Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : ELECTRON (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Physical Sciences and Engineering
Panel : Synthetic Chemistry and Materials
Entité participante : Université de technologie de Darmstadt — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2082500.0 €

Advanced materials are at the core of innovation in the 21st century for a wide range of industries, including semiconductors, consumer electronics, automotive, and aerospace. Demands for products with increased functionality, performance, and reduced power consumption are driving the need for new device structures and materials. Designing, characterizing, and testing of two-terminal devices such as MIM (metal-insulator-metal) capacitors for high performance DRAM capacitors or MSM (metal-semiconductor-metal) select elements for advanced non-volatile memory are key for improved materials stack design and integration. In ELECTRON, I will develop a technique that allows to directly image "brain-like" functions in operational e.g. RRAM devices. I aim to achieve operando electron beam-induced current imaging (EBIC) inside a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) by using amplifiers to measure electrical currents in a contacted working device exposed to a microscope ́s electron beam, and thus, for the first time map electrical activity of a real device, like neuroscientists use for example, fMRI to track blood flow within the brain: the parts that are being used will light up in the map. This technique will enable a unique and previously non-existent way to visualize electric activity in working devices while being sensitive to electric potential, electric field, work function, conductivity and temperature under simultaneous external stimuli (i.e. heating, biasing, gas). I propose this project based upon the internationally recognized expertise of my group in the development of situ/operando TEM, specifically, the ability to operate and electrically contact stack devices inside an electron microscope and my experience in MEMS-based chip platform design (Nature Communications, 4445(2018)). The goal is to push the spatial resolution of STEM-(SE)EBIC to reach atomic-resolution dimensions while probing industry relevant electronic devices under realistic conditions.

Mots-clés : structure property relations functional materials electronic devices metal insulator metal structures operando microscopy electron beam induced current imaging
Projet ERC : SEGMENT (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Entité participante : Université de technologie de Darmstadt — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2083091.25 €

The human mind understands visual scenes. We can usually tell what objects are present in a scene, we can imagine what the hidden parts of objects look like, and we can imagine what it would look like if we or an object moved. The first step of visual scene understanding is segmentation, in which our brain tries to infer which parts of the scene belong to which objects. Adults can do this in photographs – but photographs are not how we learned to see as infants. We learned to see by moving around in a 3D world. The way that scenes project into our eyes, how light is affected by the optics of our eyes, how our photoreceptors sample the light, and how we move our eyes all provide rich information about our environment. However, we do not know how adults combine all this information to perceive segmented scenes, and we do not know how infants learn this combination. Two reasons for this are that standard visual display devices cannot precisely mimic these factors, and that it is unethical to manipulate these factors in human infants. The goals of this project are to understand how adults use the rich information present in active 3D vision to perform segmentation, and to understand how this is learned. We will develop a new display device and experimental methods to study how adults segment scenes when realistic visual information is available, and develop ground-breaking new technologies using advanced computer graphics and machine learning to simulate the inputs to the visual system from early development to adulthood. We will then conduct in silico experiments in artificial neural networks to understand segmentation learning, by systematically restricting or manipulating different factors. We will compare the learned behaviours of different artificial networks to adults performing segmentation during active exploration of 3D scenes, and use similarities and differences to better understand a fundamental puzzle of perception: how the mind makes sense of scenes.

Mots-clés : vision,psychophysics,multifocal display,differentiable rendering,deep neural networks
Projet ERC : Housing. Yu (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Studies of Cultures and Arts
Entité participante : Institute of Art History — Pays : Croatie — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : IPU
Type d'entité : Organismes publics (hors enseignement & recherche)
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2370438.0 €

Housing.Yu researches the production of spaces of everyday life in Yugoslavia (1945–1991), which still constitutes about 60–70% of the current housing stock of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. The project will employ a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and methodologically innovative approach to the government’s actions, urban planners, architects, contractors, and citizen-users. The project aims to understand the critical phenomena of mass housing in a socialist state, including its policies, estate development, citizen participation and related knowledge exchange between Western and Eastern Europe. Housing policies were an essential part of the development of the self-management of socialist Yugoslavia, in which the workers decided on housing. Yugoslavia carried out three political-economic and housing reforms with an aim to generate legislation and implementation, as well as material and professional frameworks for mass housing, experimenting with different forms of standards, financing, organization of production, and ownership. In these overlapping processes, it relied on the inherited pre-war and then-contemporary practices from the East and the West, mediated by dynamic knowledge exchanges. Investigating the housing production through the relationship among social processes, construction and knowledge exchange, project transcends the traditional field of art history by using digital tools. It valorizes the housing project of socialist Yugoslavia and its contribution to the Pan-European Project Homes for all People, which ended with Right-to-buy. Housing.Yu will generate a valuable, open-access repository of knowledge of interest to the scientific, educational and professional community, both in the countries where it is implemented and at the European level. The project’s results warrant a social impact at a time when Europe is facing yet another housing crisis and broader social and environmental challenges.

