Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : Control-LM (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Technion - Institut de technologie d'Israël — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Large language models (LMs) are quickly becoming the backbone of many artificial intelligence (AI) systems, achieving state-of-the-art results in many tasks and application domains. Despite the rapid progress in the field, AI systems suffer from multiple flaws inherited from the underlying LMs: biased behavior, out-of-date information, confabulations, flawed reasoning, and more. If we wish to control these systems, we must first understand how they work, and develop mechanisms to intervene, update, and repair them. However, the black-box nature of LMs makes them largely inaccessible to such interventions. In this proposal, our overarching goal is to: *Develop a framework for elucidating the internal mechanisms in LMs and for controlling their behavior in an efficient, interpretable, and safe manner.*  To achieve this goal, we will work through four objectives. First, we will dissect the internal mechanisms of information storage and recall in LMs, and develop ways to update and repair such information. Second, we will illuminate the mechanisms of higher-level capabilities of LMS to perform reasoning and simulations. We will also repair problems stemming from alignment steps. Third, we will investigate how training processes of LMs affect their emergent mechanisms and develop methods for fine-grained control over the training process. Finally, we will establish a standard benchmark for mechanistic interpretability of LMs to consolidate disparate efforts in the community. Taken as a whole, we expect the proposed research to empower different stakeholders and ensure a safe, beneficial, and responsible adoption of LMs in AI technologies by our society.

Mots-clés : language models,interpretability
Projet ERC : MILKOSOMES (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Technion - Institut de technologie d'Israël — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2437500.0 €

We propose to use human breast milk cells to engineer breast milk biomimetic nanoparticles (NP), “MILKOSOMES,” to shuttle medicines orally into the body that, under other conditions, would not be able to distribute properly. MILKOSOMES are cellular membrane protein-functionalized phospho-lipid NP (i.e., liposomes), and they are hypothesized to cross the gastrointestinal (GI) tract while protecting their therapeutic cargo and serve as a novel way to improve oral therapy outcomes. Unfortunately, although oral delivery of therapeutic agents is the most patient-preferred route of administration because it is painless and convenient, it entails enormous challenges. Specifically, large molecules, such as messenger RNA and proteins, cannot be delivered orally due to their chemical and enzymatic degradation in the GI tract and poor intestine's permeability to these molecules. Interestingly, cells, which are a thousand times bigger than these large molecules, remain intact. Therefore, they can get out of the GI tract due to membrane protein-mediated biological processes and make their way into our bodies. Herein, we aim to: (1) Identify and assess the breast milk cell populations which cross the GI tract into the infant body after breastfeeding in vivo, (2) Fabricate and characterize MILKOSOMES, (3) Evaluate MILKOSOMES’ ability to cross the GI tract biological barrier using in vitro and ex-human models, and (4) Test MILKOSOMES’ therapeutic efficacy in vivo using two diverse in vivo models. Thus, we will harness the specific and unique biological function of these GI tract-crossing native cells while protecting their therapeutic cargo from degradation using the phospho-lipid NP backbone. Our findings will increase our fundamental understanding of cellular and NP trafficking through the GI tract and lay the foundations for designing a next generation and non-invasive nano-biomimetic oral drug delivery technology that may affect public health worldwide.

Mots-clés : biomimicry liposomes drug delivery
Projet ERC : Q-ChiMP (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Technion - Institut de technologie d'Israël — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1874500.0 €

Molecular chirality plays a central role in many fields, ranging from reaction dynamics to drug development. Fundamental questions surround chiral molecules, in particular: Why does a specific handedness prevail in natural living systems? The vast majority of Chemistry textbooks define the two enantiomers of chiral molecules as perfect mirror images, which entails tunnelling conversion between enantiomers. However, a closer look reveals that the non-conservation of spatial inversion exhibited by the weak force should violate the parity symmetry in chiral molecules. In Q-ChiMP, we aim to answer the fundamental question, Is the weak force important in chemistry? To this end, we will realize the first trapped chiral molecular ion experiment with pristine quantum control to measure parity violation (PV) in molecules for the first time by detecting tiny structural differences between enantiomers. We will use several advantages molecular ions have over neutrals in metrology. First, we will leverage the long coherence times enabled by trapped ion experiments to enhance measurement precision. Second, molecular ions provide a promising path to generate internally cold chiral molecules populating only a few quantum states, which serves as an essential ingredient of precision metrology along with high quantum efficiency in detection. Our main approach to measure PV will use our newly developed vibrational spectroscopy scheme that can extract PV from a racemic sample directly, enhancing measurement precision and overcoming synthesis challenges. Each of the aims developed in Q-ChiMP toward a measurement of PV serves as an important novel milestone for taming cold polyatomic molecules and can be applied to quantum-controlled chemistry experiments and quantum information technology. The unique experience of the PI in precision spectroscopy with molecular ion ensembles and experimental cold quantum-controlled chemistry will be instrumental in achieving these ambitious goals.

