Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
A toolset for hyper-realistic and XR-based human-human and human-machine interactions (PRESENCE)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Programme: Digital, Industry and Space
Theme: Digital
Destination: A human-centred and ethical development of digital and industrial technologies
Action type: Research and Innovation actions
Countries involved: Spain,Germany,Greece,Netherlands,France,Portugal,Italy,Belgium,Austria,Switzerland
Call: Next Generation eXtended Reality (RIA) (HORIZON-CL4-2023-HUMAN-01-CNECT, 2023)
Start date: 2024-01-01
End date: 2026-12-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 7655707.51
EU funding (EUR): 7655707.5
Participants: 20
Project status: SIGNED

The concept of presence can be understood as a synthesis of interrelated psychophysical ingredients where multiple perceptual dimensions intervene. A better understanding on how specific aspects, such as plausibility (the illusion that virtual events are really happening), co-presence (the illusion of being with others), or place illusion (the feeling of being there) impact XR experiences is key to improve their quality. The availability and performance of current technologies do not reach high levels of presence in XR, which is essential to get us closer than ever to the perennial VR dream: to be anywhere, doing anything, together with others, from any place. PRESENCE will impact multiple dimensions of presence in physical-digital worlds, addressing three main challenges: i) how to create realistic visual interactions among remote humans, delivering high-end holoportation based on live volumetric capturing, compression and optimization techniques, under heterogeneous computation and network conditions; ii) how to provide realistic touch among remote users and synthetic objects, developing novel haptic systems and enabling spatial multi device synchronisation in multi user scenarios; iii) how to produce realistic social interactions among avatars and agents, generating AI virtual humans, representing actual users or AI agents. PRESENCE will ensure the future uptake of research results following a threefold evaluation method: 1) each technology will be independently evaluated to understand its impact on the illusion of presence; 2) each component will be evaluated by the integration team, providing scientific and technical feedback in order to facilitate their use in each project iteration as well as beyond the project scope, towards technology transfer and exploitation; 3) all components will be integrated in two demonstrators (professional and social setups), following a human-centred design approach and ultimately evaluating the user experience.

Keywords: vr,xr,ar,virtual reality,extended reality,mixed reality,augmented reality,holoportation,volumetric video,ai,avatars,3d,ivas,haptics,human centred development,virtual worlds
GABAergic INterneurons signaling ImbalancE; A promising target underlying PFC-dependent cognitive flexibility defects. (GinieEffect)

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: Greece,Cyprus
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2021 (HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01, 2021)
Start date: 2022-07-01
End date: 2024-06-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 153486.72
EU funding (EUR): 153486.72
Participants: 2
Project status: CLOSED

Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of making decisions and adjusting our behavioural strategy to tackle unexpected changes in our environment. The cognitive flexibility required to modify behaviour when the rules change is ascribed primarily to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), but the exact mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain unknown. Inhibitory GABAergic interneurons (INs) seem to play a key role in this process by modulating the primary excitatory pyramidal neurons’ activity in the PFC. Indeed, individuals who have deficits in these INs, a common feature in many mental disorders, often fail to adjust their behaviour to a rule change, even though their ability to learn an initial rule remains intact. The two, main IN subsets, Parvalbumin-positive (PV) and Somatostatin-positive (SST) have different anatomical and physiological characteristics suggesting distinct functions. We, thus, hypothesize distinct roles for each subtype: PV cells may control the gain in pyramidal neuron activity, thereby affecting behaviour. SST cells, however, may control the ability to learn a new rule via plasticity in dendrites, thereby affecting behaviour, but leaving pyramidal neurons activity intact. Combining genetic, imaging and behavioural techniques in freely moving mice with in silico studies, we will dissect the effects of of long-term dysregulation of PV and SST INs on the PFC circuit function, with respect to flexible behaviour. Our experimental results will be fed to a computational model of the PFC circuit to further investigate how interneuronal control of information affects cognitive flexibility and to explore mechanisms that can reverse cognitive flexibility defects. Unravelling the mechanistic role of cognitive flexibility in the PFC will not only further our understanding of a complex brain function. It will also open new avenues for developing therapeutic approaches for numerous mental disorders, thus ameliorating a large societal and economic burden.

