Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : LArcHer (Horizon 2020, appel 2018, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : Jaume I University — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UJI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 253125.0 €

LArcHer project aims at pioneering a new and more comprehensive way of understanding one of Europe’s most extraordinary bodies of prehistoric art, awarded Unesco World Heritage status in 1998: Levantine rock art (LRA). The ground-breaking nature of the project relies on combining a multidisciplinary (Archaeology, Heritage Science and IT) and multiscale approach (from microanalysis to landscape perspectives) to gain a holistic view of this art. It also aims at closing existing gaps between science and heritage mainstreams, to better understand the values and threats affecting this tradition and bring about a change in the way we understand, care, use and manage this millenary legacy. LArcHer aims are: a) Use cross-disciplinary knowledge and methods to redefine LRA (i.e. new dating techniques to refine chronology, new analytical methods to understand the creative process); b) Use LRA as a proxy to raise new questions of global interest on the evolution of creative thinking and human cognition (i.e. the timing and driving forces behind the birth of anthropocentrism and visual narratives in the history of prehistoric art); c) Develop new research agendas to set off complementary goals between science and heritage and define best practices for open air rock art conservation and management. Spread across Mediterranean Iberia, LRA is the only European body of figurative art dominated by humans engaged in dynamic narratives of hunting, violence, warfare, dances and so forth. These scenes are unique to explore past social dynamics, human behaviour and cultural practices. As such, it is the only body of European rock art with potential to answer some of the new questions raised by LArcHer. Key to LArcHer are the systematic recording and analysis of the art through 3D Digital technologies, management and data storage systems, GIS, physicochemical analysis of pigments and bedrock and comparative analysis with other major bodies of art with equivalent developments.

Mots-clés : rock art  digital image technologies  pigment analysis  gis  it  heritage sciences  conservation
Projet ERC : WorkOD (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : University of Glasgow — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1422818.0 €

Labour law as a scholarly discipline is widely believed to be in crisis. Since the time of its birth, both the nature of working relationships and the context within which they are formed and regulated have changed significantly. The difficulty for scholars is that old concepts don’t perform the function anymore of making sense of the field. Old arguments about the need to protect workers’ interests are met with counterarguments, informed by neoclassical economics, that protective measures inhibit economic growth and increase unemployment. The WorkOD project aspires to nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the discipline of labour law across the whole of Europe and beyond. Understanding the crisis to have at its heart a crisis of methodology, it aims to develop a new methodology for the study of the key legal concept of the contract for work. It aims to explain trends in the field of work organisation and working relationships and to assess the significance of particular labour market institutions to the achievement of policy goals in a way that is useful to scholars and policy-makers. And it aims to pave the way for future contributions by scholars to policy debates, so that they may influence in positive ways the identification of new economically and socially sustainable solutions to the problem of the division of responsibilities and risks between workers and those for whom they work. In a marked departure from the state of the art, the project defines contracting for work as an instance of economic, social and legal behaviour, influenced in a variety of ways by the institutional context within which it proceeds. Rejecting the reframing of labour law according to a full blown market paradigm, it argues instead for the utility of sociological methods. Its development of a new methodology begins from a combination of micro and macro perspectives, and a synthesis of approaches drawn from economic sociology, political economy and the sociology of law.

Mots-clés : work contract,contract of employment,labour law,gig economy,labour markets,sociology of law,economic sociology,political economy,hugo sinzheimer,otto kahn freund
Projet ERC : LANGBOOT (Horizon 2020, appel 2015, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : National University of Ireland — Pays : Irlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : NUI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 453651.56 €