Mots-clés : chiral molecules,weak force,parity violation,trapped ions,quantum controlled molecules
Projet ERC : MIETEN (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Rosalind Franklin Institute — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 200000.0 €

Almost all biological processes, involving molecular trafficking, signal-transduction, cell-to-cell interactions, hinge on precisely orchestrated electrostatic interactions, arising from electrical charges on biomolecules and membranes. Yet, our understanding of the role of electrostatics in these fundamental processes remains elusive due to the absence of quantitative methods to measure the electrical charges of biomolecules and to map the surface charge distribution of membranes. This challenge is further compounded by the requirement of capturing molecular and membrane dynamics that take place at the nanometre length scales and nano- to sub-millisecond time scales. The overall objective of this project is to bridge this technological gap by introducing Metal-Induced Energy Transfer based Electrometry and Nanometry (MIETEN), a groundbreaking technology that will quantify the electrical charge of biomolecules or membranes while capturing their dynamics with nanometre spatial and microsecond temporal resolutions. We will demonstrate MIETEN for measuring: (i) the charges and sizes of individual membrane proteins, (ii) membrane protein structural changes, conformational dynamics, and spatial organization in response to changes in membrane potential, (iii) reaction-diffusion kinetics at a charged membrane, (iv) mechanical properties and dynamics of membranes containing charged inclusions and (v) interactions between two charged membranes. The ability to measure biomolecular and membrane electrical charges and to elucidate the role of electrostatics in structure, organization, and interactions of proteins, as well as in membrane dynamics and intermembrane interactions, will be crucial for our understanding of fundamental biology and for advancing biomedical research. MIETEN will open new frontiers in studying protein and membrane dynamics and impact drug development, early diagnostics, and therapeutic interventions.

Mots-clés : super resolution microscopy,fluorescence spectroscopy,biophysics,electrostatics
Projet ERC : Re.HOT (Horizon Europe, appel 2025, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : École polytechnique de Varsovie — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499775.0 €

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a widely adopted non-invasive imaging technique that allows visualizing cross-sectional images of a human eye. Enabling OCT to recover the refractive index (RI) distribution is the holy grail of imaging. It would revolutionize current OCT procedures, offering a quantitative diagnosis for the first time. This, in turn, would open doors to new, unique applications, like highly anticipated next-generation laser vision correction procedures, which today have no quality control tools. Currently, no biomedical imaging method can noninvasively provide live RI distribution of patients’ tissues. This is due to the required reflection mode of measurement. It inherently returns reconstructions with an optical transfer function that covers only the high-frequency region in the spatial-frequency spectrum. To solve this problem, I propose a paradigm shift by changing how we treat OCT signals. Namely, by applying a unique numerical framework, I propose to treat the light returning from the object as if it was transmitted twice through its part. As a result, in my breakthrough idea, OCT becomes a transmission quantitative imaging method in the sense that the measured signal covers a low-frequency region of the spectrum. What is more, my idea is to innovatively combine this novel reformulation with a holographic tomography approach. For this reason, I propose capturing multiple angularly distributed OCT measurements and applying a tailored tomographic reconstruction framework to retrieve the 3D RI distribution of live patients' tissue. This will be the first in the world imaging approach that allows fully quantitative live diagnostic, opening new possibilities not only in medicine (like a live pre- and intraoperative assessment of the tissue) but also in materials engineering (in the high-quality investigation of composite layers) or photonics industry (in the validation of photonic integrated circuits).

