Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : ENERGY ETHICS (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : University of St Andrews — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498052.0 €

In October 2014, the Chairman of the Bank of England Mark Carney warned that many oil reserves cannot be developed. If so, they would contribute so significantly to increased greenhouse gas emissions that international targets to avoid dangerous levels of global warming would be exceeded. However, stock valuations of oil companies assume that all proven and probable reserves can indeed be produced. Amounting to a potentially enormous debt overhang, the Bank of England has launched an enquiry into the threat of a crisis similar to the subprime mortgage crash, known as the ‘carbon bubble’. This looming crisis with its ‘stranded assets’ raises urgent questions about the conflicting dynamics between finance moralities and environmental politics at a time of oil dependency and an uncertain climate future. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork with oil companies in the US and Norway, energy analysts in the UK and the US, and fossil fuel divestment movements in Germany and the UK, ENERGY ETHICS will develop a new framework for understanding the relationship between oil, money and climate change that counters the prevalent tendency to interpret these issues through aggregated normative systemic analysis only. Taking its starting point in people’s own perceptions of and direct involvement in the oil economy, it will offer a major step forward in understanding how people in positions of influence within the oil economy make financial and ethical valuations of oil. This will contribute to public stakeholder dialogue and wider transdisciplinary engagements. Focusing on oil and its financialization, ENERGY ETHICS has three main research objectives: 1) to examine how people positioned strategically in relation to the global production of oil conceptualise and influence the oil market; 2) to understand the linkages and frictions between these different valuations of oil; and 3) to investigate how oil valuations relate to political reforms and new climate economic initiatives.
Projet ERC : PROTECHT (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Politecnico di Milano — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : POLIMI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In a global world, identity frauds are an important issue to ensure security throughout the EU and its member states. Improved protection systems have made more difficult counterfeiting ID documents, but all currently adopted solutions are potentially subject to fraud. This is the reason why radically novel security strategies are required to ensure security for the next decades. The PROTECHT project (Providing RObust high TECHnology Tags based on linear carbon structures) aims at developing advanced knowledge-based anticounterfeiting tags based on polymer nanocomposites containing novel carbon nanostructures. The unique optical response of such systems allows to design security tags, layers and fibers embedding barcodes to be implemented in ID documents as well as banknotes. These barcodes can be produced through low cost manufacturing techniques and thus bear strong commercial potential even for the implementation in low income countries. This proof of concept is devoted to the exploration of the development path to be pursued to take the unique PROTECHT technology to the market.

Mots-clés : security tags,id protection  novel nanocomposites,carbon nanostructures
Projet ERC : SO-ReCoDi (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Bocconi University — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1971805.0 €

In a recovery problem, we are interested in recovering structure from data that contains a mix of combinatorial structure and random noise. In a robust recovery problem, the data may contain adversarial perturbations as well. A series of recent results in theoretical computer science has led to algorithms based on the convex optimization technique of Semidefinite Programming for several recovery problems motivated by unsupervised machine learning. Can those algorithms be made robust? Sparsifiers are compressed representations of graphs that speed up certain algorithms. The recent proof of the Kadison-Singer conjecture by Marcus, Spielman and Srivastava (MSS) shows that certain kinds of sparsifiers exist, but the proof does not provide an explicit construction. Dynamics and population protocols are simple models of distributed computing that were introduced to study sensor networks and other lightweight distributed systems, and have also been used to model naturally occurring networks. What can and cannot be computed in such models is largely open. We propose an ambitious unifying approach to go beyond the state of the art in these three domains, and provide: robust recovery algorithms for the problems mentioned above; a new connection between sparsifiers and the Szemeredi Regularity Lemma and explicit constructions of the sparsifiers resulting from the MSS work; and an understanding of the ability of simple distributed algorithms to solve community detection problems and to deal with noise and faults. The unification is provided by a common underpinning of spectral methods, random matrix theory, and convex optimization. Such tools are used in technically similar but conceptually very different ways in the three domains. By pursuing these goals together, we will make it more likely that an idea that is natural and simple in one context will translate to an idea that is deep and unexpected in another, increasing the chances of a breakthrough.

Mots-clés : spectral graph theory,semidefinite programming,robust recovery,graph sparsifier
Projet ERC : IRiMaS (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : IRCAM
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 58874.0 €

In an age when technology is revolutionizing the ways in which music is made and distributed, this project proposes correspondingly to transform approaches to musicology, moving from a primarily fixed, text-based approach to one that incorporates as an integral feature the interactive and aural. It brings skills and expertise from music technology to assist in the development of research strategies and software to enable musicological research to engage more directly with sound. It will pioneer a ground-breaking approach to music research in which dynamic interaction with sound is fundamental and music’s temporal and transient nature are central to research investigations and their dissemination, presenting a significant conceptual challenge to the traditional textual bias of much musical research and leading to new enhanced modes of musicological knowledge. Unlike current Digital Musicology, rather than using software primarily to extract quantized data, IRiMaS facilitates research through dynamic interactive engagement with sound. The interactive approach will be developed in the context of three Case Studies in specific areas where prioritizing the aural is of particular significance. The Case Studies will focus on Spectralism in the field of Contemporary ‘Art’ Music; Tracking the Creative Process in Free Improvisation; and Folk Songs in Performance in the field of Ethnomusicology. Each study will produce substantial ground-breaking musicological outcomes in the form of software packages (as is appropriate to the nature of the project) and associated articles discussing the approach taken. They will also assist in working towards the development of models and generic tools to help establish the wider adoption of this interactive approach. Building on the PI's previous experience in related areas, researchers from musicological and technical backgrounds will come together to help realize these ambitious aims.