Language and cognition have a close, but cryptic, relationship. Is language just another tool in humans' diverse cognitive toolkit; vital for communication, but not necessary for complex, high-level thought? Or is language what allows us to form and manipulate complex thoughts in the first place, by allowing words to act as placeholders in ideas that would otherwise be too unwieldy to handle? Distinguishing between these possibilities is vital to understanding our most fundamental cognitive faculties and the origin of modern human cognition itself. The current project will render this problem tractable with the groundbreaking proposal that language bootstraps the cognitive complexity of the human mind by enhancing its ability to form and manipulate more elaborate mental representations than would otherwise be possible without language. In an innovative programme of investigation that uses cutting-edge methods from experimental psychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive modelling, and corpus linguistics, we will examine how words interact with conceptual knowledge gleaned from perceptual and action experience in forming mental representations across a range of fundamental cognitive tasks, including categorisation, memory performance, and abstract thought. We will test whether and how language provides indispensable aid to cognitive processing that struggles to complete under time pressure or that strains working memory capacity, and how such aid could have influenced cognitive evolution. Findings of this project will answer whether language provides critical enhancement to the achievable complexity of cognition, and whether language use could have brought about the sudden flowering of art, fine tools and culture that are the hallmarks of complex cognition in modern humans. The result will be a comprehensive, multidisciplinary perspective on the role of language in cognition that has the potential to reshape how we regard the functioning of the human mind.

Mots-clés : mental representation,concepts,embodied cognition,perceptual simulation,linguistic distributional information,cognitive evolution,cognitive science,psycholinguistics,cognitive modelling
Projet ERC : CoAct (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Complexity
Entité participante : Radboud University Nijmegen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Language is fundamental to human sociality. While the last century has given us many fundamental insights into how we use and understand it, core issues that we face when doing so within its natural environment—face-to-face conversation—remain untackled. When we speak we also send signals with our head, eyes, face, hands, torso, etc. How do we orchestrate and integrate all this information into meaningful messages? CoAct will lead to a new model with in situ language processing at its core, the Contextualized Action and Language (CoALa) processing model. The defining characteristic of in situ language is its multimodal nature. Moreover, the essence of language use is social action; that is, we use language to do things—we question, offer, decline etc. These social actions are embedded in conversational structure where one speaking turn follows another at a remarkable speed, with millisecond gaps between them. Conversation thus confronts us with a significant psycholinguistic challenge. While one could expect that the many co-speech bodily signals exacerbate this challenge, CoAct proposes that they actually play a key role in dealing with it. It tests this in three subprojects that combine methods from a variety of disciplines but focus on the social actions performed by questions and responses as a uniting theme: (1) ProdAct uses conversational corpora to investigate the multimodal architecture of social actions with the assumption that they differ in their ‘visual signatures’, (2) CompAct tests whether these bodily signatures contribute to social action comprehension, and if they do so early and rapidly, (3) IntAct investigates whether bodily signals play a facilitating role also when faced with the complex task of comprehending while planning a next social action. Thus, CoAct aims to advance current psycholinguistic theory by developing a new model of language processing based on an integrative framework uniting aspects from psychology , philosophy and sociology.

Mots-clés : multimodal communication,gesture,dialogue,interaction,joint action,language processing,social action,communicative intentions,pragmatics
Projet ERC : ELECNANO (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IMDEA
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1994712.5 €

Lanthanide metals are ubiquitous nowadays, finding use in luminescent materials, optical amplifiers and waveguides, lasers, photovoltaics, rechargeable batteries, catalysts, alloys, magnets, bio-probes, and therapeutic agents. In addition, they bear potential for high temperature superconductivity, magnetic refrigeration, molecular magnetic storage, spintronics and quantum information. Surprisingly, the study of lanthanide physico-chemical properties on surfaces is at its infancy, particularly at the nanoscale. To address this extraordinary scientific opportunity, I will research the foundations and prospects of lanthanide elements to design functional nanoarchitectures on surfaces and I will study their inherent physico-chemical phenomena in distinct coordination environments, targeting novel approaches for sensing, nanomagnetism and electroluminescence. Importantly, our studies will encompass both metal substrates and decoupling surfaces including ultra-thin film insulators and graphene. Nurturing from these studies and in parallel, we will focus on graphene voltage back-gated supports, thus surpassing the seminal knowledge on electrically-inert substrates and enhancing the scope of our research to address the overarching objective of the proposal, i.e., the design of electrically tunable functional lanthanide nanomaterials. The culmination of ELECNANO project will provide strategies for: 1.-Design of functional nanomaterials on high-technological supports. 2.-Development of advanced coordination chemistry on surfaces. 3.-Rationale of the physico-chemical properties of lanthanide-coordination environments. 4.-Engineering of lanthanide nanoarchitectures for ultimate sensing, nanomagnetism and electroluminescence. 5.-In-situ atomistic views of electrically tunable materials and unprecedented fundamental studies of charge-molecule/metal physics on devices.

