Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : Correlated_Disorder (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université de Varsovie — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3500000.0 €

This proposal aims to advance the modeling of disordered correlated-electron materials by developing novel ab-initio quantum chemistry methods that challenge the prevailing dominance of density functional theory (DFT) in this area. By harnessing recent breakthroughs in Green's function techniques, machine learning, and advanced mathematical models, we propose a comprehensive suite of tools for predicting spectral and thermodynamic properties of disordered materials. The methods developed in this proposal, based on finite temperature Green’s function approaches, will enable accurate and cost-effective simulations of disordered systems, overcoming the limitations of current approaches which rely predominantly on DFT. The proposed techniques will facilitate the study of a wide range of materials where disorder is a key factor, such as high entropy alloys, superconductors, and catalytic surfaces. Additionally, we will develop machine learning models trained on ab-initio Green's function data and integrate them with ab-initio molecular dynamics to study dynamic processes in disordered systems. Finally, we will also deliver tools for learning material specific DFT functionals from the ab-initio Green’s function data providing an insight into the functional design. This project aims to open new frontiers in quantum chemistry and materials science, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations and providing a foundation for the next generation of computational tools. The anticipated outcomes include enhanced predictive capabilities for disordered systems and improved insights into the design of DFT functionals, contributing significantly to the fundamental scientific understanding of correlated materials.

Mots-clés : post dft methods,electronic structure calculations,quantum chemistry calculations,strongly correlated quantum chemistry methods,quantum chemistry methods for solids
Projet ERC : FASTHUMANNEURON (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : Université libre d'Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

How human neuronal circuits are organized to produce human cognition is poorly understood. We recently showed (Nature, 2021) that human neocortex contains neuron types not found in other mammals. My preliminary data show that large, human-specialized transcriptomically-defined cell types (t-types) have surprisingly fast processing of synaptic input to action potential output properties. Other human t-types show much slower input-output properties more akin to average mammalian neurons. These fast human-specialized t-types are selectively vulnerable in prevalent human brain disorders with cognitive decline. Mechanisms of fast input-output processing are unknown. We also do not know whether fast-processing neuron t-types form preferential synaptic networks dedicated to fast cortical processing, increasing cortical computational power to support human cognition. Here, I will test this novel concept addressing four fundamental questions: What mechanisms drive fast cellular input-output properties? What mechanisms underlie non-linear dendritic processing of synaptic input? How is coupling between distal dendritic synapses and soma controlled? Do human neuron t-types with fast input-output properties form preferential synaptic networks? These questions can only now be answered with our recent transcriptomic, morpho-electric Patch-seq analysis of adult human neuron t-types. Combined with dendritic and multi-patch recordings, molecular interventions, photonic approaches, and computational modeling, I will provide an unprecedented quantitative understanding of fast cellular computation mechanisms in human cortex supporting human cognition. First preliminary data suggest that biophysical properties of human-specialized neuron t-types and synapses are distinct. Understanding human cortical organization of fast input-output neurons provides a novel framework to understand how selective loss of neuron t-types in human brain disorders gives rise to cognitive decline.

Mots-clés : human neurons,synapses,dendrites,neuronal computation,single cell rna sequencing,cortical microcircuits
Projet ERC : ROBOT-BOND (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université libre d'Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3195850.0 €

Robots are rapidly entering the human arena as social entities to support education and healthcare where human resources fall short. The ease and naturalness with which humans interact with social robots forebode a high potential but also present new scientific challenges. I see a paradox of nót wanting to emulate humans in robots but still create the human feel in connectedness. Ample research has been done in engineering, design and computer sciences, yet, the question from a human perspective is understudied: Why would one be willing to befriend such a thing? While building affective relationships is crucial to prolonged human-robot interaction, no encompassing theory exists that explains how, why, and when humans would bond with robots. My aim is to fill this knowledge gap and unravel the paradox, by bridging the fragmented multi-disciplinary knowledge in a novel cross-disciplinary and integrative model of Human-Robot Bonding, explaining how and why people differ in relating to robots and when robots can (not) provide personal support. My model identifies key propositions underlying bonding with robots and elucidates how people process reality- and media-based information, explicate the role of emotional states, relevant needs, and affordances, empirically examined through varying communication contexts. My advantageous multi-method approach pairs fundamental with in-situ research, tests my model in lab-studies (WP1) and the real world: in education (WP2&3), healthcare (WP4), and therapy (WP5). It uniquely compares autonomous social robots in different roles in longitudinal designs with new psychometrically sound measurement devices and Bayesian statistics, to bring required methodological innovations to the field. Results complement and integrate current perspectives on robots, enrich the understanding of communication, and has potential ground-breaking implications for science ánd society (WP6), envisioning expansive applicability of communication robots.

