Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Informational Frictions in Financial Markets (IFFINMAR)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-04-01
End date: 2018-03-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

My research studies the impact of informational frictions on financial markets. In a frictionless market all economic agents have the same access to information. However, such homogeneity is often violated either because some agents have more information or they can better process it. A source of such informational advantage could be superior ability or financial skills. Naturally such skills are likely to be concentrated among institutional investors. But academic research shows that institutional investors do not generate better outcomes. My research argues that a subset of actively managed mutual fund managers can outperform passive benchmarks, and other investors, because they can choose better stocks or better time the changes in aggregate market conditions. These differences in investment skills have permanent effects on the ex-post performance of these investors. Identifying skilled investors undermines the postulates of efficient markets and provides useful tool for households to make efficient financial decisions. Another source of friction could be institutional differences fostering incentives to acquire and process information. For example I show that the degree of centralization or business concerns inside organizations affect incentives to acquire information and take excessive risk. Informational frictions can also result from the illegal acquisition of inside information. In my current work I want to understand the role of illegal insider trading for price formation and the overall quality of information in financial markets. On a broader level I study the implications of informational frictions for the growing income inequality between rich and poor. To explain why the inequality grows I show that some agents are endowed with more resources to access beneficial information and thus can enhance their capital gains and total income. Overall, my primary aim is to understand the role informational frictions play in both micro and macroeconomic arenas.

Keywords: informational frictions,financial markets,asymmetric information,institutional investors,income inequality,insider trading
Immune and Neuromodulation Mediated by Alphaherpesviruses (INMA)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-04-01
End date: 2018-03-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Despite the advances against infectious diseases, morbidity and mortality still pose a very high social and economic impact. Viruses have developed a plethora of strategies to modulate the host. The main goal of my research is to investigate these strategies in order to understand viral immunomodulation, neuromodulation and pathogenesis. This will permit us to develop better intervention approaches to combat viral infections and their role in neuropathies. Due to their high prevalence and adaptation to their hosts, I will focus on relevant human pathogens within the Herpesviridae family: herpes simplex virus type 1 and type 2 (HSV-1 and HSV-2, respectively) and varicella zoster virus (VZV). These viruses establish latency in sensory ganglia of the peripheral nervous system. The mechanisms that allow the colonization of the nervous system by these viruses are unknown. The interplay between the virus and the immune system is relevant for persistence and pathogenesis. Chemokines and neurotrophic factors play a relevant role in the crosstalk between the immune and nervous systems. We have recently discovered the first mechanism employed by a virus, HSV, to modulate both sets of proteins. This novel strategy may be relevant for HSV spread, colonization of the nervous system and pathogenesis. Other relevant human pathogens, such as VZV, may express modulators of chemokines and/or neurotrophic factors. These hypotheses will be addressed using molecular, cell biology, functional assays, and mouse models. My previous experience in viral modulation, the multidisciplinary approach of the project and the interdisciplinary environment of the host institution will ensure the feasibility of this proposal. We will discover novel viral mechanisms of immune, neuromodulation and pathogenesis providing relevant insights on the cellular processes involved. The results will permit developing better intervention approaches to combat viral infections and their role in neuropathies.

Keywords: viral immune modulation,neuro modulation,viral spread,pathogenesis,chemokines,cytokines,neurotrophic factors,ngf,herpes simplex virus,varicella zoster virus
Evaluating the impact of socialization tactics, social networks and demographic similarity on newcomers’ organizational socialization and performance in a longitudinal cross-industry data sample. (SOCIALISEME)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Spain
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-04-01
End date: 2018-03-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Organisational socialisation, or how we “acquire the social knowledge and skills necessary to assume an organisational role”, is now more relevant than ever due to current socio-economic trends that have repercussions on individuals, organisations and the overall society. The 2008 Great Recession put the cost-structures of EU organisations under great stress, and failure in newcomer socialisation hinders organisations and firms due to the inability of incoming talent to perform at high levels, and to the costs associated with turnover and additional recruitment. My first objective is thus to evaluate the effectiveness of socialisation tactics in different industries and job tasks. Second, in the flat, interdependent organisations that characterise the current workplace, networks are critical in determining success. Thus, I will evaluate the development of newcomer social networks and their relationship to their performance. Results will allow workers to self-access their career and socialisation trajectory through a tool based on my scientific findings, in order to achieve higher individual performance, job satisfaction and well-being. Third, employees now transition into organisations that are highly diverse due to the increasing cross-country mobility and immigration in the EU. It then becomes relevant to evaluate the impact of demographic differences between newcomers, supervisors and colleagues on socialisation effectiveness. Socialising diverse newcomers more efficiently will foster organisational performance and prevent social discrimination by ensuring a smooth integration of individuals of different cultural origins into the workplace. To attain my research objectives I will test a new theoretical framework using statistical estimation methods on two separate large longitudinal datasets, based on survey data from the Apprentissage of French Master Grande Ecole students and archival data on the performance of professional basketball players (1985-2012).