Mots-clés : surface confined metal organic coordination,lanthanides,2d materials,scanning probe microscopies,scanning tunneling spectroscopy,tip induced electroluminescence,photo electron spectroscopies
Projet ERC : UFLNMR (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and analytical chemical sciences
Entité participante : University of Oulu — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : U. Oulu
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2625000.0 €

Laplace NMR (LNMR), comprising diffusion and relaxation NMR experiments, provides detailed information on the dynamics and chemical resolution of molecular systems, which is complementary to NMR spectra. Similarly to the traditional NMR spectroscopy, the information content of LNMR can be significantly enhanced by a multidimensional approach. The long experiment time and low sensitivity restrict the applicability of the multidimensional method, however. Based on spatial encoding of multidimensional data, we develop a broad range of single-scan LNMR experiments, constituting a new class of NMR experiments called ultrafast multidimensional LNMR. The method shortens the experiment time by one to three orders of magnitude as compared to the conventional method, offering unprecedented opportunity to study fast processes in real time. Furthermore, it enables boosting the sensitivity by several orders of magnitude by using nuclear spin hyperpolarization, which allows investigation of low-concentration samples. Ultrafast LNMR opens paradigm-breaking prospects in chemical, biochemical, geologic, archaeologic and medical analysis. LNMR can, e.g., provide unique information on the intra- and extracellular metabolic processes, including those of cancer cells, which facilitates diagnostics and helps to find efficient treatments, and it can be exploited in the development of new types of biosensors. Furthermore, the method reveals previously unobservable details about the phase behaviour of ionic liquids, gel and polymer formation, as well as catalysis, which are essential in understanding their performance in technological applications. LNMR is also applicable to portable, single-sided magnets, implying potential to raise the sensitivity of low-field NMR to a completely new level. This entails significant impact on mobile chemical and medical analysis. The low cost of the low-field facility renders advanced NMR analysis broadly available, even in developing countries.

Mots-clés : nmr spectroscopy,relaxation,diffusion,hyperpolarization
Projet ERC : TerrACE (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The study of the human past
Entité participante : University of York — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 100135.0 €

Large areas of agricultural terracing have been abandoned and are being destroyed in Europe. TerrACE will develop a transferrable methodology of archaeological protocols for understanding the creation, maintenance and use of terraces over the longue durée, thereby informing strategies for the sustainable management of these environmental-fragility hotspots. Terraces and lynchets are hallmarks of complex Prehistoric to Post-Medieval societies and were critical for the sustainability of many European societies (including the Greeks & Romans). However, we typically know less about them than any other archaeological site type, although they were one of the first transformations of natural into cultural landscapes, which in many cases persisted to the 20th century. Key archaeological questions are: how old are terrace systems, how were they used, did they reduce soil erosion and are they carbon sinks? The answers to these questions have high relevance in Europe today as terraces can combine high yields with decreased erosion and fire risk, whilst increasing social resilience and food security in the face of environmental change. TerrACE will be a step-change in our archaeological approach by integrating a raft of new and innovative scientific techniques through an exemplary study of the creation, operation and abandonment of terraced landscapes on a N-S climatic transect of well-known/excavated terraces across Europe. TerrACE has 5 objectives; 1) improving terrace-landscape mapping, 2) multiple dating typical terrace systems, 3) determining history of use and management, 4) understanding the role of terraces in carbon storage, and 5) outreach to promote terraces as part of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Landscapes (UNESCO GIAHS). TerrACE is only now feasible due to the development of techniques including LiDAR, direct sediment dating, palaeoenvironmental proxies, soil carbon modelling and the innovatory use of ancient DNA on terrace palaeosols.

