Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SleepCog (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Sleep is essential to all animal life. But why are sleep needs greater in young mammals? Evidence points to a key role in cognitive development. Sleep correlates with brain immaturity, and sleep dysfunctions are frequent comorbidities of neurodevelopment disorders. As screens invade their bedrooms, children are sleeping less and less, and learning disorders are on the rise. This is a growing public health concern. There is increasing evidence that poor sleep at critical development stages may facilitate the emergence of neural disorders. Yet this is only correlative, but not causal evidence. How does sleep architecture differ in immature brains? Are specific sleep oscillations needed for neural maturation? What type of neural computations do they support? Can sleep dysfunctions directly contribute to social, cognitive or learning impairments? These crucial questions are still largely unanswered due to technical limitations.  I propose to harness new concepts and tools from diverse fields of research, to launch an ambitious program bridging neurodevelopment biology, systems neuroscience and sleep research. Because of our interdisciplinary approach, my team is in the unique position to pioneer breakthrough in vivo recordings and optogenetics in rat pups. I plan to record and decode neural activity from multiple brain areas, while automatically scoring sleep in freely behaving pups, this in order to elucidate the computational mechanisms at play during developmental sleep. I will combine high density recordings with recent advances in viral, molecular and CRIPSR tools to 1) Map and 2) Impair sleep – or associated oscillatory mechanisms, with the aim to reveal their 3) Impact on healthy development. My ambition is to set the stage for a new line of research in developmental systems neuroscience. I propose to study the emergence of neural computations, infer their roles across the lifespan, and reveal sleep as a prime target for therapeutics in development disorders.

Mots-clés : sleep,systems and computational neuroscience,hippocampus,learning memory,cognitive development,closed loop optogenetics,crispr,sharp wave ripples,place cells,grid cells,entorhinal cortex,rem,theta
Projet ERC : PROBONO (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1439265.0 €

Top private law firms increasingly offer their services as advocates for societal needs at no or low cost—big law pro bono. This work changed significantly over the past decade: firms take on more pro bono activities, professionally organize those in-house, and do so over a wider geography, in particular the Global South. While traditionally engaging in litigation, pro bono lawyers have now expanded towards the full range of activities of transnational advocacy: they train and educate stakeholders, they advise international institutions and non-profit organizations, and they engage in institution-building. To do so, they rely on powerful resources, not least lawyers who went to the best law schools, ever-increasing revenues, and highly influential networks. However, we lack systematic knowledge on how big law does good and with which implications for transnational advocacy.  PROBONO is the first project to tackle this key research question at a crucial point in time. The project’s claim is that big law pro bono is crowding NGOs and local organizations out of their traditional advocacy space. These firms are not affected by the shrinking space observed for traditional human rights defenders and they are both accustomed to and better equipped for navigating democratic backsliding and authoritarian contexts. As these firms gain exclusive influence on law- and policy-making across levels, they change the organizational ecology of the field—with as yet unknown consequences. This project studies the patterns, practices, and consequences of private law firms as transnational advocates. It collects and analyses unique quantitative data and conducts in-depth qualitative case studies on big law pro bono for women’s rights and the right to a healthy environment. PROBONO significantly advances our knowledge of big law pro bono and its empirical and normative implications for transnational advocacy, bridging debates in International Relations and International Law.

Mots-clés : transnational advocacy,private actors,relational theory,women s rights,environment,case studies
Projet ERC : DROUGHT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Studies of Cultures and Arts
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1683750.0 €