Keywords: neuronal excitation and inhibition balance,neuronal manipulation,aminobutyric acid inhibitory interneurons,prefrontal cortex,cognitive flexibility,ca2 imaging,set shifting task
Cohomology, Geometry, Explicit Number Theory (COGENT)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
Theme: Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Destination: Doctoral Networks
Action type: Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions
Panel: Mathematics
Countries involved: France,United States,Switzerland,United Kingdom,Ireland,Germany,Netherlands,Croatia
Call: MSCA Doctoral Networks 2023 (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-DN-01, 2023)
Start date: 2024-12-01
End date: 2028-11-30
Duration (months): 48.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2754276.8
EU funding (EUR): 2754276.8
Participants: 14
Project status: SIGNED

The aim of COGENT is to develop, analyze and apply efficient algorithms in three core areas where computer algebra plays an important role: Cohomology, Geometry and Explicit Number Theory. These will have applications to a broad range of mathematical problems, and will touch as well upon related topics like cryptography and quantum computing. Such applications of mathematics are expected to have a wide-ranging impact on economic and societal problems. Recent years have seen a plethora of high-flying projects and a dazzling variety of applications of methods in computer algebra. One of the emerging challenges is to combine ideas of different areas of computer algebra, to share expertise between them, and to educate young researchers in theoretical and practical methods with a focus of transferring knowledge and training software development skills. COGENT provides an innovative training program to facilitate this and has ambition to stimulate interdisciplinary knowledge exchange between number theorists, algebraists, geometers, computer scientists and industrial actors facing real-life challenges in symbolic computation in order to bridge key knowledge gaps. This will address the urgent need for computer assisted investigations of several longstanding conjectures in mathematics, and EU industry’s need for workers with an advanced mathematical and computational skill set. Not only do we expect to merge the best known tools for these purposes with innovative approaches and ideas to extract previously inaccessible cohomological information of the underlying arithmetic groups, but we also anticipate finding new hitherto unknown concepts as we intend to enhance the currently available data pool by a whole order of magnitude. The latter will allow the researchers to find hidden patterns, with the ambition to form a solid basis for formulating novel cornerstone conjectures, ideally in the spirit of the famous Million-Dollar Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.

Keywords: cohomology of arithmetic groups,explicit algebraic number theory and k theory,heck operators,voronoi reduction and lattices,computational group theory,proof assistant,quantum computing
The Global Latent Workspace: towards AI models of flexible cognition (GLoW)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Advanced grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: The Human Mind and Its Compl exity
Panel description: Cognitive science, psychology, linguistics
Countries involved: France
Call: ERC ADVANCED GRANTS (ERC-2022-ADG, 2022)
Start date: 2023-09-01
End date: 2028-08-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2499366.0
EU funding (EUR): 2499366.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

Recent advances in deep learning have allowed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reach human-level performance in many sensory, perceptual, linguistic or cognitive tasks. There is a growing need, however, for novel, brain-inspired cognitive architectures to achieve more robust and flexible cognition. The Global Workspace Theory refers to a large-scale system integrating and distributing information among networks of specialized modules to create higher-level forms of cognition and awareness. It is one of the dominant neuroscientific accounts of higher-level brain function. We argue that the time is ripe to consider explicit implementations of this theory using deep learning techniques. We propose a roadmap based on unsupervised neural translation between multiple latent spaces (neural networks trained for distinct tasks, on distinct sensory inputs and/or modalities) to create a unique, amodal global latent workspace (GLW). Sensory inputs that are broadcast in this GLW acquire meaning by connecting them to (or translating them into) the relevant semantic knowledge and representations from language, memory or decision systems: the semantic grounding property. Conversely, language and semantic representations are grounded in the sensory environment via the same broadcast/translation operation. Finally, broadcasting sensory and semantic inputs to the relevant effector domains can create motor affordances and support embodied cognition. Together, the grounding and affordance properties infuse meaning in AI processes, which can then be combined sequentially (via attentional selection) to enable flexible cognitive functions—i.e., “System-2” AI. The interdisciplinary project will directly implement the GLW framework in deep learning models of growing complexity, and evaluate their correspondence with brain networks. It will provide an explicit evaluation of the Global Workspace Theory, and push the limits of current deep learning systems towards next-generation AI.

Keywords: ai,neural networks,deep learning,cognitive architectures,global workspace,awareness,grounding,affordance
Saving the unsavable? Power asymmetries and the activist potential of self-translation for sustaining minorised languages and cultures (ATLAS)

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: Social Sciences and Humanities
Countries involved: Spain,Italy
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2023 (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01, 2023)
Start date: 2025-09-01
End date: 2027-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 165312.96
EU funding (EUR): 165312.96
Participants: 2
Project status: SIGNED