Mots-clés : housing estates development,citizen participation,housing policies,knowledge exchange
Projet ERC : MICROBOTS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Prevention,  Diagnosis and T reatment of Human Diseases
Entité participante : University Hospital Regensburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UKR
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1999901.0 €

Allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT) is the most common cellular immunotherapy for hematologic malignancies, but beneficial outcomes are limited by severe morbidity and mortality by graft-vs.-host disease (GVHD) and by relapse as a consequence of insufficient antitumor immune response (graft-vs-leukemia, GVL). In allo-SCT patients, a diverse gut microbiome is associated with beneficial clinical outcomes and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) emerges as a promising therapeutic option for acute gastrointestinal GVHD patients. Yet, how the gut and tissue-associated microbiome governs immune function and tissue homeostasis remains poorly understood. We identified microbial signatures - i.e., configurations of microbial communities and their associated immune-modulatory metabolites - in allo-SCT patients that (i) favourably associate with clinical outcomes, (ii) can engage an Interferon (IFN)-I inducing pathway to induce tissue regeneration, and (iii) protect mice from immune-mediated tissue damage. We therefore hypothesize that gut and tissue-associated microbial consortia and their immune-modulatory metabolites serve as a game changer for allo-SCT. “MICROBOTS” will test this by (i) providing a thorough characterization of microbiome/metabolome-host interaction at the epithelial interface in allo-SCT patients with or without GVHD, relapse and undergoing FMT and (ii) evaluating the functional impact of identified microbial signatures in advanced preclinical models of GVL and GVHD. These novel insights will provide a template for the design of a Precision FMT approach with defined microbial-metabolite cocktails aimed to achieve robust and durable antitumor responses in allo-SCT patients as well as to improve tissue regeneration and minimize immune-mediated side effects (GVHD). This may induce a paradigm-shift in clinical allo-SCT protocols and potentially other T cell transfer therapies (CAR/TCR T cells) in cancer treatment as a whole.

Mots-clés : allogeneic stem cell transplantation,cancer immunology,cancer immunotherapy,microbiome
Projet ERC : CaPANES (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Entité participante : Université de Tilbourg — Pays : Pays-Bas — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1929204.0 €

The legal concept of sovereignty does not capture foreign trade relations, networks or economic clout. This shortcoming has resulted from a historical reduction of its meaning since the 1600s. This project will analyze legal concepts of sovereignty that developed before that time, within six networked cities of commerce (Bruges, Southampton, Rouen, Lübeck, Toulouse and Florence). In the period of 1400-1620 cities were interconnected through trade routes, correspondence and diplomacy. Legal concepts of sovereignty were crafted bottom-up and were more encompassing than the present-day legal concept of sovereignty, also for economic relations. In the process, these concepts absorbed changes within the cities and in the economic relations between cities. In the project proposed, agent-based and network methods will be used to track down these changes. The dynamism of conceptual change at the level of individual cities related to commercial, political and social developments, which will be assessed with agent-based modelling. These developments influenced institutional set-ups, constitutional approaches, the organization of trade and policies of access toward foreigners. At the level of networks between cities, dynamics impacting on sovereignty concepts related to foreign relations and yielded features different to developments within cities. Network analysis will make it possible to detect the dispersal and weight of sovereignty concepts and whether some concepts underpinned a transnational field of sovereignty. Causal patterns underlying change will be the outcome of this research into the cities and their networks, and these patterns will be used to create an updated legal concept of economic sovereignty.