Mots-clés : musicology,music technology,music analysis,contemporary music,ethnomusicology
Projet ERC : AdaptiveResponse (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Groningen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RUG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

In an era of rapid climate change there is a pressing need to understand whether and how organisms are able to adapt to novel environments. Such understanding is hampered by a major divide in the life sciences. Disciplines like systems biology or neurobiology make rapid progress in unravelling the mechanisms underlying the responses of organisms to their environment, but this knowledge is insufficiently integrated in eco-evolutionary theory. Current eco-evolutionary models focus on the response patterns themselves, largely neglecting the structures and mechanisms producing these patterns. Here I propose a new, mechanism-oriented framework that views the architecture of adaptation, rather than the resulting responses, as the primary target of natural selection. I am convinced that this change in perspective will yield fundamentally new insights, necessitating the re-evaluation of many seemingly well-established eco-evolutionary principles. My aim is to develop a comprehensive theory of the eco-evolutionary causes and consequences of the architecture underlying adaptive responses. In three parallel lines of investigation, I will study how architecture is shaped by selection, how evolved response strategies reflect the underlying architecture, and how these responses affect the eco-evolutionary dynamics and the capacity to adapt to novel conditions. All three lines have the potential of making ground-breaking contributions to eco-evolutionary theory, including: the specification of evolutionary tipping points; resolving the puzzle that real organisms evolve much faster than predicted by current theory; a new and general explanation for the evolutionary emergence of individual variation; and a framework for studying the evolution of learning and other general-purpose mechanisms. By making use of concepts from information theory and artificial intelligence, the project will also introduce various methodological innovations.

Mots-clés : architecture of adaptation,evolvability,individual variation,norm of reaction,phenotypic,plasticity,bet hedging,epigenetics,gene regulatory network,neural network,social evolution
Projet ERC : collectiveQCD (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Lund University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

In collisions of heavy nuclei at collider energies, for instance at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the energy density is so high that an equilibrated Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), an exotic state of matter consisting of deconfined quarks and gluons, is formed. In proton-proton (p+p) collisions, on the other hand, the density of produced particles is low. The traditional view on such reactions is that final state particles are free and do not rescatter. This picture is challenged by recent LHC data, which found features in p+p collisions that are indicative of collective behaviour and/or the formation of a hot and dense system. These findings have been taken as signs of QGP formation in p+p reactions. Such an interpretation is complicated by the fact that jets, which are the manifestation of very energetic quarks and gluons, are quenched in heavy ion collisions, but appear to be unmodified in p+p reactions. This is puzzling because collectivity and jet quenching are caused by the same processes. So far there is no consensus about the interpretation of these results, which is also due to a lack of suitable tools. It is the objective of this proposal to address the question whether there are collective effects in p+p collisions. To this end two models capable of describing all relevant aspects of p+p and heavy ion collisions will be developed. They will be obtained by extending a successful description of p+p to heavy ion reactions and vice versa. The answer to these questions will either clarify the long-standing problem how collectivity emerges from fundamental interactions, or it will necessitate qualitative changes to our interpretation of collective phenomena in p+p and/or heavy ion collisions. The PI is in a unique position to accomplish this goal, as she has spent her entire career working on different aspects of p+p and heavy ion collisions. The group in Lund is the ideal host, as it is very active in developing alternative interpretations of the data.
Projet ERC : ELONGAN (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems Engineering
Entité participante : Spanish National Research Council — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1480880.0 €

In contrast to human or rodent embryos, ungulate embryos do not implant into the uterus right after blastocyst hatching. Before implantation, the hatched ungulate blastocyst must undergo dramatic morphological changes characterized by cell differentiation, proliferation and migration processes leading to the development of extra-embryonic membranes, the appearance of a flat embryonic disc and gastrulation. This prolonged preimplantation development is termed conceptus elongation and deficiencies on this process constitute the most frequent cause of reproductive failures in ungulates, including the 4 most relevant mammalian livestock species in Europe. The purpose of this project is to elucidate the factors involved in conceptus elongation by gene editing and in vitro culture approaches. A first objective will be to identify key genes involved in differentiation processes by RNA-seq analysis of different embryo derivatives from bovine conceptuses at different developmental stages. Subsequently, the function of some of the genes identified as well as others known to play a crucial role in mouse development or putatively involved in embryo-maternal interactions will be assessed. For this aim, bovine embryos in which a candidate gene has been ablated (KO) will be generated by CRISPR and transferred to recipient females to assess in vivo the function of such particular gene on conceptus development. A second set of experiments pursue the development of an in vitro system for conceptus elongation that would bypass the requirement for in vivo experiments. For this aim we will perform metabolomics and proteomics analyses of bovine uterine fluid at different stages and will use these data to rationally develop a culture system able to sustain conceptus development. The knowledge generated by this project will serve to develop strategies to enhance farming profitability by reducing embryonic loss and to understand Developmental Biology questions unanswered by the mouse model.

