Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Understanding and predicting multispecies assemblages and interactions in space and time (MATES)

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: Switzerland
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-04-01
End date: 2016-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 207928.8
EU funding (EUR): 207928.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Understanding and modelling biotic interactions and their dynamics are prerequisite for predicting community and biodiversity response to climate change and, thus, for designing strategies and policies to halt the loss of biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. We propose to investigate uncertainties in biodiversity response to climate change by improving and integrating existing approaches for modelling biotic interactions in large-scale multispecies assemblages, taking into account reciprocal effects between species and their abiotic and biotic environment as well as variations in biotic interactions across space and time, and considering macroecological constraints on species assemblages. Using a hierarchical Bayesian approach, we will implement algorithms for describing biotic interactions based on simple qualitative links between species or functional groups, on quantitative interaction coefficients, and on interaction currencies, for example a common resource, that may mediate interactions. Algorithms will be benchmarked using species assemblage data on birds, butterflies and plants, mainly from Switzerland but also from other parts of Europe. Effects of different interaction mechanisms and data limitations on model performance will be tested using data from simulated communities. We will further assess the magnitude of variation in biotic associations throughout species’ environmental niches and geographic ranges. In a multi-scale approach, our multispecies interaction models will be combined with macroecological models to predict species richness and species compositions for an ensemble of climate change scenarios. By combining extensive empirical and theoretical analyses as well as expertise and datasets of researchers from four European countries, the proposed research is at the cutting edge, will provide theoretical and conceptual advancements in biodiversity science, and will help operationalizing community predictions under climate change.

Keywords: biotic interactions,species distribution models,environmental niche,global change,prediction,bayesian statistics,community ecology,species traits,species richness,macroecological constraints
Toward a Phenomenology of the Anxious Body (TPAB)

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: Ireland
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IOF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-10-01
End date: 2017-09-30
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 263058.3
EU funding (EUR): 263058.3
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The project, Toward a Phenomenology of the Anxious Body (TPAB), is a study of anxiety, which employs an interdisciplinary methodology involving philosophy, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis. Anxiety is the most common form of mental illness in the US and UK, affecting 18% of the population in the US and 13% in the UK. Despite this, a rigorous analysis of anxiety at both an experiential and conceptual level remains overlooked. The project attends to this oversight. To achieve this, the project uses an original and novel methodology that combines a first-person perspective with state-of-the-art research in cognitive science. The project involves spending two years during the outgoing phase at the University of Memphis, School of Philosophy where the applicant will gain technical and complementary skills by working with the leading figure in embodied cognition, Shaun Gallagher. Dr. Trigg will then return to University College Dublin, School of Philosophy for the final year, where he will transfer knowledge acquired in the outgoing phase under the mentorship of Dermot Moran, the leading specialist in phenomenology. The research findings are then implemented during the return phase at policy level through collaborative research with medical practitioners. The training objective for the project is to gain the necessary skills required to becoming an independent researcher at a leading research institution in the EU. This objective is possible thanks to several factors, such as the expertise of the host departments, the excellent infrastructure in place, and the existing synergy between the outgoing and return scientists-in-charge. The impact of the TPAB project on EU Excellence will be to position the issue of anxiety on the research horizon; to diversify the research horizon through the novel methodology; and to make an enduring contribution to the EU strategy for the future of mental health by tackling societal challenges such as stigma and exclusion.

Keywords: phenomenology,body,embodiment,anxiety,merleau-ponty,subjectivity,self,mood,space,intersubjectivity,interdisciplinary,psychoanalysis,bodily cognition
Evolutionary morphology of accessory auditory structures in piranhas, pacus, and related serrasalmid fishes: is acute hearing an adaptation for prey location? (EVOMORPHASIS)

