Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : MAGNETIC-SPEED-LIMIT (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : Stockholm University — Pays : Suède — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1749005.0 €

While the origin of magnetic order in condensed matter is in the exchange and spin-orbit interactions, with time scales in the subpicosecond ranges, it has been long believed that magnetism could only be manipulated at nanosecond rates, exploiting dipolar interactions with external magnetic fields. However, in the past decade researchers have been able to observe ultrafast magnetic dynamics at its intrinsic time scales without the need for magnetic fields, thus revolutionising the view on the speed limits of magnetism. Despite many achievements in ultrafast magnetism, the understanding of the fundamental physics that allows for the ultrafast dissipation of angular momentum is still only partial, hampered by the lack of experimental techniques suited to fully explore these phenomena. However, the recent appearance of two new types of coherent radiation, single-cycle THz pulses and x-rays generated at free electron lasers (FELs), has provided researchers access to a whole new set of capabilities to tackle this challenge. This proposal suggests using these techniques to achieve an encompassing view of ultrafast magnetic dynamics in metallic ferromagnets, via the following three research objectives: (a) to reveal ultrafast dynamics driven by strong THz radiation in several magnetic systems using table-top femtosecond lasers; (b) to unravel the contribution of lattice dynamics to ultrafast demagnetization in different magnetic materials using the x-rays produced at FELs and (c) to directly image ultrafast spin currents by creating femtosecond movies with nanometre resolution. The proposed experiments are challenging and explore unchartered territories, but if successful, they will advance the understanding of the speed limits of magnetism, at the time scales of the exchange and spin-orbit interactions. They will also open up for future investigations of ultrafast magnetic phenomena in materials with large electronic correlations or spin-orbit coupling.

Mots-clés : ultrafast magnetism,spin currents,lattice dynamics,thz radiation,x ray free electron lasers
Projet ERC : Simplicity (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : University of Zurich — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UZH
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1727380.0 €

Why are actual contracts and market mechanisms often simpler than our theoretical predictions? This is a central puzzle in microeconomics and, in many environments, it constrains our ability to rely on economic models. It raises further fundamental questions: What does it mean that a contract or a mechanism is simple? How to compare the simplicity of various contracts, mechanisms, and games? The proposed research program aims to address these questions and provide a new behaviorally- grounded foundation for market design, contract theory, and the analysis of simplicity. The program has three complementary parts: (i) to address the simplicity puzzle by developing a novel approach to contracting and mechanism design that takes into account perception errors; (ii) to operationalize what simplicity means and how various mechanisms, contracts, and games can be compared in terms of their simplicity; and (iii) to explore the trade-offs between simplicity and welfare-and-revenue criteria and to develop new practical market mechanisms for markets such as school choice, the assignment of medical transplants, and the auctions of commodities and government securities.
Projet ERC : BM (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : KU Leuven — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : KUL
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3350.49 €

Why do people convert to Islam? The contemporary relevance of this question is immediately apparent."Becoming Muslim" will transform our knowledge about Islamisation processes and contexts through archaeological research in Harar, Eastern Ethiopia, and examine this in comparison to other regions in sub-Saharan Africa via publication and a major conference. Assessing genuine belief is difficult, but the impact of trade, Saints, Sufis and Holy men, proselytisation, benefits gained from Arabic literacy and administration systems, enhanced power, prestige, warfare, and belonging to the larger Muslim community have all been suggested. Equally significant is the context of conversion. Why were certain sub-Saharan African cities key points for conversion to Islam, e.g. Gao and Timbuktu in the Western Sahel, and Harar in Ethiopia? Archaeological engagement with Islamisation processes and contexts of conversion in Africa is variable, and in parts of the continent research is static. This exciting 4-year project explores, for the first time, Islamic conversion and Islamisation through focusing on Harar, the most important living Islamic centre in the Horn of Africa, and its surrounding region. Islamic archaeology has been neglected in Ethiopia, and is wholly non-existent in Harar. Excavation at 5 key sites: 2 shrines, 2 abandoned settlements, 1 urban site, will permit evaluation of urban Islam, the veneration of saints, pilgrimage and shrine based practices, rural Islam, architecture and jihad, changes in lifeways, and early and comparative evidence for Islam and long-distance trade, through analysis of, e.g. architecture, epigraphy, burial orientation, imported artifacts, and faunal and botanical remains. Although it is fully acknowledged that conversion to Islam and Islamisation processes are not universal, my project is groundbreaking in developing and applying a transferable methodology for the archaeological explanation of "Becoming Muslim" in sub-Saharan Africa.
Projet ERC : VIRHIST (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499993.75 €

