Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : DiODe (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer science and informatics
Entité participante : University of Sheffield — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1413705.0 €

This grant will develop and translate a unifying framework for optimal decision-theory, and observations of natural systems, to design distributed algorithms for decentralised decision-making. This will enable a technological step-change in techniques for controlling distributed systems, primarily demonstrated during the grant by decentralised control of robot swarms. These algorithms and associated methodology will also provide hypotheses and tools to change the way scientists think about and interrogate natural decision mechanisms, from intracellular regulatory networks, via neural decision circuits, to decision-making populations of animals. Specific objectives are: 1. Distributed value-sensitive decision-making: undertake optimality analyses of the applicant’s existing decentralised decision-making algorithms based on observations of collective iterated voting-processes in honeybees, and extend these. 2. Distributed sampling and decision-making: design distributed mechanisms that implement optimal compromises between sampling information and making decisions based on that information. 3. Individual-confidence and distributed decision-making: translate machine learning theory to collective behaviour models, designing mechanisms in which weak decision-makers optimally combine their decisions to optimise group performance. 4. Optimal distributed decision-making in collective robotics: translate theory from objective 1 to 3 towards practical applications in artificial systems, demonstrated using collectively-deciding robots. 5. Development of tools for life scientists and validation of theoretical predictions in natural systems: interact with named collaborators to investigate identified decision mechanisms in single cells, in neural circuits, and in social groups. Develop accessible modelling tools to facilitate investigations by life scientists.
Projet ERC : KNOWLEDGELAB (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Glasgow — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1469955.0 €

This highly ambitious project proposes a new research programme for social epistemology. Social epistemology investigates the epistemic effects of social interactions: e.g., how we gain knowledge from social sources (others’ testimony, the media), how we should respond to disagreement, how groups (scientific teams, organisations) can know. It is among the most thriving areas in contemporary philosophy. However, there is little agreement concerning the best methodological approach to social epistemological issues. Individualism puts the individual first; it asks: ‘What are the epistemic responsibilities of individuals in social settings?’ Its main weakness is that it is too demanding to be empirically plausible: according to Individualism, the individual has to do most of the work in separating reliable from unreliable sources. In contrast, Socialism puts the social factor first; it asks: ‘How does the social environment need to be for individuals to acquire justified beliefs?’ On this view, individuals need to do more or less epistemic work, depending on the social norms in force at the context. Socialism is too permissive, in that it licences socially accepted but epistemically irresponsible behaviour. KNOWLEDGELAB develops a novel methodology for social epistemology, one that puts knowledge first; it starts with the function of social epistemic interactions, i.e. that of generating knowledge. It asks: ‘How should we proceed in social epistemic interactions in order to generate knowledge?’ KNOWLEDGELAB employs this novel methodology in the service of the epistemology of testimony, disagreement and groups, and develops the first integrated account of the epistemology of mass media in the literature. This framework is highly relevant in the context of a globalized society, replete with both easy-access information and misinformation: it is more important than ever to know what separates trustworthy sources of information from untrustworthy ones.

Mots-clés : knowledge first epistemology,social epistemology,proper functionalism,epistemology of testimony,group belief,disagreement,assertion,reporting,epistemic norms,norm of belief,epistemology of mass media
Projet ERC : MoralisingMisfortune (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Leiden University — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1807334.0 €

This is a study of the morality of commercial life insurance. What moral issues are raised when commercial companies define responsibilities for misfortune and the appropriateness of entitlements? What are the concerns about the financialization of life and intimacy? First, this study examines the morality of bureaucratic classifications produced by the insurance industry. Classifications reveal particular perspectives on the world and are at the heart of defining the risks covered by life insurance policies, as well as defining exclusionary clauses and who is allowed to take which policies; in addition, they are central to the exploration of consumer markets. What are the moral implications of classification and its associated bureaucratic procedures? Second, the study explores the questions life insurance raises about the value of life. Life insurance literally prices death. How much is a life worth? What lives can be compensated and who can receive compensation? Moral obligations and the allocation of blame may depend on whether financial support is given by commercial companies, kinship, or voluntary associations. This project examines the morality of the integration of life insurance into wider financial systems. The objective of the research is to gain insight into: 1. Public discourses on the role of commercial life insurance in everyday life; 2. The ways in which life insurance gives rise to particular notions of responsibility and compensation. 3. The ways in which the morality of commercial life insurance is intertwined with explaining misfortune, and with organizing care through kinship and voluntary associations. The study will be carried out in five countries: France and the Netherlands – two of the world’s wealthiest countries, with a long history of life insurance; India and Brazil – two of the world’s fastest expanding economies, with a growing insurance market; and the USA – where innovations create new moral concerns.

