Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SCIGMA (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Study of the Human Past
Entité participante : Université de la Ruhr à Bochum — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1492832.5 €

The early modern period is usually viewed as a time of profound change, including the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’ and the Protestant/Catholic Reformation. Historians have linked these two seemingly disparate transformations in many different ways, but one important dimension is yet to be uncovered. SCIGMA’s main hypothesis is that natural knowledge significantly influenced dogmatics as a central branch of theology in the early modern university. University textbooks eagerly addressed many questions related to natural knowledge, such as: Can the bodily resurrection be understood from a physiological perspective? Which physics apply for the Eucharist? While much has been written on the impact of theology on the natural sciences, SCIGMA will turn the tables to uncover their truly entangled relationship. The project will systematically investigate how naturalism and empiricism informed scholastic and dogmatic theology, from the Council of Trent to the French Revolution across all Western Christian denominations. Its research agenda will consider theology as a ‘scientia’ in the premodern university and therefore include it within the history of science and knowledge. SCIGMA’s first goal is to discover the multiple and changing ways in which natural knowledge informed premodern scholastic theology, which sought a rational reconstruction of faith. Second, it will uncover what effective epistemological frameworks accommodated this interplay of empiricism and revelation. Third, it will trace how these epistemological frameworks were determined by their embedding within religious and secular institutions of learning. This complex historical analysis will reveal the significant role of the ‘physico-dogmatic domain’ in institutional learning. Thereby, it sheds novel light on how premodern Western societies fundamentally reshaped scientific inquiry while being deeply religious – and ultimately paved the way to secularization and scientism in these societies.

Mots-clés : science and religion,reformation,secularisation,dogmatic theology,medicine,natural philosophy
Projet ERC : IN-MIND (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Padoue — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UniPd
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499798.0 €

Although infants perform more poorly than adults on many cognitive tasks, they are more competent language learners. Newborns must have access to an exceptional processing system where bits of the -inherently transient- speech signal remain encoded to build knowledge of the language around them. Memory, the ability to hold information in mind that is no longer present in the environment, is one of the most important components of this machinery. As yet, however, what characterizes the first cognitive and neural architectures of memory and if (and to what extent) these mechanisms constraint human language remain largely unexplained. IN-MIND proposes a fresh perspective that particularly emphasizes the study of verbal long-term and working memories as a journey in its development during infancy. The project aims to provide new insights into: i) how memories are formed at birth and sometimes stored for longer periods through the reorganization of neuronal circuits, ii) how infants’ verbal memory capacities and limits vary as their brain evolves in the first months of life, iii) when verbal working memory capacities emerge and whether they account for concurrent and later language outcomes, and iv) to what extent memory measured in the laboratory relates to how language is implemented in the real world. I will address these issues using an innovative and multimodal approach that combines experiments with behavioral techniques, wearable neuroimaging, polysomnography, and naturalistic recording in newborns, typically developing infants and infants at-risk for language impairments. The outcomes of this research may lay the foundation for identifying vulnerabilities in verbal memory capacities as well as the temporal windows in which eventual interventions might be more effective. From a theoretical perspective, IN-MIND will inform debates regarding the origins of human language, by contributing to a more complete description of what makes an infant brain language-ready.

Mots-clés : memory development,language acquisition
Projet ERC : FragArist (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université de Padoue — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UniPd
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

One of the greatest minds of antiquity was no doubt Aristotle. He left a lasting impression on Western civilization, influencing among others the Founding Fathers in designing the US constitution. But what many do not know is that only a fraction of his works survive. Those preserved through medieval transmission - his so-called esoteric works - go back to college lectures and were intended to be used by his small circle of students. But Aristotle also wrote many works for a wider audience, which survive only in "fragments," i.e. citations in later authors, and a number of epitomes. In fact, what is preserved today is not what Aristotle was famous for throughout most of antiquity or even what he intended to be known for. Yet modern research focuses almost exclusively on the esoteric works. The result is that the Aristotle one meets in contemporary scholarship is really only the Aristotle of the preserved school writings. In order to truly understand his views on politics, ethics, poetry, rhetoric, logic and the soul or his approach as a scientist and historian, we must also study the lost works. The fragments are essential to understand his philosophy and assess his impact on Western thought. FragArist aims to shift the attention back to what were initially his most important works and establish a new understanding of Aristotle by reconstructing and interpreting his lost works. We will combine methods taken from philology, papyrology, philosophy, ancient history and Digital Humanities and apply pioneering editing techniques and the latest cutting-edge imaging techniques. For the first time we will also incorporate the fragments found in Syriac and Arabic sources. We will create a radically new perspective on Aristotle's personality and elucidate his influence on later authors, including the Alexandrian grammarians, Roman philosophers, Neoplatonic philosophers and Christian authors. This will also revolutionize our knowledge of the history of literature and science.

