Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : PICNIC (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Systems and Communication Engineering
Entité participante : Université de Heidelberg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 3468472.0 €

The neuroscience principle of free energy minimization (FEM) suggests that living organisms create internal models of their environment in order to minimize surprise and manage uncertainty. This is strikingly different from artificial neural networks (ANNs), which prioritize maximizing accuracy. Although ANNs excel in applications such as natural language processing and weather forecasting, they struggle with real-time, safety-critical tasks like autonomous navigation due to their reliance on deterministic hardware in the von Neumann architecture which is poorly suited for distribution estimation and parameter extraction in probabilistic models. Photonic analog computing enables a paradigm shift for probabilistic processing by exploiting inherent physical stochasticity via direct encoding of information in physical quantities and by permitting ultralow latency and high throughput. Here, I will leverage hybrid photonic integrated circuits to harness physical random number generation (RNG) for probabilistic computing. I will develop chaotic light sources based on Erbium-doped waveguide amplifiers as physical sources of entropy for RNG at telecom wavelengths. Using time-wavelength interleaving of amplitude-bandwidth encoded probabilistic weights and broadband ultrafast waveguide-integrated modulators for vector encoding, I will achieve probabilistic sampling at rates beyond 300 Tera-operations per second. For deterministic convolution processing, I will realize ultra-high throughput programmable photonic crossbar arrays using silicon photonic circuits. By hybrid integration via 2D-3D nanoprinting, I will link different computing platforms into advanced systems. Combining deterministic and probabilistic photonic processors, I will realize disruptive compute architectures for mixed-mode probabilistic-deterministic deep neural networks, achieving Tera-scale probabilistic compute performance, and enabling real-time Bayesian object recognition beyond 100 frames per second.

Mots-clés : chaotic light,photonic neural networks,photonic computing
Projet ERC : REWORC (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Computer Science and Informatics
Entité participante : Université de la Ruhr à Bochum — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2485000.0 €

Almost half a century after the invention of public-key cryptography, there is still a vast discrepancy between the theory and practice of cryptography. With some notable exceptions, research from the cryptographic theory community focuses on problems of great theoretical interest, albeit completely disconnected from the real world. On the other hand, widely used real-world cryptographic protocols are being neglected because they are either mathematically ugly, their solutions appear uninteresting, or they simply do not cross the mind of theoreticians. The current state can be summarized as follows: • Several well-established theoretical cryptographic concepts fall short from properly modeling the way practitioners think about real-world cryptography • There exists a surprisingly large amount of modern cryptographic primitives and standards with unclear provable security status.  The central objective of the REWORC project is thus to narrow the gap between theory and practice of cryptography, providing a solid theoretical groundwork for real-world cryptography. To this end, we will • lay a new theoretical foundation for real-world cryptography in the elliptic curve setting • develop new tools and models for the design and analysis of practical cryptography in the post-quantum setting • revisit the concrete security of legacy cryptography from the 2000s, recently established standards, and forthcoming standards.  REWORC will have a substantial long-term impact on theoretical protocol design, influence ongoing standardization efforts in post-quantum cryptography, and settle doubts about the security of important cryptography used in practice.

Mots-clés : theoretical cryptography,provable security,security reduction,post quantum cryptography,real world cryptography
Projet ERC : SELFiE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de Tokyo — Pays : Japon — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 81491.0 €

