Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : OMIP (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Proof of concept grants)
Entité participante : Technion – Israel Institute of Technology — Pays : Israël — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 150000.0 €

Over-The-Counter (OTC) trading is trading done directly between two parties, without supervision of an exchange. Traders in OTC markets face several types of counterparty risk (Default, Replacement, Settlement and Liquidity). The technology developed by the PI's ERC-funded research will be applied to solve two basic problems: How to preserve the privacy and anonymity of traders involved in decentralized OTC trading, while improving accountability and transparency. The objective is the creation of a decentralized peer to peer network in which asset ownership can be settled cryptographically with little cost and latency. The system will allow traders to (1) prove ownership of assets, (2) transfer ownership between two trading parties in an efficient, secure, and timely manner. Achieving this will help traders comply with new financial regulations (such as the Dodd-Frank Act) regarding OTC markets, and reduce (1) market inefficiencies, (2) counterparty risk, and (3) settlement and clearing latencies and costs.

Mots-clés : cryptography,probabilistically checkable proofs,zero knowledge proofs,financial markets,derivative markets
Projet ERC : ProstOmics (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : Norwegian University of Science and Technology — Pays : Norvège — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NTNU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1500000.0 €

Overtreatment in prostate cancer (PCa) is a burden for health care economy and for quality of life. Correct diagnosis of early stage PCa is challenging given the limitations of the currently available clinical tools and the biological understanding of PCa. In this inter-disciplinary project, I propose an innovative approach enabling several cutting-edge ‘omics’ technologies (spatial metabolomics, genomics, transcriptomics) as well as histopathology to be performed on the same tissue sample. My goal is to reveal the molecular mechanisms of novel, but also promising metabolite biomarkers (citrate, polyamines, succinate and zinc) and their connection to recurrence, tissue heterogeneity and immune responses in complex human tissues. Such markers can personalize PCa diagnosis, open up new treatment strategies and fundamentally change the view of how to analyze tissue samples in the future. Furthermore, I want to demonstrate that citrate and polyamines are reliable prognostic markers that can be analyzed both in tissue and in patients in vivo by MR spectroscopic imaging. This work is made possible by the availability of high-quality fresh frozen tissue biobanks of prostatectomy biopsies with 5-10 years of follow-up data (N=1000)/slices (N=1000) and targeted in vivo snap-shot biopsies from clinical MR guided procedures (N=100). Among other techniques, I will implement high speed MALDI imaging (RapifleX MALDI TissueTyper) to the multi-omics protocol to study the spatial distribution and provide high resolution metabolic maps for each cell type, and which can be matched to both histopathology and MR Imaging. Multi-disciplinary platforms on large cohorts are needed to explore the clinical potential of the suggested molecular mechanisms. I expect that this ambitious proposal will address the diagnostic challenges of PCa and will further inspire the clinic and scientific community to follow the multi-omics approach within diagnosis and cancer research.

Mots-clés : diagnosis,prognosis,prostate cancer,biomarkers,maldi imaging,magnetic resonance spectroscopy,citrate,polyamines,zinc,tissue heterogeneity,inflammation,immune responses
Projet ERC : COMICS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
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 : 0.0 €

Owing to their visual essence and status as a popular, modern medium, comics – newspaper strips, comics magazines and graphic novels – provide valuable insight into the transformation of collective consciousness. This project advances the hypothesis that children in comics are distinctive embodiments of the complex experience of modernity, channeling and tempering modern anxieties and incarnating the freedom denied to adults. In testing this hypothesis, the project constructs the first intercultural history of children in European comics, tracing the changing conceptualizations of child protagonists in popular comics for both children and adults from the mid-19th century to the present. In doing so, it takes key points in European history as well as the history of comics into account. Assembling a team of six multilingual researchers, the project uses an interdisciplinary methodology combining comics studies and childhood studies while also incorporating specific insights from cultural studies (history of family life, history of public life, history of the body, affect theory and scholarship on the carnivalesque). This enables the project to analyze the transposition of modern anxieties, conceptualizations of childishness, child-adult power relations, notions of liberty, visualizations of the body, family life, school and public life as well as the presence of affects such as nostalgia and happiness in comics starring children. The project thus opens up a new field of research lying at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies and illustrates its potential. In studying popular but often overlooked comics, the project provides crucial historical and analytical material that will shape future comics criticism and the fields associated with childhood studies. Furthermore, the project’s outreach activities will increase collective knowledge about comic strips, which form an important, increasingly visible part of cultural heritage.