Recent multi-year droughts have led to severe and unequally distributed socio-environmental disruptions across Europe, the Earth’s fastest warming continent. Much more than short-term ‘crisis-events’ droughts pose long-term, multi-faceted cultural, political, and conceptual challenges to society that remain poorly understood. Adopting a comparative, multi-sited anthropological approach, this project will generate needed insights into how people—farmers, conservationists, politicians, foresters, scientists—and local communities learn to live with drought in human-dominated landscapes in Spain, Germany, and Norway.  Combining state-of-the-art theoretical approaches from such varied disciplines as anthropology, geosciences, and the environmental humanities, DROUGHT seeks to meet three specific objectives: 1) to produce a novel integrative cultural theory of drought as an inherently relational and situated socio-cultural and geophysical process that unfolds in and through human-dominated landscapes; 2) to complete the first historically informed, in-depth ethnography of living with drought in Europe; and 3) to experiment with collaborative, sensory and more-than-human research methods as a way to explore the affective, experiential, and material manifestations of drought.  Fulfilling these objectives will enable DROUGHT to achieve its overarching aim: to generate an empirically-driven, theoretically ambitious field of scholarship—anthropogenic drought studies—that will advance knowledge of droughts in the social and cultural fields while adding needed empirical depth and nuance to emerging science-centred discourses on droughts in the Anthropocene. The knowledge produced will help transform academic, public, and political understanding of, and debates over, what constitutes droughts, why they matter, and how we should respond to them.

Mots-clés : environmental anthropology environmental humanities multispecies studies more than human approaches perception of the environment socio cultural environmental change cultural landscapes anthropocene qualitative methods ethnography situated knowledge sensory methods
Projet ERC : Fish-S.H.I.E.L.D. (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499205.0 €

The sustainability of aquaculture, an important food source for human, is severely challenged by infectious diseases. Unfortunately, the development of new therapies and vaccines is hindered by our incomplete understanding of the fish immune system. The lack of knowledge of the mechanisms governing immune responses in the branchial cavity is particularly alarming considering that it represents a main port of entry for pathogens and is involved in many pathologies affecting farmed fish. Recent findings of new lymphoid tissues, bound together by a previously unknown tonsil-like organ inside an even larger lymphoid network revealed the branchial cavity as an unsuspected important region of the fish immune system. The main objective of this project is to characterize this newly discovered branchial cavity immune surveillance system to harness its potential against infectious diseases in aquaculture. Toward this goal, the project will take advantage of the zebrafish model to achieve the following objectives: 1) Characterize the newly discovered lymphoid tissues and tonsil-like organ. 2) Decipher the rules of antigen sampling and transport in the branchial cavity. 3) Characterize the development of the branchial cavity lymphoid architecture. 4) Decipher the roles of the branchial cavity immune surveillance system in immune responses to infection and vaccines. In a comparative effort, the project will then study the branchial cavity immune system in Atlantic salmon and other fish species relevant for aquaculture. The methodology will combine sophisticated immunohistology, nanotechnologies, state-of-the-art transcriptomic analysis, antibody-assays, and advanced 3D microscopy. The project will progress far beyond the current knowledge in fish immunology, which could drastically impact current paradigms in the field, open new perspectives for fish vaccination and diseases monitoring in aquaculture, and has the potential, in the long term, to positively impact human health.

Mots-clés : fish immunology,aquaculture
Projet ERC : DESCENSURA (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1490443.0 €

In the 20th century, the literary field underwent severe repression and censorship from Salazar’s and Franco’s dictatorships. Despite relevant studies, there is no full account of how these two censoring systems evolved along with common ideology but diverse praxis. Besides, the total number of books forbidden or expurgated during this period is still unknown. This project maps out and systematizes knowledge of book censorship in a comparative way, by contrasting the regimes’ propaganda with writers’ resistance, and by identifying literary works that need to be restored today. Within this large map of censored books, it will examine more closely the case of poetry, as a genre that evaded the censor’s eye. DESCENSURA aims at undoing part of the damage inflicted by the censorial apparatus, thus “decensoring” works and providing a degree of justice. DESCENSURA is foundational research that combines archival and digital methods with literary studies. The project gathers evidence from the legal, secret, and cultural documents that relate to the authors and books marked by censors. It then maps out the networks comprised of author, book, and censor review by digitally emulating these relations in a new database: Censura DB. This database will be the team’s main research tool and the first authoritative resource on Iberian book censorship. The project’s research is divided into four streams: 1) Archives, 2) Ideals, 3) Tactics, and 4) Traces. The traces left by dictatorial regimes are both immaterial and material, pertaining to the control, surveillance, repression, and censorship of writers. Yet the material traces left by censors in the manuscripts, proofs, and books they read can be made visible and relevant. That is this project’s task. It is the first-ever study to map out all the titles censored by the Iberian dictatorships and to investigate the original copies scarred by state agents, thus pioneering knowledge of the legacy of preventive and repressive censorship.