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-2013-IEF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-06-01
End date: 2016-05-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 269743.8
EU funding (EUR): 269743.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The evolutionary success of otophysans, a major lineage of fish diversity, is often attributed to a novel morphology involving unique bones, anterior vertebrae, and the swim bladder. This feature, termed the Weberian apparatus (WA), is an accessory hearing organ that transduces sound from the swim bladder to the inner ear. As a result, otophysans have sensitive hearing, however, the adaptive function for such ability is unknown. Further, the effect of WA morphological variation between species is not clear. It is hypothesized that acute hearing facilitates prey detection. This research will test this hypothesis by examining WA morphology and function in Serrasalmidae, an ecologically diverse otophysan family with 15 genera and ~60 species that include piranhas and pacus. Among serrasalmids are species that eat small fishes, scales off other fishes, small invertebrates, and falling fruits. The objectives of this research are to examine WA morphology in serrasalmids, to determine if morphology is related to hearing ability, and to test if prey can be localized by acoustic cues. This research will utilize the Muséum National de Histoire Nationelle specimen collection along with computerized tomography (CT), 3D imaging, and comparative analysis. Electrophysiology will be used to test hearing and behavioral experiments will examine piranha and pacu responses to prey sounds. This project will involve training in CT and 3D visualization, histological and microscopy methods, phylogenetic comparative analysis, and biomechanical modeling. The fellowship is expected to help the candidate realize an academic career. The candidate will learn cutting edge methods, develop skills for managing data, and gain experience with scientific presentations, writing and publishing. The unique opportunity to work with an internationally renowned research community and a highly respected functional morphology expert will allow the applicant to focus on a new, related research area.

Keywords: functional morphology,hearing,ichthyology,piranha,computerized tomography,phylogenetic comparative analysis,evolution
Index based Statistical Analysis of Large Text Corpora (ISALTEC)

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: Germany
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-07-01
End date: 2016-06-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 161968.8
EU funding (EUR): 161968.8
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The statistical analysis of large text corpora is a fundamental method for gaining insights into the structure of language, e.g. for grammar development, machine translation, terminology and named entity extraction, text correction, semantic text analysis, and others. Progress in these fields helps to improve related applications in information science (search engine technology) and many other text oriented disciplines. The core contribution of this project is a new methodology aimed at fundamentally improving statistical analysis of large text corpora. A weakness of current methods in corpus analysis is insufficient use of contextual information. Properly understanding the role, function and meaning of a phrase or word (which is important for many applications, e.g., for translation, search, etc.) is often only possible when taking sentence/paragraph contexts into account. We want to develop and study a new representation of corpora which is superior to present formats in three respects. Most importantly, it offers a much better use of contextual information. At the same time it helps to better distinguish between arbitrary and meaningful parts of text and gives hints on how to compose/decompose phrases. With these properties, the new representation gives a basis for fundamentally improving statistical analysis of corpora. The new representation is derived from a special text index structure which gives immediate access to contexts of any size. The index imposes a natural graph structure on the the phrases in the corpus, which implies that interesting graph-based statistical methods can be applied. Further more it can be efficiently constructed and updated in practice. To practically demonstrate the large potential of the new methodology in NLP we will concentrate on the machine translation where we expect to achieve improved translation methods for words and phrases.

Keywords: finite state automata,index structures,statistical machine translation
MEG2 Ultra Light TIming Drift Chamber (MULTIDC)

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: Switzerland
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF, 2013)
Start date: 2015-03-01
End date: 2017-02-28
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 199317.6
EU funding (EUR): 199317.6
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

The MEG2 Ultra Light TIming Drift Chamber (MULTIDC) proposal concerns the upgrade of MEG an experiment hosted at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) designed to search for the charged lepton flavour violating decay mu in e+gamma. The upgrade aims at a sensitivity of one order of magnitude better than the final MEG result. The MEG upgrade (MEG2) will increase the rate capability of all detectors while also improving the energy, angular and timing resolutions, for both the positron and photon arms. One of the key ingredient of the upgraded detector is a new low-mass, stereo drift chamber that exploit the timing information of all electron clusters produced by a charged particle for event filtering purposes and resolution boosting. The candidate also proposes to study the feasibility of a laser calibration system able to monitor in real time the characteristics of the gas misture and the wires alignment.