Mots-clés : optical coherence tomography,holographic tomography,refractive index
Projet ERC : TrackFLU (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Biotechnology and Biosystems E ngineering
Entité participante : Institut Pasteur du Cambodge — Pays : Cambodge — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : IPC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 408987.5 €

Avian influenza viruses (AIV) represent tenacious and major public and animal health problems across the world. Controlling AIV at its poultry source in Asia is essential to decrease the virus load in susceptible avian species and environment, limit the risk of human infection with AIV and minimize the risk for future global AIV pandemics. In TrackFLU, I will improve our capacity to quantify, model and predict the AIV spread in live bird market (LBM) networks in Asia, which are urgently needed if the impact of future epidemics of AIV is to be mitigated and thus, represent key elements for pandemic preparedness. For the first time, extensive field work will be combined with state-of-the-art network analysis, phylodynamic and disease modelling tools with the view to successfully influence policy-making. I will use this unique and innovative analytical pipeline to address the following key objectives: O1) Identify the factors shaping the connectivity of LBM networks, O2) Quantify the transmission dynamics of AIV in LBM networks and O3) Optimize strategies to limit AIV spread in LBM networks. TrackFLU will help us to disentangle the LBM networks’ connectivity and to resolve the AIV transmission dynamics in LBM networks. TrackFLU will result in a cutting-edge predictive model of AIV spread that incorporates, for the first time, most of the biological complexities of AIV spread in LBM networks in Asia. The model and its associated web-application will represent very powerful and innovative tools for the design of novel control strategies tailored to the key features of AIV transmission in LBM networks. TrackFLU will thus contribute to the active research issue of improving capacity to predict AIV transmission in these complex systems in Asia, hence addressing the unmet need of local stakeholders and decision makers for better predictive tools. With TrackFLU, I anticipate very promising results, with huge impacts on animal and public health.

Mots-clés : avian influenza viruses,modelling,phylodynamics,public and animal health,disease control
Projet ERC : FIND-OUT (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Rome « Tor Vergata » — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1019000.0 €

The integration of sensing and communication is attracting a fervent research activity and will result in a myriad of contextual data that, if properly processed, may enable a better understanding of local and global phenomena while increasing the quality, security, and efficiency of our ecosystems. The computing continuum offers a timely and unique solution for processing such a massive volume of sensed data, as it provides virtually unlimited and widely distributed computing resources. Nevertheless, the deployment of data analysis at the edge or in the cloud has many implications regarding latency, privacy, security, and data integrity. As we learn how to sense ubiquitously and we build a tool able to handle the sensed data, the greatest challenge is to understand how and where to process them. The purpose of this project is the development of a pioneering framework to guide the design of federated and distributed inference systems, leveraging sensing and communication and harnessing the computing continuum. The framework will build on: (i) the definition of statistical and mathematical models for the sensed data, which capture the complex and interrelated phenomena underpinning sensing and communication systems, with different levels of integration; (ii) the development of cloud-native inference algorithms, mainly distributed and parallelized, with scalable complexity that can be adapted to dynamic performance requirements; (iii) the design of orchestration strategies to guide the flexible deployment of the inference process at the edge and in the cloud with a dynamic allocation of the computing resources. The aim is to overcome the paradigmatic accuracy-complexity trade-off that has driven distributed inference for decades, leading to a paradigm shift that encompasses multi-level performance indicators beyond accuracy, including latency, integrity, privacy, and security aspects and how these impact the confidence on the inferred phenomena.

Mots-clés : statistical inference,sensing,integrated communication and sensing,computing continuum
Projet ERC : CHIROTRONICS (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Salamanque — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1799250.0 €