Mots-clés : graphic novels,comics,comics studies,childhood studies,children s literature,modernity,history of the body,affect
Projet ERC : PhotoRedesign (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Czech Academy of Sciences — Pays : Rép. Tchèque — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : AVČR;CAS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498861.0 €

Oxygenic photosynthesis uses the energy of sunlight to generate the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, but the vast majority of the received solar energy is not converted to biomass. Enhancing photosynthesis to improve the production of food, energy and high value compounds is a compellingly important challenge that has not been taken up yet, because it requires the modification and exchange of large ensembles of interacting photosynthesis components from different organisms. For the first time, we will undertake the comprehensive redesign of photosynthesis to enhance its capacity to harvest and safely convert solar energy. To achieve this, we combine in our team unique and complementary expertise in genetics, biochemistry and biophysics in the full range of bacterial and plant photosynthetic organisms. We will combine genetic engineering with new approaches from synthetic biology and adaptive evolution to create a novel enhanced variant of photosynthesis in the model cyanobacterium Synechocystis as chassis. The ground-breaking overall objective is to combine photosystems from different photoautotrophic organisms, including de novo-designed antennas in reimagined photosystems. By employing a multidisciplinary approach for combining different natural and de novo-designed photosynthesis modules in one adaptable bacterial chassis with the goal to create a novel enhanced type of photosynthesis, PhotoRedesign goes far beyond conventional applied and fundamental photosynthesis research. PhotoRedesign will establish new model systems and toolkits for the next generation of photosynthesis researchers, and it develops a novel concept for modifying complex processes, hitherto considered to be immutable. In consequence, PhotoRedesign will advance photosynthesis research and create the basis for improving the productivity of economically-relevant photosynthetic organisms.

Mots-clés : photosynthesis,light reactions
Projet ERC : PI2FA (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Universe sciences
Entité participante : Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IAC
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1968750.0 €

PI2FA proposal’s overarching aim is to make a major breakthrough in our understanding of the magnetised solar chromosphere under a novel frame of a multi-fluid plasma theory. Future large-aperture solar telescopes, EST and DKIST, will have among their primary focus observations of chromospheric magnetic fields. The correct interpretation of solar data requires sophisticated theories. The solar atmosphere is made of strongly stratified, weakly ionised and not completely collisionally coupled plasma. In the previous PI’s ERC SPIA project we opened a new research line and performed systematic investigations of non-ideal effects due to neutrals in the solar plasma. To build the complexity step by step, we advanced a single-fluid formalism, best valid for a strongly collisionally coupled case. Nevertheless, a multi-fluid treatment is essential for the weakly coupled chromosphere because the processes of the energy transport and conversion happen at nearly collisional scales. Now it is the right moment to take advantage and consolidate the experience gained in the SPIA project and to bring our research to a new level of challenge. The ambition of the PI2FA proposal is to create and apply tools for multi-dimensional modelling of the solar chromosphere under a precise two-fluid multi-species approach. In the recent few years it has been repeatedly demonstrated that processes related to non-ideal plasma behaviour due to neutrals may be the key to solve the problem of chromospheric heating and dynamics. PI2FA project will make progress in the following questions: determination of chromospheric heating mechanisms; understanding destabilization mechanisms of prominences related to neutrals, and creation of multi-dimensional two-fluid models of the solar chromosphere. These models will include altogether complex interactions down to smallest scales and allow direct comparison to observations, as a way to prepare our community for the coming large-aperture telescopes.
Projet ERC : PROTEUS (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Cultures and cultural production
Entité participante : Autonomous University of Barcelona — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UAB
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1158551.08 €

