Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : aSCEND (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1224201.25 €

Recent trends in computing have prompted users and organizations to store an increasingly large amount of sensitive data at third party locations in the cloud outside of their direct control. Storing data remotely poses an acute security threat as these data are outside our control and could potentially be accessed by untrusted parties. Indeed, the reality of these threats have been borne out by the Snowden leaks and hundreds of data breaches each year. In order to protect our data, we will need to encrypt it. Functional encryption is a novel paradigm for public-key encryption that enables both fine-grained access control and selective computation on encrypted data, as is necessary to protect big, complex data in the cloud. Functional encryption also enables searches on encrypted travel records and surveillance video as well as medical studies on encrypted medical records in a privacy-preserving manner; we can give out restricted secret keys that reveal only the outcome of specific searches and tests. These mechanisms allow us to maintain public safety without compromising on civil liberties, and to facilitate medical break-throughs without compromising on individual privacy. The goals of the aSCEND project are (i) to design pairing and lattice-based functional encryption that are more efficient and ultimately viable in practice; and (ii) to obtain a richer understanding of expressive functional encryption schemes and to push the boundaries from encrypting data to encrypting software. My long-term vision is the ubiquitous use of functional encryption to secure our data and our computation, just as public-key encryption is widely used today to secure our communication. Realizing this vision requires new advances in the foundations of functional encryption, which is the target of this project.

Mots-clés : cryptography,public key encryption,secure computation
Projet ERC : HRNUDGE (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Copenhagen — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UCPH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 976425.24 €

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the effectiveness of human rights law and judgments, yet almost no attention has been given to the impact of remedies on states’ compliance practices or the internalisation of human rights into their domestic legal systems. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research in six countries, the project aims to expose the dynamics of the (non)compliant state and the efficacy of different types of remedies in changing the behaviour of human rights violators. These goals will be achieved through three sub-studies: (1) an empirical study of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to determine the compliance and internalisation practices and their link to different remedies; (2) the exploration and analysis of states’ internalisation practices and policies (including the identification of players that shape this practice) to determine whether remedies play a crucial role in shifting states’ actions; (3) a computer simulation to discover how we can change the architecture of human rights remedies to increase compliance and internalisation, and to deter future violations. The central aim of the project is to identify new remedy options – incentives or nudges – which human rights institutions can use to deter future violations. Using the example of the ECtHR and its caselaw, the research will build on insights from behavioural economics to interrogate widespread assumptions about monetisation of human rights, public shaming, and deference shown to states in the specification of remedies. Through computer simulation, the project will aim to predict how monetary and non-monetary remedies could be used separately or together to alter the behaviour of states and their key players. The research will be ground-breaking in many ways, reshaping the field of human rights remedies and contributing crucially to the emerging field of behavioural international law.
Projet ERC : BlobMech (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999806.0 €

Recently it has emerged that ‘membraneless organelles’ a commonly encountered body for compartmentalisation in Eukaryotic cells that include ‘nucleoli’ and ‘stress granules’, are phase separated liquid droplets suspended inside cells, formed from highly mobile disordered proteins. My research has focused on the prediction from physical theory, that the interior of liquid droplets should have very different chemical properties to the exterior dilute phase. By quantitatively analysing model biological liquid droplets formed by the Ddx4N1 protein, we discovered that their interior resembles an organic solvent (DMSO), can melt double stranded DNA, and selects which proteins can enter based on a simple sequence-based algorithm, akin to a chemical solubility rule. The field of biological liquid droplets has largely focused on phenomenological observations. This proposal aims to step beyond this and test the central hypothesis that “intermolecular interactions drive biological liquid droplet formation to create regions of solvent tailored to promote specific chemical functions”. By studying a diverse range of biological liquid droplets, I seek to establish that physico-chemical properties explain both when liquid droplets mix and when they do not, explain which molecules are absorbed and which are not, use these features to predict new properties to design new functionalised sequences using rules based on their fundamental inter-molecular interactions, determine structures of the liquid droplets using NMR and cryo-electron tomography and investigate the effects of liquid droplets on chemical reactivity. This research has the potential to change our understanding of the mechanisms of biochemistry, and use principles from physical chemistry to explain why cells naturally create these regions of effectively organic solvent inside the cell as part of their life cycle.

