Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : NovelEco (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Trinity College Dublin — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TCD
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999941.0 €

Novel ecosystems are unmanaged wild areas that are anthropogenic in composition and can never be restored to their original ecological status. Though relatively new, novel ecosystem theory challenges our fundamental relationships with ‘new’ nature and what this means for the future of biodiversity conservation and societal progress. This has resulted in much polarised debate among the ecology community where novel ecosystem theory is highly contested, but there has been no engagement with human communities on the implications of novel ecosystems. The aim of NovelEco is explore novel ecosystem theory as a bridging concept and a conduit for rewilding urban society. NovelEco will be a shift in theoretical exploration and will redefine ‘new’ nature, and how it may be perceived and valued. Urban novel ecosystems have been chosen because they are the most likely spaces where many citizens will encounter what appears to be ‘wild’ nature, particularly people and communities with little financial resources to visit wild nature in a remote setting. Indeed, we know little of the implications of novel wild nature in urban communities. NovelEco is a citizen science project that will measure for the first time the societal attitudes to urban wild spaces by asking citizens to study them. It will first of all engage citizens in co-creating an online instrument to enable ecological data collection within urban novel ecosystems. During data collection the citizen scientists will also record their attitudes to novel ecosystems and reveal whether engagement with them alters their values and perhaps even their environmental behaviour. Comparing these data with the wider community this project will be the first to quantify the social and ecological values of novel ecosystems. NovelEco will refine and redefine the novel ecosystem concept and create a new awareness of the transformative potential of urban wild spaces.

Mots-clés : novel ecosystems,rewilding,attitudes,citizen science
Projet ERC : aQUARiUM (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Tampere University — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499431.0 €

Novel sophisticated technologies that exploit the laws of quantum physics form a cornerstone for the future well-being, economic growth and security of Europe. Here photonic devices have gained a prominent position because the absorption, emission, propagation or storage of a photon is a process that can be harnessed at a fundamental level and render more practical ways to use light for such applications. However, the interaction of light with single quantum systems under ambient conditions is typically very weak and difficult to control. Furthermore, there are quantum phenomena occurring in matter at nanometer length scales that are currently not well understood. These deficiencies have a direct and severe impact on creating a bridge between quantum physics and photonic device technologies. aQUARiUM, precisely address the issue of controlling and enhancing the interaction between few photons and rolled-up nanostructures with ability to be deployed in practical applications. With aQUARiUM, we will take epsilon (permittivity)-near-zero (ENZ) metamaterials into quantum nanophotonics. To this end, we will integrate quantum emitters with rolled-up waveguides, that act as ENZ metamaterial, to expand and redefine the range of light-matter interactions. We will explore the electromagnetic design freedom enabled by the extended modes of ENZ medium, which “stretches” the effective wavelength inside the structure. Specifically, aQUARiUM is built around the following two objectives: (i) Enhancing light-matter interactions with single emitters (Enhance) independent of emitter position. (ii) Enabling collective excitations in dense emitter ensembles (Collect) coherently connect emitters on nanophotonic devices to obtain coherent emission. aQUARiUM aims to create novel light-sources and long-term entanglement generation and beyond. The envisioned outcome of aQUARiUM is a wholly new photonic platform applicable across a diverse range of areas.

Mots-clés : metamaterials,epsilon near zero,quantum nanophotonics,rolled up structures,quantum dots
Projet ERC : REWOCRYPT (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : University of Wuppertal — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : BUW
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1410788.0 €

Novel technologies like Cloud Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, Big Data, Industry 4.0, and the Internet of Things do not only come with a huge demand for practical and efficient cryptosystems, but also with many novel attack surfaces. The security properties required from cryptographic building blocks for these innovative applications go beyond classical security goals. Modern theoretical cryptography has very successfully developed powerful techniques that enable the design and rigorous formal analysis of cryptosystems in theoretical security models. Now that these techniques are readily available, we have to take the next important step: the evolution of these techniques from idealized theoretical settings to the demands of real-world applications. The REWOCRYPT project will tackle this main research challenge at the intersection of theoretical and real-world cryptography. It will provide a solid foundation for the design and mathematically rigorous security analysis of the next generation of cryptosystems that provably meet real-world security requirements and can safely be used to realize secure communication in trustworthy services and products for a modern interconnected society.

