Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Visual Recognition of Function and Intention (ACTIVIA)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Computer science and informatics
Countries involved: France
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2013-01-01
End date: 2018-12-31
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1497420.0
EU funding (EUR): 1497420.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Computer vision is concerned with the automated interpretation of images and video streams. Today's research is (mostly) aimed at answering queries such as "Is this a picture of a dog?", (classification) or sometimes "Find the dog in this photo" (detection). While categorisation and detection are useful for many tasks, inferring correct class labels is not the final answer to visual recognition. The categories and locations of objects do not provide direct understanding of their function i.e., how things work, what they can be used for, or how they can act and react. Such an understanding, however, would be highly desirable to answer currently unsolvable queries such as "Am I in danger?" or "What can happen in this scene?". Solving such queries is the aim of this proposal. My goal is to uncover the functional properties of objects and the purpose of actions by addressing visual recognition from a different and yet unexplored perspective. The main novelty of this proposal is to leverage observations of people, i.e., their actions and interactions to automatically learn the use, the purpose and the function of objects and scenes from visual data. The project is timely as it builds upon the two key recent technological advances: (a) the immense progress in visual recognition of objects, scenes and human actions achieved in the last ten years, as well as (b) the emergence of a massive amount of public image and video data now available to train visual models. ACTIVIA addresses fundamental research issues in automated interpretation of dynamic visual scenes, but its results are expected to serve as a basis for ground-breaking technological advances in practical applications. The recognition of functional properties and intentions as explored in this project will directly support high-impact applications such as detection of abnormal events, which are likely to revolutionise today's approaches to crime protection, hazard prevention, elderly care, and many others.

Keywords: visual recognition,image classification,video analysis,functional recognition
Life beneath the ocean floor: The subsurface sink of carbon in the marine environment (CARBONSINK)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Earth system science
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-12-01
End date: 2017-11-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1945695.26
EU funding (EUR): 1945695.26
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

One prominent idea for mitigating global climate change is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere by storing it in fluids in the natural environment; for example dissolved within sediments below the ocean floor or in oceanic crust. This carbon sequestration is popular because it would allow us to place carbon into semi-permanent (on human timescales) storage, ‘buying time’ to wean us from our dependence on carbon-based energy sources. Application of such a mitigation technique presumes knowledge of what will happen to carbon when it is dissolved in various environments. Studies of naturally produced excess dissolved CO2 are, however, equivocal; this lack of knowledge represents a huge deficit in our comprehension of the global carbon cycle and specifically the processes removing carbon from the surface of the planet over geological timescales. This proposal will resolve the sink for CO2 within marine sediments and oceanic crust. Beneath much of the ocean floor exists the ‘deep biosphere’, microbial populations living largely in the absence of oxygen, consuming organic carbon that has fallen to the sea floor, producing a large excess of dissolved inorganic carbon. This dissolved inorganic carbon can diffuse back to the ocean or can precipitate in situ as carbonate minerals. Previous attempts to quantify the flux of carbon through the deep biosphere focused mostly on studies of sulfur and carbon, and these studies cannot reveal the fate of the produced inorganic carbon. I propose a novel approach to constrain the fate of carbon through the study of the subsurface calcium cycle. Calcium is the element involved in precipitating carbon as in situ carbonate minerals and thus will directly provide the required mass balance to determine the fate of CO2 in the marine subsurface. This mass balance will be achieved through experiments, measurements, and numerical modeling, to achieve the primary objective of constraining the fate of carbon in submarine environments.

Keywords: calcium isotopes,carbon cycle,paleoclimate
Muon Spectroscopy of Excited States (MUSES)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Condensed matter physics
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-12-01
End date: 2017-11-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1476891.0
EU funding (EUR): 1476891.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Muon spin spectroscopy has shown itself to be a very powerful probe of material properties, with Europe leading this research due to it operating half of the available muon sources in the world, but to date there has been very little work done on spectroscopy of excited states. In the first instance, this proposal will design and build an upgrade to an existing spectrometer (HiFi at ISIS) that will comprise a high-power tunable laser to provide the electronic excitation. This will be followed by a study of the physics of excited state muon spectroscopy, an entirely unexplored area of the technique. The fundamental mechanisms of charge carrier transport in organic semiconductors will then be investigated, and the ground-work for directly measuring the recombination zone in organic LEDs will be done. Perhaps most importantly, the fundamental physics of electron transfer in peptides will be performed - which is responsible for many biological processes and not well understood. The muon technique has recently been shown by the applicant to offer both spatial and temporal information on the electron’s progress through the molecule - this is the only technique that can measure the electron’s wavefunction at different locations on the molecule as a function of time after the excitation is formed.