In the European context, about 43% of living languages are endangered. While the European Union has 24 official languages, all of which are recognised as national languages of its member states, there are over 60 regional and minority languages with no official status. Although self-translation has been discussed as a site of power struggle and an expression of multilingual identities, its relevance to language vitality and sustainability has not been explored. This project (ATLAS) aims to investigate the activist potential of self-translation in empowering minorised languages and contributing to their sustainable development in line with the Global Goals. It will be the first project to investigate self-translation and power in relation to activism and sustainability, relying on public engagement and integrating online contexts. The research objectives are: 1) to examine the language attitudes of self-translators and their reasons for self-translating, 2) to investigate publishing practices concerning publication layouts and paratext (online and in print) and publishers’ attitudes to self-translation and languages, 3) to determine language use and attitudes to self-translation among broader society. I will use Sicilian self-translation as a case study due to its minorised status and vulnerable position and will combine community’s participation with a mixed-methods approach (official statistics/policies, survey, interviews, school workshops, exhibition, questionnaires, paratextual analysis). I will be trained by the host and partner institution in problematising power asymmetries and applying sociolinguistic approaches. A secondment in Sicily will allow me to collect data and engage with the community. ATLAS will stress the European linguistic and cultural heritage, with self-translation as another tool for promoting equality and multilingual practices and policies. It will also contribute to my development as an independent and collaborative researcher.

Keywords: translation,power asymmetries,sociolinguistic justice,minority languages,multilingualism
AdoptART: Strengthening a Child-centric Perspective in Adoption Research, Policies and Practices (AdoptART)

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: Social Sciences and Humanities
Countries involved: Spain
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2022 (HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01, 2022)
Start date: 2024-04-01
End date: 2026-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 181152.96
EU funding (EUR): 181152.96
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Every child has a unique identity, including her/his birth, name, nationality and family relations, among other elements. The UNCRC (1989) put the focus on the child’s best interests and the States Parties have an obligation to preserve the child’s identity and promote child participation. However, the issue of respecting children’s relationships and identities in adoption remains an area of uncertainty and ambivalence in adoption policies and practices. In addition, current adoption procedures do not provide opportunities for children’s meaningful participation. Children are the main stakeholders but, at the same time, the most absent and invisible actors. In response to this challenge and knowledge gap, AdoptART is a 24-month interdisciplinary, intersectoral and multi-method project which aims to co-create new knowledge and implement innovative strategies and methods that collaboratively involve children and other key stakeholders in adoption research, policies and practices. AdoptART is a multi-sited research project conducted in two countries: Spain (Europe), a Spanish-speaking country that has recently introduced the figure of open adoption, and Chile (Latin America), a Spanish-speaking country that is considering its introduction. The project connects my prior research experience in Chile with a two-way transfer with the AFIN Research Group (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) under the supervision of Professor Diana Marre. By examining the Spanish and Chilean cases, AdoptART aims to formulate policy guidelines for decision-makers and practitioners to strengthen a child-centric perspective in adoption research, policies and practices, in line with global adoption challenges and the European policies on the Rights of the Child.

Keywords: adoption child participation children s right to identity qualitative methodologies participatory research chile spain
The Trilateral Magnetic Exchange (TRILMAX)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Widening Participation and Strengthening the European Research Area
Programme: Widening participation and spreading excellence
Theme: Improved access to Excellence
Destination: Improved access to Excellence
Action type: Coordination and support actions
Panel: Physics
Countries involved: Hungary,Spain,Germany
Call: Twinning Bottom-Up (HORIZON-WIDERA-2023-ACCESS-02, 2023)
Start date: 2024-09-01
End date: 2027-08-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1500000.0
EU funding (EUR): 1500000.0
Participants: 5
Project status: SIGNED

The 'Trilateral Magnetic Exchange' initiative - TRILMAX aims to make a transformative impact on research excellence at Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem—ELTE. Through strategic collaborations with leading centres of excellence in Germany (Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie—HZB) and Spain (Universidad de Oviedo—UO and Universitat de València—UV) and supported locally by the associated partner Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem—BME, our consortium will decisively enhance ELTE's research capacity, with a particular emphasis on magnetic van der Waals materials. Our research is aligned with the long-standing goal of the European Commission to secure strategic autonomy in green and digital technologies. We aim to identify and comprehensively characterize two-dimensional magnetic materials that fulfil the requisites of power-efficient, fast, and scalable magnetic random-access memories (MRAM). Our goal is to conceive a device concept at TRL2, poised for a seamless transition to further exploration (TRL2⇾4) within the domain of Horizon Europe's Cluster 4. Our activities will extend beyond research and fortify ELTE's administrative capabilities, enhancing our proficiency in securing and managing forthcoming funding opportunities within Horizon Europe and other international funding schemes. TRILMAX's overarching mission is to harness this research excellence as a catalyst for preparing subsequent proposals in the field of digital and emerging technologies under the Horizon Europe framework.

