Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Mimicking Adaptation and Plasticity in WORMS (MAPWORMS)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: The European Innovation Council (EIC)
Theme: EIC Pathfinder
Destination: Open to supporting projects in all areas of science, technology,...
Action type: EIC actions
Countries involved: Italy,Greece,Israel,Finland,Austria
Call: EIC Pathfinder Open 2021 (HORIZON-EIC-2021-PATHFINDEROPEN-01, 2021)
Start date: 2022-05-01
End date: 2026-04-30
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2896750.0
EU funding (EUR): 2896750.0
Participants: 6
Project status: SIGNED

Traditionally, a robot is a machine controlled by a central unit and used to perform specific tasks automatically, often in a structured environment. MAPWORMS aims at challenging this traditional concept by proposing robots inspired by simplified forms of Marine Annelida, able to performtasks in response to environmental stimuli and to adapt to the environment with a shape-morphing strategy. Smart shape-memory hydrogels, able to respond to different stimuli (ion species, chemicals, light, pH, etc.), represent the building blocks in this new generation of morphing robots. By combining smart reactive hydrogels with nonreactive elements, actuation units able to transduce stiffness variation into geometrical changes will be developed. In the proposed endeavour, biology is the inspiration for simplifying principles to deal with a complex world, material science is the foundation for giving the body its proper role in shaping behaviour, mathematical modelling is the way to describe biological mechanisms to provide hints and laws for the artificial counterpart. Robotics and engineering aim at providing tools to quantitatively and functionally study biology, to bring innovative materials from chemistry labs to working systems, and to provide general purpose actuators and adapting machines. With a team of 6 partners (including 2 SMEs) in 4 years, MAPWORMS intends to: 1) study adaptation and plasticity of the body plan in Marine Annelida and shed light on the specialization process that allowed forms appeared early in the evolution of the Phylum to adapt to different environments; 2) develop a mathematical model of Annelida plasticity and adaptation to the environment through burrowing, protrusion of parts of their bodies, and morphological changes; 3) develop smart soft materials embodying responsivity, shape morphing and self-healing capabilities, and based on DNA components; 4) develop bio-inspired modular shape morphing robots across the scale.

Keywords: shape morphing robots,soft materials,dna based hydrogels,biomimetics,adaptation and plasticity,animal behaviour
Advancing Cooperative Robotics for a Sustainable and Automated Construction Future (RoboCons)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Climate, Energy and Mobility
Theme: Energy
Destination: Efficient, sustainable and inclusive energy use
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Partnership: B4P (co-programmed)
Countries involved: Norway,Belgium,Portugal,Spain,France,Germany,Switzerland
Call: Robotics and other automated solutions for construction, renovation and maintenance in a sustainable built environment (Built4People Partnership) (HORIZON-CL5-2024-D4-02, 2024)
Start date: 2026-01-01
End date: 2029-06-30
Duration (months): 42.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3998932.5
EU funding (EUR): 3998932.5
Participants: 15
Project status: SIGNED

The European construction sector stands at a pivotal turning point, where traditional methods of subcontracting and project management are increasingly strained by workforce shortages, sustainability targets, and heightened client expectations. Currently, this industry is one of the most energy-intensive sectors in modern society and consumes over 400 million tons of material annually, significantly impacting natural resources, accounting for 50% of landfill waste, and responsible for 23% of air pollution and 40% of drinking water contamination, posing serious health risks . Additionally, the industry reports one of the highest rates of workplace fatalities together with budgets exceeding estimations by 20-30% due to inefficiencies, errors, and poor coordination and planning resulting in project delays, which affects overall productivity. In this environment, integrating advanced robotics with digital methodologies offers a clear pathway to more efficient, resilient, and inclusive construction processes. A crucial element of this transformation lies in fostering a collaborative ecosystem in which humans and robots work in tandem. RoboCons main objective is to establish a safe, resource-cost efficient, and environmentally conscious Robot-Human Adaptive Construction Ecosystem (ACE) that is embraced by its workforce and industry stakeholders and tailored to their needs. To accomplish this objective, the project will establish a Digital Construction Platform (DCP), a comprehensive framework designed to facilitate the technological development of human-empowering, robot-assisting, and situational awareness solutions. These pioneering solutions will be integrated into five robotic and AI-driven autonomous prototypes, which will undergo testing and validation in seven relevant construction and renovation scenarios grouped in three use cases. This approach is craftly designed to mitigate the environmental impact associated with construction activities.

