Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Microbially catalyzed electricity driven bioproduction from CO2 at the cathode in bioelectrochemical systems (MICROBIOELECTROSYN)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Belgium
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-05-01
End date: 2015-04-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 177000.0
EU funding (EUR): 177000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The breakthroughs in extracellular electron transfer abilities of several bacteria and other technological advancements during last decade facilitated the development of bioelectrochemical systems (BESs) like microbial fuel cells, which are on the threshold from a lab bench to technological realization for electricity generation. The electricity driven microbial metabolism at cathode has recently opened a new horizon in BES research as it provides very appealing and novel route for the production of valuable fuels and chemicals from CO2 and organics [referred to as microbial electrosynthesis (MES)]. At present, bioproduction via MES exists conceptually or to a limited extent in the laboratory. So far, very few microbial catalysts for these processes have been identified and the impact of electrode materials and operational parameters on microbial colonization at cathodes is not known. Furthermore, there is no developed model of such processes in an engineered environment. The proposed research in MicrobioElectrosyn will tackle these aspects on the example of acetate production by employing several microbiological, electrochemical, molecular biology, chromatography, bioengineering methods and techniques. The accomplishment of proposed objectives with a multidisciplinary approach is expected to advance the MES research with regard to aforementioned challenges for the production of fine chemicals from CO2 and electricity as well as generate scientific and commercial outcome with both environmental and economic benefits for the EU. It represents a Carbon Capture and Consumption approach and is in strong relationship with several national programs worldwide to transform CO2 into new molecules. Overall, it will enable and promote innovative and knowledge-based technologies for bioproduction. Furthermore, if linked to the wastewater treatment as an electron source, it has a potential to address the aspiration of producing high value products from waste.

Keywords: l817 biotechnology - applied microbiology,microbial bioelectrochemical systems,microbial electrosynthesis,biocathode,bioproduction,extracellular electron transfer,microbial communities
Investigating the involvement of lincRNAs in aging of haematopoietic stem cells and in haematological malignancies (LINCAGE)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: France
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-04-01
End date: 2015-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 269743.8
EU funding (EUR): 269743.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Changes in chromatin structure are observed during aging and are often a critical step during tumorigenesis. The class of long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNA), has emerged as an important regulator of chromatin structure during normal differentiation, and recently has been implicated in the disregulation of chromatin structure observed in several solid tumours. These lincRNAs could represent an important new class of oncogene. We propose to investigate a potential involvement of lincRNAs in chromatin changes that occur during normal aging of haematopoietic stem cells (HSC), and in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), an age-related haematological malignancy that is frequently associated with chromatin abnormalities. High-throughput sequencing will be used to compare expression of lincRNAs between young and old HSC, and between AML and normal CD34+ cells. Differentially expressed lincRNAs will be functionally investigated by lentiviral-mediated knockdown and overexpression in cell lines and primary cells, and concomitant changes in chromatin structure will be profiled by chromatin immunoprecipitation. It is expected that this project will clarify the general importance of lincRNAs both in normal aging and in an age-related cancer, and could identify novel molecules which are important drivers of malignancy as well as the functional changes associated with HSC aging. As well as being potential prognostic markers and direct targets for therapeutics in AML, these molecules might also be targeted to improve the function of aging HSCs.

Keywords: epigenetics,long intergenic non-coding rna,haematopoietic stem cell,aging,acute myeloid leukaemia,polycomb proteins,chromatin structure,histone modifications
Integrating Object Recognition and ActiOn for action sentence production and comprehension in a developmental humanoid Robot (ORATOR)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-05-15
End date: 2015-07-15
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 221606.4
EU funding (EUR): 221606.4
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Recent models from cognitive robotics research have recently begun to appreciate the entwined relationship between language and action, and have proposed to ground robots’ language understanding in sensorimotor representations. These models, however, focused mainly on the one-way relation between language and action, neglecting its bi-directional character. Hence, the primary aim of this research is to provide an experimental and computational framework for explaining how the processes of language interact with other processes such as motor control. We intend to tackle this issue from the developmental robotics perspective. This highly interdisciplinary field of robotics benefits greatly from the direct collaboration with child psychologists and the modeling of child development phenomena in robots. One classic approach to studying child development is to look at the errors that children sometimes commit. Young children, for example, sometimes make a serious attempt to perform impossible actions on miniature objects. We suggest that these errors may result from the onsets of language and propose to test it empirically: does a child with a larger vocabulary and/or more advanced grammatical skills perform more errors than a less advanced child? The hypotheses derived from the study will be replicated in experiments with the developmental robotics platform iCub to demonstrate the impact of such an embodied cognitive approach in the design of integrated action and language capabilities in robots. This research will contribute to the knowledge of cross-talk between language and motor structures and suggest a possible developmental mechanism, and endow a robot with the ability to comprehend sentences on object interaction. The fellowship will also provide the researcher with an opportunity to further develop multidisciplinary skills in child psychology and developmental robotics methods, and transferable skills for R&D in academia and service robotics industry.

