Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : COOLed (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and Processes Engineering
Entité participante : Conseil supérieur de la recherche scientifique — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CSIC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

COOLed will explore the development of an innovative battery-free technology to generate electCOOLed will explore the development of an innovative battery-free technology to generate electricity using cold space in any place and at any time. COOLed proposes the powering of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart cities. This novel technology will combine a radiative cooler based on tri-dimensional (3D) polymer metamaterials and a thermoelectric generator of 2D transition metal selenides. The final proposal aims to produce a technology with the required maximum output power density (1 W/m2) to power IoT devices. To accomplish this objective several steps must be undertaken:  - The development of 3D polymer metamaterials with excellent optical properties, high solar reflection and high infrared emittance.  - The investigation of an efficient radiative cooler, composed of 3D polymer metamaterials, with enough cooling capacity to reduce the temperature to the required level. - The development of 2D materials of transition metal selenides with exceptional thermoelectric properties.  - The engineering of high-performance thermoelectric generators based on the 2D materials studied.  - The integration of a radiative cooler and thermoelectric generator in a single battery-free technology.  COOLed will be an excellent opportunity for the energy sector, specifically in electricity consumption, to explore new ways to save and recover energy using battery-free and off-the-grid technologies. This ambitious proposal considers the exploitation of materials such as 3D polymer metamaterials and 2D transition metal selenides that will provide a huge benefit to the environment due to the generation of electricity using cold space without the use of batteries, promoting renewable energy. This proposal will allow the research of new investigation lines based on the development of devices of radiative cooler and thermoelectric generators formed by 3D and 2D materials, respectively.

Mots-clés : radiative cooler,thermoelectric materials,anodization,electrodeposition
Projet ERC : MILWAYS (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de Vilnius — Pays : Lituanie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999489.0 €

Crop diversification critically mitigates agricultural risk for humanity. Identifying the environmental and cultural factors influencing the adoption and abandonment of staple foods through time is essential to an informed discussion about present-day food security and adaptation to a changing global climate. Past studies on ancient agriculture have identified the routes and timing of primary crop dispersals, but we possess a remarkably narrow understanding on how and why new foods were integrated and later abandoned by societies, and why certain crops remained restricted to distinct geographical regions. The MILWAYS project is perfectly poised to fill this alarming gap in knowledge, though a multi-faceted investigation of a specific crop - broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) - which, due to its unique biochemical properties, is traceable across space and time. Making use of multi-disciplinary cutting edge research methodologies, MILWAYS will bridge a large geographic territory and track the earliest millet dispersals across eastern-central Europe from the mid. 2nd mill. BCE onwards all the way to past millet cultivation limit. MILWAYS will utilize the high carbon isotope values of millet, resulting from its C4-photosynthetic pathway in conjunction with the distinct miliacin biomarker in order to identify its consumption, with respect to shifting climates, human mobility, demographic categories of sex, age and changes of plant use across historical times. Along with transforming the approaches on how we study past agriculture, MILWAYS will: a) Identify the interplay of cultural versus climatic factors in past staple food adoption and abandonment; b) Develop novel methodologies to the study of past diets and climates that are highly transferable to the study of other crops; c) Better understand millet environmental adaptation in northern latitudes; d) Create models of past and future crop exploitation strategies.

Mots-clés : ancient agriculture,plant dispersal,millet
Projet ERC : COMPLEXITY (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Institut norvégien de recherche sur le patrimoine culturel — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NIKU
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998859.0 €