Keywords: robotics,automated solutions,human robot collaboration,3d printing,exoskeleton,digital twin,xr,time reduction,energy efficiency,workers safety,sustainability,cost effectiveness,
Green SELf-Powered NEuromorphic Processing EnGines with Integrated VisuAl and FuNCtional SEnsing (ELEGANCE)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: The European Innovation Council (EIC)
Theme: EIC Pathfinder
Destination: Challenges
Action type: EIC actions
Countries involved: Greece,Portugal,Sweden,Finland,United Kingdom,Spain,Switzerland
Call: EIC Pathfinder Challenge: Responsible Electronics (HORIZON-EIC-2023-PATHFINDERCHALLENGES-01, 2023)
Start date: 2024-11-01
End date: 2028-10-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3100934.25
EU funding (EUR): 3100934.25
Participants: 11
Project status: SIGNED

Today’s Internet-of-Things (IoT) incorporates a complex distributed network of wireless sensors and processors connected to the cloud. These platforms and their data-processing needs are creating a stronger and stronger demand for energy that is not sustainable. At the same time, the increasing consumers demand for IoT electronic devices and their limited lifespan, are significantly contributing to the world’s fastest-growing waste stream, known as electronic waste. To avoid an unsustainable energy cost in this data deluge, disruptive innovations in electronics from material to systems are urgently required. ELEGANCE proposes the development of a radically new, printable and light-operated processing technology specialized for IoT edge-computing applications. The project implements an eco-sustainable approach at component and processes level, where abundant, recyclable eco-friendly materials are employed, targeting a zero environmental footprint strategy. The processor’s building block includes a hybrid stack of an oxide optoelectronic memristor with an electrochromic layer on top exhibiting a unique light-triggered Processing-in-Memory enabling simultaneous IoT energy-efficient computing and visual sensing. In-memory computing schemes, such as crossbar memristor arrays, will be implemented employing low-cost, industrially compatible sustainable printing techniques. This will enable the design of energy efficient neuromorphic and artificial intelligence computing systems optimized for a plethora of consumer applications in the wearable, healthcare, and edge-computing sectors, making ELEGANCE an ambitious and technologically concrete breakthrough for the IoT with high potential for large societal benefits.

Keywords: oxide transistors,memristors,electrochromics,2d materials,printing technologies,sustainable materials
Navigating the Marketplace of Indicators (Navigator)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems
Panel description: Political science, international relations, law
Countries involved: Norway
Call: ERC STARTING GRANTS (ERC-2024-STG, 2024)
Start date: 2025-04-01
End date: 2030-03-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1499970.0
EU funding (EUR): 1499970.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Most policy fields in global governance have an abundance of country performance indicators (CPIs) and new CPIs proliferate apace. States are now measured and ranked on a dizzying array of cross-cutting metrics. Prima facie, the era of indicators promises a revolution: armed with ever improving data, policymakers can better allocate scarce resources to address global challenges. Yet, the era of indicators generates a problem and a paradox: while each individual CPI strives to simplify complexity, an abundance of CPIs on the same issue multiplies complexity and thus generates ambiguity. Moreover, while it would be reassuring if we could assume only the soundest CPIs would thrive, many high-profile CPIs remain in widespread use despite well-known shortcomings.Crucially, the paradox begets a major puzzle that prior research has yet to consider: How do private and public bodies navigate policy fields populated with multiple indicators, each portending to measure the same phenomenon? Although prior research provides firm grounds to hope that CPI users and producers improve their practices over time, no studies have investigated whether they do. Rendering this gap tractable, Navigator investigates the “marketplace of indicators” in four major policy fields: education, global governance, climate policy, and pandemic preparedness. Navigator’s novel framework—inspired by the classic liberal theory of the marketplace of ideas—enables the systemic, longitudinal analysis of how users’ and producers adapt their practices over time: Whether users learn in light of criticism of their favoured CPIs, how they discern when faced with a diversity of CPIs; and how producers compete for users within crowded policy fields. In this way, Navigator would push the frontier of CPI research by conducting a systematic problem shift: from investigating a single CPI’s influence or limitations, to examining how users and producers adapt in the face of growing CPI competition and CPI critique.