Keywords: mram,van der waals magnets,theory experiment collaboration
The evolution of new organs during insects’ conquest of the sky (mayFLYeye)

Framework: Horizon Europe — Excellent Science
Programme: European Research Council (ERC)
Theme: European research council
Destination: Consolidator grants
Action type: ERC actions
Panel: Environmental B iology, Ecology  and E volution
Panel description: For all organisms : Ecology, biodiversity, environmental change , evolutionary biology, behavioural ecology, microbial ecology , marine biology, ecophysiology, theoretical developments and mod elling
Countries involved: Spain
Call: ERC CONSOLIDATOR GRANTS (ERC-2021-COG, 2021)
Start date: 2023-02-01
End date: 2028-01-31
Duration (months): 60.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1995263.0
EU funding (EUR): 1995263.0
Participants: 1
Project status: SIGNED

The history of life on Earth has been defined by key game-changing events. In animals, this has often been driven by the appearance of novel organs, conferring new capabilities to explore new niches and adaptive landscapes, completely changing the subsequent evolution of certain lineages. This proposal will focus on one of the most fascinating and revolutionary events in animal history: insect’s conquest of the skies. First, by addressing the origin of the morphological change responsible for this revolution: the origin of wings. Second, by studying one of the multiple cascading effects set off by this initial event that continued shaping flying insects’ anatomy and boosted their diversification: the turbanate eyes of mayflies, a sex-specific extra set of eyes that males use to find mates during flight. We still know very little about these two events, due to the lack of data from key species and the need for multilevel and quantitative approaches. My lab will overcome these difficulties by using a unique experimental platform that I have built over the last five years: the setup of mayflies, a key group to study insect evolution, as a new experimentally tractable model. We will study the genetic basis and key factors underlying the origin of these two organs, with a multidisciplinary view combining single cell -omics, developmental and functional approaches and, in the case of new eyes, their impact in physiology and diversification. By comparing these two evolutionary processes, we will unveil key common and specific events in the evolution of the gene regulatory networks behind the origin of these two new organs. This project will generate the most comprehensive picture of two novel organs with huge impact in the evolution and ecology of winged insects and mayflies, answering long-standing evolutionary questions on morphological novelties. This will have a major impact in the way we study and understand the origin of new forms and their transformative nature.

Keywords: evo devo,morphological evolution,new organs,insects,mayflies,origin of wings,new visual systems,functional genomics
Unravelling the crosstalk between Stellate cells and Kupffer cells and its role in maintaining Stellate cell quiescence (StellateZEN)

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: Belgium
Call: MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2021 (HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01, 2021)
Start date: 2022-06-01
End date: 2024-12-31
Duration (months): 31.0
Total project cost (EUR): 175920.0
EU funding (EUR): 175920.0
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Liver diseases are a global cause of mortality, accounting for two million deaths a year, of which half are attributed to liver fibrosis. Activated stellate cells are the major source of excessive extracellular-matrix deposition that drives fibrosis. The signals that convert quiescent stellate cells into pathogenic myofibroblasts remain largely unknown. Spatial analysis from the Guilliams lab has recently revealed that each quiescent stellate cell is paired with a Kupffer cell (KC) in the steady-state liver. This is because stellate cells play a central role in the maintenance of the KC pool. Indeed, upon KC depletion, stellate cells are the main cells promoting the recruitment of monocytes and their differentiation into KCs through the production of instructive signals. Interestingly, in fibrotic livers of mice and humans the progressive activation of stellate cells is coupled with the gradual disappearance of KCs and pro-fibrotic stellate cells are no longer paired with KCs. I hypothesize that the KC-Stellate cell relationship is mutually beneficial and essential for liver homeostasis and that, just as the stellate cell is the primary cell of the KC niche, KCs play a key role in preventing stellate cell activation. I have recently identified a mouse model in which the knock-down of a receptor for one of the main stellate cell-derived instructive factors leads to an almost complete absence of KCs in the liver. This yields a liver where most stellate cells are not paired with a KC. Interestingly, these mice spontaneously develop fibrosis, strengthening my hypothesis that KCs are crucial to maintain stellate cells quiescence. In this project, I will use scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics to study stellate cells paired or unpaired with a KC to define and study gene targets involved in the KC-stellate cell crosstalk, in the hope to unravel the KC-derived signals that maintain stellate cells in a quiescent state, as this may lead to novel anti-fibrotic strategies.

Keywords: liver kupffer cells,hepatic stellate cells,cell cell interactions,fibrosis,niche