Mots-clés : legal history
Projet ERC : MaSES (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Human Mobility, Environment, and Space
Entité participante : Leuphana University of Lüneburg — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1981765.0 €

Mainstreaming Social-Ecological Sufficiency: Closing the sustainable consumption gap between societal demand and ecological limits  Global patterns of production and consumption are fundamentally unsustainable, threatening key planetary boundaries—earth system processes vital for maintaining of ecological integrity and human well-being. Strategies for averting this ‘ecological overshoot’ have largely focused on ‘greening’ production by reducing the material intensity (efficiency), or the material throughput (consistency) of economic activity. However, neither of these approaches address what constitutes a sustainable scale of economic activity. Here, the novel notion of social-ecological sufficiency—a socially satisfactory standard of living within ecologically sustainable natural resource usage—represents a vital third (integrative) strategy for moving towards an economy within a 'safe operating space for humanity’.  The overall aim of MaSES is to mainstream the notion of social-ecological sufficiency as a conceptual and empirical bridge between research on planetary boundaries and sustainable production and consumption, with far-reaching academic and societal implications for sustainable resource use. WP1 will synthesize disparate approaches to conceptualizing sufficiency and cement social-ecological sufficiency as a core idea in sustainability. WP2 will employ a global environmentally extended material and energy flow analysis to quantify key planetary boundaries (land-system change, biochemical flows, climate change and freshwater use) in terms of ‘ecologically sufficient’ levels of household consumption. WP3 will adapt methods from consensual deprivation assessments to identify ‘socially sufficient’ levels of household consumption across different social groups. WP4 will assess the feasibility of different strategies for closing the gap between ecologically ‘safe’ and socially ‘acceptable’ levels of household consumption. WP5 addresses project management.

Mots-clés : sufficiency,sustainability science,ecological limits,material flow analysis,household consumption,sustainable production and consumption,degrowth
Projet ERC : autoXitus (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Life Science
Panel : Molecules of Life: B iological  Mechanisms , Structures  and Functions
Entité participante : Université Johann Wolfgang Goethe de Francfort-sur-le-Main — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2000000.0 €

Cells control their content by balancing its synthesis and degradation. Autophagy is a key degradation process capable of engulfing large fractions of cells, including organelles, into double-membrane vesicles called autophagosomes. These fuse with lysosomes causing degradation of their cargo. Secretory pathways, including secretory autophagy, offer an alternative option to remove unwanted materials from cells. However, mechanisms allowing the secretion of larger cellular components are still unknown. We identified a novel pathway, which we termed autoxitus – for self (auto) exit (xitus) – that leads to the secretion of autophagosomes. This proposal aims at defining the molecular mechanism and regulation of autoxitus. We will first study how specificity and decision-making between secretory autoxitus and degradative autophagy routes is achieved and whether there is cross-regulation. Autophagosomes on the autoxitus route can contain parts of the cytosol, but also large fragments of organelles, raising the question whether the secreted autoxitus vesicles signal to neighbouring cells in a non-cell autonomous manner. We aim to uncover the impact of these signalling processes to determine whether and how autoxitus helps to signal stress conditions or may even deliver material or organelles to other cells. Finally, the role of autoxitus in two (patho-)physiological conditions will be analysed. Since autophagic processes are key to viral particle release, we will study the contribution of autoxitus to the viral life cycle. Furthermore, we will investigate the role of autoxitus in the release of protein aggregates from cells and the resulting seeding propensity.  This proposal will give ground-breaking insight into autoxitus, its molecular underpinnings and physiological consequences. AutoXitus will provide the framework for future integration into numerous cellular pathways.

Mots-clés : autophagy,protein homeostasis,secretion,extracellular vesicles,non cell autonomous signaling,protein aggregation,disease
Projet ERC : NETWORK (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Fondation Jean-Jacques Laffont - Toulouse sciences économiques — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : JJL-TSE
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 591000.0 €

The overarching goal of this project is to develop a coherent set of econometric methods to deal with unobserved heterogeneity in the analysis of social interactions between agents. Such heterogeneity is well recognized to be important. It is often of great interest to document the degree of heterogeneity, evaluate its impact, and uncover the existence and form of any complementarities that may exist between agents. With the growing availability of network data, questions of this kind are increasingly being asked in applied work. The development of appropriate econometric tools to answer them has, however, not followed suit. If anything, recent theoretical work has pointed at substantial difficulties with the so called fixed-effect approach currently serving as the workhorse tool. This project recognizes the potential of taking a random-effect view. For settings where agents interact in pairs, such a view has received some attention in the literature. However, to date, it struggles with issues of identification, estimation, and computation. We will develop a new nonparametric approach that provides a solution to each of these three issues. We will next venture forward and extend this framework to situations where agents interact in larger groups. Both collaborative and non-collaborative settings will be considered, thereby covering team production, competition, and peer effects. Special attention will be given to recovering treatment effects in the presence of social interactions, where interference on unobservable confounders is an issue. For situations where data limitations prevent a fully nonparametric approach, instrumental-variable methods that build on flexible functional form restrictions will be developed. The statistical properties of the proposed estimators will be derived, software implementation will be provided, and empirical illustrations will be presented to highlight the usefulness of the methods.

