Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : BrainPlay (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : University of Geneva — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNIGE
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Our goal is to uncover the learning algorithms that subserve biological intelligence and to discover how they are implemented in the brain. We take for granted that biological intelligence results from neural information processing, that neural information processing is based on the transmission of action potentials through synapses, and that learning is realized through synaptic plasticity. We are inspired by two key observations: Firstly, we know that biological learning unfolds in ways different from mainstream machine learning that relies on learning from large labeled datasets. Second, we discovered that the engagement of the brain during play can result in unexpected and profound cognitive benefits. This proposal describes an untravelled route to the learning algorithms of the brain that runs through the no-man’s-land between synaptic physiology, systems neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, theoretical neuroscience and machine learning. Our approach focuses on the self-teaching abilities of the mammalian brain and covers and connects four major topics: (1) the objective functions that govern synaptic plasticity, (2) the teaching signals through which learning is steered, (3) behavioral mechanisms of self-teaching, in particular play behaviors, (4) the brain states that engage self-teaching behaviors, in particular the brain state of play. The BrainPlay grant will study self-teaching abilities from synapses to brains, from computational theory to action video games. As gaming has been shown to be highly beneficial for human brain function, we are intrigued by how little we know about what is going on in playing brains and how the brain state of play shapes learning. Engaging the latest theoretical and technological breakthroughs, BrainPlay will reach far beyond mainstream neuroscience and embrace and elucidate playfulness and self-teaching as important components of the brain's learning algorithms.

Mots-clés : play,supervised learning,unsupervised learning,synaptic plasticity
Projet ERC : WEIRD WITNESSES (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : VU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1496770.0 €

Our increasingly international society demands that eyewitnesses of serious crimes regularly provide testimony in cross-cultural settings, such as international criminal tribunals. This poses significant challenges for investigators and legal decision-makers. Errors in fact-finding may result in wrongful convictions and unjust acquittals. Yet, eyewitness memory research has predominantly focused on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) witnesses. The project addresses two key objectives: (1) develop culturally modulated theory of eyewitness memory and (2) design and test evidence-based interview guidelines. In Subproject 1, I will examine what happens when police investigators interview eyewitnesses from a different cultural background. It will involve the systematic coding of culture-dependent variables in video-recorded police interviews with witnesses of serious crimes in South Africa, a society with many different subcultures. In Subproject 2, I will analyse the frequency, nature and legal consequences of culture-dependent variables in international criminal cases. It will involve an empirical document analysis of eyewitness evidence provided at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and interviews with international legal scholars and practitioners. In Subproject 3, I will assess how different cultural groups encode, store and retrieve memories, and how memory reports are evaluated in immigration contexts. It will involve a series of experiments in which the objective and perceived characteristics of statements provided by asylum seekers originating from Sub-Saharan Africa are compared to a matched Western control group. The project integrates analyses of video, document and experimental data to provide insight into culture-dependent variables in eyewitness memory. The new theory will enable researchers and practitioners to steer away from the present WEIRD bias in legal psychology.

Mots-clés : eyewitness memory,international criminal law,investigative interviewing,cross cultural psychology,asylum seekers
Projet ERC : GreekSchools (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Ministero della cultura — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : MiBACT;MiC
Type d'entité : Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 100000.0 €

Our knowledge about Greek philosophical schools is mostly second-hand and based on Diogenes Laërtius’ 'Lives of Eminent Philosophers' (3rd century AD) and Philodemus of Gadara’s 'Arrangement of the Philosophers' (75-50 BC) – hereinafter 'Syntaxis' –, an extensive treatise in several books which represents the earliest ‘history of philosophy’ to have reached us directly from antiquity. From this work exclusively preserved by the Herculaneum papyri we may derive a virtually systematic account of the history of Greek philosophical schools, which is in many respects unique and much closer to the facts than Diogenes’ is. Unfortunately, the original manuscripts which transmit it are in a poor state and the currently available editions of them have largely been made obsolete by the latest technological progress. By relying on the most advanced technologies available today, the project aims to provide a new innovative critical edition of the whole treatise and its different sections, with extensive introductions and commentaries. In particular, we shall apply Shortwave-Infrared Hyperspectral Imaging, TeraHertz Imaging, Optical Coherence Tomography, X-Ray Fluorescence Mapping, 3D Microscopy and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Relaxometry to both opisthograph and multi-layered papyri belonging to Philodemus’ 'Syntaxis', as well as to other papyri, in order to (a) read the text hidden on the verso, (b) detect, classify and replace overlapping layers, and (c) read the text concealed inside the latter. We shall combine these state-of-the-art methods with new, sounder philological approaches in order to produce a more reliable and substantially improved critical text of Philodemus’ treatise and its various sections through an innovative editorial system. Finally, we shall produce an open-access electronic edition of it through a pioneering open-source scholarly Web platform, engaging the scientific community in an on-going and on-line collaborative review of our critical edition.