Keywords: language development,developmental robotics,embodied cognition,integration of language and action,affordances
A remote controlled helicopter for investigating the echoes experienced by bat during navigation (CHIROCOPTER)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-05-01
End date: 2015-04-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 231283.2
EU funding (EUR): 231283.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

While foraging and commuting, echolocating bats navigate to salient places in their surroundings. They are able to do this relying only on echolocation. Currently, we have only a very limited idea about the kind of information these animals extract from the returning echoes to support navigation. Recent findings in both insect vision and the sensory ecology of bats suggest that their navigation ability is based on statistical descriptors of the environment. This project aims at immersing an artificial echolocator, the Chirocopter, i.e. an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with an emission and recording apparatus, in real environments, re-enacting the behaviour recorded from freely behaving bats. In this approach, this project is the first to collect an ecologically valid set of stimuli (echoes) as perceived by flying bats. The dataset collected using the Chirocopter allows testing the hypothesis that a statistical representation of the environment underlies the navigation abilities of bats. Final aim of the project is to develop a bio-inspired algorithm for echo based navigation to explain the navigation capabilities of bats.

Keywords: cognition,echolocation,bats,navigation,robotics,bio-inspired,sensory,ecology
Novel MESO-SUPERstructured solar CELLS with enhanced performance and stability (MESO-SUPERCELLS)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2014-01-22
End date: 2016-01-21
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 299558.4
EU funding (EUR): 299558.4
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The present proposal focuses on the advanced research training of Dr. T. Stergiopoulos on a novel type of 3rd generation solar cells, promising low cost, ease of fabrication and sustainability, called “Meso-superstructured solar cells” (MSSCs). MSSCs were very recently invented by Dr. Snaith in Oxford, and their operation stands between inorganic−organic heterojunction and standard solid-state sensitized-solar cells; the novel and revolutionary concept is that alumina replace titania, acting as a meso-scale scaffold upon which the device is structured and a perovskite is responsible for both visible light absorption and efficient electron conduction. The efficiencies of MSSCs lie at the moment at 10.9 %, limited by the low mobility of the organic hole transport material (spirobifluorene) used to regenerate the perovskite. The proposed research activities aim to make a big step beyond state-of-the-art, realising viable lab-scale devices with efficiencies higher than those of DSCs (>12.4 %) by incorporating fast liquid redox electrolytes in lieu of the low hole mobility spirobifluorene. The expected research results could (i) lead closer towards the commercialization of this new technology, (iii) contribute to the Europe’s continuing research for “clean and efficient energy”, creating reliable “low carbon” solar electricity, and (iv) promote the Excellence of the European Research Area, by building the strongest Photovoltaic research community in the field of 3rd generation solar cells. The fellow will get an interdisciplinary training on the fabrication and fundamentals of this new class of solar cells, also gaining research expertise in state-of-the-art techniques, such as the Photoinduced Absorption Spectroscopy, and acquire complementary/diversifying skills (technology transfer, IP Protection), which will establish his academic future. His outreach activities shall create awareness in the general public of the importance of the Solar Cell research to society.

Keywords: photovoltaics,devices,perovskites,ionic conductors,redox mediators,efficiency,stability,n-type semiconductor,charge separation,p302 physical chemistry,p308 chemical physics
Thermomechanical response of Cu-based shape memory alloys suitable for micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) applications: interplay between grain size and sample size effects (SMAMEMS)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: International Outgoing Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Spain
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IOF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-09-01
End date: 2016-02-29
Duration (months): 30.0
Total project cost (EUR): 211986.45
EU funding (EUR): 211986.45
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Shape memory alloys (SMA) exhibit unique and useful effects, such as a capacity to cycle a component between two different macroscopic shapes by cycling the temperature. In the recent years MEMS components made of shape memory alloys have attracted considerable interest in the research field as they offer a high output work density and exhibit specific desirable thermomechanical effects. As a consequence, many research studies have been focused on the development of shape memory thin films which could be integrated into the planar technology of microsystems. However, there are few works in the literature where the effects of the grain size (d)/sample size (D) ratio are studied, and those that do exist are insufficient to draw general conclusions. Among the many SMA families that have been reported in the literature, the Cu-based SMAs are attractive because they can exhibit excellent shape memory properties at a substantially lower materials cost relative to the market-dominant Ni-Ti-based alloys. In this project it is proposed to synthesize Cu-based shape memory alloys at the scales relevant to MEMS applications. The first stage of the project comprises the design and production of SMA thin films using electrodeposition methods, with grain sizes ranging from few nanometers to tens of microns, in order to evaluate grain size effects on the thermomechanical behaviour of Cu-based SMA. Furthermore, this step will also permit to optimize the electrodeposition parameters to further carry out the electrodeposition on the pre-patterned surfaces. The second stage aims to produce SMA in the micro- and nano-meter scale dimensions (for example pillars) by means of electron beam lithography and subsequent electrodeposition. The main goal of this part is to study the contribution of the grain size/sample dimensions on its thermomechanical behaviour; i.e., when the grain size is considerably finer than the sample size or when the grain size is close to the sample dimension.