Mots-clés : provable security,real world cryptography,cryptographic protocols
Projet ERC : REWOCRYPT (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Paderborn University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 87850.0 €

Novel technologies like Cloud Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, Big Data, Industry 4.0, and the Internet of Things do not only come with a huge demand for practical and efficient cryptosystems, but also with many novel attack surfaces. The security properties required from cryptographic building blocks for these innovative applications go beyond classical security goals. Modern theoretical cryptography has very successfully developed powerful techniques that enable the design and rigorous formal analysis of cryptosystems in theoretical security models. Now that these techniques are readily available, we have to take the next important step: the evolution of these techniques from idealized theoretical settings to the demands of real-world applications. The REWOCRYPT project will tackle this main research challenge at the intersection of theoretical and real-world cryptography. It will provide a solid foundation for the design and mathematically rigorous security analysis of the next generation of cryptosystems that provably meet real-world security requirements and can safely be used to realize secure communication in trustworthy services and products for a modern interconnected society.

Mots-clés : provable security,real world cryptography,cryptographic protocols
Projet ERC : DIFFOP (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1260000.0 €

Nowadays, extensive collection and storage of massive data sets have become a routine in multiple disciplines and in everyday life. These large amounts of intricate data often make data samples arithmetic and basic comparisons problematic, raising new challenges to traditional data analysis objectives such as filtering and prediction. Furthermore, the availability of such data constantly pushes the boundaries of data analysis to new emerging domains, ranging from neuronal and social network analysis to multimodal sensor fusion. The combination of evolved data and new domains drives a fundamental change in the field of data analysis. Indeed, many classical model-based techniques have become obsolete since their models do not embody the richness of the collected data. Today, one notable avenue of research is the development of nonlinear techniques that transition from data to creating representations, without deriving models in closed-form. The vast majority of such existing data-driven methods operate directly on the data, a hard task by itself when the data are large and elaborated. The goal of this research is to develop a fundamentally new methodology for high dimensional data analysis with diffusion operators, making use of recent transformative results in manifold and geometry learning. More concretely, shifting the focus from processing the data samples themselves and considering instead structured data through the lens of diffusion operators will introduce new powerful “handles” to data, capturing their complexity efficiently. We will study the basic theory behind this nonlinear analysis, develop new operators for this purpose, and devise efficient data-driven algorithms. In addition, we will explore how our approach can be leveraged for devising efficient solutions to a broad range of open real-world data analysis problems, involving intrinsic representations, sensor fusion, time-series analysis, network connectivity inference, and domain adaptation.

Mots-clés : diffusion geometry,manifold learning,dimensionality reduction,kernel methods
Projet ERC : NPC-BUILD (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: Biological Mechanisms, Structures and Functions
Entité participante : Medical University of Vienna — Pays : Autriche — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2178488.0 €

Nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) are gatekeepers at the nuclear envelope, mediating traffic between the nucleus and cytoplasm. Unlike simpler protein channels that insert into a single lipid bilayer, NPCs can remodel the outer and inner nuclear membranes to form a specialized pore in the nuclear envelope. High-resolution models of the symmetric NPC core have transformed our understanding of NPC architecture. In contrast, we know little about the NPC basket, a prominent structure on the nucleoplasmic side of NPCs. This lack of knowledge is salient, because the basket impacts on transport, DNA repair, and chromatin activity. Notably, the basket was recently found to play a key role in shaping the nuclear membrane, which is critical for NPC biogenesis. Studying the NPC basket is challenging because of its size, intricate architecture, structural flexibility and embedding in a membrane. Yet, knowledge of the architecture of the NPC basket is central to understanding how it influences gene expression, and operates in membrane remodeling in synergy with the NPC core. I propose to develop new experimental tools that will enable a structural analysis of the basket in its membrane environment. This will provide unprecedented insight into the function of this enigmatic part of the NPC.

