Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CARENET (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Technische Universität Berlin — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : TUB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2497500.0 €

Wireless communication networks are the essential connectivity tissue of the modern digital age. Wireless data traffic is predicted to increase by almost three orders of magnitude in the next five years. It is unlikely that such increase can be tackled by an incremental “more-of-the-same” approach. This proposal stems from the observation that the killer application for wireless networks is on-demand access to Internet content. CARENET advocates a novel content-aware approach to wireless networks design that can provably solve the scalability problem of current systems, thus supporting the paradigmatic shift “from Gigabits per second for a few to Terabytes per month for all”. CARENET’s vision is to serve an arbitrarily large number of users with bounded transmission resources (bandwidth, number of transmit antennas, and power). The fundamental question is: how can such a per-user throughput scalability be achieved in the presence of on-demand requests, for which users do not access simultaneously the same content? CARENET builds on a novel information theoretic formulation of content-aware networks and on several recent results in information theory, network coding, channel coding, and protocol design, stimulated by the PI’s recent work. Key elements of the proposed content-aware architectures are new caching strategies, where content is stored across the wireless network nodes. These strategies are supported by the ever-growing on-board memory of wireless devices and by the new features of the forthcoming 5G-like technology. Our thesis is that scalability is possible through the novel content-aware design, while it is information-theoretically impossible otherwise. Our overarching goal envisions the delivery of one Terabyte per month to each user at an affordable cost and good Quality of Experience, rather than the traditional Gigabit per second peak rates targeted by conventional technology development.

Mots-clés : wireless caching,network information theory,on demand multimedia content streaming,throughput scalability
Projet ERC : MIMICS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Amsterdam University Medical Centers — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

With 13,000 deaths each year in the EU, cervical cancer (CC) is one of the deadliest cancers worldwide. This is unnecessary, since CC is well detectable and treatable at early stages. For this reason, most EU countries have screening programs in place. These screening programs have had (varying) success in reducing CC incidence, however, this reduction has reached a plateau and new strategies are needed to improve screening success. An important reason for the stagnating decline in CC incidence is the relative high rate of non-compliance to screening because the gynaecological procedure to collect a sample is seen as highly uncomfortable and very invasive. Offering self-sampling options increases the participation rate in non-responder women by 30%. However, self-sampling is not compatible with the current cytology-based screening method (e.g. Pap test). There is thus a great need for the development of new, molecular screening assays for CC that can be used on self-samples. In the ERC-AdG MASS-CARE, we investigate the value of two classes of molecular markers, DNA methylation and miRNA for the detection of cervical disease in self-samples. In our analyses, we frequently observed variations at the 3’ end of the miRNA markers. Such variations (isomiRs) have great impact on their detectability by standard assays and thus specific assay development for these isomiRs constitutes a great improvement compared to using the canonical miRNA sequence. In MIMICS, we aim to select the isomiRs with the strongest association with CC which therefore have added value as disease biomarker compared to the canonical miRNAs. The identified isomiRs, which improve CC detection compared to the canonical miRNAs will be added to the panel of DNA methylation and canonical miRNAs as identified in the ERC-AdG. This assay will constitute the first full molecular, non-morphology-based, objective screening assay for cervical cancer fully compatible with self-sampling.

Mots-clés : diagnostic assay,cervical cancer,mirna,isomir,molecular marker
Projet ERC : FluAttack (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : CNRS Innovation — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Organismes privés (hors enseignement)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 10919.0 €

