Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : EmbodiedTech (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 66662.48 €

Wearable technology is redefining the boundaries of our own body. Wearable robotic (WR) fingers and arms are robots, designed to free up or complement our hand actions, to enhance humans’ abilities. While tremendous resources are being dedicated to the development of this groundbreaking technology, little notice is given to how the human brain might support it. The intuitive, though unfounded, view is that technology will fuse with our bodies, allowing our brains to seamlessly control it (i.e. embodied technology). This implies that our brain will share resources, originally devoted to controlling our body, to operate WRs. Here I will elucidate the conditions necessary for technological embodiment, using prosthetic limbs as a model. I will build upon knowledge gained from rehabilitation, experimental psychology and neuroscience to characterise and extend the boundaries of body representation towards successful adoption of WRs. I will combine behavioural, physiological and neuroimaging tools to address five key questions that are currently obscuring the vision of embodied technology: What conditions are necessary for a person to experience an artificial limb as part of their body? Would the resources recruited to control an artificial limb be shared, or rather conflict, with human body representation? Will the successful incorporation of WRs disorganise representations of the human limbs? Can new sensory experiences (touch) be intuitively inferred from WRs? Can the adult brain support the increased motor and cognitive demands associated with successful WRs usage? I will first focus on populations with congenital and acquired hand loss, who differ in brain resources due to plasticity, but experience similar daily-life challenges. I will then test body representation in able-bodied people while learning to use WR fingers and arm. Together, my research will provide the first foundation for guiding how to successfully incorporate technology into our body representation.

Mots-clés : body representation,brain plasticity,motor learning,perceptual learning,neuroimaging,prosthetic limbs,wearable technology
Projet ERC : CRISPRhistory (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499564.0 €

What are the main differences between a photograph and a video? Photographs record a single point in time and videos continuously record a sequence of events. While the content and interpretation of a photograph is heavily reliant on a single moment in time, a video is not. The tools that scientists have to understand the molecular and cellular world around them are most like film cameras – producing single snapshots to describe dynamic processes. Towards the goal of continuously recording molecular events within cells, my laboratory recently developed ‘transcriptional recording’, an approach that employs CRISPR spacer acquisition from RNA to capture and convert intracellular RNAs into DNA, permanently storing transcriptional information in the DNA of living cells. The newly acquired sequences serve as transcriptional records, which are retrievable via deep sequencing and can be leverage to reconstruct cellular histories. This technology provides an entirely new mode of interrogating dynamic biological and physiological processes and opens up numerous avenues for future work. The overall goal of this proposal is to develop transcriptional recording sentinel cells with the capacity to continuously monitor biological and pathological processes within the mammalian gut. To achieve this goal, we will employ a variety of methods that include molecular and cellular biology, synthetic biology, protein engineering, bioinformatics, and mouse models. We will focus our efforts on improving the efficiency of transcriptional recording, combining transcriptional recording with biosensing gene circuits, and demonstrating that transcriptional recording sentinel cells facilitate interrogation of the mammalian gut environment and can be applied as a living diagnostic. In summary, this study lays the foundation for developing a fundamentally new approach to interrogating dynamic biological and pathological processes as well as engineering living diagnostics.

Mots-clés : crispr cas biology,crispr spacer acquisition,synthetic biology and cellular memory genetic circuits,deep sequencing,functional genetics,protein engineering and directed evolution,microbial based living diagnostics
Projet ERC : NeuroSyntax (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CEA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499746.66 €

What are the origins of humans’ remarkable capacities to grasp, memorize, and produce complex sequences and rules, as manifested in language and mathematics? During its evolution, the human brain may have acquired a capacity to represent nested rules, based in part on the expansion of circuits involving the inferior frontal gyrus. This hypothesis will be tested using behavioral measures, functional MRI, magneto-encephalography (MEG), electro-corticography (ECOG) and machine learning techniques in human and non-human primates tested in identical paradigms. (1) We will design a hierarchy of non-linguistic visual and auditory sequences that place increasing demands on abstract rule coding.(2) Behavioral studies of pointing time and eye tracking will investigate the memory for such sequences in human adults, children, and macaque monkeys, and their extrapolation to future items. (3) Functional MRI, MEG, and ECOG will probe the localization, time course, and neural coding of such non-linguistic sequences in human adults. (4) In the same subjects, we will investigate the representation of linguistic and mathematical structures and determine if they involve the same areas and coding principles. (5) We will also record fMRI and ECOG responses to this hierarchy of non-linguistic sequences in macaque monkeys, in search of both correspondences and sharp differences with humans. (6) The same non-linguistic materials will be used in fMRI and EEG studies of human children and infants. Our hypothesis predicts that human children may perform better than adult monkeys. (7) We will formulate and test mathematical models that propose that the human brain “compresses” incoming sequences using nested rules (Kolmogorov complexity), uses predictive codes to anticipate on future inputs, and encodes syntax via tensor-product representations. The results will clarify the brain mechanisms of human language and abstraction abilities, and shed light on their ontogeny and phylogeny.