Mots-clés : aristotle,fragments,digital critical edition,ancient philosophy
Projet ERC : LIGHTSTAR (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Entité participante : Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499511.0 €

The widespread use of artificial lighting has drastically changed night skies across the globe, creating a specific threat to nocturnal species: light pollution. Recently, light pollution has been identified as one driver of insect decline. Among nocturnal insects, moths are particularly important as they serve as both key pollinators and food source, providing essential ecosystem functions. To mitigate the effects of light pollution, a comprehensive understanding of moth orientation is essential, including their response to natural and artificial light as well as their interplay. To date the available data is extremely limited, primarily due to the challenging conditions of night-time research and the lack of methods for collecting behavioural data in the field. LIGHTSTAR will set a paradigm-shift beyond classical field and laboratory experiments by combining large-scale field experiments across a light pollution gradient with targeted manipulations of streetlights, moonlight, and polarized light. This approach will allow an in-depth investigation on the orientation performance of moths in dependence on the light environment. We will develop a drone-based 3D tracking system to obtain behavioural data of unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. Incorporating these novel 3D data into our advanced simulation tools will fundamentally broaden our understanding of habitat fragmentation caused by streetlights and will allow a new dimension of assessing habitat connectivity. The data collected will, for the first time, provide a holistic understanding of the impact of light pollution on the orientation of nocturnal insects. Our discoveries will be highly valuable for developing strategies to mitigate their decline and promote insect-friendly lighting solutions that can reduce the risk of species extinctions and maintain connectivity of habitats. Moreover, our new tracking system will unlock new realms for all research on movement and behavioural ecology of insects.

Mots-clés : light pollution,insect orientation,habitat connectivity,3d insect tracking,insect decline,streetlights,moths,insect friendly lighting,mating success
Projet ERC : InqML (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Padoue — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UniPd
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 971310.0 €

Modal logic is at the heart of an incredibly fruitful interdisciplinary enterprise: it is used to formalize reasoning about key notions like knowledge and belief, obligation and permission, action and outcome, and finds important applications in computer science, AI, economics, and linguistics. In its current form, modal logic builds on truth-conditional semantics, which analyzes meaning in terms of truth conditions. This is the source of two limitations. First, there are important modal notions whose argument is not a proposition, but a question. Since questions do not have truth conditions, these notions cannot be analyzed in existing modal logics. Second, much recent work indicates that natural language modals are sensitive not only to the truth conditions of their argument, but also to the different "alternatives" it presents, thus making distinctions that are invisible to truth-conditional semantics. The aim of this project is to develop a new framework for modal logic that overcomes these limitations; to achieve this, we will replace truth-conditional semantics with a novel foundation: inquisitive semantics. Since inquisitive semantics allows us to analyze not only statements but also questions, it becomes pos- sible to define modal operators that take questions as arguments. This brings a whole spectrum of new modal notions within the reach of logical analysis; examples include the notion of supervenience, several notions of dependence and independence, agential control and influence, and attitudes like wondering and indifference. Moreover, since inquisitive semantics allows us to associate a modal argument with a set of alternatives, we may now define a new class of modalities that are alternative-sensitive. This allows us to systematize a number of proposals made in the literature and to aim for a general theory of the alternative-sensitivity of natural language modals.

Mots-clés : modal logic questions inquisitive semantics team semantics modality in natural language free choice inferences alternative sensitivity supervenience logics of dependence and independence logics of agency temporal logic epistemic logic
Projet ERC : QuaQuaMA (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499190.0 €

The assumption that the plain vanilla single-band Hubbard model captures the relevant physics of the cuprate materials has been a key motivation for a host of numerical work and quantum simulation experiments. Recent numerical advances challenge this assumption and raise the pressing question: which minimal model can be used to understand quantum materials exhibiting unconventional superconductivity? However, extracting the relevant Hamiltonian of real materials is a formidable challenge and usually involves ab-initio methods that only approximately capture strong correlations. The goal of QuaQuaMA is to perform Hamiltonian reconstruction for materials by developing a novel approach where strong correlations take center stage: we will systematically compare observables from experiments on materials with quantum simulators and large-scale numerics, which directly take strong interactions into account. Building upon this year’s Nobel prize work, we will develop and use neural networks to simulate interacting quantum many-body systems. The number of simulations for different candidate Hamiltonians will be minimized through a highly efficient, machine learning based exploration of the vast parameter space. Our advanced numerical methods, in combination with quantum simulation experiments, will also enable the exploration of the phase diagrams of the determined effective Hamiltonians, employing novel observables to reveal the underlying physics. We will focus on three particularly interesting, related material classes with the ultimate goal to distill the essence of unconventional superconductivity: cuprates, infinite layer nickelates, and bilayer nickelates. The Hamiltonian reconstruction framework established in QuaQuaMA will be applicable far beyond these materials, for example to study effective Hamiltonians in the context of light-induced superconductivity, thus generating an enormous impact in the fields of strongly correlated electron systems and quantum simulat

Mots-clés : quantum simulation,cold atoms,numerical methods for quantum many body systems,fermi hubbard,machine learning in condensed matter physics,cuprates,nickelates,hamiltonian reconstruction
Projet ERC : QuSiGauge (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental Constituents of Matter
Entité participante : Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498369.0 €