Our capacity for self-awareness is often considered a defining feature of human consciousness and in adulthood allows us to imagine how others see us, recollect our past and contemplate our future. Our work has shown that in infancy, the emergence of a self-representation profoundly changes developing cognition. Yet, there are currently no mechanistic accounts of how it could develop, and empirical investigation within contemporary developmental science is surprisingly absent. In the current proposal, I put forward the first mechanistic account of the development of a self-representation, drawing upon recent data from cognitive neuroscience. This new account articulates a biological foundation that captures the idea that it is in detecting oneself as the target of another person’s attention that a concept of self emerges. I propose a pathway through which caregiver communicative cues towards infants – particularly direct gaze – give rise to a belonging to the body feeling state via their modulating effect on the heartbeat and its afferent cortical representation. Motivated by a bias to seek the targets of others’ gaze, a concept of self emerges from filling a placeholder target with this feeling state. This theory will be tested in 4 interlinked projects. Project 1 examines the longitudinal relationship between early interoception and a conceptual self-representation; Project 2 tests the novel hypothesis that direct gaze alerts infants to their interoceptive signals and Project 3 builds on this to test the claim that early in life, infants encode direct gaze as 'about me' which then fosters the inclusion of new self-related events in a reinforcing loop. Project 4 adds a crucial cross-cultural comparison capitalizing on natural variability in caregiving to test the model described in this proposal. This project seeks to fill a crucial gap in our understanding of development, essential for any theory that seeks to fully explain human consciousness.

Mots-clés : self representation,self awareness,self concept,infants
Projet ERC : DEAGENCY (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Ljubljana — Pays : Slovénie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1887187.5 €

Each from their own perspectives, various disciplines have shed light on the roles fulfilled by the dead in contemporary society. Their findings, however, remain compartmentalised, their insights scattered; a comprehensive understanding of their role in the lives of individuals is still missing. This project will benefit from the insights of each of them, with the aim to transform the current partial understandings into a complex view of the roles that the dead play in individuals’ lives. Instead of focusing exclusively on the role of personally significant dead for the bereaved or treating the dead as expression of “folk belief”, or metaphors of cultural and social problems and changes, the project will view the dead as being actively involved in the intricate relationships between individuals and larger social and cultural processes. The over-arching aim of DEAGENCY is to generate a new theory for comprehensively understanding the roles that the dead fulfil for individuals in contemporary society. This will be achieved through identifying: 1) the ways individuals experience and conceptualise the agency of the dead; 2) the reasons and contexts within which it is triggered; and 3) the aims and manners of interaction with the dead. To gain insight into the widest possible range of the roles of the agency of the dead in individuals’ lives, the project will study them within three disparate areas of social / cultural changes and problems, related to the post-socialist period: 1). the effects of the problematic political past (mass graves); 2). changing religious landscape; and 3). changing social life in rural communities. To access subjective experiences of individuals, the ethnographic method will be used in fieldwork conducted in Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Through comparative analysis, common patterns transcending particular changes / problems and contexts will be identified, leading to the final synthesis: the generation of a new theory.

Mots-clés : the agency of the dead,east central europe,individuals
Projet ERC : HPDR (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Mathematics
Entité participante : Université de Ljubljana — Pays : Slovénie — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1166282.5 €

The aim is to develop an emerging field of complex analysis and geometry focused on holomorphic partial differential relations (HPDR). Such a relation of order r is given by a subset of the manifold of r-jets of holomorphic maps between a pair of complex manifolds, and the main question is when does a formal solution lead to an honest analytic solution. This complex analogue of Gromov’s h-principle is highly important but poorly understood. The project will focus on the following problems.  (A) Oka theory concerns the existence and approximation of holomorphic maps from Stein manifolds to complex manifolds, corresponding to HPDRs of order zero. The central notion of Oka theory is Oka manifold; this is a complex manifold such that the h-principle holds for maps from any Stein manifold into it. Recently developed techniques give a promise of major new developments on Oka manifolds and their applications to a variety of problems in complex geometry. (B) Open first order HPDRs. Oka-theoretic methods will be applied in problems concerning holomorphic immersions and locally biholomorphic maps.  (C) First order HPDRs defined by analytic varieties in the jet bundle. Application of Oka-theoretic methods in holomorphic directed systems, with emphasis on complex contact manifolds and holomorphic Legendrian curves.  (D) Applications of Oka theory to minimal surfaces. Development of hyperbolicity theory for minimal surfaces. The Calabi-Yau problem for minimal surfaces in general Riemannian manifolds. Study of superminimal surfaces in self-dual Einstein four-manifolds via the Penrose-Bryant correspondence. These closely interrelated topics embrace major open problems in three fields, with diverse applications.