With 3 to 5 million severe cases and up to 650,000 deaths per year worldwide, influenza viruses are not only major human pathogens, they are also a heavy economic burden to our societies. In addition, influenza pandemics can occur at any time with potential devastating effects in terms of lives and costs. Solutions to prevent infection, to treat severe influenza cases and to respond to a severe pandemic are currently extremely limited and rely on vaccination and on only few approved molecules. All these solutions have their limitations with respect to efficacy and all face the problem of viral resistance. Thus, the demand for new options against influenza infections is high. The World Health Organization (WHO) and influenza virus specialists agree that innovative and effective anti-influenza compounds with a reduced risk of viral escape are urgently needed. The main goal of this ERC PoC is to provide key data on a promising innovative therapeutic solution identified in the lab. Taking advantage of a powerful screening system we have developed during the ERC StG ANTIViR, we have identified a family of molecules as potent inhibitors of influenza virus (with IC50<100nM). The mode of action of these molecules is known and they actually target a cellular function essential to all influenza viruses. Preventing viral replication by targeting a cellular function is a novel approach, predicted to strongly reduce the risk of drug resistance. Importantly, one of our hits went through several phase II and III clinical trials as an anti-cancer agent, making this molecule a perfect candidate for drug repurposing. In this context, the specific objectives of this ERC PoC are: i) to further characterise and validate our best hit, in particular in commercial 3D human airway epithelial cells and in vivo in a mouse model, and ii) to secure IPR and to establish an exploitation strategy plan (patent licensing or creation of a start-up) to support future development and preclinical tests.

Mots-clés : influenza viruses,antivirals,pandemic,drug repurposing,host factor inhibition,viral escape risk reduction,first in class molecule,broad range activity
Projet ERC : COVOPRIM (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Aix-Marseille Université — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : amU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2900000.0 €

With COVOPRIM I propose to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of one often overlooked component of speech and language: voice perception. Perceptual and neural mechanisms of voice perception will be compared between humans, macaques and marmosets –two highly vocal and extensively studied monkey species–to quantify cross-species differences and infer mechanisms potentially inherited from a common ancestor. Two key building blocks of vocal communication detailed in my past research in humans will be compared across species: (1) the sensitivity to conspecific vocalizations, and (2) the processing of speaker/caller identity. COVOPRIM is organized in three workpackages (WPs). WP1 will use large-scale behavioural testing based on ad-lib access of monkeys to automated test systems (following the highly successful model developed locally with baboons). Two main behavioural experiments will establish psychometric response functions for robust cross-species comparison. WP2 will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure cerebral activity during auditory stimulation in the three species. I will compare across brains the organization of what I hypothesize constitutes a “voice patch system” similar to the face patch system of visual cortex and broadly conserved in primates. I will also take advantage of the monkey models and use long-term, subject-specific enrichments of the auditory stimulation to probe the experience-dependence of neural coding in the voice patch system—an outstanding issue in human voice perception. WP3 will use fMRI-guided microstimulation in monkeys and transcranial magnetic stimulation in humans to establish the effective connectivity within the voice patch system and test the causal relation between voice patch neuronal activity and voice perception behaviour. COVOPRIM is expected to generate considerable advances in our understanding of the recent evolution in primates of the perceptual and neural mechanisms of voice perception.

Mots-clés : voice,perception,auditory cortex,evolution,humans,macaques,marmosets,fmri,voice patch,conspecific vocalizations,norm based coding,prototype,long term experience,microstimulation
Projet ERC : pBioStrat-for-PDA (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Inserm
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

With an overall 3-year survival rate of only ~6% together with an increased incidence pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), which represents 90% of pancreatic cancer, figures as the solid cancer with the worst prognosis. In trying to understand “the” reason for such negative outlook, one has to consider that the fundamental and clinical research conducted during the last 30 years has focused on characterizing and understanding the properties of the PDA cancer cells, neglecting the specific cellular context of those tumors. Indeed PDA consists of 80% of non-tumor cells. In the ERC Starting grant, S-Target-in-PANR, I conducted from 2011 to 2016 we took into account this specificity and analyzed the impact of this stromal compartment on PDA physiology. The discoveries and conceptual progresses obtained throughout the S-Target-in-PANR programme opened new potent improvements of PDA patients’ management. Among them, we revealed that one of the candidates, PAP/REG3A, was secreted by acinar cells from the peri-tumoral microenvironment to enhance peri-neural invasion ability of tumor cells. Interestingly, we demonstrated that PAP/REG3A titration in serum was a potent biomarker in order to stratify PDA and could lead to patients’ management optimization and more specifically to predict resectability. This validation, using robust cohorts and adapted testing, constitutes the main goal of our ERC-PoC pBioStrat-for-PDA. Indeed, it will provide a powerful tool for clinicians in order to better determine the resectability of a tumor by taking into account its biological nature on top of the only clinical criteria used so far. As a consequence the use of a non-invasive PAP/REG3A serum level determination will improve patients’ managements by (1) shortening the delay to start palliative chemotherapy, (2) limiting unnecessary surgery with important mortality/morbidity and (3) improving their redirection to adapted clinical trials, as the one targeting JAK2/STAT3 signalling.