Mots-clés : greek papyrology,ancient philosophy,textual criticism,shortwave infrared hyperspectral imaging,terahertz imaging,optical coherence tomography,x ray fluorescence mapping,3d microscopy,nuclear magnetic resonance relaxometry,computational philology,digital scholarly editing,machine learning for text
Projet ERC : NEUROMEM (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
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 : 2429964.0 €

Our memories define us, and their disruption in psychiatric and neurological conditions can be devastating. However, how we are able, e.g., to remember our wedding day and re-imagine the scene that was around us, remains one of the great mysteries of the human mind. NEUROMEM is an integrated experimental and computational attempt at a fundamental breakthrough in this problem. Building on recent insights into how environmental location and orientation is encoded by neurons in the mammalian brain, I aim to develop a mechanistic understanding of how events we experience are stored, recalled and imagined, i.e. a neurocomputational model of how specific memories result from patterns of activity in neuronal populations. NEUROMEM will provide mechanistic answers to 3 long-standing questions: 1) What is the link between memory and space, and role of spatial context in re-imagining episodes? 2) How are the multiple diverse elements of complex life-like events recollected together? 3) How can remembered events be read-out as visuospatial imagery? Work will comprise psychological and functional neuroimaging experiments using sophisticated designs including use of virtual reality, and corresponding simulations of how such behaviour can be driven by neuronal activity. The computational modelling will directly contact neurophysiological data such as the firing of place and grid cells in the hippocampal formation, and provide quantitative behavioural predictions, while neuroimaging provides a read out of population activity during this processing in the human brain. NEUROMEM will generate new hypotheses and explanations at the cognitive level, of interest to all scholars of the complexity of the human mind, and allow neurophysiological interpretation of behavioural data - providing a vital link between cognitive theory and neuroimaging and neurological data. Its implications extend beyond memory, including the mechanism for imagining views that have not been experienced.

Mots-clés : episodic memory,neural networks,spatial cognition,hippocampus
Projet ERC : INTELLICORR (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : University of Leeds — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 955710.0 €

Our planet’s population will continue to grow rapidly; between 2010 and 2025 the population will grow by 1.1bn. Urbanisation and growth of the consumer class in developing countries will lead to unprecedented demands on energy. There is arguably no bigger challenge to society than ensuring the security of affordable and environmentally-sustainable energy. Hydrocarbons will provide a large proportion of the world’s energy for the foreseeable future. There is no escape from the critically low oil price worldwide. Innovation becomes important in this price environment. “Easy” oil has already been found; future supply will come from complex reservoirs requiring enhanced oil recovery (EOR). There is a massive growth in renewables technology; the EU is making steady progress towards its 2020 target. The EU renewables energy share increased from 8% to 15% in the decade to 2013. Energy supply and consumption brings with it the global issue of climate change as emissions from industry and transport increase. Inextricably linked to energy is the reduction of the global carbon footprint and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) offers the only real technology that can handle the already produced carbon dioxide. Corrosion in energy and environmental control linking to energy supply provide the underpinning rationale for this proposal. Corrosion is one of the major life-limiting factors for energy supply (oil and gas, renewables, EOR) and in environmental pollution control (CCS) and is estimated to cost 3% GDP. This proposal brings some of the most exciting experimental and modelling engineering science to create a framework for the intelligent management of corrosion. INTELLICORR will use synchrotron techniques, advanced microscopy, numerical methods and environmental/cost analysis to bring about unprecedented advances in (a) prediction and management of localised pitting corrosion and (b) novel methods for green corrosion protection using the natural corrosion product layer

