioural implications of their interaction, are hotly debated topics in archaeology. In this context, chronology plays a pivotal role, with radiocarbon (14C) dating representing the backbone back to 50 ka BP. However, due to varying atmospheric 14C concentrations in the past, the method requires calibration to an independently dated archive. So far, only the past 14 ka BP can profit from the most direct natural archive of 14C activity, which are annually resolved tree-ring chronologies. Before this time, temporal resolution is remarkably lower and different calibration records disagree, leading to discrepancies in the calibration of up to 2000 years. This project aims to achieve for the first time an accurate and highly resolved chronology back to 50 ka BP, to establish the timing of when AMHs arrived in Europe, their interaction with Neanderthals and the final cause of Neanderthal extinction. The project involves fieldwork in Mediterranean and southeast Europe to find more glacial trees, the study of the existing collection of glacial conifers, exceptional 14C precision for 14C dates in the Glacial, and the cutting-edge methodology in linking floating tree-ring chronologies to 10Be on the ice core scale. The results of this work will be crucial in solving some of the most interesting puzzles in European prehistory. With tree-rings, the resolution will be an order of magnitude higher, and using the most recent advances in the AMS technique, we will obtain confidence intervals of only a few centuries in glacial times. This project will be of pivotal importance for key periods in human evolution.

Mots-clés : human evolution,radiocarbon dating,dendrochronology,cosmogenic isotope,neanderthal,anatomically modern human
Projet ERC : EXPLO (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : University of Bern — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 4191625.0 €

European societies today face unprecedented environmental change. Understanding how human societies responded to past challenges of environmental change relates to the interface between culture and environment. The EXPLO project proposes a novel interdisciplinary approach to investigate key questions regarding the interaction between past human ways of life, land use and the wider environment through a unique combination of archaeological, biological and dynamic mathematical modelling approaches. Archaeological prehistoric sites in lakes of northern Greece and the southern Balkans provide an excellent opportunity to investigate rich archives of societal and environmental change in the cradle of European farming. Natural lake sediments and submerged prehistoric settlements offer exceptional preservation conditions and uniquely holistic insights into past anthroposphere, biosphere and geosphere dynamics. More than 8,000 years ago, technological and social breakthroughs allowed the introduction of farming from western Asia to Greece and thus for the first time to Europe; however, so far there is no high-resolution picture of how this revolutionary innovation interacted with the environment, including its long-term consequences. New underwater archaeological research will allow the construction of highly precise settlement chronologies on the basis of dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling. On-site information from excavations will be combined with off-site palaeoenvironmental data from the same lakes to investigate past adaptation strategies to the environment as well as the effects of past societies on their environments. Dynamic models integrating archaeological contexts and palaeoenvironmental data will open up the opportunity to investigate vulnerability, resilience, tipping points and thresholds of ancient agrarian economies, with implications for future food systems under a rapidly changing climate.

Mots-clés : neolithic,bronze age,paleoecology,bioarchaeology,balkans,northern greece,wetlands,underwater archaeology,early agropastoral societies,lande use,anthropogenic land cover land use change
Projet ERC : ANTICIPATE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : University of Stuttgart — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499625.0 €

Even after three decades of research on human-computer interaction (HCI), current general-purpose user interfaces (UI) still lack the ability to attribute mental states to their users, i.e. they fail to understand users' intentions and needs and to anticipate their actions. This drastically restricts their interactive capabilities. ANTICIPATE aims to establish the scientific foundations for a new generation of user interfaces that pro-actively adapt to users' future input actions by monitoring their attention and predicting their interaction intentions - thereby significantly improving the naturalness, efficiency, and user experience of the interactions. Realising this vision of anticipatory human-computer interaction requires groundbreaking advances in everyday sensing of user attention from eye and brain activity. We will further pioneer methods to predict entangled user intentions and forecast interactive behaviour with fine temporal granularity during interactions in everyday stationary and mobile settings. Finally, we will develop fundamental interaction paradigms that enable anticipatory UIs to pro-actively adapt to users' attention and intentions in a mindful way. The new capabilities will be demonstrated in four challenging cases: 1) mobile information retrieval, 2) intelligent notification management, 3) Autism diagnosis and monitoring, and 4) computer-based training. Anticipatory human-computer interaction offers a strong complement to existing UI paradigms that only react to user input post-hoc. If successful, ANTICIPATE will deliver the first important building blocks for implementing Theory of Mind in general-purpose UIs. As such, the project has the potential to drastically improve the billions of interactions we perform with computers every day, to trigger a wide range of follow-up research in HCI as well as adjacent areas within and outside computer science, and to act as a key technical enabler for new applications, e.g. in healthcare and education.
Projet ERC : MATTER (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Leibniz Association — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : LG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 51339.52 €