Keywords: grain size/sample size effects,shape memroy allos,mechanical properties,structural characterization,c109 electrochemistry c122 thin films,g311 materials engineering,g313 micro(system) engineerin
Localized Frame Expansions in Time-Scale Analysis (LOCETISA)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: International Incoming Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Austria
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IIF, 2012)
Start date: 2014-10-01
End date: 2016-09-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 179137.2
EU funding (EUR): 179137.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

A frame expansion is a representation of a general signal (function) as a weighted superimposition of basic building blocks. Diverse operations on functions can be understood by first considering their action on these basic atoms. Similarly, several subtle properties of functions (e.g. smoothness, decay, directional regularity) are encoded in the coefficients (weights) involved in the representation. The usefulness of frame expansions, both in theory and applications, comes from the possibility of designing dictionaries of atoms with prescribed properties. The counterpart of this flexibility is redundancy. In order to construct dictionaries with certain properties one often has to give up perfect independence between different atoms, thus yielding a redundant expansion. Redundant representations also entail a number of technical problems because not all operations on the coefficients of a frame expansion have an exact counterpart in the signal being represented. The theory of localized frames aims at overcoming these technical obstacles by relaxing the notion of independence to the one of low correlation. This project addresses these topics with a special emphasis on time-scale analysis, aiming at providing a framework where the tools associated with a redundant frame perform comparably to the ones associated with a non-redundant one, and give in addition a very valuable extra flexibility.

Keywords: m109 analysis,wavelets,time-scale analysis,frames
Microsmatic primates revisited: Determining the importance of olfaction in primate communication (PRIMOLF)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-10-01
End date: 2015-12-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 231283.2
EU funding (EUR): 231283.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Female primates signal impending ovulation with a suite of sexual signals. Increasing numbers of studies are investigating the function of these signals and in particular the relationships among female signals, the timing of the fertile period, and male sexual behaviour. However, these studies have focused on visual, and to a lesser extent, acoustic signals, neglecting olfactory signals. Moreover, despite good theoretical reasons to expect that different modes of signalling communicate different information, to different male audiences, most studies to date have studied only one or two modes of signalling. We aim to investigate the information content of female olfactory signals in captive baboons (Papio anubis), and relate these to the female sexual cycle and the fertile period (determined using progesterone and oestrogen levels, measured in faeces), other female sexual signals (visual and behavioural), and male behaviour. This is the first detailed study of olfaction in sexual communication in Old World primates, and the first to integrate information concerning all the potential signals that females exhibit. The project will contribute to our understanding of (i) olfactory communication in primates that, like humans, have traditionally been considered as “microsmatic”, (ii) the information that females provide to different males concerning their fertility, and (iii) the role of multiple signals in mate choice, as well as to the development of a model with potential practical consequences for humans. The complementary expertise of the fellow and the scientist in charge make this project highly multidisciplinary. Furthermore, the training provided by the scientist in charge and host organisation will contribute significantly to the profile of the fellow, adding new methodological and scientific competences as well as complementary skills fundamental to the fellow’s future career as an independent researcher.

Keywords: animal ecology,behavioural biology,evolutionary biology,primates,primate behaviour,faecal hormone analyses,enzyme immunoassays,signaling,olfaction,gas chromatography-mass spectrometry
Foreign aid and stability in the Middle East (AIDINMENA)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Intra-European Fellowships
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Norway
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF, 2012)
Start date: 2013-09-01
End date: 2016-10-08
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 225444.6
EU funding (EUR): 225444.6
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The overall objective of the proposed research training is to restart Beata Paragi’s career after her maternity leave and advance its development by gaining work experiences and enhancing the diversity of her skills and competences at Fafo AIS, an independent research institute in Norway. The training will strengthen the ‘researcher’ part of her academic identity building on her teaching experiences. It will help the fellow reach professional maturity as a researcher enhancing the transfer of knowledge between a research organisation operating in the field of social sciences and the fellow who has worked as an assistant professor at a Hungarian university. Objectives will be achieved by means of empirical research on recent events taking place in the Middle East. The research project embraces the issue how relations between the Middle East and the West (with particular emphasis on the EU) have been changing in a broad sense and more narrowly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The project contends that an important component of these relations has been the trade-off between the foreign support channelled in the form of aid to governments in the Middle East and benefits (regional stability, regime stabilities) ensured for such support. The research aims (1) to track the recent changes of Western (EU, to lesser extent US) aid policies in the MENA countries involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how they are applied in an attempt to control regional developments; (2) to understand local perceptions on aid-related foreign interventions and on political elites and/or regimes (3) to understand how Western aid policies have contributed to the Arab Spring and how the focus of Western aid has been changing; to evaluate the function and overall ‘price’ of foreign aid – social costs and externalities included – from the perspective of the donors and from that of the recipients.

Keywords: s107 transformation of societies - democratization - social movements,s109 political systems - legitimacy of governance,e117 economic history - development