Why have certain regions, like West Africa, rich in biodiversity, also become identified as emerging disease hotspots in scientific and popular understanding? VIRHIST aims to discern the ecological, economic, political and social forces at play that have simultaneously turned certain regions into profitable sites of natural resource extraction, productive enclaves of biomedical research, and hot zones of pandemic threats. At its core, the project seeks interrogate how Western economic interests tied to natural resource extraction in West Africa produced new understandings about the ecology of disease, while simultaneously creating new environments and species relationships--in the laboratory and on the plantation--that eliminated certain diseases, but also creating conditions of possibility for other pathogens to thrive. VIRHIST offers a groundbreaking approach, stimulating cross-fertilization and interaction across the fields of environmental history, medical history, and STS, to develop new perspectives on the history of environment and health. Through a focus on three bloodborne diseases—yellow fever, hepatitis B, and Ebola— at three distinct moments in West African history, VIRHIST advances the following research objectives: 1) Identify and substantiate the intended and unintended changes in disease ecologies produced through industrial plantations and biomedical interventions; 2) Interrogate the shifting ethics and economics driving emerging infectious disease research in West Africa in an age where biosecurity, surveillance, and pandemic anxieties mobilize significant resources and attention; and 3) Investigate the changing ethical, commercial, legal, and political standards that have shaped the collection and extraction of natural resources—from rubber, to chimpanzees, to viruses—in conservation and disease hotspots of the world.
Projet ERC : LUNAR (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPC
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1498723.0 €

Why is machine translation between English and Portuguese significantly better than machine translation between Dutch and Spanish? Why do speech recognizers work better in German than Finnish? The main problem is the insufficient amount of labelled data for training in both cases. Although the world is multimodal and highly multilingual, speech and language technology is not keeping up with the demand in all languages. We need better learning methods that exploit the advancements of a few modalities and languages for the benefit of others. This proposal addresses the low-resources problem and the expensive approach to multilingual machine translation since systems for all translation pairs are required. LUNAR proposes to jointly learn a multilingual and multimodal model that builds upon a lifelong universal language representation. This model will compensate for the lack of supervised data and significantly increase the system capacity of generalization from training data given the unconventional variety of employed resources. This model will reduce the number of required translation systems from quadratic to linear as well as allowing for an incremental adaptation of new languages and data. The high-risk/high-gain relies on automatically training a universal language representation by specifically designed deep learning algorithms. LUNAR will employ an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder represents an abstraction of the input by reducing its dimensionality,which will become the proposed universal language representation; from this abstraction, the decoder generates the output. The encoder-decoder internal architecture will be designed for learning the universal language representation,which will be appropriately integrated as an objective of the architecture. LUNAR will impact multidisciplinary communities of specialists in computer science, mathematics, engineering and linguistics who work on natural language understanding and speech processing applications.