Mots-clés : liquid liquid phase separation,nmr spectroscopy,solubility phenomena in complex fluids
Projet ERC : Cell-Lasers (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Nanocenter — Pays : Slovénie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 413070.0 €

Recently, micro-sized lasers have been integrated into biological systems including cells and tissues. Currently the most frequently used techniques to study complex processes in live cells employ fluorescent probes. However, fluorescent probes have several disadvantages including photobleaching, sensitivity to environmental factors, potential phototoxicity and broad emission spectrum, which limits their sensitivity, multiplexing ability and imaging capabilities in biological tissues. The transition from detecting laser emission from bio-integrated lasers instead of fluorescence represents a paradigm shift. Due to narrow emission linewidth, high coherence, large intensity and highly nonlinear output from lasers, they open huge opportunities in ultrasensitive sensing, spectral multiplexing and microscopy. The applicant has recently for the first time demonstrated a laser completely embedded inside a live human cell. However, to date it has only been demonstrated that laser light can be generated within the cell, but not how is the laser output coupled to the biophysical and biochemical processes inside cells. The goal of Cell-Lasers is to study these intimate interactions including forces acting within cells, properties of natural cavities in lipid droplets and the intracellular chemical environment. Since the spectral positions of laser lines do not change with propagation through scattering and absorbing media, the cell lasers will enable multiplexed sensing, tracking and localization of cells embedded deep inside tissues. In the long term Cell-Lasers aims to transform the bio-integrated lasers from being a pure scientific curiosity into powerful tool for the study of biophysical and biochemical processes taking place on a single cell level.

Mots-clés : lasers,microcavities,cells,biophotonics,imaging,chemical sensing,barcoding,force,measurement,lipid droplets
Projet ERC : TOPODY (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : École normale supérieure PSL — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ENS PSL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Recently, topology stepped in an increasing number of areas in physics, including via the concept of topological phases of matter. In strongly interacting systems, topological phases may exhibit intricate quantum entanglement between their constituents, leading to fascinating physical properties, such as the emergence of anyons. Since the discovery of fractional quantum Hall states in 1982, the scientific community is awaiting further experimental advances: new types of strongly correlated states, observation/manipulation of anyons. In this field, ultracold atoms promise novel approaches with a specific degree of control. Yet, despite the recent creation of weakly interacting topological states with atomic gases, reaching the strongly correlated regime, with long-range quantum entanglement, remains an open challenge. In TOPODY, I will use a novel approach to produce strongly correlated topological states with microscopic samples of atomic Dysprosium. The envisioned laboratory experiment will combine state-of-the-art techniques, such as single-atom detection or laser-induced spin-orbit coupling. It will allow preparing quantum gases subjected to artificial gauge fields beyond the previously accessible regimes. The project will focus on realizing two paradigmatic physical systems – the Laughlin state and a topological superfluid. 1. We will create the Laughlin state by injecting a controlled amount of angular momentum using optical transitions with finely-shaped laser beams. We will infer distinctive features of the Laughlin state – incompressibility and atom anti-bunching – from the distribution of atom positions. 2. We will produce strongly interacting Fermi gases in one dimension and subjected to a spin-orbit coupling, leading to a topological superfluid state. The topology will manifest itself by the presence of Majorana bound states, which are quantum states delocalized between the two ends of the system, and accessible using quasi-particle spectroscopy.