Keywords: the politics of evaluation
Guiding glioblastoma treatments by decrypting tumor biomechanics via Magnetic Resonance Elastography. (GLIOBID)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Postdoctoral Fellowships
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Life Sciences
Countries involved: Norway,United States
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2021 (HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01, 2021)
Start date: 2023-04-01
End date: 2026-03-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 284179.68
EU funding (EUR): 284179.68
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most common and deadly type of primary brain tumour, carrying a dire prognosis with a median survival of 14.6 months for patients undergoing standard treatments. The causes of poor clinical prognosis are late diagnosis, diffuse infiltration, pseudo necrosis, high neovascularization and resistance to therapy. In principle, drugs can reach the tumors via the vascular system, but the tumor microenvironment plays the role of an antagonist to any efficient drug delivery whereby reducing treatment efficacy. Recent treatments combine chemotherapy with drugs which aim at re-normalising the tumor microenvironment by releasing the mechanical pressure and/or by reducing the angiogenesis. However, there are yet no imaging biomarkers clinically available which can disentangle the different effects of the therapy on the components of the TME. This hinders patient management in particular dosage. GLIOBID project aim at disentangling the therapy impact on tissue integrity and pressure from the modulation of tumour vasculature by quantifying tissue rheology with magnetic resonance Elastography (MRE). This imaging breakthrough will allow to assess the effect of treatments on the main target – the tumor - and the pathways to reach it – the vessels and the tumour microenvironment - providing a unique guidance to tailor combined therapies based on component-specific biomarkers. GLIOBID will involve the main experts in the field of imaging and cancer biology, creating a highly multidisciplinary and eminently clinical environment. This together with the complementary expertise of researcher and hosting institutions will provide the best conditions for decrypting the complexity of the problem and find approaches translatable to the clinical routine. GLIOBID will potentially allow a paradigm shift from the current TREAT-THEN-OBSERVE approach to an OBSERVE-THUS-TREAT approach.

Keywords: glioblastoma tumor microenvironment magnetic resonance elastography magnetic resonance imaging tumor pressure angiogenesis preclinical tumor model tumor treatments
Machine Learning for Offensive Computer Security (MALFOY)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Computer Science and Informatics
Panel description: Informatics and information systems, computer science, scientific computing, intelligent systems
Countries involved: Germany
Call: ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANTS (ERC-2021-COG, 2021)
Start date: 2023-01-01
End date: 2027-12-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1962000.0
EU funding (EUR): 1962000.0
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

Despite a long series of research, computer attacks still pose a major threat to the security of digital systems. Different malicious actors, such as cybercriminals and intelligence agencies, continuously develop new offensive techniques to evade and outsmart existing defenses. As a result, security research is in a constant arms race and needs to anticipate novel developments as early as possible. However, one of the key technologies of the last years, machine learning, has received very little attention in offensive security so far. The simple question — ''how would a hacker use machine learning?'' — is largely unexplored and there is a striking gap in current research that hinders the anticipation of forthcoming threats. The project Malfoy closes this gap and systematically explores how machine learning can be applied for offensive computer security. By adopting the position of an adversary, we investigate how learning algorithms can be used to find security flaws, generate exploits, and construct computer attacks. To this end, we combine offensive security techniques with modern concepts for discriminative, generative, and reinforcement learning. Our goal is to assess how these techniques can interface with each other and improve their performance through learning. Based on this analysis, we become able to devise completely novel defenses that account for the presence of machine learning in the toolchain of attackers. Despite its offensive nature, the project thus strengthens computer security: First, it explores an uncharted area of research and hence will substantially expand our knowledge about modern computer attacks. Second, the project gives rise to novel and disruptive protection mechanisms, which enable us to move one step ahead of attack development. Finally, the project links two disconnected areas (offensive security and machine learning) and thereby establishes a new branch of joint research.

Keywords: vulnerability discovery exploit generation penetration testing generative learning,reinforcement learning
HIGH-TEMPERATURE THERMOCHEMICAL HEAT STORAGE POWERED BY RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY FOR INDUSTRIAL HEATING APPLICATIONS (HERCULES)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Climate, Energy and Mobility
Theme: Energy
Destination: Efficient, sustainable and inclusive energy use
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Netherlands,Germany,Greece,Sweden,Denmark,Spain
Call: Development of high temperature thermal storage for industrial applications (HORIZON-CL5-2022-D4-01, 2022)
Start date: 2023-06-01
End date: 2027-05-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3988016.25
EU funding (EUR): 3988016.0
Participants: 10
Project status: SIGNED

HERCULES introduces a novel breakthrough approach towards thermal energy storage of surplus renewable energy via a hybrid thermochemical/sensible heat storage with the aid of porous media made of refractory redox metal oxides and electrically powered heating elements. The heating elements use surplus/cheap renewable electricity (e.g. from PVs, wind, or other sources) to charge the metal oxide-based storage block by heating it to the metal oxide reduction temperature (i.e. charging/energy storage step) and subsequently (i.e. upon demand) the fully charged system transfers its energy to a controlled airflow that passes through the porous oxide block which initiated the oxidation of the reduced metal oxide. It is an exothermic process thus a hot air stream is produced during this step which can be used to provide exploitable heat for industrial processes. The proposed research will be conducted by an interdisciplinary consortium constituting leading research centers, universities, innovative SMEs, and large enterprises including ancillary service providers and technology end-users.