Mots-clés : nuclear pore complex,nuclear envelope,biochemical reconstitution,membrane biology
Projet ERC : QUINCY (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Nutrient availability plays a pivotal role in the response of terrestrial ecosystems to increasing atmospheric CO2 and climate change. The global role of nutrients is only poorly understood quantitatively, limiting the predictive understanding of terrestrial biosphere - climate feedbacks. The first generation of global nutrient-carbon cycle models shows strongly diverging estimates of the nutrient effect, resulting from lacking integration of ecosystem observations and fundamental uncertainties in the representation of governing processes. The objective of QUINCY is to clarify the role of the interacting terrestrial nitrogen and phosphorus cycles and their effects on terrestrial C allocation and residence times as well as terrestrial water fluxes. QUINCY will create a novel, predictive framework founded on the principle of resource optimisation, shifting the paradigm of terrestrial biosphere modelling towards an active biological control of matter flows. QUINCY’s main themes are (i) the effects of nutrient availability on plant photosynthesis and respiration, explicitly taking the energy requirement of nutrient acquisition into account, and (ii) the effects of vegetation-soil interactions, namely rhizosphere processes, on plant nutrient availability and soil C turnover. To corroborate these theoretical concepts, QUINCY will synthesise existing and ongoing ecosystem monitoring and manipulation studies. To specifically test emerging hypotheses on the effects of rhizosphere priming on soil C storage and plant nutrition - and to provide currently lacking data for soil-vegetation models - QUINCY will establish a tree mesocosm, elevated CO2 experiment. The novel model concepts will be consistently integrated to form a new general terrestrial biosphere model. For the first time, QUINCY will be able to address the multiway interactions of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and water cycles globally in a theoretically well-founded way commensurate with ecosystem observations.

Mots-clés : nutrient cycles,soil vegetation interaction
Projet ERC : OCONTSOLAR (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Universidad de Sevilla — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

OCONTSOLAR aims to develop new control methods to use mobile sensors mounted on drones and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) as an integral part of the control systems. Sensors mounted on vehicles have been used for surveillance and for gathering information, however these mobile sensors have not been used so far as an integral part of control systems. Solar power plants will be used as a case study, with the aim of optimizing their operation using spatial irradiance estimations and predictions. Many results will be applicable to other systems such as traffic control in highways and cities, energy management in buildings, micro-grids, agriculture (irrigation and plague control) and flood control. The main objectives and challenges are: 1. Methods to control mobile sensor fleets and integrate them as an essential part of the overall control systems. 2. Spatially distributed solar irradiance estimation methods using a variable fleet of sensors mounted on drones and UGVs. 3. New model predictive control (MPC) algorithms that use mobile solar sensor estimations and predictions to yield safer and more efficient operation of the plants allowing the effective integration of solar energy in systems delivering energy to grids or other systems while satisfying production commitments. OCONTSOLAR includes proofs of concepts by implementation on the Solar Platform of Almeria and on a solar air conditioning plant installed at the host institution.

Mots-clés : model predictive control,mobile sensors,solar energy
Projet ERC : ONE-MIX (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication 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 : 3210000.0 €

ONE-MIX proposes to develop single-source dual-comb lasers for mid-infrared (2-5 μm wavelength) spectroscopy, potentially enabling many new applications in science and industry, such as environment, safety, pharma, and health. This proposal extends our recent demonstration of a dual-comb MIXSEL (Modelocked Integrated eXternal-cavity Surface Emitting Lasers) in the near-infrared, validated by measuring weak water absorption at 968 nm. Many more relevant gas absorption lines, however, are in the mid-infrared, where sensitivities of parts-per-billion can be achieved. Dual-comb mid-IR spectroscopy applications are currently limited by the cost, complexity, and size of conventional optical comb systems, based on two modelocked lasers with four active stabilization loops. The single-source dual-comb MIXSEL, however, substantially reduces the complexity of existing systems to a single compact free-running laser. In comparison to other competing new approaches such as quantum cascade lasers or micro resonator combs, the MIXSEL provides substantially more power per comb line with low linewidth and noise, and is ideally suited for a 1 to 5 GHz comb spacing, which is optimal for many molecular spectroscopy applications, allowing for fast, accurate, and sensitive absorption measurements. This proposal leverages our know-how in MIXSEL design combined with III-V semiconductor epitaxy to demonstrate this new class of lasers in the mid-IR, enabling simpler, lower-cost systems with sufficient speed and sensitivity for many relevant and commercially interesting applications in the 2 to 5 μm spectral region, such as CO2 , CH4, or NOx trace gas detection. We propose to extend the near-IR MIXSELs to the mid-IR by combining two validated semiconductor approaches – using type-II gain quantum wells combined with a type- I saturable absorber quantum wells, fabricated with existing GaSb (gallium-antimonide) molecular beam epitaxy systems operated out of the FIRST lab at ETH Zurich.

