Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : CARBONFIX (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université de Strasbourg — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UNISTRA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

How can simple molecules self-organize into a growing synthetic reaction network like biochemical metabolism? This proposal takes a novel synthesis-driven approach to the question by mimicking a central self-amplifying CO2-fixing biochemical reaction cycle known as the reductive tricarboxylic acid cycle. The intermediates of this cycle are the synthetic precursors to all major classes of biomolecules and are built from CO2, an anhydride and electrons from simple reducing agents. Based on the nature of the reactions in the cycle and the specific structural features of the intermediates that comprise it, we propose that the entire cycle may be enabled in a single reaction vessel with a surprisingly small number of simple, mutually compatible catalysts from the recent synthetic organic literature. However, since one of the required reactions does not yet have an efficient synthetic equivalent in the literature and since those that do have not yet been carried out sequentially in a single reaction vessel, we will first independently develop the new reaction and sequences before attempting to combine them into the entire cycle. The new reaction and sequences will be useful green synthetic methods in their own right. Most significantly, this endeavour could provide the first experimental evidence of an exciting new alternative model for early biochemical evolution that finally illuminates the origins and necessity of biochemistry’s core reactions.

Mots-clés : biomimetic synthetic methods,metabolism,co2 as feedstock,self amplification
Projet ERC : EuroWARCHILD (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Oslo — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UiO
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1692946.5 €

How can we ensure that children born of war do not pay for the sins of their parents? Political debates about how to address the plight of children born of foreign fighters to ISIS/Daesh make this an acute concern in Europe today. The European debates are polarized; some argue that socialization of these children will transform them into the next generation of terrorists, while others argue that they must be assumed innocent with rights to citizenship in European countries and state protection. How might we understand, respond, and address the needs and rights of these children raises the fundamental question of how we understand children of the enemy, as innocent individuals or security threats? Further, it is important not to repeat previous historical mistakes. By learning from the past, we can ensure that we will not need to issue apologies for wrongdoings in the future. After World War II, children conceived by enemy soldiers experienced shaming, harassment and isolation. We know that some of the children conceived through conflict related sexual violence during the Bosnian war of 1992-1995, were rejected and adopted, whereas some remained with their mothers under difficult circumstances. These war children were long silenced, but with time, they have formed vocal groups who argue for the right to be seen, heard, and recognized. Their core message is that the sins of their parents are not theirs to bear; they are not the enemy. EuroWARCHILD develops methodological innovation and combines theory development, life history interviews and text analyses to investigate how a child born of war can become a security concern, and what it entails for the child who does. This project is the first to comprehensively examine different groups of war children in the European context; across different conflicts, security settings and generations. EuroWARCHILD will affect policy development and increase attention to children born of war in many European countries, and beyond.

Mots-clés : children born of war,feminist security studies,conflict related sexual violence,international relations
Projet ERC : ReARQ.IB (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : University of Porto — Pays : Portugal — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 0.0 €

How can we manage, improve and develop resilient, sustainable communities, without a solid scientific knowledge of our built environment? Our everyday life is framed by a cohort of buildings about which we know very little, or nothing: they are outside of our cultural concerns, even though we reside, work, learn or convalesce in them. Understanding the architecture that shapes our everyday empowers our communities – it enables them to take informed decisions about what to preserve, reuse and replace; how to update and improve their buildings. At a time when resources are dwindling and must be used rationally, repurposing and retrofitting existing buildings is a priority over new construction, everywhere. European societies have a vast building stock at their disposal, erected in the second half of the past century, to be used and transformed: sturdy, pragmatic objects whose features are seldom discussed. ReARQ.IB bridges the gap between local communities in Spain and Portugal and their ‘architecture of proximity’: structures, ensembles and neighbourhoods generally left out of canonical historiography, close to our lives but far from our minds. Making the genetic fabric of this built environment clear, intelligible and operative is an essential first step for responsible management and decision-making by stakeholders. Contemporary architecture in both countries may be celebrated in professional circles, and even enjoy public visibility – but communities across the Iberian Peninsula, including many designers, know precious little about their modern built environment, which grew exponentially in the 20th century. Focusing on public-use and residential buildings – prevalent generic typologies that concern most communities – ReARQ.IB will integrate information and critical enquiry to support management and action while advancing architectural and urban history. This is applied science for community participation enabling a more sustainable and resilient built environment