The main question of this research project is: can political complexity evolve from small-scale cooperative groups? The predominant view of nomadic empires – that they are caused by contact with agricultural neighbours – cannot explain how pastoralists transitioned from small, kin-based cooperative herding groups to complex hierarchical groups with the power to conquer their sedentary neighbours. By perceiving cooperative herding groups as the building blocks of nomadic societies, this project aims to develop a theoretical explanation of pastoral political organisation ranging from acephalous societies in Africa to imperial confederations in Inner Asia. While cooperative herding has been documented, previous studies have been based on single case studies. Thus, a cross-cultural investigation of pastoral cooperation is lacking. There is also a view that livestock, as the primary source of wealth, limits the development of inequalities, making pastoralism unable to support complex or hierarchical organisations. However, evidence indicates that environmentally induced livestock losses exacerbate rather than limit the development of wealth inequalities. COMPLEXITY rectifies this situation through three steps. First, by combining a systematic literature review of the ethnographic material with information in the eHRAF World Cultures database, COMPLEXITY will cross-culturally document the prevalence of cooperative herding groups. Second, by using a pluralistic methodology, e.g., experimental economic games, observations and interviews, COMPLEXITY will comparatively investigate to what degree pastoral cooperation is structured by evolutionary factors – such as kinship, reciprocity, social network structure, and norms – and investigate how cooperation affect pastoral performance and inequality. Third, by combining empirical data with modelling techniques, COMPLEXITY investigates whether cooperative herding groups can be considered prototypes for more complex organisations.

Mots-clés : human behavioural ecology,evolutionary social science,cooperation,nomadic pastoralism
Projet ERC : KiLiM (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Université de Rome « La Sapienza » — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1396400.0 €

This project studies the transition between dynamical laws governing the physical world at different scales. Our focus will be on large systems of interacting particles with random initial data, underlying the kinetic theory of gases and dilute plasmas. Central to this theory are the Boltzmann equation, and its appropriate modification for charged particles given by Landau. Their description of approach to equilibrium and irreversible behaviour is a legendary success in the physics of time-dependent phenomena. Nevertheless, the rigorous foundation of such equations remains a largely immature aspect of the theory. This is a major problem in mathematical physics and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. The effective equations of kinetic theory are an approximation of particle systems ruled by the time-reversible laws of classical mechanics. But their validity should become exact in a suitable limit of large system size. In the last decade, there has been substantial progress in the derivation of kinetic equations from first principles. Such work is restricted to rarefied regimes. Results are available for models of interacting monatomic gases of identical particles. Besides the macroscopic equations leading the average behaviour, results have been obtained for fluctuations, large deviations, and for the random evolution of tracer particles. Equilibrium fluctuations are in itself of great interest, including results on long time scales which justify physically relevant applications.  Most of the results hold only for an overidealized model of hard-sphere interactions. None of them is, with the present techniques, extendable to realistic interatomic potentials. The goal is to bridge this gap by proving the validity of kinetic theory for some of the most common interaction models in physics: such as the Boltzmann equation for Lennard-Jones type forces, the Vlasov-Boltzmann equation for mixtures, and the Landau equation for screened Coulomb potentials.

Mots-clés : kinetic theory,boltzmann grad limit,boltzmann equation,landau equation,bbgky,rigorous methods for nonequilibrium statistical mechanics
Projet ERC : DANAE (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université de Rome « La Sapienza » — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1675000.0 €

In Particle Physics the research on neutrinos is continuously producing new results and further discoveries might just be around the corner. They could provide answers to crucial questions on how matter was created in the Universe or reveal the existence of new types of fundamental interactions between elementary particles. Possibly even more intriguing is the search for Dark Matter, an unknown form of matter that, according to astrophysical observations, outweighs the ordinary matter in our Universe by more than 5 times. Dark Matter particles have been searched for since 30 years, and invariably eluded discovery. DANAE intends to enable unprecedented sensitivities in the study low energy neutrinos and in the search for Dark Matter, by measuring the tiny nuclear recoils that these particles induce in their passage through matter. The goal is to create a pilot experiment by introducing for the first time monolithic, and at the same time highly segmented, arrays of thousands multiplexed superconducting detectors. If successful, precision measurements of a recently discovered process, the coherent and elastic neutrino scattering off nuclei, could be made. In the Dark Matter field new hypothesized particles could be sensed, lighter than those searched and never found so far.