Mots-clés : oka manifold,stein manifold,complex contact manifold,minimal surface
Projet ERC : UniEn-MLD (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université Aalto — Pays : Finlande — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2499645.0 €

UniEn-MLD research seeks the extremity of the atomic/molecular layer deposition (ALD/MLD) thin-film technique to enable unforeseen material functionalities. The targeted metal-organic materials and interface-engineered superstructures are designed and elaborated so that the unique advantages of this atomic/molecular precision gas-phase synthesis approach can be best exploited. New science evolves from our aim at (i) unique material assemblies (bonding schemes, crystal structures, layer piling sequences, interface interactions) not accessible through conventional synthesis, and (ii) synergistic combinations of different material functionalities, also such which would be mutually exclusive in conventional materials. An important project part is the search for new innovative organic components capable in bringing, e.g., structural guidance, redox control, carrier doping or stimuli-switching into the hybrid material, to create the desired functionalities. The technical advantage follows from the specific ALD/MLD mechanism which yields the new adventurous materials as high-quality large-area homogeneous and conformal coatings, even on demanding surfaces. This opens attractive new avenues for technology advances in important and strongly emerging fields, such as efficient magnetic information storage and local energy harvesting and storage, also addressed within the UniEn-MLD action. This project builds on my long experience in frontier functional material research, and my pioneering role in the development of the ALD/MLD technology for building a beautiful variety of intriguing metal-organic materials. Our proof-of-concept results also support the main hypotheses and feasibility of this ambitious UniEn-MLD research.
Projet ERC : CRIMLIFE (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université de Port Harcourt — Pays : Nigeria — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : UNIPORT
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 101250.0 €

How do social contexts determine paths into crime? How do these trajectories vary across different societal circumstances? And how are they narrated? CRIMEGLO is the first-ever large-scale comparative life-course criminological study globally. No research hitherto has addressed criminal careers and storytelling in such detail and on the scale envisaged in this project. The approach will counterweight the current Northern bias in research and theory, a shift necessary to establish a truly global perspective within life-course criminology. Cultural and societal contexts play a large role in defining and responding to crime. Social conditions shape the life-courses of those getting caught up in the criminal justice system. Context is also intertwined with the ways people talk about their lives. CRIMEGLO will explore and compare crime from a life-course and life-story perspective spanning four continents and six countries: Norway, the Czech Republic, Türkiye, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Colombia. By combining criminological theory with institutional, cultural, and narrative studies, CRIMEGLO’s goal is to establish global comparative research on crime within a life-course perspective. The primary objective is to introduce and theoretically develop a contextually sensitive, comparative global life-course criminology. The secondary objective is to achieve a better empirical understanding of the particular social, economic, institutional, and gendered factors shaping criminal life-courses in different countries with highly divergent societal contexts. Principal Investigator Sveinung Sandberg is a sociologist and one of Europe’s leading qualitative criminologists. He has pioneered the prominent research traditions of Bourdieusian Criminology and Narrative Criminology. With CRIMEGLO, he expands globally his qualitative work on life-courses and life-stories started in Latin America and, for the first time, incorporates quantitative and comparative methods to his research.

Mots-clés : sociology,criminology,narrative criminology,life course analysis,life history analysis,crime
Projet ERC : REACT (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Physical and Analytical Chemical Sciences
Entité participante : Université d'Anvers — Pays : Belgique — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2463858.0 €

Knowing the crystal structure at unit cell level is crucial for understanding and controlling the physical properties of materials and thus for advancing the various fields of materials science. However, for many materials, the arrangement of the atoms within the unit cell varies over nanoscale domains, especially after reactions or under the influence of external factors. Current techniques, such as three-dimensional electron diffraction, X-ray diffraction and atomic resolution imaging techniques, cannot determine unknown crystal structures for phases that are mixed at nanoscale. Therefore, in REACT, I develop a new method to precisely quantify crystal structures varying at nanoscale, and even unit cell scale, across multiphased particles. The new method will significantly impact materials science by providing, for the first time, the crystal structure of previously unknown phases that occur in functional materials during operation. It will accurately and precisely reveal how their structural parameters - such as chemical bond angles and lengths, and the coordinates and occupancy of atom sites - vary across the particles and change under external influences or reactions. This will give the field of materials science new critical insights into the structural changes accompanying processes like intercalation, degradation and diffusion. To demonstrate its potential, I apply the technique to open questions in materials science: the phases appearing in Li- and Na-ion battery materials during charge-discharge cycling and the changes in the local structure of metal organic frameworks (MOF) during CO2 intercalation. This project will generate a whole new research direction in crystal structure analysis. It will open new doors to understanding material behaviour at the nanoscale, contributing to technological advancements and scientific discoveries across the entire field of materials science.