Mots-clés : social robots media psychology mediated communication human robot communication
Projet ERC : Tree2Globe (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth System Science
Entité participante : Wageningen University & Research — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : WUR
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 33738.0 €

Three trillion trees lie behind a carbon sink that has taken up about 30% of humanity’s carbon emissions over recent decades. Yet whether we can continue to rely on this huge natural subsidy is highly uncertain. The sink emerges from systematic perturbations in the dynamics of growth, death and establishment of individual trees. Taken together across the forest, these lead to the net uptake or release of carbon. Both theory and recent observations point towards profound changes in these dynamics of the world’s forests being underway, potentially causing the sink to saturate and decline. But our ability to accurately assess and quantify such on-going changes worldwide is severely limited. The reasons for this are twofold: a lack of standardised measurements of the sink and the dynamics that cause it across the world, and the difficulty of modelling the dynamics of trillions of trees. Tree2Globe solves both of these limitations, using a novel model-data assimilation approach to consistently integrate the dynamics of millions of observations of individual trees collected under disparate protocols worldwide and link together this information in space and time based on physically-consistent principles. The resulting global forest reanalysis system will (a) provide a step-change in capability to make accurate and timely assessment of the rates of tree growth, death and establishment globally and (b) quantify how these combine with the legacies of past land-use and disturbance to explain the size, location and trajectory of the global carbon sink in trees over the period 1990-2027. This will enable us to make a definitive assessment of whether hypothesised changes in forest dynamics and the resulting carbon sink are coming to pass. This unique insight into how the world’s forests and their contribution to climate change mitigation are changing will provide key information to help guide the world to meet its net zero emissions policy commitments.

Mots-clés : forest carbon sink forest dynamics reanalysis vegetation modelling
Projet ERC : MEDAPP (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université du Pays basque — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 60000.0 €

The Islamic conquest of Iberia in the 8th century brought in profound changes in the political, social and economic realms that transformed the everyday life of local rural and urban communities. Technological innovations and the arrival of new crops impacted their agriculture, diet and culinary practices. Plants were present in almost all aspects of medieval people’s ordinary lives (food, crafts, medicines, etc.). However, they have been commonly sidelined in discussions of the past. Most of what we know about plants in this multicultural period in Iberia is based on a limited number of archaeobotanical studies and on written sources, which despite their undeniable value they often reflect issues related to the elites. By contrast, archaeology, and more specifically archaeobotany and their associated science-based techniques, are placed in an extraordinary position for approaching issues related to plant production, processing, preparation and consumption, and how these connect to broader societal changes. By integrating archaeobotany and written sources, as well as applying ground-breaking techniques (plant genomics and food remains analyses), MEDAPP aims to disentangle what range of plants were used in Medieval Iberia (6th-11th CE); where new species came from and when were they introduced, who brought them, and how people engaged with them through different practices. The project sets a new holistic agenda for understanding the impact of the new political, economic and social system on agriculture, eating habits and culinary practices of Iberian medieval communities. This project aims at providing a step-change in the way agriculture, plant production, preparation and consumption have been studied in Medieval Iberia. It represents a golden opportunity to fill the voids of texts, looking for clues in the archaeobotanical record; an occasion to approach, with a suite of scientific and innovative methods, the unspoken information contained in these silences.