Mots-clés : contemporary and 20th century literature,contemporary and 20th century iberian poetry,20th century literary censorship,book censorship,portuguese literary censorship,spanish literary censorship
Projet ERC : iSwarm (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Grenade — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498800.0 €

Robot swarms are incredibly fragile against imperfections. World-class roboticists agree that one of the fundamental challenges in robotics is on the availability of systematic methods with formal guarantees for the design and control of the swarm's force multiplication, where sensing, actuation, and communication are distributed in space. However, no matter the approach, control theory, or heuristic, tiny imperfections are amplified throughout large numbers of robots and rapidly erode and make unpredictable the overall performance of the swarm. Notwithstanding, imperfections can result in surprising complex emergent behaviors such as intricate trajectory patterns of mobile robot swarms.  iSwarm questions the current paradigm of fighting imperfections to suppress their “damaging” effects. Conversely, I propose a rigorous control theory to unleash and ally with imperfections, such as dropouts, delays, and scaling/biasing factors in sensors and actuators, as novel distributed control inputs for taming emergent behaviors. My paradigm shift requires new ways of analyzing algorithms and their robot integration at the crossroads between algebraic graph theory, network theory, control, and mechatronics for multi-agent systems.  To achieve the project's goal, I will: 1) develop a general formulation to characterize the controllability/stabilizability of emergent behaviors with imperfections as inputs; 2) introduce unconventional strategies such as the mismatched Lyapunov functions to engineer emergent behaviors; 3) construct equivalence principles between imperfections and inconsistent shared information to improve the effectiveness of the swarm’s “collective awareness” for fault-recovery algorithms; and 4) demonstrate the control of a state-of-the-art robot swarm in non-lab conditions by exploiting robot imperfections.  iSwarm regards imperfections as part of the solution, will inspire innovative research methods and lead new applications of multi-robot systems.

Mots-clés : multi robot systems
Projet ERC : WHEP (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université de Grenade — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 84718.75 €

Food production covers the most basic human need, and simultaneously is the main driver of anthropogenic environmental impacts. These impacts have resulted in the transgression, during the brief period since the industrial revolution, of the planetary boundaries defining the safe operating space of humanity. A rich research literature quantifies the last 60 years’ fast, heterogeneous, and often unfair development in food supply and related environmental impacts, and how these depend on agro-climatic factors, technology, and trade flows, all of which have greatly changed but with different trajectories around the world. However, these developments lack an integrated approach, and are very poorly quantified before 1961. WHEP will bridge these knowledge gaps, assessing “who has eaten the planet” by answering the questions: “What are the environmental impacts of food production since 1850?”, “What is the role of trade in food supply and in displacing the responsibilities for these impacts?” “How are impacts related to planetary boundaries, food supply and inequality?” These highly ambitious goals are addressed by four objectives: 1) Constructing a consolidated global country-level annual database on agricultural production and management, using massive data collation in combination with modelling; 2) Estimating the environmental impacts: greenhouse gas emissions and carbon, land, water, nitrogen, and phosphorus through spatially explicit, integrated, dynamic modelling; 3) Calculating product footprints and tracing them along international trade chains; and 4) Analyzing the observed trajectories in the safe and just operating space, by assessing the drivers, and how impacts at the production and consumption levels are related to fair and healthy supply. This ground-breaking research will shed new light on the environmental history of food, opening up many new research frontiers, and providing necessary information to design fair and sustainable policies.

Mots-clés : planetary boundaries,diets,agro food system,land use change,greenhouse gas emissions,soil organic carbon,nitrogen,phosphorus,water,long term,life cycle assessment,environmental footprints,integrated modelling
Projet ERC : BE4COPY (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université d'Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499099.0 €