Mots-clés : complementarity,heterogeneity,identification,inference,matching,network,teams,peer effects
Projet ERC : POLARIZE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Université Pompeu Fabra — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1862500.0 €

Political polarization has risen in many countries over the past decades and cross-party animosity now extends to previously non-partisan issues. Polarization is alarming as it undermines social cohesion, fuels distrust in institutions and violence against out-groups, and can even favor the emergence of conspiratorial beliefs. These cleavages also hinder intergroup cooperation, making it difficult to build the broad political support needed to tackle urgent social challenges. Many have ascribed the rise in polarization to the Internet and social media, seen as disproportionately exposing individuals to like-minded content and people, thus further reinforcing their opinions. Yet, the causes of political polarization, and the role of the Internet, remain largely understudied, and few solutions have been proposed to reduce polarization and avert its direst consequences. My project investigates the technological and social determinants of political polarization and its broader consequences for society, and explores possible ways to alleviate this problem. To this end, I tackle four distinct but intertwined questions. First, I examine the extent to which personalized search engine results expose users to divergent political content and affect their political views. Second, I study the extent to which the introduction of paywalls by online news outlets has affected users’ news consumption, information inequities, and ideological segregation. Third, I examine how technology-driven economic shocks that favor social exclusion and undermine workers’ identity influence beliefs in conspiracy theories. Finally, I study whether perspective-taking interventions can offer an effective tool for reducing ideological and ethnic tensions, and promoting intergroup cooperation. My results will provide a unified framework for understanding the complex technological and social forces behind political polarization, and for formulating concrete policy recommendations on how to mitigate it.

Mots-clés : political polarization algorithmic bias search engines paywalls conspiratorial beliefs political effects of robotization and automation perspective taking
Projet ERC : FAPoD (Horizon Europe, appel 2021, Consolidator grants)
Domaine scientifique : Social Sciences and Humanities
Panel : Individuals, Markets and Organisations
Entité participante : Université Pompeu Fabra — Pays : Espagne — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : UPF
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1191078.0 €

Internet markets tend to concentrate in the hands of a very few large platforms. These platforms have been accused of abusing their monopoly power vis-a-vis their users (consumers, sellers, advertisers) and maintaining the latter through hostile behavior towards potential competitors. They are said to harm users by ‘self-preferencing’, data harvesting, creating 'monopoly positions' and extracting resulting rents with high fees, all the while avoiding competition by acquiring, copying and otherwise disadvantaging potential competitors. This proposal addresses these concerns in four parts. Part 1 focuses on the dual role of online marketplaces, whereby the platform both runs the marketplace and acts as a seller on it. I aim to understand how such hybrid marketplaces conduct themselves toward consumers and third party sellers. The model will be used to evaluate recent policy proposals and suggest ways to avoid significant unintended consequences. Part 2 studies how platforms steer consumers to sellers. As most platforms let sellers set prices and collect fees on revenues, a platform’s own algorithm and her choice to augment/replace it with a position auction may be consequently driven by revenue maximization. I plan to show that steering systems may drastically alter pricing, leading to ‘mediated’ competition. Part 3 explores the nature of recommendation algorithms, particularly the interplay between consumer search and algorithm effectiveness. I demonstrate that algorithms may be self-fulfilling and self-defeating, which determines their effectiveness and significantly alters the resulting allocations and their efficiency. Part 4 explains the circumstances in which an incumbent platform may acquire an upstart platform. These depend on, the overlap of existing user bases, increasing returns to data and monopoly power over advertisers. Acquisitions may be used in situations of both no and substantial overlap in user bases, with mixed welfare consequences.

Mots-clés : digital platforms,marketplaces,regulation,antitrust policy