Mots-clés : prognostic biomarker,predictive resectability biomarker,pancreatic cancer,patients  management optimisation
Projet ERC : RURALIMAGINATIONS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : University of Amsterdam — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UvA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

With globalization primarily considered an urban phenomenon, its impact on rural areas tends to be neglected. Tackling this blind spot is urgent as rural-urban divides persist and rural communities, notably in the 2016 Brexit vote and US election, claim their concerns about globalization’s effects are being ignored. RURALIMAGINATIONS focuses on the crucial role played by cultural imaginations in determining what aspects of contemporary rural life do and do not become visible nationally and globally, which, in turn, affects how the rural can be mobilized politically. Using a distinctive humanities approach, it examines prominent cultural imaginations of the rural in film, television and literature in the UK, US, Netherlands, China and South Africa, asking: 1) to what extent do these imaginations render globalization’s effects on the rural (in)visible? 2) what role do traditional rural genres and the feelings or desires they attach to the rural play in this making (in)visible? 3) how can new aesthetic repertoires highlighting the rural as a site of globalization and addressing rural-urban divides and inequalities be developed? The five subprojects conduct, in their national contexts, a narrative, visual and discursive analysis of post-2000 rural imaginations, guided by an innovative theoretical framework combining three concepts: the chronotope reveals what the imagined rural time-space renders visible and how it relates to urban and global time-space; spectrality gives access to what rural imaginations render invisible and to their haunting by traditional genres; and affect exposes how these imaginations attach feelings and desires to the rural, impacting its evaluation and political mobilization. The project synthesis compares the five contexts and examines how rural imaginations interact globally. Expert workshops in the national contexts forge collaborations between humanities scholars, social scientists and cultural producers to develop new rural imaginations.

Mots-clés : cultural imagination,rural,globalization,literature,film,television,narrative analysis,visual analysis,discourse analysis,chronotope,spectrality,affect,genre,politics
Projet ERC : TheHiggsAndThe7Tops (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Manchester — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999998.0 €

With the ground-breaking discovery of a new scalar particle, the Higgs boson, in 2012 by ATLAS and CMS, the standard model (SM) of particle physics has been completed. Despite this success, many open questions on the fundamental laws of nature remain unanswered. Among these are how exactly particles acquire their mass and why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. One of the most promising avenues to approach these questions is to explore the relation between the Higgs boson and the heaviest known elementary particle: the top quark. Due to its large mass, the top is expected to play a special role in the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. In order to shed light onto this mechanism, understanding the coupling between the top and the Higgs in great detail and exploring the charge and parity (CP) nature of the Higgs are essential. While the SM Higgs boson is CP-even, many models beyond the SM require a CP-odd component. Higgs-top couplings are expected to provide an unambiguous probe of CP-mixed states. I will explore for the first time all processes in which a direct determination of the top-Higgs interconnection is feasible, in particular events where the Higgs is produced in association with 1, 2 and 4 top quarks. These are among the most challenging channels at the LHC. I will pioneer a comprehensive programme, consisting of the development of powerful event-reconstruction methods and improved boosting techniques, allowing the first exploitation of novel variables in a beyond-state-of-the-art cross-process analysis, thus unravel the CP-properties in the top-Higgs interaction. The ultimate goal of the project is the precise direct measurement of the top-Higgs Yukawa coupling, and the first determination of the CP-nature of the Higgs boson in fermion interactions. Confronting these results with the SM and models that go beyond the SM will yield an unprecedented insight into the origin of mass of elementary particles.
Projet ERC : IoN (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : Imec the Netherlands — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1732906.0 €