Mots-clés : electron crystallography,3ded,4d stem,in situ,electron diffraction,phases,multiphase,structure solution,crystal structure
Projet ERC : CONFINED (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Soci al World and Its Interactions
Entité participante : Université libano-américaine — Pays : Liban — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : LAU
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 42111.25 €

CONFINED will develop and validate an innovative, comparative, and global research agenda of confined lives. Confinement is a ubiquitous and unequally distributed human condition. While confinement sometimes can be protective, for some groups, not least the displaced on dangerous roads, the marginalized in urban slums and the detained in prisons, it can be a damaging experience linked to violence and inequality. With an empirical point of departure in different contexts across the global north and south, known to produce a variety of confined lives, CONFINED explores, 1) how certain people’s lives are rendered confineable; 2) how confineable groups and networks navigate discursive, actual, and potential practices of confinement, and 3) how and to what extent the concept of confined lives can transform our understanding of the practices and experiences of confinement across global divides in ways that drive theoretical innovation and help build new agendas for social justice. Through three interdependent and sequentially organized work packages, CONFINED proposes to explore confined lives contextually and ethnographically across the global North and South (WP1); to compare what confines people, how they make sense of their confined lives, and how they navigate confinement (WP2), and to conceptually develop and validate the approach through engagement with academics and experts locally and globally (WP3). CONFINED will carry out comparative, ethnographic field work to follow precariously situated translocal family network across four contexts as a privileged lens to understanding confined lives at the intersection of dangerous journeys, urban slums and prisons and camps: Denmark and Lebanon; South Africa and Malawi; Thailand and Myanmar and the UK and Sierra Leone. This will allow CONFINED to reframe the empirical field of confined lives and to generate a new conceptual language to understand one of the most important drivers of inequality world-wide.

Mots-clés : displacement,urban marginality,incarceration,family and kinship,state and non state violence
Projet ERC : C-SWITCH (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Advanced grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Université de Marbourg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2082419.0 €

Nucleotide-dependent molecular switches play key roles in the regulation of cellular processes such as translation, protein folding and transport, cytoskeletal dynamics and cell differentiation. Until recently, their function was thought to rely exclusively on the purine nucleotides GTP or ATP as cofactors. This paradigm changed in 2019, when my group identified a fundamentally new class of regulatory switches, now called C-switches, that depend on the pyrimidine nucleotide CTP.  The few C-switches studied to date have important functions in bacterial growth and pathogenicity. Database searches predict that C-switches are highly diverse and widespread in nature. However, the physiological roles and modes of action of these proteins are still largely enigmatic. The overarching goal of C SWITCH is to provide comprehensive insight into the biology of C-switches and clarify the ways in which this newly identified regulatory principle can control protein activity and cellular functions. For this purpose, we will employ both bioinformatic and experimental methods to systematically identify new types of C-switch proteins and perform detailed mechanistic studies of prototypic representatives, using state-of-the-art in vitro and in vivo approaches. C-SWITCH will thus break new ground in the understanding of cellular regulation and pave the way to a global understanding of C-switches as versatile regulators in biology. Importantly, proteins containing a canonical C-switch domain are absent from humans and other mammalian systems. C-SWITCH will therefore also explore the pharmacological potential of C-switches as new targets for antibacterial and antivirulence therapies, thereby possibly opening new avenues for translational applications and supporting the current global effort to combat bacterial antibiotic resistance.

Mots-clés : molecular switches,regulatory ctpases,small molecule inhibitors,regulatory principles