Mots-clés : language,mathematics,comparative cognition
Projet ERC : VICTEUR (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : National University of Ireland — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498126.0 €

What can the large scale literary datasets now available tell us about the ways in which national cultures develop and the role of migration in that development? This project seeks to push beyond the frontiers of current understanding of the role of migration and migrants in the dynamics of cultural change and continuity, examining intra-European migration in the Victorian period through the ‘macroscope' of text mining and the microscopes of literary scholarship. During the Victorian period Britain was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and/or economic deprivation. While this period and process has attracted considerable attention from historians, literary studies have primarily focussed on colonial racist and imperialist attitudes or representations of single ethnic groups. VICTEUR will focus on how the intra-European cultural exchange triggered by this movement of population is embedded in Victorian fiction. It will identify persistent and residual narratives and attitudes to a cross-section of European migrants by members of the host community and the cultural output of these migrants across a very large literary data set, the 35,918 volumes of fiction in the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus operationalised for text mining via UCD’s Curatr data interface. VICTEUR will trace the residual impact of these cultural representations in neo-Victorian fiction, film and television, focussing on the period 2011-2016, combining methodologies from text mining, transmedia and cultural memory studies. The project will examine in detail the relationship between gender and national and ethnic identities within the texts and the impact of authorial gender on representations of migrants by British and migrant writers. It will develop a new transhistorical and intra-national model for understanding migration as a key driver of cultural development at the interface of gender, ethnicity and demography.

Mots-clés : victorian novel,natural language processing,migration and gender,neo victorianism,adaptation and transmedia,semi supervised machine learning
Projet ERC : MIMAT (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Bocconi University — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1335693.75 €

What determines the patterns of international trade and the associated welfare effects? Can individual incentives to trade diverge from societal objectives? Should governments intervene to promote or restrict international transactions? Questions like these have recently gained new salience, in Europe and elsewhere, due to renewed protectionist pressures and resurgent nationalistic tendencies arising from diffuse disenchantment with globalization. The aim of the research project is to highlighting key dimensions along which the answers to these questions obtained from conventional trade models with homogenous firms should be revisited in the light of permanent pervasive firm heterogeneity. In particular, the project will pursue four specific objectives through four integrated work packages providing new insights on how firm heterogeneity affects: (1) the ability of markets to deliver allocative efficiency; (2) The design of optimal multilateral trade policies; (3) The comparative advantages of countries; (4) The capabilities of a country as an exporter. The first work package will investigate whether the allocative inefficiency (“misallocation”) determined by firm heterogeneity in the presence of pricing distortions is quantitatively relevant for a country’s aggregate economic performance, and whether economic integration reduces or exacerbates such misallocation. The second work package will develop the theoretical implications of firm heterogeneity for trade policy, with special emphasis on the cooperative design of optimal multilateral trade agreements aimed at maximizing the joint welfare of all trade partners. The third work package will study how country, sector and firm characteristics interact to determine countries’ responses to trade liberalization. The fourth work package will investigate the distinct role of firm heterogeneity in determining a country’s ability to export through the shape of the productivity distribution of its producers.

Mots-clés : gains from trade,imperfect competition,firm heterogeneity,comparative advantage,trade policy,misallocation,marshall s second law of demand,intensive and extensive margins of trade,gravity
Projet ERC : CALLIOPE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
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 : 1499905.0 €

What did politicians sound like before they were on the radio and television? The fascination with politicians’ vocal characteristics and quirks is often connected to the rise of audio-visual media. But in the age of the printed press, political representatives also had to ‘speak well’ – without recourse to amplification. Historians and linguists have provided sophisticated understandings of the discursive and aesthetic aspects of politicians’ language, but have largely ignored the importance of the acoustic character of their speech. CALLIOPE studies how vocal performances in parliament have influenced the course of political careers and political decision making in the 19th century. It shows how politicians’ voices helped to define the diverse identities they articulated. In viewing parliament through the lens of audibility, the project offers a new perspective on political representation by reframing how authority was embodied (through performances that were heard, rather than seen). It does so for the Second Chamber in Britain and France, and in dialogue with ‘colonial’ modes of speech in Kolkata and Algiers, which, we argue, exerted considerable influence on European vocal culture. The project devises an innovative methodological approach to include the sound of the human voice in studies of the past that precede acoustic recording. Adapting methods developed in sound studies and combining them with the tools of political history, the project proposes a new way to analyse parliamentary reporting, while also drawing on a variety of sources that are rarely connected to the history of politics. The main source material for the study comprise transcripts of parliamentary speech (official reports and renditions by journalists). However, the project also mobilizes educational, satirical and fictional sources to elucidate the convoluted processes that led to the cultivation, exertion, reception and evaluation of a voice ‘fit’ for nineteenth-century politics.