Keywords: clfv,charged lepton flavour violation,drift chambers,gas based detectors,trackers,spectrometer,detector calibration
Brain dynamics and patterns of activity signature of inner speech during recall and conceptual emergence in bilinguals. (NINAME)

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: Spain
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-03-01
End date: 2016-02-29
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 166336.2
EU funding (EUR): 166336.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Frege, in 1882, puts forward a philosophical account of language as symbols permitting the emergence of conceptual knowledge from individual memories. Since then, the influence of language on the episodic memory system and on the emergence of conceptual knowledge stays an undisclosed thesis. Life experiences are transformed into episodic memory via the hippocampus, the hippocampus in interplay with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex would then elicit the emergence of conceptual knowledge. In this project the hypothesized interdependency of the long term memory network on language processes will be experimentally assessed thanks to language manipulation in fluent bilinguals. It will focus on language specific processes in interplay with the hippocampo-ventro-Medial-Prefrontal Cortex patterns of activity and dynamics. Thus, the project will include two main enterprises: first, the neuroimaging and neurophysiological investigation of the influence of the used language on inner speech during life experience recall. Second, the neuroimaging and neurophysiological investigation of the influence of the used language on the emergence of conceptual knowledge active in the network. The methodological objective of this project is thus to develop an integrated view of the human brain in play in the language-memory interdependency, using fMRI brain responses patterns, and assessing potential contribution of theta rhythms synchrony via the use of MEG. Application side, this project will give the first step in understanding the role of inner speech in long term memory, and the emergence of conceptual knowledge in the network. Applicability side, it will promote an adapted view on the self memory processes of bilinguals essential for clinical practices of psychopathology; moreover, the understanding on the emergence of conceptual knowledge will enhance the adaptation of novel educational plans both for general populations and particularly for bilinguals.

Keywords: inner speech,long term episodic memory,episodic autobiographical memory,theta rhythm,hippocampus,temporal pole,ventro-medial-prefrontal cortex
Analyzing metabolism in an unusual nitrogen fixing symbiosis using metatranscriptomics (TRANSUCYNA)

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-2013-IOF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-05-19
End date: 2017-11-18
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 254474.1
EU funding (EUR): 254474.1
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

UCYN-A is a globally abundant nitrogen fixing cyanobacterium with a very unusual metabolism and lifestyle. These microorganisms express nitrogenase genes with maximum transcript abundances during the light period (Zehr et al., 2007). Previous results in the group of Jonathan Zehr found that UCYN-A cyanobacteria are genetically incapable of oxygenic photosynthesis because the entire PSII apparatus is missing (although the PSI apparatus appears to be intact). Moreover, PSII isn´t the only component that is lacking in this genome: RuBisCo (ribulose-1,5 bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase that fixes CO2) and the tricarboxylic acid cycle (TCA) that usually are present in the cyanobacteria, are missing in UCYN-A. The lack of biosynthetic pathways suggested that this organism depend on other organisms, either in close association or in symbiosis, for critical nutrients. Thanks to flow cytometry and the metagenomic studies, this group obtained a complete genome sequence from UCYN-A and observed by quantitative isotopic analysis that UCYN-A has a symbiotic association with a unicellular Prymnesiophyte (Thompson et al., 2012). In this project we will determine whole-genome transcription over natural diel cycle in order to get a better understanding of the interplay of host and cyanobacterium metabolisms, and how it relates to supply of organic matter from the host eukaryote to the cyanobacterium. The transcriptome work will help to determine the global importance of N2 fixation by this cyanobacterial group in order to better constrain the global ocean nitrogen budget. - Thompson, A., R. Foster, A. Krupke, B. Carter, N. Musat, D. Vaulot, M. Kuypers & J.P. Zehr. Science 337:1546 (2012). - Zehr, J., S. Bench, B. Carter, I. Hewson, F. Niazi, T. Shi, H. Tripp & J. Affourtit. Science 322: 1110 (2008). - Zehr, J., J. Montoya, I. Hewson, E. Mondragon, C. Short, A. Hansen, B. Jenkins, M.Church & D.M. Karl. Limnol. Oceanogr. 52: 169 (2007).