Keywords: organisation socialisation,newcomer performance,socialisation best-practices,demographic similarity,social discrimination,social networks,job satisfaction,longitudinal,survey,panel data
Multilingual Lexicon Extraction from Comparable Corpora (MULTILEX)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-09-01
End date: 2018-12-28
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Given large collections of parallel (i.e. translated) texts, it is well-known how to, by successively applying a sentence- and a word-alignment step, establish correspondences between words across languages. However, parallel texts are a scarce resource for most language pairs involving lesser-used languages. On the other hand, human second language acquisition seems not to require the reception of large amounts of translated texts, which indicates that there must be another way of crossing the language barrier. Apparently, the human capabilities are based on looking at comparable resources, i.e. texts or speech on related topics in different languages, which, however, are not translations of each other. Comparable (written or spoken) corpora are far more common than parallel corpora, thus offering the chance to overcome the data acquisition bottleneck. Despite its cognitive motivation, in the proposed project we will not attempt to simulate the complexities of human second language acquisition, but will show that it is possible by purely technical means to automatically extract information on word- and multiword-translations from comparable corpora. The aim is to push the boundaries of current approaches, which typically utilize correlations between co-occurrence patterns across languages, in several ways: 1) Eliminating the need for initial lexicons by using a bootstrapping approach which only requires a few seed translations. 2) Implementing a new methodology which first establishes alignments between comparable documents across languages, and then computes cross-lingual alignments between words and multiword-units. 3) Improving the quality of computed word translations by applying an interlingua approach, which, by relying on several pivot languages, allows a highly effective multi-dimensional cross-check. 4) We will show that, by looking at foreign citations, language translations can even be derived from a single monolingual text corpus.

Keywords: dictionary generation,dictionary extraction,comparable corpora,lexicography,identifying word translations,bilingual dictionaries,corpus linguistics
Extending, disseminating, and harmonizing the quantification of human and ecosystem toxicity impacts when assessing the sustainability of products and services over their life cycle (QUAN-TOX)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Denmark
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-04-01
End date: 2018-03-31
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

QUAN-TOX is a four-year project aiming at extending, disseminating, and harmonizing the QUANtification of human and ecosystem TOXicity impacts when assessing the sustainability of products and services over their life cycle. QUAN-TOX supports a full and long-term integration of Dr. Peter Fantke at the Division for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment of the Technical University Denmark, strengthens his academic profile, while meeting research needs at the hosting institution. Research will identify and address existing gaps in current toxicity assessment models. Dissemination of research results includes scientific publications and knowledge transfer including teaching activities and elaborating training material. As a result, QUAN-TOX promotes sustainability aspects towards integration into European legislation and strengthens Europe's role in raising scientific awareness of aspects around risk minimization, product optimization, and life cycle thinking, which is in line with the Europe 2020 economy growth strategy. Thereby, QUAN-TOX will play a key role at the interface between researchers in life cycle toxicity assessment and stakeholders including policy makers at the European scale, community organisations, industry, academy, schools and students, and the general public. Finally, QUAN-TOX helps to tackle societal challenges like human health and well-being, sustainable agriculture, and clean energy that all reflect policy priorities according to the Horizon 2020 EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.

Keywords: life cycle thinking,sustainable production and consumption,human health and ecosystem impacts,toxicity assessment,life cycle impact assessment,usetox scientific consensus model
Towards a complete spatiotemporal model of viral morphogenesis during HIV maturation (VIRALMORPHMECH)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG, 2013)
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Viral morphogenesis, the phenomenon by which viruses reorganize their internal macromolecular structure in space and time across their lifecycle, is a complex process that is not quantitatively understood. HIV maturation, in particular, involves detailed atomistic processes such as protein-ligand recognition and cleavage that triggers large-scale macromolecular spatiotemporal rearrangement such as capsid self-assembly and RNA-modulated nucleocapsid condensation leading to infectious virus particles (virions) in a sequence of morphological changes that need to be carefully timed. Many antiretroviral inhibitors have been developed to stop maturation but their efficacy has been undermined by the emergence of drug resistant mutations. Furthermore, the effect of such inhibitors on the internal spatiotemporal viral dynamics is unknown. In order to quantitatively understand the determinants of maturation, inhibition and mutational resistance it is vital to construct a complete physics-based model of the maturation process. This requires detailed understanding of how all the relevant viral molecular constituents interact with each other at the atomistic level, how this is affected by drug interactions and mutations in proteins and how this carries over to the large-scale cleavage and self-assembly process. This project aims at deriving a multi-scale computer model of HIV maturation, integrating thermodynamic and kinetic binding data from massively parallel detailed molecular dynamics simulations of viral protein-protein and protein-drug interactions with particle-based reaction diffusion kinetics simulations describing the internal processing and remodeling in an entire virion explicitly in space and time. We will also investigate what happens if the morphological sequence is perturbed and use this to discover novel allosteric targets followed by implementing a high-throughput virtual and experimentally validated drug-screening program towards HIV eradication therapy.