Gauge theories (GT) are the staple of the Standard Model, and their far-from-equilibrium dynamics opens a window into the most fundamental questions of high-energy physics (HEP) and the nature of equilibration in isolated quantum many-body systems. However, this dynamics is often highly nonperturbative and difficult to probe using classical methods due to entanglement buildup. Through quantum advantage and tunability, quantum simulators (QS) emerge as a particularly suitable venue to solve this problem.  QuSiGauge hinges on developing an overarching framework composed of two main interconnected pillars: a technological one focused on designing robust tunable experimentally feasible QS of GT, and a phenomenological one concerned with a rigorous formulation of far-from-equilibrium quantum criticality and equilibration in isolated many-body models. The project will focus on the quantum simulation of (non-)Abelian GT, qudit quantum computing for HEP, non-ergodic dynamics of GT, and extracting far-from-equilibrium quantum critical exponents from dynamical phase transitions in GT. The approach is organized such that it provides both basic intuition and formal understanding, while emphasizing quantitative predictions accessible to state-of-the-art and near-term QS.  QuSiGauge will pave at least two solid paths to uncover new physics: (1) It will provide a toolbox for probing engineered exotic GT and gauge-noninvariant dynamics not easily accessible to particle colliders, yielding tunable platforms for investigating the equilibration of controlled isolated many-body models. (2) It will advance QS towards the holy grail of making them a reliable complementary venue for exploring collider-relevant physics. QuSiGauge will be of immediate impact to current cold-atom and ion-trap experiments, which are approaching quantum advantage, and will reach far beyond its immediate field, eliciting strong connections between condensed matter, HEP, and quantum simulation/computing.

Mots-clés : quantum simulation,lattice gauge theories,far from equilibrium dynamics,dynamical quantum phase transitions
Projet ERC : RESCALE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université Louis-et-Maximilien de Munich — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1455058.0 €

The ideal of a final theory has shaped much of modern physics and its philosophical interpretations. Physicists have used it as a blueprint to construct theories of space, time, matter, and motion that apply in principle everywhere and under any circumstances. Philosophers have used it as a guide to interpret existing theories and depict the entire universe in terms of a bedrock of fundamental entities. Although this ideal still plays an important role today in quantum gravity, the situation has considerably changed since the 1950s. Physicists now widely recognize that our best current theories work only at certain scales, and that this may well be the case for any future empirically successful theory. Physicists also spend most of their time studying systems scale by scale and analyzing how physical effects depend on each other across scales, even in the context of quantum gravity. How should philosophers adjust their interpretative practice if they are to take this new way of doing physics seriously? What kind of world picture would result from this? The RESCALE project contends that the ideal of a final theory no longer provides a sensible interpretative guide, leaving us with no better option but to depict the universe one scale at a time. More precisely, the project will show through an in-depth integrated historical and philosophical study that physicists’ new scale-based theoretical practice leads us to draw a partial picture of the world structured in a complex hierarchy of overlapping layers across scales, which is largely independent of what may lie beyond. Besides disclosing a fundamental epistemological transformation in the recent history of science and showing how it forces us to rescale our world picture, this systematic interdisciplinary study at the crossroads of history, philosophy, and physics will have profound implications for our understanding of representation, reduction, realism, and metaphysics at the frontiers of science.

Mots-clés : history and philosophy of physics effective field theories renormalization group scientific representation reduction and emergence scientific realism metaphysics of science
Projet ERC : DOMESTIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Université catholique de Louvain — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UCL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499614.0 €

Existing literature on agricultural markets, telecoupling, and supply chain governance focuses on global value chains, largely overlooking domestic markets – though these are responsible for the majority of food (74-88%), agricultural land use (78%), deforestation (61-71%), and global land use emissions (73%). A key barrier to the study of domestic markets is the lack of data. While country-level data are commonly used to track international trade, the data necessary to map subnational trade flows within domestic markets are seldom collated. In the proposed project we will bridge this knowledge gap by integrating novel datasets sourced from citizen science, wholesale markets, freight platforms, and government procurement contracts. Our focus will be on mapping the flow of food products within Brazil – the world’s ninth largest economy, a rapidly urbanizing, emerging market with a booming agricultural sector and large domestic market. We will employ life cycle assessment methods to these food flow data to compute the land use, deforestation, and carbon footprints of millions of individual supply chains and products. This will provide an unprecedented analysis of how the environmental impact of consumption varies across different populations and cities and how it relates to urban context. A key advance on previous product footprints will be our combination of supply chain data alongside information on land tenure, agricultural suitability, commodity prices, and forest fires to differentiate how much deforestation is driven by agriculture, rather than other contributing factors. Finally, the project will analyse public policies affecting food production and consumption, including a large-scale assessment of the Brazilian school meal program (PNAE) to understand its nutritional and environmental impacts, and an examination of how agricultural subsidies can be redirected to foster a sustainability transformation within the Brazilian food system.