Mots-clés : machine translation,speech recognition,lifelong learning,natural language understanding
Projet ERC : RHEA (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : Université Libre de Bruxelles — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ULB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1065004.8 €

Why sexual reproduction is overwhelmingly predominant among the metazoans remains unclear. Ancient asexual taxa are interesting model systems to gain general insights into the adaptive values of sex. The most notorious and the highest taxonomic rank within the metazoans to reproduce asexually is the bdelloid rotifers. While studies suggest that most asexuals arose recently, the published genome of the bdelloid rotifer Adineta vaga provided the first positive evidence for the long-term ameiotic evolution of this group, confirming its ancient asexuality. How bdelloid rotifers have been able to persist despite the expected negative consequences of asexuality is the focus of this ERC proposal. I will study the mechanisms that prevent genome deterioration and promote diversification in the absence of meiotic recombination. I will include sexual rotifer sister clades in the comparison and study all components of the bdelloid lifestyle that may foster their evolution. One of the key components could be their desiccation resistance and the associated DNA double-strand breaks that appear upon prolonged desiccation. To this end, I plan to (i) sequence genomes of sexual rotifers and distinct bdelloid species that diverged a long time ago, including lineages that never experience desiccation; (ii) apply contact genomics, cellular and molecular assays, as well as targeted mutagenesis to uncover their DNA repair mechanisms; (iii) use whole-genome and RAD sequencing to perform a population genomic study of genetic exchanges among bdelloids; and (iv) investigate the function of the meiosis-specific Spo11 gene in bdelloids through targeted mutagenesis and complementation experiments. Using a computational simulation I will generate theoretical predictions on the impact of the mechanisms promoting genome evolution in asexuals. This proposal should revolutionize the field of asexual evolution and provide a new biological model system to study fundamental processes such as DNA repair.

Mots-clés : asexual reproduction,genome evolution,dna repair,desiccation,horizontal gene transfer
Projet ERC : RHEA (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : University of Namur — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 843370.2 €

Why sexual reproduction is overwhelmingly predominant among the metazoans remains unclear. Ancient asexual taxa are interesting model systems to gain general insights into the adaptive values of sex. The most notorious and the highest taxonomic rank within the metazoans to reproduce asexually is the bdelloid rotifers. While studies suggest that most asexuals arose recently, the published genome of the bdelloid rotifer Adineta vaga provided the first positive evidence for the long-term ameiotic evolution of this group, confirming its ancient asexuality. How bdelloid rotifers have been able to persist despite the expected negative consequences of asexuality is the focus of this ERC proposal. I will study the mechanisms that prevent genome deterioration and promote diversification in the absence of meiotic recombination. I will include sexual rotifer sister clades in the comparison and study all components of the bdelloid lifestyle that may foster their evolution. One of the key components could be their desiccation resistance and the associated DNA double-strand breaks that appear upon prolonged desiccation. To this end, I plan to (i) sequence genomes of sexual rotifers and distinct bdelloid species that diverged a long time ago, including lineages that never experience desiccation; (ii) apply contact genomics, cellular and molecular assays, as well as targeted mutagenesis to uncover their DNA repair mechanisms; (iii) use whole-genome and RAD sequencing to perform a population genomic study of genetic exchanges among bdelloids; and (iv) investigate the function of the meiosis-specific Spo11 gene in bdelloids through targeted mutagenesis and complementation experiments. Using a computational simulation I will generate theoretical predictions on the impact of the mechanisms promoting genome evolution in asexuals. This proposal should revolutionize the field of asexual evolution and provide a new biological model system to study fundamental processes such as DNA repair.

Mots-clés : asexual reproduction,genome evolution,dna repair,desiccation,horizontal gene transfer
Projet ERC : hls4ml (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Proof of concept grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : European Organization for Nuclear Research — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CERN
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

With Deep Learning becoming ubiquitous in our life, running Deep Learning algorithms in real time on an heterogeneous set of hardware platforms is a pressing need in many aspects of our society. While traditional workflows based on standard CPUs and GPUs are established, Deep Learning inference on low-power devices (e.g., cars, smart phones, watches, etc) is gaining more attention. Typically, this would require strong background in electronic engineering to convert a neural network into a Digital Signal Processor. We propose to develop a complete open-software library to automatically convert Deep Neural Networks to electronic circuits, using High Level Synthesis tools. With a large basis of potential applications (e.g., autonomous cars, medical devices, portable monitoring devices, custom electronics as in the real-time data processing system of large-scale scientific experiments, etc.), the hls4ml library would assists users by automatising the logic circuit design as well as by reducing resource utilisation while preserving accuracy.