PROTEUS studies main strategies devised by Western philosophy in representing time in cosmology. It aims at modifying current metaphysics and its relationship with cosmology in the light of recent scientific debates in quantum gravity and quantum cosmology, thereby boosting a new research field in history and philosophy of cosmology. The project is based on two hypotheses: 1) the history of philosophy reveals a guideline that can be traced back to Plato and that characterizes physical and metaphysical approaches to the question of the beginning of the universe in terms of a tension between fundamentality and non-fundamentality of time; 2) there is a conceptual problematic assumption in Western culture and it consists in shaping the problem of the origin of the world as a problem of thinking about the very same conditions of possibility of the origin of a process that is not in time. The project spells out the conceptual roots of current representations of time in quantum gravity and quantum cosmology and highlights the conceptual break that they provide with respect to philosophical concepts of time portrayed in previous systems. PROTEUS explores in detail the notions of time and the paradoxes emerging in the philosophy and cosmology of Plato and Kant and identifies the fundamental characters of emergent time in current quantum gravity theories. In identifying these fundamental features, PROTEUS produces conceptual innovation in metaphysics in such a way that philosophical investigation is complementary to the development of current theories. PROTEUS elaborates alternative argument(s) to anthropic principle, as well as new categories accounting for the notion of ‘contingent necessity’ of the world. The research team includes members from different backgrounds (philosophy, mathematics and physics) and will promote the application of a new methodology emphasizing the relevance of the history of philosophy and the actual interaction between philosophers and scientists.

Mots-clés : plato,timaeus,kant,antinomies,time,space,change,universe,quantum gravity
Projet ERC : PSINFONI (Horizon 2020, appel 2016, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Condensed matter physics
Entité participante : University of London — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. London
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1427361.0 €

PSINFONI aims to open new avenues of research in ultrafast routing and polarization synthesis of light in nanophotonics, and in the manipulation, sorting, levitation and trapping of nanoparticles, molecules, or single atoms near novel nanomaterial surfaces. To this end, we will explore the fundamentals and applications of a range of novel nanophotonic phenomena: (i) spin-orbit interactions of light for polarization-controlled optical routing and polarization synthesis at the nanoscale; (ii) repulsive and switchable lateral optical forces on particles near engineered surfaces for optical manipulation and sorting; and (iii) Casimir repulsive and lateral forces for quantum levitation / frictionless nanomaterials. All these diverse phenomena can be studied under the single framework of particle-surface interactions in the near field, greatly diversifying the research outcomes from a single research effort. Knowledge of the full 3D electromagnetic fields in particle-surface systems will form the foundation from which to explore fundamental aspects and limitations of the above mentioned effects, opening new applications in information technologies and new nanomaterials. Proof of principle experimental demonstrations will be performed where possible.
Projet ERC : PUSH-IT (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Saarland University — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1499658.0 €

PUSH-IT aims to establish charge-separation within formal multiple bonds as a concept for the activation of strong bonds in redox catalysis. The project is motivated by sustainable chemistry and displays a bottom-up approach for new methods relevant for chemical synthesis as well as chemical energy conversion and storage. Inspired by heterogeneous catalysis, we will “push electrons” through formal multiple bonds and translate new principles from main-group chemistry to metals, which readily change oxidation states. We propose these charge-separated, vicinal zwitterions as the “activated” key intermediates for the functionalization of strong bonds (C–C, C–H, C–O, N–H and O–H). Importantly, we anticipate complementary and hence hitherto elusive chemo- and regiodiscrimination to the state of the art due to the unprecedented nucleophilicity of these compounds. The targeted applications include both fine- and bulk chemical synthesis. The interdisciplinary project focuses on coordination chemistry and combines inorganic and organic synthesis with catalysis and advanced spectroscopy. High-end computational design will guide all experiments. More specifically, hitherto unknown vicinal zwitterions of an earth-abundant alkaline earth metal (magnesium), late transition metals (palladium, platinum, gold), and a non-toxic heavy p-block element (bismuth) with carbon (terminal carbides), nitrogen (terminal imides) and oxygen (terminal oxides) atoms will be isolated using innovative and novel synthetic approaches. With these new and exciting molecular coordination compounds in hand, we will establish the stoichiometric activation and functionalization of strong bonds and will develop catalytic redox cycles. Overall, this research project will introduce a novel mechanism for bond activation in catalysis, which will allow us to understand elementary steps on heterogeneous surfaces as well as invent new chemical transformations in homogeneous reaction media.
Projet ERC : Brain2Bee (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : University of Birmingham — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1783147.0 €