Mots-clés : corrosion,synchrotron,electrochemistry
Projet ERC : ArtHistCEE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Fundatia noua europa — Pays : Roumanie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Nec
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 638618.7 €

Our project proposes a fragmentary account of the art histories produced in present-day Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia between 1850 and 1950, from an entangled histories perspective. We will look at the relationships between the art histories produced in these countries and the art histories produced in Western Europe. But, more importantly, we will investigate how the art histories written in the countries mentioned above resonate with each other, either proposing conflicting interpretations of the past, or ignoring uncomfortable competing discourses. We will investigate the art histories written between 1850 and 1950 because we are interested in how art history contributed to nation building discourses. Therefore, we will focus on those art histories that concur to nationalising the past. Our project is articulated around three crucial concepts – periodisation, style and influence – set in the context of relevant contemporary historiographies produced in Western Europe, and analysing the entanglements with competing historiographies in each of the countries considered. We will focus on two main issues: 1. How did Central and Eastern European art historians adopt, adapt and respond to theoretical and methodological issues developed elsewhere, and 2. What are the periodisations of art produced on the territory of Central and Eastern European countries; what are the theoretical and methodological strategies for conceptualising local styles; and how was the concept of influence used in establishing hierarchical relationships. Researching the conceptualisation of a theoretical framework that would accommodate the artistic production of the past will show the difficulties in dealing with a complex reality without simplifying and essentializing it along ideological lines. The research will also show that the three concepts that we focus on are not neutral or strictly descriptive, and that their use in art history needs to be reconsidered.

Mots-clés : art historiography,central and eastern europe,19th century,20th century
Projet ERC : CELLPLASTICITY (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Institute for Research in Biomedicine — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IRB;IRB-CERCA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2024047.0 €

Our research group has worked over the years at the interface between cancer and ageing, with a strong emphasis on mouse models. More recently, we became interested in cellular reprogramming because we hypothesized that understanding cellular plasticity could yield new insights into cancer and ageing. Indeed, during the previous ERC Advanced Grant, we made relevant contributions to the fields of cellular reprogramming (Nature 2013), cellular senescence (Cell 2013), cancer (Cancer Cell 2012), and ageing (Cell Metabolism 2012). Now, we take advantage of our diverse background and integrate the above processes. Our unifying hypothesis is that cellular plasticity lies at the basis of tissue regeneration (“adaptive cellular plasticity”), as well as at the origin of cancer (“maladaptive gain of cellular plasticity”) and ageing (“maladaptive loss of cellular plasticity”). A key experimental system will be our “reprogrammable mice” (with inducible expression of the four Yamanaka factors), which we regard as a tool to induce cellular plasticity in vivo. The project is divided as follows: Objective #1 – Cellular plasticity and cancer: role of tumour suppressors in in vivo de-differentiation and reprogramming / impact of transient de-differentiation on tumour initiation / lineage tracing of Oct4 to determine whether a transient pluripotent-state occurs during cancer. Objective #2 – Cellular plasticity in tissue regeneration and ageing: impact of transient de-differentiation on tissue regeneration / contribution of the damage-induced microenvironment to tissue regeneration / impact of transient de-differentiation on ageing. Objective #3: New frontiers in cellular plasticity: chemical manipulation of cellular plasticity in vivo / new states of pluripotency / characterization of in vivo induced pluripotency and its unique properties. We anticipate that the completion of this project will yield new fundamental insights into cancer, regeneration and ageing.
Projet ERC : NeuroFlux (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Tübingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1484727.0 €