Mots-clés : ethnography,morality,financialisation,economic anthropology
Projet ERC : DeCO-HVP (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Lancaster University — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499994.0 €

This programme aims to convert carbon dioxide into high value hydrocarbon products using carbon neutral electrochemical methods. High value products are materials that may be used as carbon based chemical feedstocks and as synthetic fuels, reducing the ever-present demand on oil and natural gas to fulfil these needs. The project is within the remit of an international ambition to valorise carbon dioxide waste and reduce environmentally harmful greenhouse gas generation, as opposed to stopping at carbon capture and sequestration. This proposal outlines an alternative route to carbon dioxide utilisation (CDU), in which a mediated approach that decouples the electrochemical reduction from the catalytic process is explored. Novel bimetallic catalysts will be synthesised and studied, meditating electron donating solutions will be generated, and a robust and comprehensive analytical arrangement will be implemented to allow total identification and quantification of the wide range of possible products. Electrocatalytic CO2 reduction is one of the key approaches to CDU, as it has a direct pathway to carbon neutral renewable electricity. Nonetheless it is a field that has shown minimal progress in the past 30 years. A paradigm shift is necessary in the approach to electrochemical CO2 reduction, where conventional heterogeneous interfacial catalysis is limited by mass transport, passivation, and CO2 solubility. This proposal outlines the use of electron donating mediators generated separately to the catalysed chemical reduction of CO2, such that the electrolyte becomes the electrode. This opens a whole new avenue for catalyst research, and here target bimetallic catalysts that suppress side reactions and promote high value product synthesis are described.
Projet ERC : TYPHI (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Immunity, Infection and Immunotherapy
Entité participante : University of Aberdeen — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1101358.24 €

This programme will identify critical host mechanisms that kill bacterial pathogens by exploring a novel mammalian antimicrobial pathway, which I discovered. This pathway protects non-susceptible hosts from typhoid fever. Typhoid fever is caused by Salmonella Typhi, a unique intracellular pathogen that kills more than 200,000 humans per year. Yet, Salmonella Typhi does not infect other mammalian species, such as mice. An understanding of the mechanisms that protect mice from Salmonella Typhi infection will enable me to determine how Salmonella Typhi circumvents these protective mechanisms in humans to cause fatal disease. I have demonstrated that the mechanisms protecting mice are based on an intracellular trafficking process regulated by the Rab32 GTPase. The following critical questions will be addressed: 1) What killing molecules does the Rab32-dependent trafficking pathway deliver to the Salmonella Typhi vacuole? 2) How is the Rab32-dependent trafficking pathway regulated? 3) Is the Rab32-dependent trafficking pathway active in human macrophages? And if so, how does Salmonella Typhi evade killing to replicate in human macrophages? I will define the antimicrobial mechanisms responsible for killing Salmonella Typhi and other bacterial pathogens by exploiting a powerful combination of functional genomics, cutting-edge “omic” approaches and versatile screens. This ambitious, high-gain programme will: I) Identify novel antimicrobial molecules that kill bacterial pathogens; II) Identify critical regulators of this novel antimicrobial pathway; III) Elucidate how Salmonella Typhi establishes deadly infections in humans and identify new therapeutic targets. The overall objective of this programme is to improve global health by capitalising on novel mechanisms of host defence that will not only elucidate ways to treat typhoid, but also extend these insights to the treatment of other bacterial diseases.