Mots-clés : architectural culture,spain,portugal
Projet ERC : CLASS (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Strathclyde — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 11419.46 €

How children acquire their native language remains one of the key unsolved problems in Cognitive Science. This project will answer a question that lies at the heart of this problem: How do children acquire the abstract generalizations that allow them to produce novel sentences, while avoiding the ungrammatical utterances that result from across-the-board application of these generalizations (e.g., *The clown laughed the man)? Previous single-process theories (the entrenchment, preemption and verb semantics hypotheses) fail to explain all of the current English data, and do not begin to address the issue of how learners of other languages solve this learnability problem. The aim of the present project is to solve this problem by developing and testing a new unified cross-linguistic account of the development of sentence structure. In addition to the overarching theoretical question set out above, the research will address four key questions: (1) What do learners bring to the task in terms of cognitive-semantic universals?; (2) How do children form linguistic generalizations in the first place?; (3) Why are languages the way they are; would other types of systems be difficult or impossible to learn?; (4) What is the nature of development?. These questions will be addressed by means of four Work Packages (WPs). WP1 uses grammaticality judgment and elicited production paradigms developed by the PI to investigate the acquisition of basic transitive and intransitive sentence structure (e.g., The man broke the window/The window broke) across six typologically different languages: English, K’iche’ Mayan, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and Turkish (at ages 3-4, 5-6, 9-10 and 18+ years). WP2 uses the same paradigms to investigate idiosyncratic language-specific generalizations within three of these languages. WP3 uses Artificial Grammar Learning to focus on the issue of language evolution. WP4 uses computational modeling to investigate and simulate development.

Mots-clés : child language acquisition,language development
Projet ERC : TRANSPOP (Horizon 2020, appel 2014, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Carlos III University of Madrid — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1133396.0 €

How did ordinary people acquire the capacity to mobilize and influence the political decision-making process? How did standard forms of popular collective action emerge and get institutionalized in European modernity? To address these questions, this project explores the transformation of European popular politics in the long nineteenth-century (c. 1789-1914), while also offering a systematic and empirically rigorous causal account of the processes that led to the emergence of the typical forms of social movement activities that dominate the current landscape of popular protest. The project will seek to address two interconnected problems in current scholarship. First, it will enrich our knowledge of the scope and variety of popular politics in the period by focusing on cases (Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain) that unlike the “core” cases of Great Britain and France have not been studied exhaustively. Second, it will transcend the limitations of existing treatments that have focused predominantly on class formation and state building as the ultimate determinants of popular politics in the period. Through careful archival research and innovative quantitative techniques, the participants will consider an interrelated set of questions on the proper causal relationship between political scale and political mobilization and on the varied cultural and organizational forms of social movement activity.
Projet ERC : ANCESTORS (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of Tartu — Pays : Estonie — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UT
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 690645.0 €