Mots-clés : machine learning,deep learning,fpga,edge computing,asic
Projet ERC : CREATE (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Products and processes engineering
Entité participante : University of Twente — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1750000.0 €

With an unprecedented rise in solar cell efficiencies and ease of fabrication, hybrid lead halide perovskites (PbHP) have gained worldwide popularity. However, these materials still rely on the use of toxic Pb and lack of long-term stability. Moreover, distracted by a race for higher conversion efficiencies, the development of in-vacuum deposition techniques to reproducibly and controllably grow these hybrid films has been highly overlooked. This is now the main hurdle for the full exploration of Pb-free and stable hybrid halides, which might not be as defect tolerant or easily produced by solution process as PbHP. Therefore, a revolutionary method allowing the discovery of new sustainable complex hybrid materials is now, more than ever, of paramount importance. Here I describe a completely new approach that allows stoichiometric and layer-by-layer in-vacuum deposition of wide families of organic-inorganic materials, and their mixture in any pre-determined ratio. To overcome the specific challenges of hybrid film growth (incompatible volatility and solubility) I propose Pulsed Dual-Laser Deposition (PDLD) to decouple the deposition of the inorganic and organic sources with two distinct laser sources, a high energy (UV) and a low energy (IR), all in one vacuum system. Only this decoupling will allow the control and versatility to bridge the hybrid materials discovery gap and to tackle open scientific questions regarding the interplay between the organic and inorganic components, defect nature and their influence on optical properties, carrier scattering and recombination phenomena. Combining these fundamental insights with controlled growth, will enable the design of a new generation of stable and non-toxic hybrid films. My extensive experience in in-vacuum materials synthesis for solar cells, supported by the unique PLD expertise at the host institution will enable a leap in the discovery and understanding of hybrid materials for solar energy conversion and beyond.

Mots-clés : hybrid materials discovery  rir maple  pulsed laser deposition  lead free hybrid halide perovskites  hybrid organic inorganic materials  combinatorial materials discovery
Projet ERC : DustPrints (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LMU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1435088.0 €

With close to 2000 detected planets, it is striking that we still do not understand how planets form. Their building blocks form in gas disks around young stars, where colliding dust grains form ever-larger aggregates. But this growth is not without limits: larger particles quickly drift towards the star and collide at speeds that shatter them to pieces, long before gravity can bind them together. The mechanisms involved in the assembly and transport of these building blocks remain some of the biggest mysteries of planet formation. Solids in protoplanetary disks evolve differently than the gas, but not independent of it. Observations allow us to directly probe particle growth – the first stage of planet formation. But the gas-solids coupling also enables us to probe the gas disk structure indirectly – just like we cannot see the wind, but we see leaves being moved by it. With this proposal I want to answer some of the key questions of planet formation: (1) What mechanisms drive disk evolution? (2) What role do solids play in the transport of volatiles and the pre-biotic building blocks of life? We will for the first time couple detailed models of the evolution of solids in protoplanetary disks with chemical models on the one side and with hydrodynamical simulations on the other. We aim to derive the unique observable fingerprints of these processes and link those predictions to upcoming observations. With the advent of the ALMA observatory, the prospects of finding these fingerprints are excellent. ALMA will allow us to test our predictions through a wide range of observables at unprecedented sensitivity and resolution, including dust continuum emission, chemical abundance patterns, and isotopic ratios in disks, comets, and our solar system. With our work designed to interpret these observations, we will set the stage for a future understanding of protoplanetary disks and planet formation.

Mots-clés : astrochemistry