Our societies are built on the premise that humans are rational agents who make decisions that are in line with their held beliefs. A central principle is that of choice consistency, i.e. that humans will make identical choices when facing the same problem. However, experimental work overwhelmingly demonstrates that humans are consistently inconsistent and that an exaggerated behavioural variability is a key feature of impulsive psychiatric disorders. The causes for these inconsistencies are unknown and economic theories and computational models fail to explain this omnipresent human characteristic. I propose that intrinsic fluctuations of brain activity are causing us to behave seemingly inconsistent, and the overarching aim of NeuroFlux is to examine how endogenous brain activity changes how we act and make decisions. NeuroFlux will use a novel neuroimaging framework that I have recently developed and that allows to quantify whether and how strongly endogenous fluctuations in a specific brain area contribute to behaviour. I will use this cutting-edge technology to answer the following questions: (i) How do endogenous fluctuations in the dopaminergic midbrain influence decision making and learning? (ii) How do endogenous fluctuations in the noradrenergic midbrain influence decision making? (iii) Is impulsivity driven by an exaggerated brain-behaviour coupling? To address these questions, I will combine real-time functional MRI with pharmacological manipulations and transdiagnostic studies across three intertwined work packages. NeuroFlux will reveal how the brain’s idle states drive and alter our behaviours. This project will provide a new computational understanding that no longer treats behavioural inconsistency as irrelevant noise but as a meaningful window into the brain’s inner workings. NeuroFlux thus has the potential to revolutionise how we understand human behaviour per se and may reveal the mechanisms underlying impulsive psychiatric disorders.

Mots-clés : decision making,choice inconsistency,endogenous fluctuations,reinforcement learning
Projet ERC : NINI (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Tübingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999375.0 €

Our thoughts and actions result from the activity of functionally specialized neurons in the brain. We have learned a lot about how individual neurons encode sensory, cognitive and motor information. But we lack understanding of how this information comes about. The fundamental, yet rarely addresses, assumption is that this information results from neuronal interactions within local and large-scale brain networks. However, little is known about which specific interactions establish information coding. This is because neuronal interactions and information coding are largely studied in isolation in separate research fields. The key objective of this proposal is to close this gap, and to directly test which neuronal interactions establish information coding. We will employ a novel interdisciplinary approach that tightly integrates human and monkey electrophysiology and that combines several key advances established in our lab. First, we will perform directly comparable human M/EEG and monkey EEG recordings during the same decision-making task. We will employ a common analysis platform to identify local and large-scale interactions underlying information coding in both species. Second, we will characterize the circuit interactions underlying information predictive interactions in monkeys using simultaneous large-scale multi-area microelectrode and EEG recordings in the same behavioral task. We will combine these recordings with manipulative techniques to causally probe the circuit interactions underlying information coding. If successful, this work will constitute a paradigm shift in cognitive neuroscience by linking to largely disconnected fields: neuronal interactions and information coding. Identifying neuronal interactions that underlie neuronal information coding will establish a breakthrough for understanding the neural basis of our thoughts and actions.

Mots-clés : neuronal information,neuronal interactions,primate electrophysiology,oscillations
Projet ERC : REBUILDCNS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Cellular, Developmental and Regenerative Biology
Entité participante : German Cancer Research Center — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : DKFZ
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Over a million different cell types and billions of connections underlie brain function. While the embryonic brain glial progenitors generate this cellular diversity, in the adult brain progenitor competence becomes restricted to generation of few cell types. Thus, any attempt to repair the brain requires knowledge of the rules governing fate decisions within a damaged environment. We have shown that injury activates an inflammatory transcriptional signature in glial progenitors leading to exit from a dormant state. Excitingly, our recent data indicates that injury leads to demethylation of developmental enhancers in these glial progenitors too. In the regenerating zebrafish, activation of enhancers drives a transcriptional regenerative program. Yet, in rodents, despite enhancer demethylation by injury, transcription of a developmental program is missing. The overall goal of this project is to envisage ways to efficiently commission enhancers to re-direct lineage choices of glial progenitors towards re-establishing brain function following injury. Recent technological breakthroughs, including clonal lineage tracing, genome editing, and single cell “omics” combined with mouse genetics and injury models will allow (i) analysis of fate choices in the naïve and injured CNS (ii) study of how the chromatin landscape impacts transcriptional modulation of cell identity (iii) to finally design an integrated manipulation of the epigenome, transcriptome and environment for directed brain repair by endogenous progenitors. We follow a multidisciplinary approach combining cutting edge technology in functional genomics, developmental biology and translational research and leverage on a set of cutting-edge experimental platforms established in my lab and validated protocols that have led to exciting preliminary discoveries. We will provide fundamental knowledge on the mechanisms underlying lineage-decisions of CNS progenitors and open new research lines for treating CNS disorder

Mots-clés : ischemia,clonal analysis,dormant stem cells,interferon,epigenome editing,methylome,single cell rna seq,lineage tfs,injury,neuroinflammation,fate choices,differentiation,regeneration