Mots-clés : bacterial infections,bacterial pathogens,salmonella,rab gtpases,typhoid fever,salmonella typhi
Projet ERC : XSPECT (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Edinburgh — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 633687.0 €

This project (short name, XSPECT) aims to harness the emerging science of the predictive brain to deliver new insights into the nature, scope, mechanisms and (most importantly) the very possibility of conscious experience. The project thus explores and extends the vision of the brain as an inner engine continuously striving to predict the incoming sensory barrage. The key innovation is to consider this increasingly popular vision in the special context of embodied agents able to predict many of their own evolving states and responses – agents able to ‘expect themselves’. These crucial self-expectations span the interoceptive (targeting the internal sensory flows signaling our own physiological states, such as hunger, arousal, itch, and muscular and visceral sensations) and the exteroceptive (targeting the world, and our own behaviors as they might unfold over multiple scales of space and time). XSPECT explores the idea that such interacting states of complex, layered self-prediction hold the key to understanding much that is puzzling about conscious experience. The project is divided into three simultaneously active sub-projects. The first sub-project concerns relations between prediction, motor action, and experience. The second sub-project targets the role of interoceptive prediction in the construction of experience. The third sub-project considers ways in which more reflective forms of conscious experience (involving agency, selfhood, and the introspection of own experiential states) are further enriched by a spiraling array of socially mediated higher-level self-predictions. XSPECT will combine integrative philosophical argument, collaborative experimentation, and leading edge interdisciplinary research and discussion, leveraging two very successful but under-communicating research programs (‘embodied cognition’ and ‘the predictive brain’) to offer new perspectives on the puzzle of conscious experience.

Mots-clés : embodied cognition,predictive coding,predictive processing,consciousness,interoception
Projet ERC : StrEnQTh (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Heidelberg University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 118750.5 €

This project addresses a frontier of modern quantum physics, entanglement in strongly correlated many-particle systems. At present, despite its importance for fundamental phenomena and potential applications, many-body entanglement is poorly understood theoretically and eludes experimental investigations. Three fundamental challenges are blocking further progress: there are infinitely many classes of many-body entangled states, the calculation of real-time quantum dynamics is inherently difficult, and the quantification of many-particle entanglement remains a hard experimental challenge. StrEnQTh adopts a radically novel approach to force a breakthrough in each of these challenges, concentrating on specific targets motivated by next-generation AMO setups. 1. By designing a dedicated quantum resource theory, I will establish a novel framework for topological long-range entanglement. 2. By implementing crucial improvements on a tensor-network method, thermalization dynamics in gauge theories becomes tractable, especially hydrodynamization after heavy-ion collisions. 3. By exploiting the untapped potentials of time-reversing quantum dynamics and measuring high-order correlations, mixed-state entanglement becomes accessible. Further, by introducing a new paradigm of detection by dissipation, unequal-time correlators become available as a novel toolset for witnessing many-body entanglement. To achieve these goals, StrEnQTh builds on (i) my expertise at the interface of quantum optics and information with quantum many-body theory; (ii) previous works and preliminary results that minimize risks; (iii) fruitful synergies between the goals; (iv) a high versatility of the developed methods. The impact of this project will reach far beyond its immediate field. It will elucidate fundamental theoretical questions of relevance to strongly correlated matter at large, and it will deliver a new generation of detection tools that can find application in other platforms.

Mots-clés : amo gauge theories,thermalization dynamics,quantum resource theories,detection of entanglement
Projet ERC : QSpec-NewMat (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of the Basque Country — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UPV;EHU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 872500.0 €

This project addresses the development of novel theoretical and computational tools that utilize the quantum nature of light to understand and control quantum phenomena in complex systems in and out of equilibrium. Some examples of these processes include exciton-exciton interaction, quantum coherence, assisted energy and charge transport, photochemistry, and new states of matter. The present project aims to build up the basic theoretical and computational machinery to allow quantum computations of the electronic and ionic dynamics of atomic, molecular or extended systems coupled to quantised electromagnetic fields and thereby set the stage for a new era in the first-principle computational modelling of light-matter interactions. To achieve this goal, we will combine the principles of time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) and quantum electrodynamics (QED) into a new quantum electrodynamical-DFT approach named as “QEDFT”. Insight, design and control define the scientific rationale of the project, which will focus on the discovery of the general principles that describe and control systems far from equilibrium and orchestrate the behavior of many electrons and atoms to create new phenomena/states of matter. Besides developing and implementing the new theory of QEDFT, we will investigate atoms and molecules with quantum optical fields; whether and how selected laser pulses drive molecules and solids into new states of matter that have no equilibrium counterpart. What happens when it enters these coherent states? The objective is to identify the spectroscopic fingerprint of those new states. Which states arise in the strong light-matter coupling regime? e.g. hybridized states such as photon bound states, exciton/plasmon-polariton states, so far still undiscovered states. The long-term goal is to deliver an all-out theoretical and computational toolbox for QED-TDDFT applicable to complex molecular systems (like presently approachable by DFT and by TDDFT).