With the increase of people suffering from various neural disorders, the need for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to regain sensory-motor or cognitive functions are expected to become acute in the coming decades. However, the existing BCIs can only control simple motions, e.g., grasping, and are far from realizing our vision to help paralyzed patients to walk again. This is due to the lack of a high-bandwidth wireless BCI, capable of supporting the recording from a large number of neurons with high spatial and temporal resolution, while having large spatial coverage, brain-wide. In IoN, we target to achieve a breakthrough in the ability to transfer data from intracortical recording devices, e.g., multi-electrode arrays, by developing a transcranial telemetry system that enables the efficient transfer at high data rate from such high channel count sensors (e.g., imec’s Neuropixels with 1000 channels). Most importantly, it will also fulfil the form factor required for minimally-invasive surgery, needed to minimize the surgical risk and the complications after insertion. Furthermore, IoN will significantly scale up brain-wide recordings, by introducing a new telemetry network that has the capacity to support 16 distributed recording nodes (enabling a total of 16,000 channels), which has never been demonstrated from any BCIs before. To reach these challenging targets, we propose i) a novel hybrid signal propagation method to achieve a 500Mbps data rate with a 10mm^2 implant area, 20× smaller than the state-of-the-art; ii) a completely new “spike-Aloha” protocol to maximize the network capacity, supporting 166× more channels. The technology developed in IoN will be an important transformational step to revolutionize the way neuroscientists and neurologists collect and process brain-wide neural data. By introducing this miniature, energy-efficient, and high-capacity wireless telemetry network, we want to help patients with disability to regain the quality of life.

Mots-clés : brain computer interfaces,wireless communications,wireless networks,cmos asic design,implantable electronics,low power electronics,integrated micro systems,impulse radio ultra wideband
Projet ERC : DYMO (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Saarland University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

With the prevalence of information technology in our daily lives, our ability to interact with machines in increasingly simplified and more human-like ways has become paramount. Information is becoming ever more abundant but our access to it is limited not least by technological restraints. Spoken dialogue systems address this issue by providing an intelligent speech interface that facilitates swift, human-like acquisition of information. The advantages of speech interfaces are already evident from the rise of personal assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana or Amazon Alexa. In these systems, however, the user is limited to a simple query, and the systems attempt to provide an answer within one or two turns of dialogue. To date, significant parts of these systems are rule-based and do not readily scale to changes in the domain of operation. Furthermore, rule-based systems can be brittle when speech recognition errors occur. The vision of this project is to develop novel dialogue models that provide natural human-computer interaction beyond simple information-seeking dialogues and that continuously evolve as they are being used by exploiting both dialogue and non-dialogue data. Building such robust and intelligent spoken dialogue systems poses serious challenges in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The project will tackle four bottleneck areas that require fundamental research: automated knowledge acquisition, optimisation of complex behaviour, realistic user models and sentiment awareness. Taken together, the proposed solutions have the potential to transform the way we access information in areas as diverse as e-commerce, government, healthcare and education.

Mots-clés : statistical spoken dialogue systems
Projet ERC : Work-STeP (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Utrecht University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 137694.25 €

With the proposed Workforce Sustainability Testing Platform (Work-STeP) organisations will have a tool to assess their HR practices with regards to workforce sustainability (e.g. engagement, health, performance).The proposed project will have a profound impact on the European business community. By automating all aspects of the platform, Work-STeP is able to offer its services at affordable rates. Where traditional HR analytics are often too costly for small and medium establishments (SMEs), with Work-STeP SMEs too will be able to assess their workforce sustainability. The project will be embedded in the host institution’s Future of Work Hub and will be supported by its advisory committee consisting of executives from large national and international organisations. The advisory committee, and the PI’s network of organisations from the Sustainable Workforce project will ensure that Work-STeP will be in line with industry demands. In the Proof of Concept phase the team will determine whether and to what extent the platform can use our substantial benchmark dataset from the ERC-Advanced Sustainable Workforce project, in which we investigated what HR investments organisations make and the effects they have on the workforce, in 259 organisations from nine EU countries across six economic sectors. Work-STeP will offer the manager insight in key performance measures of teams within the organisation. Lower team or organisation scores, in comparison with their sector and region, expose areas where there is room for growth in terms of workforce sustainability. These areas of concern, team demographics and the Sustainable Workforce analyses on policy effectiveness allow Work-STeP to offer organisations contextualized advice on which investments to use.

Mots-clés : workforce sustainability,hr policy assessment,online testing platform