Keywords: molecular dynamics,reaction diffusion,multiscale modeling,conformational molecular kinetics,self-assembly,nanotechnology,allostery,antiretrovirals,hiv maturation,hiv eradication therapy
Analytic problems in Coarse Geometry and Geometric Group Theory (COARSE ANALYSIS)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG, 2013)
Start date: 2015-10-29
End date: 2019-10-28
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The overall goal of this proposal is a systematic study of C*-algebras related to coarse structures of metric spaces and discrete groups. The background theme is the interplay between analysis and coarse geometry. It addresses questions relating to exactness of discrete groups and spaces, Roe algebras and the Baum--Connes conjectures. The interplay between coarse and analytic properties is exemplified by the first objective: computing the nuclear dimension of Roe algebras in terms of asymptotic dimension of the underlying space. Nuclear dimension of C*-algebras is a recent notion that plays a tremendous role in Elliott's Classification Program of C*-algebras. The motivation for this objective is to systematically study the parallels between C*-algebraic methods of the Classification Program and topological and K-theoretic methods used for Novikov-type conjectures. The second objective is to expand the techniques from Geometric Group Theory to produce a concrete example of a non-exact group. So far the only such examples are shown to exist by probabilistic methods, after an outline by M. Gromov. As non-exactness is highly relevant for (the potential failure of) the Baum-Connes conjecture, having concrete examples to study would be paradigm-shifting. The idea for such a construction is to generalize the small cancellation theory to a coarse setting. The last objective is to prove the Baum-Connes conjecture for certain limits of hyperbolic groups, using the quantitative K-theory of Oyono-Oyono and Yu. Since most of the examples of discrete groups with unusual properties (e.g. non-exact) are constructed as such limits, showing that some of them do satisfy the conjecture is desirable.

Keywords: coarse geometry,exactness,roe algebras,baum--connes conjecture
Oxytocin and Dopamine Interplay in Humans – on the Biology of Social Cognition (BIOSOCIOCOG)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Portugal
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG, 2013)
Start date: 2015-01-01
End date: 2020-07-01
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

This project asks ‘Do oxytocin and dopamine systems interact in the human brain?’. It will encompass an innovative, inter- disciplinary method combining established techniques in neuropharmacology, neuroimaging and genetics. It will use a mentalizing (social dilemma) task where it is hypothesized that the trust-eliciting reward value of mutual cooperation is coded by both dopaminergic and oxytocinergic actions in the striatum. Support for this comes from dopamine´s well-characterized role in reward learning and oxytocin’s recently found impact on affiliate and cooperative behavior and its neurocorrelates. As a way of assessing these systems, I will combine, for the first time, oxytocin and dopamine manipulations; as well as integrate information from natural genetic variability to further support my predictions. The underlying assumption is that acute changes in their striatal levels as well as chronic predispositions affecting their systems can influence striatal activation during social reward processing. (Chronic predispositions arising from environmental historical events and personality will also be taken into account.) There is robust evidence that interplay between the dopamine and the oxytocine systems is crucial for social cognition from animal studies, however this has not yet been investigated in humans. The question is paramount and timely as mental illness enigmas involving trust/paranoia, social avolition and anxiety or drug addiction are still unresolved and new oxytocinergic therapies are now being clinically trialed for autism and schizophrenia (and partially to complement dopaminergic ones, as in the case of the latter). The ultimate goal herein is to inform the rational design of treatments for these conditions by better understanding the biological underpinnings of human social cognition, in respect to trust and social behaviour.

Keywords: oxytocin,dopamine,social cognition,cooperation,mentalizing,reward,learning,genetics,neuropharmacology,fmri
Interactive Communications in Noisy Channels (INTCOMM)

Framework: FP7 — People
Programme: Marie-Curie Actions
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Life-long training and career development
Action type: Support for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie)
Countries involved: Israel
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG, 2013)
Start date: 2014-03-01
End date: 2018-02-28
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 100000.0
EU funding (EUR): 100000.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The problem of reliable communications over a noisy channel traditionally involves the use of complex error correcting codes, designed to combat channel noise and interference from other users. When operating near the information theoretical limits, such codes incur large delays and involve onerous decoding efforts. This common approach to channel coding, where messages are mapped in advance into fixed long codewords, is unavoidable when communication is strictly one-way. In practice however, this is hardly the predominant case. A more prevalent scenario in the modern communication arena is one where a number of users are interconnected via some noisy medium, and can both send and receive information. This more general model allows for the introduction of a new element into the channel coding scheme: Interaction. In an interactive coding protocol, different users “converse" over a noisy channel and make their transmission decisions on the fly rather than encoding their information in advance. Such protocols, perhaps reminiscent of the interaction schemes found in biological systems, could potentially be much simpler, admit shorter delays, and be more robust to channel variations. While there is some initial evidence supporting these notions in simplified scenarios, a theoretical understanding of noisy interaction is still meager, and the aforementioned prospective gains are seldom reaped in practice. The main goals of this proposal are to develop a formal mathematical theory of noisy interaction, and to apply it towards the design of efficient interactive communication protocols. A breakthrough in this line of research could lead to a paradigm shift that would revolutionize communication systems methodologies, facilitating cheaper, power-saving, more robust designs.

Keywords: information theory,interactive communication,channel coding,communication with feedback