Mots-clés : quantum gases,quantum hall effect,topological matter
Projet ERC : IGOC (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 50204.02 €

Recently, we discovered that the notion of Cartan subalgebras builds bridges between C*-algebras, topological dynamics, and geometric group theory. The goal of this research project is to develop our understanding of this concept in order to attack the following major open questions: I. The UCT question II. The Baum-Connes conjecture III. The conjugacy problem for topological shifts IV. Quasi-isometry rigidity for polycyclic groups UCT stands for Universal Coefficient Theorem and is a crucial ingredient in classification. I want to make progress on the open question whether sufficiently regular C*-algebras satisfy the UCT, taking my joint work with Barlak as a starting point. The Baum-Connes conjecture predicts a K-theory formula for group C*-algebras which has far-reaching applications in geometry and algebra as it implies open conjectures of Novikov and Kaplansky. My new approach to II will be based on Cartan subalgebras and the notion of independent resolutions due to Norling and myself. Problem III asks for algorithms deciding which shifts are topologically conjugate. It has driven a lot of research in symbolic dynamics. Conjecture IV asserts that every group quasi-isometric to a polycyclic group must already be virtually polycyclic. A solution would be a milestone in our understanding of solvable Lie groups. To attack III and IV, I want to develop the new notion of continuous orbit equivalence which (as I recently showed) is closely related to Cartan subalgebras. Problems I to IV address important challenges, so that any progress will result in a major breakthrough. On top of that, my project will initiate new interactions between several mathematical areas. It is exactly the right time to develop the proposed research programme as it takes up recent breakthroughs in classification of C*-algebras, orbit equivalence for Cantor minimal systems, and measured group theory, where measure-theoretic analogues of our key concepts have been highly successful.

Mots-clés : c  algebras,cartan subalgebras,groupoids,k theory,topological dynamics,orbit equivalence,geometric group theory
Projet ERC : AlgoRNN (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Università della Svizzera italiana — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : USI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are general parallel-sequential computers. Some learn their programs or weights. Our supervised Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) RNNs were the first to win pattern recognition contests, and recently enabled best known results in speech and handwriting recognition, machine translation, etc. They are now available to billions of users through the world's most valuable public companies including Google and Apple. Nevertheless, in lots of real-world tasks RNNs do not yet live up to their full potential. Although universal in theory, in practice they fail to learn important types of algorithms. This ERC project will go far beyond today's best RNNs through novel RNN-like systems that address some of the biggest open RNN problems and hottest RNN research topics: (1) How can RNNs learn to control (through internal spotlights of attention) separate large short-memory structures such as sub-networks with fast weights, to improve performance on many natural short-term memory-intensive tasks which are currently hard to learn by RNNs, such as answering detailed questions on recently observed videos? (2) How can such RNN-like systems metalearn entire learning algorithms that outperform the original learning algorithms? (3) How to achieve efficient transfer learning from one RNN-learned set of problem-solving programs to new RNN programs solving new tasks? In other words, how can one RNN-like system actively learn to exploit algorithmic information contained in the programs running on another? We will test our systems existing benchmarks, and create new, more challenging multi-task benchmarks. This will be supported by a rather cheap, GPU-based mini-brain for implementing large RNNs.

Mots-clés : recurrent neural networks,long short term memory
Projet ERC : BioSCoPe (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1865336.0 €

Reducing greenhouse gas and harmful emissions in the transport sector is a crucial issue in the fight against climate change and air pollution. The use of sustainable biofuels remains the solution of choice to reduce the carbon footprint of propulsion systems that are difficult or impossible to electrify, such as those for aviation or road freight transports. The addition of biofuels to conventional fuels strongly affects their oxidation stability, leading to changes in their chemical and physical structures, which in turn affects the combustion engines functioning in terms of efficiency, safety and pollutant emissions. The synergistic effects of the oxidation of liquid fuels (aging), the action of antioxidant additives, and their consequences on the reactivity and pollutant emissions during their combustion remain unexplored. This project aims at promoting the development of sustainable biofuels and antioxidants for heavy-duty transports by bringing a new fundamental understanding of their coupled effects on conventional fuels, throughout all their chain of use, from storage to combustion. Unprecedented well-defined kinetic experiments to study the oxidation stability of liquid fuels will be developed and directly coupled with a gas-phase combustion reactor. Key intermediates and pollutants will be quantified in the liquid- and gas-phase reactors. Detailed kinetic models will be developed and validated for liquid-phase oxidation and gas-phase combustion, using an original approach based on theoretical chemistry for the challenging liquid-phase models. This project will set new standards in the research field of biofuel combustion properties by integrating the crucial step of fuel aging, a neglected source of pollutants. It will push the frontier of knowledge on oxidation stability of fuels and antioxidants properties, and lead to new scientific tools and concepts to understand, design and optimize biofuel/antioxidants mixtures throughout all their chain of use.