Keywords: electron transfer,peptides,amino acids,muon spectroscopy,musr,laser excitation,organic semiconductors,molecular electronics
Supersymmetry Breaking in String Theory (SUSYBREAKING)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Fundamental constituents of matter
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-10-01
End date: 2017-09-30
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1027855.0
EU funding (EUR): 1027855.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

This project will study supersymmetry breaking directly within string theory. Most studies of supersymmetry breaking, in both phenomenology and cosmology, are performed using the crutch of four dimensional field theory. This project will raise the state of the art and remove this restriction. I will develop tools to study supersymmetry breaking directly on the worldsheet and aim to do this for both phenomenological models of low-energy supersymmetry breaking and also for cosmological supersymmetry breaking, applicable during the inflationary epoch in the early universe. Once these tools are developed they will be applied to search for novel effects of string theory in the early universe and also to calculate the phenomenology of string models of low energy supersymmetry breaking.

Keywords: string theory and phenomenology,supersymmetry breaking and phenomenology,early universe cosmology.
Highly-Reactive (Regenerative) Phosphorus Building Blocks - New Concepts in Synthesis (SYNPHOS)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Materials and Synthesis
Countries involved: Germany,Germany
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2013-03-01
End date: 2018-02-28
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1422000.0
EU funding (EUR): 1422000.0
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Fundamental research is key important to allow us to find new, economically and ecologically attractive ways to meet current challenges. The current depletion of available phosphorus resources is a concern. Unlike oil, which is lost once used, phosphorus can be recovered and used over and over again or at least transformed into other compounds of chemical use. The intention of the present research proposal is to contribute to the field of synthetic chemistry both, inorganic and organic, by identifying and developing highly-reactive phosphorus building blocks that can be potentially regenerated. We would like to enter new avenues of phosphorus chemistry which will address fundamental questions and develop new applications. Using novel and powerful phosphorus reagents, new concepts for more efficient, selective and sustainable synthetic procedures will be developed. We also seek greener and more efficient processes and, whenever possible, to recover the phosphorus after the reaction. Phosphorus-based compounds will also be used in the recovery of industrial waste by-products such as phosphane oxides and depleted UF6, and will therefore have a positive impact on certain chemical industries and the environment. With our proposal we aim to address the following aspects: 1) Synthesis of N-heterocyclic pnictanes (Pn = P, As, Sb, Bi with emphasis on P) and related cationic derivatives 2) Exploration of N-heterocyclic phosphanes as reagents in organic synthesis. 3) Preparation of catenated, branched and cyclic polyphosphanes via a novel method for P–P bond formation – access to novel polyphosphorus-based ligand systems. 4) Alternative processes for the recycling of UF6 and related derivatives to access novel precursors for uranium chemistry and to recover fluorine based products of high economic value.

Keywords: fundamental main-group chemistry sustainable synthetic methods
Transversal Multilinear Harmonic Analysis (TMHA)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Mathematical foundations
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-10-01
End date: 2018-09-30
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1042293.0
EU funding (EUR): 1042293.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

This proposal consists of two intimately related programmes. The aim of Programme 1 is to make major contributions to the celebrated restriction theory for the Fourier transform and combinatorial problems of Kakeya-type using emerging multilinear techniques. The aim of Programme 2 is to develop a multilinear perspective on a much broader family of curvature-related problems in harmonic analysis, including important classes of Radon-like transforms that arise naturally in the theory of dispersive partial differential equations. The specific objectives represent major challenges at the emerging frontiers of harmonic analysis with a variety of disciplines, including geometric analysis (encompassing heat-flow methods and convex geometry), affine geometry and algebraic topology.