Mots-clés : neutrinos,dark matter,cryogenic detectors,kinetic inductance detectors
Projet ERC : CRYPTOLAYER (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université de technologie de Darmstadt — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1984800.0 €

Blockchain technologies offer an exciting new alternative for centralized platform providers. They distribute trust over a large number of parties, thereby promising major benefits in terms of security, freedom and efficiency. Unfortunately, due to their inherent distributed nature, state of the art blockchains suffer from a multitude of shortcomings. In contrast to centralized platforms, they are restricted in terms of scalability, confidentiality and functionality, and thus cannot power large scale applications. The ambitious goal of CRYPTOLAYER is to overcome this situation by building decentralized systems that can compete with centralized platforms. We will achieve this goal via building off-chain technologies that form a secure second protocol layer on top of the underlying blockchain. The first component of CRYPTOLAYER builds a family of secure protocols for off-chain transaction systems. These protocols move the massive amount of transactions to a second layer, thereby offering nearly unlimited scalability and instantaneous transaction processing. Our solutions will support smart contracts - complex programs that can handle money - and offer strong privacy guarantees by relying on tools from cryptography. The second component of CRYPTOLAYER leverages advanced cryptographic building blocks to construct secure off-chain services for confidentiality and access to real-world data. This will enable rich classes of applications to run over decentralized infrastructures. Finally, since secure protocol design is highly involved and error-prone, we will build upon the formal framework of theoretical cryptography. We will develop formal security models using the universal composability framework, and carry out a rigorous security analysis using mathematical proofs. With our overarching treatment of off-chain technologies, our vision is to establish this field as a central part of the rapidly evolving research on blockchain technologies.

Mots-clés : blockchain,cryptographic protocols,distributed ledger,multiparty computation,smart contracts,cryptographic models
Projet ERC : scAInce (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université de technologie de Darmstadt — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998348.0 €