Ever since the discovery of topological surface states in three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators (TI), this fascinating physics has thrilled scientists. While arguable the transport properties of 3D TIs are of utmost importance for potential applications, they are extremely difficult to characterize, yet utilize for devices. The reason is that transport in those materials is always dominated by bulk carriers. Within this proposed research project, I will overcome the problem of bulk carrier domination conceptually by a nanoparticle-based materials’ design of interrupted early stage sintering. By this interrupted early stage sintering approach, I compact 3D TI nanoparticles at mild temperature and low pressure. The obtained highly porous macroscopic sample features a carrier density of the surface states in the order of 1018 cm-3, hence in a comparable order of magnitude as the bulk carrier density. Further, the interruptedly sintered nanoparticles impose energetic barriers for the transport of bulk carriers (hopping transport), while the connected surfaces of the nanoparticles provide a 3D percolation path for surface carriers. Within the preliminary work, my group tuned interruptedly sintered nanoparticles into a transport regime completely dominated by the surface states. Within this project, nanoparticle-based macroscopic 3D TI materials will be developed towards test structures for devices. Their properties will be tailored by the nanoparticle synthesis (Objective 1) and the materials processing of interrupted early stage sintering (Objective 2). This is complemented by an in-depth characterization of the transport as well as spectroscopic properties and data modelling (Objective 3). My group will use this know-how for the fabrication of test devices (Objective 4). This combination will provide the first macroscopic quantum transport devices that utilize the unique electronic properties of surface states, overcoming the problem of bulk carrier domination

Mots-clés : nanoparticle processing,topological insulator,transport properties,sintering
Projet ERC : EVERBONE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Trinity College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 149891.0 €

Every 30 seconds a person suffers an osteoporosis-related bone fracture in Europe, resulting in significant morbidity, mortality and healthcare costs estimated at €36billion annually. Current anti-catabolic therapeutics are associated with severe side effects and are purely preventative, while the only anabolic treatment plateaus at 6 months. This has resulted in a crisis in osteoporosis treatment. Therefore, the aim of EVERBONE is to develop and commercialise a new anabolic multitargeted medicinal product for bone regeneration that mimics the beneficial effects of physical exercise, by recruiting endogenous cells to promote angiogenesis, osteogenesis and bone formation. Building on the discovery that osteocyte-derived mechanically activated extracellular vesicles (MAEVs) mediate the anabolic bone forming response to physical exercise, this project will develop novel bioreactor systems to increase MAEV yield in vitro and scale up for clinical use. Secondly, it will identify a standard mechanical conditioning procedure to generate optimised angiogenically and osteogenically primed MAEVs. Finally, preclinical evaluation of MAEV treatment will be performed in a model of osteoporosis and bone healing, whereby it is expected that MAEVs will localize to bone and mobilise endogenous endothelial and stem cell populations to enhance bone regeneration in osteoporosis and improved healing rates in bone defects. This regrowth of bone will overcome current limitations of anti-resorptive treatments, reducing the risk of fracture and thus the financial burden of treatment. The project will leverage the applicants experience in bone mechanobiology to develop a new product with significant commercial potential. Therefore, the impact of EVERBONE will be multifaceted: it will transform how osteoporosis is treated, it will create economic value through the commercialisation of IP, and most importantly it will improve patient experience and their long-term health and well-being.