Parkinson’s Disease is usually characterised by motor impairment, and Autism by social difficulties. However, the co-occurrence of social and motor symptoms is critically underappreciated; Parkinson’s Disease patients exhibit social symptoms, and motor difficulties are common in Autism. At present, the biological basis of co-occurring social and motor impairment is unclear. Notably, both Autism and Parkinson’s Disease have been associated with dopamine (DA) system dysfunction and, in non-clinical populations, DA has been linked with social and motor ability. These disparate strands of research have never been combined. Brain2Bee will use psychopharmacology in typical individuals to develop a model of the relationship between DA, Motor, and Social behaviour – the DAMS model. Brain2Bee will use sophisticated genetic analysis to refine DAMS, elucidating the contributions of DA-related biological processes (e.g. synthesis, receptor expression, reuptake). Brain2Bee will then test DAMS’ predictions in patients with Parkinson’s Disease and Autism. Finally, Brain2Bee will investigate whether DAMS generalises to an animal model, the honey bee, enabling future research to unpack the cascade of biological events linking DA-related genes with social and motor behaviour. Brain2Bee will unite disparate research fields and establish the DAMS model. The causal structure of DAMS will identify the impact of dopaminergic variation on social and motor function in clinical and non-clinical populations, elucidating, for example, whether social difficulties in Parkinson’s Disease are a product of the motor difficulties caused by DA dysfunction. DAMS’ biological specificity will provide unique insight into the DA-related processes linking social and motor difficulties in Autism. Thus, Brain2Bee will determine the type of dopaminergic drugs (e.g. receptor blockers, reuptake inhibitors) most likely to improve both social and motor function.

Mots-clés : social cognition,kinematics,emotion recognition,mentalising
Projet ERC : MONOLITH (Horizon 2020, appel 2019, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Fundamental constituents of matter
Entité participante : University of Geneva — Pays : Suisse — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UNIGE
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2500000.0 €

Particle-physics, space research and several other fields of basic and applied science necessitate the production of thin sensors capable to provide excellent position and time resolution at the same time. The diode structure of present silicon pixel sensors strongly penalises the enormous potential of silicon-based time measurement: the ~30 ps intrinsic limit of diodes was already reached in sensors with internal gain with pad sizes of 1 mm2. Therefore, new ideas are needed to improve by another order of magnitude and reach the picosecond level. This project introduces a novel silicon-sensor structure devised to overcome the intrinsic limits of present sensors and simultaneously provide picosecond timing and high spatial resolution in a monolithic implementation. This goal is achieved by the introduction of a fully depleted multi-junction. The remarkable performance of this new sensor, combined with the simplified assembly process and reduced production cost offered by the monolithic implementation in standard CMOS processes, represent the required breakthrough. In addition to the novel multi-junction sensor, the cornerstones of the project are the low-noise very-fast SiGe HBT frontend and the patented TDC with robust synchronisation method that the PI has already produced in preliminary versions. The monolithic detector proposed here will offer a sustainable solution for the next generation of experiments at hadron colliders, in nuclear physics and for space-borne experiments in cosmic-ray physics and solar physics. Besides the primary goal of basic science, it will represent an extraordinary enabling technology for the large spectrum of high-tech applications that benefits of picosecond-level Time-Of-Flight measurements. The innovative monolithic detector introduced here will also offer a starting point for further progress in the field of light detection. European industrial partners have been contacted for commercial exploitation of the detector.

Mots-clés : silicon pixel sensors,time of flight,picosecond tdc,tof pet,photon detection