Keywords: ecology,metatranscriptomics,symbiosis,cyanobacteria,ucyn-a and oceanography
Functional analysis of pectic RG-I in tomato and strawberry fruit (RGIFRUTO)

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-2013-IEF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-10-01
End date: 2017-04-16
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 231283.2
EU funding (EUR): 231283.2
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

Available high-throughput techniques, such as genomics, underpin a new era for Big Data in Science. The application and analysis of such large amounts of information is not facile and must be combined in parallel with a detailed analysis of the functions of genes/proteins in relation to less tractable biomolecules such as glycans and ultimately cell, tissue and organ attributes. This last part of the analysis looking at the properties of biological organisms, named phenomics, is a final step of Big Data approaches and is crucial for maximizing Big Data application and usefulness. In this project I will focus on a glycomic/phenomic approach to characterise the role of the complex pectic glycan rhamnogalacturonan I (RG-I) pectin in fruits in relation to texture properties.I shall focus on two species, tomato as model for climacteric fruits and strawberry as model for non-climacteric fruits. I will take advantage of the genome sequence projects and associated publicly available tools, which will be supported by my background in both strawberry research and plant cell walls. I aim to analyse genes related to the remodeling of RG-I pectin, by functional analysis of silenced transgenic lines in both tomato and strawberry, to structurally dissect the complex pectic glycans and determine their specific roles in fruits, with special interest in fruit mechanical properties and texture.This complex quality trait produces important losses in the fleshy fruit industry. Our hypothesis is that the restriction of cell wall disassembly in fruits will contribute to improve their textural features and also result in a longer fruit shelf-life, reduced mechanical bruising during the postharvest period and more resistance to plant pathogens. This widened knowledge in high value crops of fleshy fruits will underpin the application of R&T advances into crop breeding programs towards a more sustainable agricultural management and healthier foods, which are key priorities of Horizon2020.

Keywords: tomato,strawberry,fruit,fruit texture,pectic polysaccharide,rhamnogalacturonan i,plant cell wall structure,immunoassay,epitope detection chromatography,biophysics,atomic force microscopy
United by diversity - Management policies of cultural and linguistic diversity in Switzerland and Canada : Two reference laboratories for European Union? (UNITED BY DIVER-FRI)

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: Switzerland
Call:  (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF, 2013)
Start date: 2014-05-01
End date: 2016-03-31
Duration (months): 23.0
Total project cost (EUR): 257490.37
EU funding (EUR): 257490.37
Participants: 1
Project status: CLOSED

This project is a continuation of my previous doctoral research into multiculturalism and national identity in Canada, Quebec and France using a comparative perspective. The project goal will be the acquisition of additional skills in the field of political anthropology, and the continuation of my research in order to prepare an Accreditation to supervise research. The implementation of this project requires a period of mobility at the University of Freiburg and my integration within the Department of Political Anthropology where Professor Christian Giordano is committed to supervise my research. Canada and Switzerland are two federations characterized by cultural and linguistic diversity. In both cases, the recognition of this diversity is one of the cornerstones of collective identity. Their respective Constitutions state that one of the primary objectives is the promotion of diversity on their territories. I have chosen to use the phrase: "united in diversity" in order to describe these countries which share the same institutional paradigm: the diversity of cultures and languages is an asset to be preserved. The objective of this research is to compare the political management of cultural and linguistic diversity in Canada and Switzerland at the federal and local levels. To do this, we will rely on an analysis of constitutional provisions in legislation and jurisprudence, published sociological and historical analyzes on this subject, as well as some targeted interviews. The term "consociation" (Walzer, 1997) used to describe these political regimes characterized by the coexistence of different cultural and linguistic communities within a territory will be preferred to that of a multinational federation, the use of which is more controversial. This comparative analysis will lead to a broader discussion on the status of the European Union today: a union of nation states or a new form of consociation?

Keywords: multinational federation,consociation,switzerland,canada,policies,management of cultural and linguistic diversity,comparison,preservation,paradigm