Keywords: harmonic analysis,geometric analysis
Scandium-based multifunctional nitrides for optoelectronic, polaritonic and ferro/magnetoelectric devices (SCOPE)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Systems and communication engineering
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-11-01
End date: 2017-10-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1486341.8
EU funding (EUR): 1486341.8
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Device performance is ultimately limited by material properties. To break existing performance limits, I plan to develop a new multifunctional Sc-based nitride materials platform in which tuneable semiconducting, ferroelectric and magnetic functionalities may be achieved for the first time. I can then address three major challenges: (1) solving a 20-year-old problem in solid-state-lighting using highly efficient green light-emitters, (2) creating the first electrically pumped full-spectrum polaritonic lasers, and (3) developing an optimised artificial synapse for adaptive computing (plus similar related non-volatile memory devices). Combined, such advances could lead towards the “spintronics dream” of devices with integrated optoelectronic, photonic and magnetic functionality. Importantly, the mature growth and device processing technologies in place for conventional nitride semiconductors will allow rapid exploitation of this versatile new group of materials. A theme is planned for each objective. At Stage 1 (months 1 – 30), I plan to grow and characterise crystalline thin films of the Sc-based nitrides relevant to each theme, aiming to control the structure and properties of the individual layers and simple heterostructures from which devices will be constructed. Themes 1 and 2 will use specific Sc/III-nitride alloys created by molecular beam epitaxy, a flexible industry-proven growth technique. Theme 3 will explore and use a broad range of transition-metal/ScGaN alloys created by electron-beam epitaxy, a relatively low-cost technique optimised for transition metals. Full experimental data on layer properties will be input into models, which will be used to design full device structures. Optimised device designs will be chosen at Month 30. At Stage 2 (months 31 – 60), test structures will be created, processed and characterised, mostly using techniques already established for III-nitride semiconductor devices, leading to working prototype devices for each theme.

Keywords: new device materials,nitride semiconductors,light-emitting diodes,lasers,artificial synapse,memory devices,transistors,molecular beam epitaxy,thin films
Nanodevices for Quantum Optics (NAQUOP)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Condensed matter physics
Countries involved: Sweden,Netherlands
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2013-04-01
End date: 2018-03-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1500000.0
EU funding (EUR): 1500000.0
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

We propose developing a nanodevice toolbox for single photon quantum optics. A scalable scheme to generate indistinguishable single photons, an interface to couple single photon polarization to a single electron spin and high efficiency single photon detectors represent the core of the scientific problems to be addressed in this project. We set the following research objectives: 1- Understand to what extent quantum dots can be made indistinguishable. 2- Interface coherently single photons to single electron spins via strain engineering in quantum dots. 3- Gain a better understanding of the limits to time resolution and detection efficiency of ultrafast superconducting single photon detectors. The proposed research effort will yield novel experiments: the realization of scalable indistinguishable quantum dot sources by frequency locking single quantum dots to atomic transitions, the demonstration of new selection rules in semiconductor nanostructures to couple photon polarization to the electron spin only, the development of ultrafast and high efficiency single photon and single plasmon detectors and their implementation in two photon interference and quantum plasmonics experiments. To carry out the work, multidisciplinary efforts where nanofabrication, quantum optics, semiconductor and superconductor physics will be merged to demonstrate the scalability of quantum dots for quantum information processing, providing crucial new knowledge in single photon optics at the nanoscale. The impact of the project will be important and far reaching as it will address fundamental questions related to the scalability of quantum indistinguishability of remote nanostructures.