Mots-clés : voice,rhetoric,political culture
Projet ERC : MUYA (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2241454.25 €

What exactly are the words which priests recite in the Yasna, the core ritual of one of the most ancient and influential living religions, Zoroastrianism? What is their meaning and how do they relate to the ritual actions? The Yasna is significant for our cultural heritage not only because of its influential thought system which arguably impacted on post-exilic Judaism, nascent Christianity and Islam, but also because with parts of it going back to the 2nd millennium BCE, it is the oldest witness to Iranian languages. Its full appreciation, however, is severely hampered by the presence of outdated editions and translations or by their absence altogether. Moreover, the relationship between the text recited and the action performed during the ritual is unexplored due to a lack of documentary evidence. The Multimedia Yasna proposes to fill these gaps in a methodologically ground-breaking fashion. MUYA combines two different, yet complementary approaches by examining the Yasna both as a ritual performance and as a text attested in manuscripts. The two approaches will be integrated to answer questions about the meaning and function of the Yasna in a historical perspective. The research methods for achieving MUYA’s objectives unite cutting edge approaches from Digital Humanities, Philology and Linguistics into four interrelated work-packages. These will involve filming and analyzing the ritual performance and teaching practices in priestly schools, the creation of a suite of electronic tools for editing Avestan texts, a database of transcribed manuscripts of the Yasna and in-depth studies of selected parts of the text by combining datasets produced by electronic processes with philological methods of textual criticism and linguistic analysis. These complementary datasets and methods will be used to produce an online publication of the sub-titled and interactive film of the Yasna ritual, together with print editions, translations and commentaries of the Avestan Yasna.

Mots-clés : avestan language,digital humanities,zoroastrianism,manuscript studies,text transmission
Projet ERC : LEVIATHAN (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Universität Hamburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UHH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2704883.25 €

What is Europe? The status of the European Leviathan is in doubt today as never before. Whether in the form of authoritarian governments or populist agitation, there is intense contention over what the role, size, and scope of the state in the 21st century should be. What can a historical account tell us about the European Leviathan then and now? What holds our European community together? Amid this uncertainty our project calls attention to a common concern for the health of the individual and the well-being of the social body. We argue that post-war European history on each side of the so-called Iron Curtain is characterized by a preoccupation with health as the common good. Taking medicine as an analytical lens offers a common reference point through which a shared and integrated history of Europe can be developed beyond the usual clichés and dichotomies of the period. That is the unusual but promising argument that underlies our project. Our project is distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach: Neither economics nor politics nor ideology nor everyday life, but an integration of these perspectives makes it possible to pursue the development of the common good both, in state socialism and in the capitalist state. To do this, we propose a multi-layered investigation of medicine, which came to represent a significant—if not the decisive—institutional, conceptual and legitimating framework for all efforts towards the common good. Thus, on the one hand, the life sciences’ claim to universal truth offers a privileged perspective beyond the usual oppositions of ideology, economic and political systems. On the other hand, medicine is socially, politically, economically, technologically and culturally determined more than nearly any other field of our modern life. The innovative approach of our project goes beyond our heuristic methodology. Rather than merely studying postwar Europe’s two halves separately we aim to understand Europe as one.

Mots-clés : europe,post war history,history of medicine,health,east west,common good
Projet ERC : LEVIATHAN (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2686397.5 €

What is Europe? The status of the European Leviathan is in doubt today as never before. Whether in the form of authoritarian governments or populist agitation, there is intense contention over what the role, size, and scope of the state in the 21st century should be. What can a historical account tell us about the European Leviathan then and now? What holds our European community together? Amid this uncertainty our project calls attention to a common concern for the health of the individual and the well-being of the social body. We argue that post-war European history on each side of the so-called Iron Curtain is characterized by a preoccupation with health as the common good. Taking medicine as an analytical lens offers a common reference point through which a shared and integrated history of Europe can be developed beyond the usual clichés and dichotomies of the period. That is the unusual but promising argument that underlies our project. Our project is distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach: Neither economics nor politics nor ideology nor everyday life, but an integration of these perspectives makes it possible to pursue the development of the common good both, in state socialism and in the capitalist state. To do this, we propose a multi-layered investigation of medicine, which came to represent a significant—if not the decisive—institutional, conceptual and legitimating framework for all efforts towards the common good. Thus, on the one hand, the life sciences’ claim to universal truth offers a privileged perspective beyond the usual oppositions of ideology, economic and political systems. On the other hand, medicine is socially, politically, economically, technologically and culturally determined more than nearly any other field of our modern life. The innovative approach of our project goes beyond our heuristic methodology. Rather than merely studying postwar Europe’s two halves separately we aim to understand Europe as one.

Mots-clés : europe,post war history,history of medicine,health,east west,common good