Mots-clés : bone,mechanobiology,osteocyte,extracellular vesicle,osteoporosis,regenerative medicine
Projet ERC : METACELL (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Integrative Biology: from Genes and Genomes to Systems
Entité participante : European Molecular Biology Laboratory — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : EMBL
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2330628.0 €

Every cell is unique. Metabolites define the composition of each cell and play key roles in essential intracellular processes of energy production and uptake, signaling, regulation, and cell death. Obtaining metabolite signatures of individual cells and linking them to cellular phenotypes is of paramount importance for a holistic understanding of these processes. This requires high-throughput single-cell metabolomics that is not generally attainable due to the limited sensitivity, low throughput, and disruptiveness of state-of-the-art metabolomics methods. I propose to develop a spatial single-cell metabolomics approach for human cell culture systems. The approach will be based on using metabolite imaging mass spectrometry and will provide metabolite profiles of individual cells and metabolite signatures of single-cell phenotypes identified by light microscopy. With this approach developed, I will investigate the link between the intracellular metabolism and single-cell phenotype and focus on the following questions: How is the intracellular metabolism linked to cellular heterogeneity? How high is the variation of essential metabolites in a cell population? How do the energy metabolism and lipids biosynthesis change through the cell cycle and infection stages? What is the metabolic response to inflammatory signals? I will scale up the analysis to discover novel cell phenotypes both in the cell culture systems and in big metabolite imaging mass spectrometry data from various biological systems provided to us by our collaborators and the community, and representing billions of cells. My project will enable spatial single-cell metabolomics on a large scale and will provide yet lacking capacity for investigating and visualizing the intracellular metabolism on a single-cell level. It will advance our molecular understanding of key biological processes and pave the way to discoveries of molecular mechanisms of inflammation, cancer, and infection.

Mots-clés : single cell analysis,imaging,big data
Projet ERC : eHONESTY (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Sapienza University of Rome — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1412217.16 €

Every day, everywhere, people make unethical choices ranging from minor selfish lies to massive frauds, with dramatic individual and societal costs. Embodied cognition theories posit that even seemingly abstract processes (like grammar) may be biased by the body-related signals used for building and maintaining self-consciousness, the fundamental experience of owning a body (ownership) and being the author of an action (agency), that is at the basis of self-other distinction. Applying this framework to morality, we hypothesize that strengthening or weakening participants’ bodily self-consciousness towards virtual avatars or real others will influence dishonesty in real, virtual, and web-based interactions. To test this hypothesis, we will measure: i) individual dishonesty after modifying body ownership (e.g., by changing the appearance of the virtual body) and agency (e.g., by changing the temporal synchrony between participant’s and avatar’s actions) over an avatar through which decisions are made; ii) intergroup dishonesty after inducing inter-individual sharing of body self-consciousness (e.g., blur self-other distinction via facial visuo-tactile stimulation); iii) individual and intergroup dishonesty by manipulating exteroceptive (e.g., the external features of a virtual body) or interoceptive (e.g., changing the degree of synchronicity between participant’s and avatar/real person’s breathing rhythm) bodily inputs. Dishonesty will be assessed through novel ecological tasks based on virtual reality and web-based interactions. Behavioural (e.g., subjective reports, kinematics), autonomic (e.g., heartbeat, thermal imaging) and brain (e.g., EEG, TMS, lesion analyses) measures of dishonesty will be recorded in healthy and clinical populations. Our person-based, embodied approach to dishonesty complements cross-cultural, large-scale, societal investigations and may inspire new strategies for contrasting dishonesty and other unethical behaviours.
Projet ERC : MYCLASS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : University of Helsinki — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499099.0 €