Mots-clés : crispr,bovine,embryo
Projet ERC : POLEVPOP (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Antwerp — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UAntwerp
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499062.0 €

In democracies, policies are expected to be responsive to public opinion. Extant research showed that responsiveness is selective. It varies across issues, time and countries. Yet, how come policies vary in their responsiveness has not received a satisfying answer. POLEVPOP formulates and examines a novel answer to the puzzle why policy responsiveness varies. Its core argument holds that politicians evaluate public opinion and let their actions—in line with public opinion or going against it—depend on their appraisal. When public opinion is evaluated negatively, it has no effect on what politicians do; that it is evaluated positively increases the chance that politicians act congruently. Politicians’ appraisal of public opinion has been completely overlooked as a mechanism bringing about responsive representation. Considering it a core factor POLEVPOP examines three matters: (1) which criteria politicians use to appraise public opinion; (2) how, depending on the opinion content of the message, the channel through which the opinion is conveyed and the group from which it comes, concrete public opinion signals are evaluated; and, (3) which effect these evaluations have on politicians’ political action. The central expectation is that public opinion is evaluated by politicians based on a consistent and common scoreboard. For instance, opinion signals are rated based on their representativity and underlying public opinion is evaluated on its quality and its intensity. The project tackles these matters drawing on a comparative study in eight different countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Israel, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden). In two consecutive rounds of data gathering, a large sample of politicians is surveyed and interviewed, and they are subjected to a series of survey-embedded experiments. To put politicians’ behavior in perspective, their answers are compared to parallel citizen surveys in all countries.

Mots-clés : representation,policy responsiveness,politicians,inequality
Projet ERC : SUMOblock (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : CERCA Institution — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CERCA;I-CERCA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

In eukaryotes, SUMO (Small Ubiquitin Modifier) conjugation to proteins is an essential process that regulates many aspects of cell biology. Defects in SUMO conjugation have been associated to cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and others, raising a great interest in developing novel drugs for inhibiting SUMO conjugation. Specifically, recent reports have pointed to a high dependency on an active SUMO conjugation by Myc-overexpressing cancers. Consequently, SUMO conjugation has become a non-oncogene addiction target of special relevance since the oncogenic Myc is nondruggable. Based on the results obtained by our group, we have developed a novel assay for identifying efficient SUMO conjugation inhibitors, which could lead to the identification of novel therapeutic drugs. The main outcome that we expect to obtain from this project is the identification of a SUMOylation inhibitor that will be patent protected. Initial steps towards the valorization of the identified product will be taken, and available commercialization opportunities will be carefully analyzed for entering into the next steps of drug development, including preclinical and clinical studies. The fact that SUMOylation may be a key element in almost 70% of cancer types due to its involvement in the Myc pathway makes the search for hit drug candidates an enterprise worth taking, which could benefit millions of people worldwide.

Mots-clés : peptidomimetic,sumo,cancer,therapeutic drug
Projet ERC : Minor Universality (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Saarland University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999310.0 €

In her TED Talk 2009 the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made an argument on „the danger of a single story“. She maintained that only plural narrations do justice to the complexity of humankind: „Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.“ Thus narrations have the power to produce a unifying experience of equal humanity. Minor Universality aims to make a substantial contribution to the debate on the problem of universality after Western universalism. Indeed, the question of how universality can be produced is crucial in times characterised by a double relativistic signature: the necessary critique of Occidental universalism, and identitarian assertions. But how can a shared human horizon be addressed? Here general narratology provides a crucial twist: if it is an anthropological characteristic of the narration to make a claim about the world as a whole starting from a singular setting, narrations create ways of extending concrete contexts towards universality. This can be analyzed in literature, in an epistemic field beyond the book and in social practices being part of global migrations. In contrast to the conceptual debate on World Literature, which addresses the question through canons and legitimacies, this project shifts the debate to narratological problems of world production: with which aesthetic means do contemporary cultural productions such as literatures, films and social media, literary festivals, architectures and museums, open up local settings so as to produce a new sensuous, embodied or intellectual awareness of universality? Re-expanding the material and medial turns to processes of consciousness and agency, the project is set to have a general impact in comparative literature and cultural studies. It will explore new literacies about the role of narration for civil imaginaries of our world and provide ways to address universality in debates about justice and legitimacy within world society.

Mots-clés : general narratology,aesthetics,cultural theory,cultural anthropology,literature and architecture,museum studies,art based research,embodiment,re mediation,multilingualism