Mots-clés : environmental history,complex societies,social change,palaeoecology,archaelogical survey,biomolecular methods,sediment dating,agricultural history,rural sustainability
Projet ERC : MIC (Horizon 2020, appel 2020, Starting grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Social World and Its Diversity
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 : 1499127.0 €

Large scale rural-to-urban migration and associated urbanization in developing countries constitute an opportunity but also a risk for human development. In either case, urbanization may lead to increased international migration. Our understanding of the interactions between these two phenomena is constrained by the lack of evidence on subnational heterogeneity in international migration, and the traditional divide between internal and international flows in research. MIC provides the most comprehensive analysis of trends in both types of migration in more than 3000 cities and rural areas spanning all developing regions. We address three substantive research questions. In project A, we explore how internal and international migrations evolve over time across educational strata of population, the hierarchical distribution of settlements, and the national settings of urbanization. In project B, we examine why migration trends differ across these contexts. In project C, we investigate how migration transforms cities’ socio-demographic potential for human development. MIC is innovative in its global and comparative perspective on migration among metropolitan populations. This is enabled by the integration of spatial data and harmonized census records, creative use of indirect demographic estimation techniques, and advanced statistical methods for data analysis. Each of the three sub-projects has the potential for innovative results that are highly policy-relevant. Projects A & B will provide information on where and why we should expect increased international migration in rapidly urbanizing developing countries, and how this relates to the domestic movements. Project C identifies the consequences of migration for the processes of urbanization and human development. MIC will help governments to tailor their existing migration and development policies, to maximize the development impact of migration, and to make cities more sustainable.

Mots-clés : international migration,internal migration,urban hierarchy,urbanization,human development,metropolitan areas,global south
Projet ERC : CORNEA (Horizon 2020, appel 2017, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and communication engineering
Entité participante : University of Groningen — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : RUG
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1998933.0 €

Large-scale technological, biological, economic, and social complex systems act as complex networks of interacting autonomous agents. Large numbers of interacting agents making self-interested decisions can result in highly complex, sometimes surprising, and often suboptimal, collective behaviors. Empowered by recent breakthroughs in data-driven cognitive learning technologies, networked agents collectively give rise to evolutionary dynamics that cannot be easily modeled, analysed and/or controlled using current systems and control theory. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop new theoretical foundations to tackle the emerging challenging control problems associated with evolutionary dynamics for networked autonomous agents. The aim of this project is to develop a rigorous theory for the control of evolutionary dynamics so that interacting autonomous agents can be guided to solve group tasks through the pursuit of individual goals in an evolutionary dynamical process. The theory will then be tested, validated and improved against experimental results using robotic fish. To achieve the aim, I will: (1) develop a general formulation for stochastic evolutionary dynamics with control inputs, enabling the study on controllability and stabilizability for evolutionary processes; (2) introduce stochastic control Lyapunov functions to design control laws; (3) construct new classes of conditional strategies that may propagate controlled actions effectively from focal agents in multiple time scales; and (4) validate experimentally on tasks with unknown difficulties that require a group of robotic fish to evolve and adapt. The project will result in a major advance from the conventional usage of evolutionary game theory with the systematic design to actively control evolutionary outcomes. The combination of theory with experimentation and the multi-disciplinary nature of the approach will lead to new applications of autonomous robotic systems.