Mots-clés : biofuels,oxidation stability,combustion,antioxidants,chemical engineering,theoretical chemistry,kinetic model
Projet ERC : 4D-BOUNDARIES (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : National University of Ireland — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : NUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 312500.0 €

Regeneration of musculoskeletal tissues requires engineered grafts that mimic the heterogeneous and anisotropic structure and mechanics of the native tissue. Despite decades of research, existing regenerative strategies have failed to produce tissues mimicking this exquisite structural complexity, dramatically limiting their clinical utility. Clues to addressing this grand challenge can be found in normal tissue development, which relies upon both the self-organizing potential of stem cells as well as key physical instructions from the microenvironment to establish final tissue architectures. Recognising this, the goal of 4D-BOUNDARIES is to leverage emerging 3D bioprinting technologies to provide precise physical boundary conditions and spatially localised morphogens to self-organizing cells and cellular aggregates to engineer structurally anisotropic and mechanically functional musculoskeletal tissues. To realise this goal, 4D-BOUNDARIES will build upon applicant’s extensive expertise in bioprinting and bioink development to produce two new biofabrication platforms that provide temporary guiding structures to self-organizing tissues. To demonstrate the utility of these bioprinting platforms they will be used to engineer, for the first time, patient-specific cartilage and meniscal grafts that mimic the internal and external anatomy and anisotropic mechanical properties of the native tissues. The ability to bioprint such functional tissues will transform the field of orthopaedic medicine, providing grafts to biologically resurface large areas of damaged articular cartilage and meniscus and thereby prevent the development of osteoarthritis – a debilitating disease affecting millions of people worldwide. The impact of 4D-BOUNDARIES will not be limited to the orthopaedic space, as it is envisioned that these new bioprinting platforms will find numerous applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Mots-clés : bioprinting,articular cartilage,meniscus
Projet ERC : 4D-BOUNDARIES (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
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 : 2390615.0 €

Regeneration of musculoskeletal tissues requires engineered grafts that mimic the heterogeneous and anisotropic structure and mechanics of the native tissue. Despite decades of research, existing regenerative strategies have failed to produce tissues mimicking this exquisite structural complexity, dramatically limiting their clinical utility. Clues to addressing this grand challenge can be found in normal tissue development, which relies upon both the self-organizing potential of stem cells as well as key physical instructions from the microenvironment to establish final tissue architectures. Recognising this, the goal of 4D-BOUNDARIES is to leverage emerging 3D bioprinting technologies to provide precise physical boundary conditions and spatially localised morphogens to self-organizing cells and cellular aggregates to engineer structurally anisotropic and mechanically functional musculoskeletal tissues. To realise this goal, 4D-BOUNDARIES will build upon applicant’s extensive expertise in bioprinting and bioink development to produce two new biofabrication platforms that provide temporary guiding structures to self-organizing tissues. To demonstrate the utility of these bioprinting platforms they will be used to engineer, for the first time, patient-specific cartilage and meniscal grafts that mimic the internal and external anatomy and anisotropic mechanical properties of the native tissues. The ability to bioprint such functional tissues will transform the field of orthopaedic medicine, providing grafts to biologically resurface large areas of damaged articular cartilage and meniscus and thereby prevent the development of osteoarthritis – a debilitating disease affecting millions of people worldwide. The impact of 4D-BOUNDARIES will not be limited to the orthopaedic space, as it is envisioned that these new bioprinting platforms will find numerous applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Mots-clés : bioprinting,articular cartilage,meniscus