Every fourth woman suffers from uterine leiomyomas (ULs) – benign tumors of the uterine smooth muscle wall - at some point in premenopausal life. ULs, also called myomas or fibroids, cause a substantial health burden through symptoms such as excessive uterine bleeding, abdominal pain and infertility. These tumors are the most common cause of hysterectomy. Considering the impact that ULs have to women’s health, they are severely understudied. Our breakthrough work has shed important new light on the biology and genesis of ULs. In this ERC proposal we hypothesize that ULs can emerge through several distinct mechanisms and anticipate that each mechanism contributes to somewhat different tumor biology, clinicopathological features, and response to treatment. Also, we hypothesize that predisposing genetic variants may confer susceptibility to a particular UL subclass. To test these hypotheses, we shall create multiple layers of high-throughput data on clinicopathologically characterized ULs, including copy number variation, whole genome sequence, gene expression, and methylome profiles. Integration of these data should establish the existence and key characteristics of the different UL subclasses. Finally, we shall examine the effect of currently used drugs as well as new lead compounds in response to treatment, stratified per UL subclass. These efforts will 1) provide biological insight into molecular mechanisms driving the UL genesis and lay the scientific basis of their molecular classification, 2) describe the key characteristics of each class, 3) provide key biomarkers and molecular tools for routine diagnosis of UL subclasses, as well as clues to their targeted treatment, and 4) produce tools for detection of hereditary predisposition to ULs. This ERC project will be an important step towards non-invasive management of ULs. Reaching this goal would benefit hundreds of millions of women.

Mots-clés : gynecology,cancer genomics,tumor predisposition,tumorigenesis,cancer,cancer genetics,medical genetics,molecular classification
Projet ERC : HABIT (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Trinity College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499910.0 €

Every minute of every day, our brain’s habit system is hard at work automating well-practiced actions so our brains can focus on new and more complex challenges. This does not always work to our benefit, however. My research has implicated hyper-expression of habits in a range of compulsive behaviours, from drug addiction to out-of-control spending, binge-eating and obsessive-compulsive rituals. Despite the importance of habits in our lives, there are major gaps in our understanding of how they are acquired in humans and a virtual absence of research into how they can be broken. This is because the mainstay experimental paradigms in the field measure habit expression in a way that cannot distinguish impairments in goal-directed control from the strength of automatic stimulus-response associations. This has led to confounded interpretations that have seriously impeded research aiming to investigate these basic mechanisms. HABIT aims to change this by leveraging known differences in the temporal dynamics of each sysem, where stimulus-response automaticity is fast and goal-directed behaviour, slow. Our novel approach couples the millisecond precision of electrophysiology with the breadth of large-scale phenotyping via smartphone to develop a new mechanistic model of the independent functioning of these systems and their interaction. This novel combination will be used to develop a detailed neural account of both systems and their split-second trade-off, but also to test the real-world functional consequences of disruptions to either system. A series of causal manipulations anchor this grant and are designed to challenge key assumptions of our working model. Can we engineer more robust and rigid habits by-design and develop novel methods to break the most rigid of habits? With clear potential for impact, the fundamental insights from this project will reveal how we can harness the power of habits in our lives and better understand key aspects of mental illness.

Mots-clés : habit,goal directed,transdiagnostic,compulsivity,tics
Projet ERC : WebMAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : UK Research and Innovation — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UKRI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 79134.4 €

Everyone’s perception of the world is unique. Subjective attributions exert powerful influences on our cognition and behaviour, ranging from implicit biases to explicit decision-making. Psychology, public policy, and marketing have long histories of attempts to measure subjective judgements using questionnaires, in which single items are rated one scale at a time. However, ratings require individuals to translate the richness of their perceptual experience into discrete quantities for each item separately. This does not reflect the continuous and context-rich nature of experience. In our ERC Starting Grant, we have been developing a novel technique for capturing judgements of relationships among a large number of objects. In this technique, the participant arranges the objects on a computer screen by mouse drag-and-drop operations. This multi-arrangement (MA) method enables participants to communicate multiple continuous object-pair similarities by a single drag-and-drop placement and to adjust the judgements in the context of the entire set. The MA method also lends itself to efficient acquisition of multiple continuous property judgements performed in the context of the set. Our aim with the present Proof of Concept (PoC) project is to develop a web-based platform for the MA method that is compatible with modern technologies (e.g. tablets, touchscreen laptops and desktop PCs). We plan to use JavaScript, Python, and HTML in order to implement an easy to use web-based tool that makes the MA method available to a broad base of users. The web-based platform would provide important savings, reducing programming costs, research assistant work, and volunteer travel expenses. This would enable researchers in science, governments, and industry to quickly and easily acquire substantial amounts of subjective judgment data at lower costs. The PoC grant would enable us to build this web-based platform and explore its potential for broad application and commercialisation.