Mots-clés : archaeobotany,written sources,islamic,food,identity,storage,food remains,isotopes,genetics,
Projet ERC : SUBLIMINAL (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université Eberhard Karl de Tübingen — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2483750.0 €

Central to this research project is the observation that there are regularitiesand systematicities in the spoken language that escape our awareness, that are shielded from us by linguistic traditions and cultural conventions embodied in writing systems, but that nevertheless are detected by our brains, albeit subliminally, and used to optimize lexical processing. Philosophers such as Emmanual Kant, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and more recently the cognitive scientist Hoffman, have called attention to how our perception of reality is shaped by and filtered through our minds and bodies. According to Hoffman, mathematically, fitness beats truth: our perceptions of the world are tuned to our survival. Writing systems are culturally evolved technologies that also hide from our eyes and ears the truth about what we really hear and say. Obviously, in order to work, writing systems must abstract away from the full richness of the spoken word. However, many features of our speech that are masked by writing systems, are nevertheless exploited by our cognitive system when we listen or speak. For native speakers, mismatches between speech and writing are relatively unproblematic. For second language acquisition, however, mismatches can render learning unnecessarily difficult.  The research programme for which I am requesting funding addresses this issue for Mandarin Chinese. Two kinds of mismatches will be investigated, using state-of-the-art methods in computational modeling, distributional semantics, and statistical analysis: subliminal mismatches between what written words are supposed to sound like, and how they are actually spoken, and subliminal mismatches between how the writing system is supposed to work, and how it actually functions and, as a semiotic system of its own, influences thought. These investigations will inform the applied goal of this project: developing ways to enhance vocabulary learning of Mandarin Chinese as a second language.

Mots-clés : phonetics,corpus linguistics,mental lexicon
Projet ERC : TAtypic (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université Jagellonne — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2253125.0 €

Quantum theory, confirmed in numerous sophisticated experiments, is widely believed to describe our world at the micro scale. It is thus legitimate to investigate, which structures are allowed by quantum theory, and which of them can potentially be relevant for developments of quantum technologies. The basic notion of a quantum state – a mathematical tool used to compute probabilities, characterizing the outcomes of a quantum measurement – is of a primary importance. Furthermore, one analyses quantum maps, which describe how quantum states evolve in time, and quantum supermaps, representing evolution in the space of quantum maps. Assuming that the number of outcomes is finite, all these sets form convex bodies embedded in a real space of a suitable dimension. The case, if the physical system is composed of several subsystems, is of a special interest, as one can analyse correlations and entanglement between subsystems.  Main goal of this project is to investigate properties of typical quantum states, maps and supermaps, and to identify distinguished, atypical structures with extreme properties, useful for processing of quantum information. We will search for new constructions of absolutely maximally entangled multipartite states, which imply existence of quantum error correcting codes, novel schemes of mutually unbiased bases and symmetric informationally complete generalized quantum measurements, which offer optimal measurement accuracy. Moreover, we plan to analyze quantum supermaps with distinguished properties, and study, how these structures behave under decoherence, as quantum features become gradually suppressed. To put all these structures of the same footing we are going to use generalizations of the Choi-Jamiołkowski isomorphism, which relates quantum maps with quantum states of the extended system, and apply the theory of random matrices to elucidate differences between typical objects with generic features and the atypical ones with desired properties.

Mots-clés : quantum entanglement,quantum information,quantum combinatorics,random matrices,quantum maps
Projet ERC : VOICES (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université Jagellonne — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2426800.0 €

VOICES offers a new, large-scale perspective on the history of song-performing cultures of South India in premodern and colonial contexts. More than a song, pattu stands for a multitude of interrelated constellations of song traditions - a galaxy of regional song cultures. One region alone (Kerala) boasts nearly eighty song genres, many of epic proportions: from songs of heroes and place through verses to awake a deity or activate a curse, to songs of ecstatic praise. Most are embedded in recurring ritual events, linked to matrilineal order and performers of subaltern roots. Some connect to minorities: Christians, Muslims, Jews. Pattu invokes practices of deploying skills stored in songs to cure diseases, restore prosperity, empower listeners, or otherwise affect reality. From the 13th c. CE on, the song genres influenced literary forms as trans-medial textuality and cultural technology to store knowledge and generate trust. This rich universe remains understudied. Building a digital archive, VOICES will explore ways in which the sonic ecumene of singing the local in shared imaginary of the South proved resilient over centuries and embraced two languages of prestige: Tamil and Sanskrit. We shall study ontologies of singing the body, the suffering and deliverance, the humane and divine, movement and restraint in this unique subaltern record. We aim at a new understanding of the processes of forging identities at the crossroad of the literary and folk by mapping genre distribution, narrative patterns, transmission modes and cultural economies while identifying key moments of historical change. Fusing ethnomusicology, media and literary studies, VOICES wants to show why tracking this evolution has the potential to reveal intriguing trajectories of the formation of premodern expressive ecologies. Enriched by optics of genre economy, it promises new analytical tools for studying infrastructures of communication and meaning-making practices across South Asia and beyond.