Innovations have largely been the driver of human development; with the current Anthropocene peaking humanity’s influence on the livability of our planet. Technology is believed to be, once again, the solution to severe environmental, economic, and social crises, even though its implementation has a mixed track-record of finding solutions just to create new and sometimes more severe problems [8]. We ask whether more sustainable cities are smarter? Therefore, we will develop the urban scAInce theory transforming our understanding of how artificial intelligence and its associated technologies has, can, and will alter urban systems questioning whether the technology transformation leads to more sustainable living in our cities. We will achieve this goal by: (1) historically correlating urban sustainability outcomes with smart city technology adoption (2) evaluating privately-driven AI solutions on their impact to create more sustainable cities through a pre/post study (3) evaluating whether future cities will be sustainable by inaugurating a virtual open science city that allows its residents living across the world to jointly change their virtual environment, and (4) estimating the sustainability gap of 41000 cities through analyzed archetype cities.
Projet ERC : ScaleMAP (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Consolidator grants)
Entité participante : Université d'Uppsala — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Nonmutational epigenetic reprogramming and genome instability are hallmarks of cancer, intricately tied to the tumor microenvironment. Understanding these processes requires scalable, spatially resolved tools at the molecular, cellular, and histological levels. The purpose of spatial omics, similar to geographic information systems (GIS), is to enable the analysis of spatial relationships across complex biological features. In GIS, geospatial indexing allows us to effortlessly search for patterns and events—such as Dating Apps, Chat Apps or Proximity searches (Uber, Lyft, Yelp, Google)—using real-time updates and interactive maps. In contrast, current spatial omics technologies lack scalability, real-time integration, and interactive visualization. Scalable mapping of the tumor microenvironment at multiple levels is essential to decipher tumor progression and identify new therapeutic targets. Inspired by geospatial indexing, I will develop an interdisciplinary toolbox, ScaleMAP, for mapping single-cell spatial epigenetics and genomics within the tumor microenvironment. ScaleMAP offers high-throughput, high-resolution, scalable, and interactive mapping across large tissue sections. 3D reconstruction of ScaleMAP will enable the investigation of cancer evolution in three dimensions. Like Google Maps, ScaleMAP treats tissues as "biological terrains," allowing researchers to interactively zoom into specific areas of interest across molecular, cellular, and histological levels to extract valuable insights. We will also develop GIS-inspired analytical packages for ScaleMAP data. Furthermore, we will adapt ScaleMAP for formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples and apply it to clinically archived paired primary and metastatic colorectal cancer samples to dissect metastasis. Beyond cancer, ScaleMAP has broad applications in biological research and digital pathology, offering powerful tools for exploration, diagnosis, and therapeutic discovery.
Projet ERC : PICTREE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Tilbourg — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Creating pictures is a unique human capacity, yet pictorial communication has received less focus in the study of cognition than other domains like language. Indeed, graphics are often viewed as reflecting perception alone with no complex representational properties like the hierarchic combinatoriality permeating throughout linguistic structures. Yet, various theories have argued that graphics also use hierarchic combinatoriality, both in individual pictures and visual narrative sequences, raising an overarching question of: Is there evidence of hierarchic combinatoriality in graphic expression, and what is its relationship with combinatoriality in language? The PICTREE project therefore targets this fundamental property of combinatoriality within substructures of pictorial communication, and aims to further probe its relationship to language. First, it will seek evidence for hierarchic structure within individual images (Theme 1), investigating the combinations of regions revealed within the drawing orders of pictorial objects (Theme 1.1), and the combinatoriality of visual affixes, like gears above the head to convey thinking (Theme 1.2). Second, it will examine the cognitive correlates of established syntactic phenomena from language that also occur in sequential images of visual narratives, including center- embedded clauses, serial conjunctions resulting in alternations, and ambiguous anaphoric relationships (Theme 2). Finally, since combinatorial structures have been argued across language, visual narratives, and music—and studies have observed similar neural responses to “grammars” in all of these domains—I will then ask (Theme 3): do these domains share a common processor for combinatoriality in the brain? Altogether, this project will challenge prevailing assumptions about the complexities of pictorial communication, while probing the relations between graphics and language, sponsoring greater focus on pictures within the linguistic and cognitive sciences.

Mots-clés : visual narrative comics psycholinguistics cross modal cognition music cognition
Projet ERC : EndoRPHIm (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and I mmunotherapy
Entité participante : University Hospital Bonn — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999415.0 €

Almost half of our genome is occupied by ancient viral sequences that can be mobilized under certain conditions and either jump or copy themselves from one location to another. A group of these mobile genetic elements is called endogenous retroelements. Mobilization of retroelements like LINE1 has been shown to cause cancer via insertional mutagenesis. In recent years LINE1 activation has also been associated with the development of inflammatory diseases and inflammation-driven ageing. This means, we collected substantial evidence that half of our genome can potentially make us sick. Nevertheless, we keep replicating these sequences with every cell division at great energetic cost, suggesting that keeping them provides an evolutionary advantage. In my project I will investigate if sporadic retroelement transcription in healthy cells serves a physiological role in priming the immune system through the constant sensing of retroelement-derived nucleic acids by intracellular nucleic acid sensors. My team and I will investigate how retroelement transcription is regulated in response daily life stresses like virus infections or DNA damage. I propose that instead of regulating transcription themselves, retroelements are largely regulated by canonical gene expression. In mouse models we will investigate how retroelements are sensed by the innate immune system and if this has functional consequences for establishing protective and pathologic immunity. Furthermore, we will investigate the exact molecular mechanism, by which retroelement-derived single stranded cDNA activates the innate immune system, which is currently not understood. Our project involves the development of a new deep sequencing workflow for identification of the genomic origin of retroelement transcripts and a new mouse model to study endogenous LINE1 elements in vivo. I believe that my project can fundamentally change our view on the role of endogenous retroelements as modulators of host immunity.

Mots-clés : retroelements,interferon,inflammation,ageing,nucleic acid sensing