How did politics and inequality work in prehistoric Europe? Traditionally, politics has been seen in terms of discrete political ranks identified through differential treatment of individual burials. But this results in classifying much of prehistory, where the dead were treated in ways which effaced individual identity, as egalitarian. The result is an artificially dichotomous history: Neolithic people had landscapes, rituals and ancestors, Bronze and Iron Age people had politics and inequality. In the last two decades this approach has been strongly critiqued. Burial treatment rarely relates to status so directly; the dead serve many different political roles. Inequality in pre-state groups rarely consists of clear strata; inequality and equality exist in tension within groups. Inequality may have been present throughout European prehistory, but manifest situationally through differential life chances, kinship, ritual or ancestorhood, rather than overtly through political command, wealth or identity. But this new perspective has never been tested empirically. This project tests alternative models of prehistoric inequality and deathways. To investigate social relations in life, it uses osteobiography, reconstructing life stories from skeletons through scientific data on identity, health, diet, mobility and kinship. To understand deathways, it employs a second new methodology, funerary taphonomy. Combining osteobiography and taphonomy allows us to connect ancient lives and deaths. Peninsular Italy provides a substantial test sequence typical of much of Europe. For each of three key periods (Neolithic, 6000-4000 BC; Final Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, 4000-1800 BC; Middle Bronze Age to Iron Age, 1800-600 BC), 200+ individuals will be analysed. The results will allow us to evaluate for the first time how inequality affected lives in prehistoric Europe and what role ancestors played in it.

Mots-clés : osteobiography,ritual taphonomy,ancestors,death,prehistory,kinship,politics
Projet ERC : PhyCogy (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Environmental Biology, Ecology and Evolution
Entité participante : Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ETH Zurich
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999540.0 €

How did the current biodiversity emerge? How does a single fertilised egg develop into a functioning organism? Which factors govern the spread of a pathogen during an epidemic? The answers to these questions depend on the underlying population dynamic processes, i.e. the replication and change of individuals. I will establish fundamental rules of population dynamic processes within the project PhyCogy. I hypothesize that applying statistical tools to phylogenetic trees uncovers these fundamental rules. Such statistical phylodynamic inference is possible since trees display replication events together with the genotypes and phenotypes of individuals. However, the phylodynamic technique has only been widely applied in the disciplines of macroevolution and epidemiology. In Part I of the PhyCogy project, I will lay generalizable mathematical, statistical, and computational foundations for phylodynamics. In particular, I will formulate, explore, and apply novel phylodynamic models that are appropriate for neutral as well as selective or developmental processes. I will then investigate whether the newly proposed phylodynamic models allow us to reconcile competing theories within macroevolution and real-time epidemiology. In Part II, the proposed phylodynamic models are then used to investigate the development of multicellular organisms. I will quantify brain development based on human stem-cell derived organoids as well as zebrafish using single cell data obtained both via CRISPR-Cas9-based lineage tracing and transcriptome sequencing. The project PhyCogy establishes a phylodynamic foundation, quantifying core population dynamic processes in macroevolution, epidemiology, and development. Importantly, the generalizability of the framework allows for future application across biological scales, leading to the rules of population dynamic processes in disciplines as diverse as microbiology, virology, ecology, immunology, or cancer.

Mots-clés : phylogenetics,phylodynamics,birth death models,bayesian statistics,macroevolution,epidemiology,development
Projet ERC : PRESEISMIC (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Earth system science
Entité participante : Université de Strasbourg — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UNISTRA
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 40607.5 €

How do earthquakes begin? Answering this question is essential to understand fault mechanics but also to determine our ability to forecast large earthquakes. Although it is well established that some events are preceded by foreshocks, contrasting views have been proposed on the nucleation of earthquakes. Do these foreshocks belong to a cascade of random failures leading to the mainshock? Are they triggered by an aseismic nucleation phase in which the fault slips slowly before accelerating to a dynamic, catastrophic rupture? Will we ever be able to monitor and predict the slow onset of earthquakes or are we doomed to observe random, unpredictable cascades of events? We are currently missing a robust tool for quantitative estimation of the proportion of seismic versus aseismic slip during the rupture initiation, cluttering our attempts at understanding what physical mechanisms control the relationship between foreshocks and the onset of large earthquakes. The current explosion of available near-fault ground-motion observations is an unprecedented opportunity to capture the genesis of earthquakes along active faults. I will develop an entirely new method based a novel data assimilation procedure that will produce probabilistic time-dependent slip models assimilating geodetic, seismic and tsunami datasets. While slow and rapid fault processes are usually studied independently, this unified approach will address the relative contribution of seismic and aseismic deformation. The first step is the development of a novel probabilistic data assimilation method providing reliable uncertainty estimates and combining multiple data types. The second step is a validation of the method and an application to investigate the onset of recent megathrust earthquakes in Chile and Japan. The third step is the extensive, global use of the algorithm to the continuous monitoring of time-dependent slip along active faults providing an automated detector of the nucleation of earthquakes.