Mots-clés : songs,song studies,literary cultures,performative genres,south asia,india,oral history,history of south india,malayalam,premodern studies,colonial studies,ethnomusicology,media archeology
Projet ERC : POSITRONIUM (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université Jagellonne — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

A method for non-invasive assessment of hypoxia (deficit of oxygen in tissue) is keenly awaited in medicine. This project is motivated by the exciting question whether it is possible to assess the concentration of oxygen in the tissue by detecting photons from positronium decays inside cells. Positronium (a bound state of an electron and positron) is copiously produced in the human body during positron emission tomography. Its properties in tissue depend on the size of the intramolecular voids and the concentration of molecular oxygen. Thus, it is plausible to expect that positronium may serve as a biomarker of tissue oxidation. Yet is this really the case? Is it at all possible to disentangle annihilation of positronium after it interacted with oxygen from the annihilation with electrons from the tissue’s atoms? This question has no a priori answer because the number of classical observables accessible by the measurement of annihilation photons is less than the number of mechanisms leading to positron annihilation in the tissue. Here we put forward the fundamentally new hypothesis that tissue oxidation may be sensed by the measurement of the degree of entanglement of photons from positronium. Theoretically, these photons are quantum entangled in polarization and exhibit non-local correlations. The entanglement is reflected in the distribution of relative angle between photons’ polarization planes. We hypothesize that such distributions are sensitive to tissue hypoxia. This leads to the expectation that the degree of entanglement for photons from positronium interacting with dissolved oxygen differs from the case when it annihilates by picking-off an electron from a molecule. Answers to these fundamental questions will be delivered for the first time. The project will be implemented by using a unique tomography system invented by the PI facilitating imaging of positronium lifetime and detecting the polarization of photons from the positronium annihilation.

Mots-clés : beta plus decay,positronium,electron positron annihilation,compton scattering,plastic scintillators,photon s polarisation,tissue hypoxia,positron emission tomography
Projet ERC : FLOW (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Maastricht — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499692.0 €

We live in a rhythmic world. Take a deep breath, listen to your heartbeat, to the trees swinging with the wind, music playing, people chatting. Every perception and cognition, every heartbeat happens in time following its own rhythmic frequency. Our brain also generates rhythmic brain waves and there is wide consensus that these neural oscillations are a fundamental building block of how our brain works. Interestingly, the brain is not the only organ generating such intrinsic rhythmic signals. Bodily rhythms such as heartbeats, breathing or gastrointestinal activity can also be described as endogenous oscillators. But are these brain and bodily rhythms functionally relevant for how we perceive the world? Could it be that these rhythms determine what we attend to, what we remember and how much information we can store in our mind? This ERC proposes a new perspective on how oscillating body-brain states structure our cognition. We hypothesize that brain rhythms enable us to adapt to changing cognitive demands by flexibly switching between two fundamental operating modes: (i) to support communication between brain regions (WP1), and (ii) to code for the mental representation of specific content in our mind (WP2). We further propose that bodily rhythms can also dynamically tune their coupling strength with the brain in a state-dependent manner (WP3), supporting the operating mode of neural oscillations when being in “flow” (WP4). We formalize these hypotheses in a proposed FLexible Oscillatory Workspace (FLOW) model and empirically test our predictions using a noninvasive “brain pinging” approach for causally probing state-dependent rhythmic body-brain coupling mechanisms. In a final proof-of-principle project, we will then use rhythmic non-invasive neuromodulation for entraining and tuning intrinsic brain and body-brain rhythms to enhance cognitive performance and develop new rhythmic neuromodulation therapies to treat cognitive deficits (WP5).

Mots-clés : brain rhythms,neural oscillations,cognition,brain stimulation,neuromodulation