Chirality is a foundational and unifying topic in science. It relates properties of elementary particles, to those of molecules in chemistry and biology (e.g. sugars), as well as the electromagnetic responses of artificial systems with non-superimposable mirror images. Besides, chirality bears an extraordinary potential for modern engineering, despite of the current lack of large, robust and actively controlled chiral signals needed to develop new applications. The emergence of atomically thin quantum electronic materials with handedness has marked the ultimate twist in chirality. A wide variety of exotic and gigantic chiral phenomena are predicted to occur in these novel quantum systems. Moreover, these effects are expected to be actively controlled by local fields, and therefore useful for applications. Nonetheless, such responses have yet to be detected, are puzzling and bring in new conundrums that demand investigation. The purpose of CHIROTRONICS is two-fold. Firstly, the study aims to experimentally observe these striking chiral responses predicted to occur in chiral, atomically thin quantum electronic materials. Intriguingly, the exploration of these interdisciplinary effects will also contribute to shed light on central questions existing in many areas of knowledge where chirality is involved. Secondly, the project will demonstrate how chiral signals arising in these quantum materials can be actively controlled and enhanced by local fields, as well as harnessed to engineer a range of basic enantioselective and non-reciprocal optical and electronic devices. As such, CHIROTRONICS will pave the way to develop ultra-compact and disruptive 'chiral technologies', hardware components to be used in a myriad of novel applications including biochemical sensing or quantum communications. The project will achieve success by an integral approach to research, combining expertise from different disciplines, including materials science and metrology.

Mots-clés : chirality,atomically thin materials,2d materials,nano electronics,nano optics
Projet ERC : LSP-MIST (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe Sciences
Entité participante : Université de Varsovie — Pays : Pologne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1380760.0 €

Exoplanetary science is one of the most studied and challenging areas of modern astrophysics. Various planet detection techniques allowed astronomers to discover over 4,500 extrasolar planets in our Galaxy, providing important constraints for testing planet formation theories. However, with the currently available methods, it is still impossible to find planets in the far regions of the Milky Way and in other galaxies. In consequence, we still cannot answer fundamental questions of exoplanetary science such as: how are planets distributed in our and other galaxies, and how does their occurrence rate depend on the chemical content and density of their environments? Therefore it is urgent to find a new method of planet detection that will allow us to discover faraway planets and thus open new horizons for exoplanetary studies. Here I propose to develop such a method. I will use a class of abundant bright giant stars that exhibit long secondary periods (LSPs) as traces of extrasolar planets. These stars are binary systems, in which the companion is substellar and is submerged in a dusty cloud. The hypothesis is that the companion is a former planet that accreted enough matter from the host star to become a brown dwarf. I will use the high quality photometric and spectroscopic data of LSPs from large-scale surveys and combine them with modern hydrodynamical simulations to verify this hypothesis. If successful, the novel method will revolutionise the field of exoplanet detection, by allowing to find extrasolar planetary systems beyond our neighbourhood, and especially in other galaxies, which is impossible with the current techniques. In the next step, I will apply this novel method to hundreds of thousands of LSP variables from the OGLE catalogs of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds to investigate the distribution of planets in different chemical and dynamical environments, and thus provide completely new constraints for planet formation theories.

Mots-clés : long period variable stars asymptotic giant branch stars exoplanet detection methods star planet interactions
Projet ERC : HUGERA (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Texts and Concepts
Entité participante : Université d'Exeter — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499979.0 €

How can we study human genomics without racism? This project will develop an empirically informed philosophical framework to answer this question. The project aims to produce a systematic diagnosis of how racism can influence human genomics research, identifying the types of harm that unfold from it but might have been overlooked by scientists. Human Genomics promises to reveal who we are and revolutionize medical diagnosis and treatment. However, geneticists and social scientists are increasingly worried that genomics research might involve racist assumptions, unknowingly harming vulnerable populations. It is key to assess how racism might co-opt Human Genomics and how harmful it is, but key knowledge gaps persist. For instance, discussions about racism in Human Genomics are rarely grounded on theories of racism. These discussions focus on parts of the research ecosystem (e.g., data collection) and don’t consider how racism can influence the whole knowledge production process.  The project aims to fill this knowledge gap by combining the conceptual apparatus developed by philosophers of science and race with empirical, qualitative methods from the social sciences. First, we develop an epistemological account of two key methodologies in human genomics research, characterizing how data, models, theories, and experiments interrelate to generate genetic knowledge. Second, we conduct a multidisciplinary literature review and interviews to identify potential racist assumptions in those methodologies of human genomics research, analysing them in light of theories of racism. Third, we examine the role of those assumptions in the generation of genetic knowledge, identifying the types of epistemic injustice that follow from it and how they are overlooked by scientists. Our results will help scientists identify aspects of genetic research that require ethical attention to avoid racism.

Mots-clés : racism human genetics classification ethics of science epistemology genome wide association studies