Keywords: nanoscience,quantum dots,quantum optics,single photons
Laser-engineered Biomimetic Matrices with Embedded Cells (LEBMEC)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Products and process engineering
Countries involved: Austria
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2013-03-01
End date: 2018-02-28
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1440594.0
EU funding (EUR): 1440594.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Traditional 2D cell culture systems used in biology do not accurately reproduce the 3D structure, function, or physiology of living tissue. Resulting behaviour and responses of cells are substantially different from those observed within natural extracellular matrices (ECM). The early designs of 3D cell-culture matrices focused on their bulk properties, while disregarding individual cell environment. However, recent findings indicate that the role of the ECM extends beyond a simple structural support to regulation of cell and tissue function. So far the mechanisms of this regulation are not fully understood, due to technical limitations of available research tools, diversity of tissues and complexity of cell-matrix interactions. The main goal of this project is to develop a versatile and straightforward method, enabling systematic studies of cell-matrix interactions. 3D CAD matrices will be produced by femtosecond laser-induced polymerization of hydrogels with cells in them. Cell embedment results in a tissue-like intimate cell-matrix contact and appropriate cell densities right from the start. A unique advantage of the LeBMEC is its capability to alter on demand a multitude of individual properties of produced 3D matrices, including: geometry, stiffness, and cell adhesion properties. It allows us systematically reconstruct and identify the key biomimetic properties of the ECM in vitro. The particular focus of this project is on the role of local mechanical properties of produced hydrogel constructs. It is known that, stem cells on soft 2D substrates differentiate into neurons, stiffer substrates induce bone cells, and intermediate ones result in myoblasts. With LeBMEC, a controlled distribution of site-specific stiffness within the same hydrogel matrix can be achieved in 3D. This way, by rational design of cell-culture matrices initially embedding only stem cells, for realisation of precisely defined 3D multi-tissue constructs, is possible for the first time.

Keywords: 3d nano- and microfabrication,rapid prototyping,additive manufacturing,scaffold,femtosecond laser,photopolymerization,hydrogel,tissue engineering,biomimetic matrices,stem cells embedment
Particle Physics beyond the Energy Frontier (PRECISIONFLAVOUR)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Fundamental constituents of matter
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-10-01
End date: 2018-09-30
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1399984.0
EU funding (EUR): 1399984.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The Standard Model of particle physics is incomplete. It fails to address such fundamental questions as the baryon asymmetry of the universe (i.e. our own existence), dark matter and dark energy, and gravity; it has too many free parameters, and suffers from self-consistency problems (the fine-tuning and hierarchy problem). Nearly all alternatives to the Standard Model that address these problems predict the existence of new, heavy particles. Flavour physics is sensitive to quantum loops that can be affected by new particles with masses even beyond those that can be directly produced at the highest-energy colliders - it allows us to see beyond the energy frontier. This makes it highly sensitive to physics beyond the Standard Model The observed size of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe proves that additional, undiscovered sources of charge-parity (CP) violation must exist. CP violation measurements, which are the domain of flavour physics, hold therefore particular promise in the search this "New Physics". We will use powerful new techniques and the unprecedented datasets of LHCb to extract some of the most important, and currently most poorly constrained CP violation parameters. We will collaborate across several international collaborations to further improve our measurements. We will reach new levels of precision that will dramatically increase the New Physics reach of the entire flavour physics approach.

Keywords: precision flavour physics,cp violation,gamma,charm,b physics,lhcb,cleo-c,bes iii,dalitz plots,amplitude analyses.
Quantitative electron and spin transport theory for organic crystals based devices (QUEST)

Framework: FP7 — Ideas
Programme: European Research Council
Theme: European research council
Destination: Starting grants
Action type: Support for frontier research (ERC)
Panel: Condensed matter physics
Countries involved: Ireland
Call:  (ERC-2012-StG_20111012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-12-01
End date: 2018-11-30
Duration (months): 72.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1492728.0
EU funding (EUR): 1492728.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Predicting the electron and spin transport properties of organic crystals is a formidable theoretical challenge as these are determined both by the electronic structure of the individual molecules and by the morphology of the crystal. Quest's research program seeks at developing a fully quantitative theory for electron and spin transport in organic crystals, which does not rely on external parameters and can be applied to materials underpinning a multitude of applications, ranging from organic electronics, to spintronics, to energy. In particular we aim at combining state of the art density functional theory with advanced quantum transport methods and Monte Carlo simulations. We will then construct a hierarchical computational protocol enabling us to evaluate electron and spin transport across different length scales at finite temperature, including effects originating from external fields (electric and magnetic). Our developed tools will form a software package to be distributed freely to academia.

Keywords: electron transport theory,organic semiconductors,density functional theory,electronic structure theory,organic/inorganic interfaces,device simulations,organic fet,spin-valves