BE4COPY examines the long-term history of printing privileges from a cross-disciplinary and European perspective. These privileges provided exclusive rights for the production of books and images: they can be considered one of the precursors of what we now call ‘copyrights’. Introduced around 1470, shortly after the invention of the printing press, privileges were abolished around 1789, when new notions of ownership emerged alongside new ideas about political representation. The BE4COPY project studies the changing nature of the printing privilege over the course of these turbulent 300 years. The intimate relationship between legal frameworks and the politics of knowledge is the primary focus of the project. Although numerous studies have examined printing privileges in their local context, there are to date no historical studies that have examined how different European systems of printing privileges were interrelated. BE4COPY will change that and thus contribute to a better understanding of the origins of copyrights as a specific form of shared European heritage. It does so by (1) examining the distribution of printing privileges on a European scale, exposing existing trade routes and political alliances, and (2) rethinking the relationship between legal protection and political interests. How did shifting discourses of expertise and stewardship influence the proprietorship of intellectual creations’ How did the interplay between law, economy, and politics shape the production of knowledge? And how did ‘authorship’ and ‘ownership’ eventually emerge in that context as twin categories? BE4COPY employs an innovative archive-based approach centred around the cross-cutting themes of ‘Censorship and Promotion’, ‘Travelling Ideas and People’, and ‘Authorship and Readership’. The project adds a new layer to our evolving understanding of copyright and opens up new perspectives regarding the question of how knowledge was produced and shared in early modern Europe.

Mots-clés : early modern history,history of knowledge,printing privileges,copyright history
Projet ERC : REGIO (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Queen Mary University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : QMUL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1477651.0 €

REGIO develops advanced econometric methods to identify and estimate economic fundamentals in games played by firms, addressing a broad spectrum of real-world industrial organization scenarios. These methods bridge critical gaps where existing techniques fall short and provide a disciplined framework to relax less credible assumptions about firm behavior and the game environment, enabling researchers to draw robust empirical conclusions. Their effectiveness is demonstrated through applications, supporting strategies to ensure fair competition, consumer protection, and a clearer understanding of distributional impacts and inequality. To achieve these goals, REGIO is structured around four pillars. Pillars 1 through 3 focus on designing identification and inference methods that remain robust to misspecification by imposing minimal restrictions on firm behavior and the game environment. By crafting new tools based on partial identification, these pillars tackle theoretical challenges, such as addressing multiple equilibria and firms’ potentially limited awareness of their competitive landscapes, as well as statistical challenges. Pillar 4 pioneers the use of the novel methods to real-world scenarios, demonstrating their practical applicability and bolstering informed market interventions. Through these pillars, REGIO not only advances econometric research but also significantly enhances the interface between economics and policymaking, improving our understanding of dynamics in modern markets.

Mots-clés : partial identification,inference,moment inequalities,repeated games,multiple equilibria
Projet ERC : 2D-PULSES (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université de Rome « La Sapienza » — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498750.0 €

We propose the construction and development of a visible/ultraviolet (UV) two-dimensional resonance Raman (2DR) setup with phase-sensitive detection to tackle ultrafast Chemical, Physical and Biological processes. Light-induced reactions cover a broad range of phenomena, from screening of photo-damage in skin upon UV irradiation to carrier relaxation in opto-electronic devices and energy conversion in proteins. Their lowest hierarchical level lies in the interplay of nuclear motion and normal mode couplings, such as funnelling the absorbed energy to the solvent via molecular oscillations in nucleobases, electron-phonon/phonon-phonon couplings in graphene, vibrational cooling in hemeproteins. Nature has intricately coupled vibrational degrees of freedom to facilitate light-energy conversion into synergistic nuclear motions, ruling femtochemistry and femtophysics. Conventional spectroscopic methods project structural information along specific normal coordinates, providing limited insights into these coupled motions. 2DR combines the structural sensitivity inherent to the Raman process with a multi-dimensional scheme, yielding frequency correlation spectra that encode information on the vibronic mode couplings across the entire vibrational manifold. Critically, the development of 2DR and its application to light-driven processes has been hindered by technical and conceptual hurdles. Among them: 1) 2DR realizations have been confined to restricted visible regions, while most biomolecules require spectral tunability and/or UV excitations; 2) vibrational signatures recorded by 2DR can be assigned both to vibrational (anharmonic) mode couplings as well as to (harmonic) high-order Raman transitions. The set up of the proposed novel 2DR approach will circumvent these limitations, establishing an interdisciplinary research team toiling over unsolved problems in which the ultrafast and multidimensional facets play a key role.