Mots-clés : first principles modeling,tddft,non linear coherent spectroscopy,nanostructures  1d and 2d,decoherence and electronic correlation,optimal control theory,non adiabatic molecular dynamics
Projet ERC : LRC (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999750.0 €

This project aims at developing a novel method of optical spectroscopy to study the wholly unexplored atomic structure of the superheavy transition metals, starting with element 103, lawrencium (Lr). My team will experimentally identify optical spectral lines that will serve as fingerprints in the search for superheavy elements in the universe. The spectral lines are strongly influenced by relativistic and quantum electrodynamic effects and thus will constitute powerful benchmarks for atomic modeling incorporated within this project. Furthermore, since the nuclear charge distribution influences the atomic structure, our experimental data will advance our understanding of the effects of nuclear shells and deformations on the stability of radionuclides at the top of the Segré chart. While I recently opened up the atomic structure of element 102, nobelium, the new challenges faced are the refractory nature of the elements, which lay ahead, coupled with shorter half-lives and decreasing production yields. I propose to overcome these by developing an ultra-sensitive and fast Laser Resonance Chromatography (LRC) to set the new standard in optical spectroscopy. The LRC method combines the element selectivity and spectral precision of laser spectroscopy with cutting-edge technology of ion-mobility mass spectrometry. Based on high-accuracy atomic calculations, my team will optically probe the 1S0-3P1 ground-state transition in singly-charged 255Lr ions and record the distinct arrival times of the ions after passing a drift tube to identify the laser resonance signal. We will perform the experiments at leading in-flight facilities such as the GSI velocity filter SHIP and the new GANIL separator S3. Crucially, the LRC method will be insensitive to physicochemical properties and tolerant of the decreasing yields with increasing atomic number. This paves the way for atomic structure studies of the superheavy elements, in particular, those of refractory nature beyond lawrencium.

Mots-clés : superheavy elements,ion mobility spectrometry,laser spectroscopy
Projet ERC : SPECMAP-CGM (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : Leibniz Association — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : LG
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2459123.75 €

This project aims at developing a radically new view on the structure and dynamics of gas flows in the surroundings of galaxies, a domain known as the circumgalactic medium (CGM). In the last years it became clear that the CGM is crucial for our understanding of galaxy evolution, which are largely shaped in the CGM by the interplay of inflows from the intergalactic medium and outflows driven by supergalactic winds. I plan to investigate the CGM of normal galaxies by means of integral field spectroscopy, or spectro-mapping, in various emission lines. I bring privileged access to two new major astronomical facilities, MUSE on the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile, and HETDEX on the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas. These instruments are both unique in their capability of performing integral field spectroscopy over unprecedented fields of view, delivering high-quality spectro-mapping information for hundreds of galaxies and their circumgalactic environments simultaneously. I have a leading role in both, and I am the only astronomer in the world with direct access to MUSE Guaranteed Time Observations and to the entire HETDEX survey. The major challenge for this experiment is the extreme faintness of the CGM emission, which so far made spectro-mapping unfeasible except for a few extreme objects. My recent breakthrough discoveries with MUSE of ubiquitous Lyman-alpha haloes around high-redshift galaxies demonstrate that finally we have achieved the sensitivity required to detect the CGM directly in emission through imaging spectroscopy. I now want to go a big step beyond and apply this approach to large representative samples of typical galaxies at all redshifts. My goal is not only to detect and establish line emission from the CGM as a universal phenomenon, but to disantangle its complex substructures and, through comparisons with physical models and the latest numerical galaxy formation simulations, build a comprehensive picture of these processes.