Mots-clés : earthquake nucleation,foreshocks,slow slip,seismic waves,insar,tsunami
Projet ERC : SynapSeek (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System
Entité participante : University of Oxford — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 29685.59 €

How do we learn to dance, play an instrument, or a game as complex as chess or go? How do we make a memory? The common answer to these questions is “through synaptic plasticity”, through changing the synaptic connectivity of neural circuits so that representative brain activity can be reliably triggered. Such connectivity changes are governed by rules, i.e., synaptic mechanisms which monitor the activity of their environment and stereotypically strengthen or weaken synapses accordingly. The shape and mode of operation of these rules is still largely unknown: For the more than hundred different connection types in cortical circuits, only a handful of rules has been described at all. Similarly, testing observed rules in simulations of cortical function has only seen limited success. Our slow progress is due to the extraordinary difficulty of measuring and observing synapses without interference. Here, we propose a new approach. By utilizing the growing power of machine learning methods we can deduce synaptic plasticity rules directly. Newly developed search algorithms and sheer computational power allow us to integrate published data and infer synaptic rules in silico. We aim to (1) develop a new mathematical expression of synaptic plasticity rules, experimentally appropriate and flexible enough to be implemented in a Machine Learning framework, dubbed SYNAPSEEK. Next (2), we will apply SYNAPSEEK to deduce the rules for building various neural structures with increasing complexity. Finally (3), we will incorporate additional constraints to SYNAPSEEK to develop synaptic rules that shape network function as much as its structure. Our work will establish, for the first time, canonical sets of synaptic plasticity rules, based on the circuit structure they must produce, and the function they are meant to support. SYNAPSEEK will have immediate and wide ranging applications, from a basic understanding of cortical development to better protocols for Deep Brain Stimulation.

Mots-clés : machine learning,artificial intelligence,synaptic plasticity
Projet ERC : GenPercept (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Florence — Pays : Italie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2480969.38 €

How do we rapidly and effortlessly compute a vivid veridical representation of the external world from the noisy and ambiguous input supplied by our sensors? One possibility is that the brain does not process all incoming sensory information anew, but actively generates a model of the world from past experience, and uses current sensory data to update that model. This classic idea has been well formulised within the modern framework of Generative Bayesian Inference. However, despite these recent theoretical and empirical advances, there is no definitive proof that generative mechanisms prevail in perception, and fundamental questions remain. The ambitious aim of GenPercept is to establish the importance of generative processes in perception, characterise quantitatively their functional role, and describe their underlying neural mechanisms. With innovative psychophysical and pupillometry techniques, it will show how past perceptual experience is exploited to manage and mould sensory analysis of the present. With ultra-high field imaging, it will identify the underlying neural mechanisms in early sensory cortex. With EEG and custom psychophysics it will show how generative predictive mechanisms mediate perceptual continuity at the time of saccadic eye movements, and explore the innovative idea that neural oscillations reflect reverberations in the propagation of generative prediction and error signals. Finally, it will look at individual differences, particularly in autistic perception, where generative mechanisms show interesting atypicalities. A full understanding of generative processes will lead to fundamental insights in understanding how we perceive and interact with the world, and how past perceptual experience influences what we perceive. The project is also of clinical relevance, as these systems are prone to dysfunction in several neuro-behavioural conditions, including autism spectrum disorder.

Mots-clés : gernative perception,oscillations,serial dependence,saccadic stability