Mots-clés : passive mode locking,surface emitting semicondutor lasers,mid infrared molecular spectroscopy,frequency metrology,optical frequency combs
Projet ERC : TransGen RNA (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : Max Planck Society — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : MPG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 413860.0 €

Obesity and T2D affect large populations and cause a decline in life expectancy if untreated. The pandemic proportion of obesity and inaptitude of anti-obesity approaches reflect our limited understanding of its complex environmental and genetic etiology. Genome-wide association studies revealed that disease-associated risk variants are often situated in those 98% of the genome not encoding for proteins. This noncoding genomic space yet does not reflect ‘Junk DNA’ but gives rise to >10,000 noncoding RNAs like microRNAs and long, noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) that implicated in control of glucose metabolism and energy homeostasis also by the applicant (Kornfeld et al. Nature 2013). LncRNAs were paraphrased as 'Dark matter of the genome' due to their tissue-specific and dynamic expression that contrast their poorly understood role in gene regulation. In the 1st part of this proposal, we ask if lncRNAs regulate glucose metabolism and are involved in the obesity-associated dysregulation of insulin signaling in the liver, the major glucoregulatory organ in mammals. Using RNA-Seq and novel lncRNA prediction algorithms, we observed that obesity alters expression of 28 annotated and 15 hitherto unknown lncRNAs in two mouse models of obesity. To identify lncRNAs causally controlling glucose metabolism, we established a siRNA screening system that allows functional interrogation of >650 lncRNAs. These in vitro findings serve as entry for the generation of lncRNA knockout mice that are metabolically phenotyped. In the 2nd part, we hypothesize that germline ncRNAs could control the transgenerational consequences of paternal obesity as shown for lower organisms. This builds upon unpublished findings from our lab showing that obesity profoundly changes expression of germline ncRNAs. In-vitro fertilization and intergenerational breedings will trace the legacy of paternal obesity across generations and reveal ncRNAs involved in this ‘Lamarckian’ control of glucose metabolism.
Projet ERC : TransGen RNA (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Physiology in Health, Disease and Ageing
Entité participante : University of Southern Denmark — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : SDU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 930637.5 €

Obesity and T2D affect large populations and cause a decline in life expectancy if untreated. The pandemic proportion of obesity and inaptitude of anti-obesity approaches reflect our limited understanding of its complex environmental and genetic etiology. Genome-wide association studies revealed that disease-associated risk variants are often situated in those 98% of the genome not encoding for proteins. This noncoding genomic space yet does not reflect ‘Junk DNA’ but gives rise to >10,000 noncoding RNAs like microRNAs and long, noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) that implicated in control of glucose metabolism and energy homeostasis also by the applicant (Kornfeld et al. Nature 2013). LncRNAs were paraphrased as 'Dark matter of the genome' due to their tissue-specific and dynamic expression that contrast their poorly understood role in gene regulation. In the 1st part of this proposal, we ask if lncRNAs regulate glucose metabolism and are involved in the obesity-associated dysregulation of insulin signaling in the liver, the major glucoregulatory organ in mammals. Using RNA-Seq and novel lncRNA prediction algorithms, we observed that obesity alters expression of 28 annotated and 15 hitherto unknown lncRNAs in two mouse models of obesity. To identify lncRNAs causally controlling glucose metabolism, we established a siRNA screening system that allows functional interrogation of >650 lncRNAs. These in vitro findings serve as entry for the generation of lncRNA knockout mice that are metabolically phenotyped. In the 2nd part, we hypothesize that germline ncRNAs could control the transgenerational consequences of paternal obesity as shown for lower organisms. This builds upon unpublished findings from our lab showing that obesity profoundly changes expression of germline ncRNAs. In-vitro fertilization and intergenerational breedings will trace the legacy of paternal obesity across generations and reveal ncRNAs involved in this ‘Lamarckian’ control of glucose metabolism.