Keywords: thermochemical heat storage,industrial heating,redox looping cycle
Adaptive microcombs for innovative connectivity in datacenter applications and optical clocks (AMICA)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Innovative Europe
Programme: The European Innovation Council (EIC)
Theme: EIC Transition
Destination: Challenges
Action type: EIC actions
Countries involved: Sweden,Israel,Belgium,Germany,Denmark
Call: EIC Transition Challenge: Chip-scale optical frequency combs (HORIZON-EIC-2023-TRANSITION-01, 2023)
Start date: 2024-08-01
End date: 2027-07-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2499340.0
EU funding (EUR): 2499340.0
Participants: 7
Project status: SIGNED

The rampant growth of ICT applications, such as AI, is moving an increasing amount of computing resources to datacentres. Datacentres are responsible for approximately three quarters of the internet protocol data in the world. The continuous increase in data traffic and bandwidth demands are challenging the status quo of the datacentre interconnect architecture. The outstanding challenge for the next decade is finding scalable and efficient solutions to enable the bandwidth density that will be needed. Co-packaged optics (CPO) is the enabling technology to drive this shift in the computational efficiency paradigm, and the market in silicon photonics with largest forecasted CAGR in 2022-2026, with potential multi-billion dollar revenues beyond 2030. CPO is based on decreasing the distance of power-hungry electrical interfaces by co-integrating optoelectronic modules on the same interposers. In order to drive the scaling in optical edge bandwidth density, multi-wavelength laser sources for densed wavelength division multiplexing will be needed, but state of the art commercial solutions face fundamental scaling issues. Amica builds upon a breakthrough wafer-scalable, super-efficient microcomb technology to realize critical demonstrators in WDM CPO, aiming at petabit-per-second aggregate speeds in a mass-manufacturable platform with unprecedented combination of channel count, efficiency, line spacing and power per line. The consortium brings a synergetic effort among an industrial leader in datacentre interconnects and high-performance computing, academic partners with complementary expertise in integrated photonics and an emerging startup that owns the intellectual property rights for commercialization. The team is complemented with an innovation office to lead the tech to market transition, and two associated partners who will help testing the technology for emerging markets beyond telecom.

Keywords: microcomb silicon photonics co package optics datacentre interconnects
iNnovative EV-charging EnviRonment for Future Low-cost mAss deploymenT (NEVERFLAT)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Climate, Energy and Mobility
Theme: Mobility
Destination: Clean and competitive solutions for all transport modes
Action type: Innovation actions
Partnership: 2ZERO (co-programmed)
Countries involved: Denmark,Spain,Estonia,Germany,Romania
Call: Smart, low-cost pervasive stationary slow charging and bi-directional solutions synergic with the grid for EV mass deployment (2ZERO Partnership) (HORIZON-CL5-2024-D5-01, 2024)
Start date: 2025-01-01
End date: 2028-06-30
Duration (months): 42.0
Total project cost (EUR): 7850222.22
EU funding (EUR): 6754952.57
Participants: 13
Project status: SIGNED

NEVERFLAT aims to develop and demonstrate in real-life settings an innovative, efficient, and user-friendly pervasive low-cost smart bi-directional charging infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs), directly contributing to a specific strategic objective of the 2Zero Partnership - developing affordable, inclusive, user-friendly charging infrastructure concepts and technologies that include vehicle and grid interaction. It will bring crucial advancements in core hardware and software applied infrastructure innovation (using cutting edge technologies like ML predictive models and simulation, or WBG semiconductors), optimization in deployment and placement of the novel charging solutions, their strategic orchestration improving operative performance, grid stability and RES utilization, and social and business model innovations and incentivisation involving relevant SSH expertise in the consortium, together with major industry partners, innovative SMEs and research organizations. The complete integrated and deployed charging solution will be validated in extensive operational urban and peri-urban environments on pilot sites in Germany, Romania and Spain, showcasing the potential for widespread massive adoption, user acceptance and seamless coverage interoperable across European country borders, contributing to removing barriers to EV user acceptability.

Keywords: ev chargers,bi directional chargers,renewable energy,grid optimization,energy tokenization