ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline that offers powerful tools to control and manipulate fundamental processes in living matter. We propose to develop and apply such tools to modify the genetic code of cultured mammalian cells and bacteria with the aim to study the role of lysine acetylation in the regulation of metabolism and in cancer development. Thousands of lysine acetylation sites were recently discovered on non-histone proteins, suggesting that acetylation is a widespread and evolutionarily conserved post translational modification, similar in scope to phosphorylation and ubiquitination. Specifically, it has been found that most of the enzymes of metabolic processes—including glycolysis—are acetylated, implying that acetylation is key regulator of cellular metabolism in general and in glycolysis in particular. The regulation of metabolic pathways is of particular importance to cancer research, as misregulation of metabolic pathways, especially upregulation of glycolysis, is common to most transformed cells and is now considered a new hallmark of cancer. These data raise an immediate question: what is the role of acetylation in the regulation of glycolysis and in the metabolic reprogramming of cancer cells? While current methods rely on mutational analyses, we will genetically encode the incorporation of acetylated lysine and directly measure the functional role of each acetylation site in cancerous and non-cancerous cell lines. Using this methodology, we will study the structural and functional implications of all the acetylation sites in glycolytic enzymes. We will also decipher the mechanism by which acetylation is regulated by deacetylases and answer a long standing question – how 18 deacetylases recognise their substrates among thousands of acetylated proteins? The developed methodologies can be applied to a wide range of protein families known to be acetylated, thereby making this study relevant to diverse research fields.

1 499 375 €

Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2021-06-30

Alfonsine astronomy is arguably among the first European scientific achievements. It shaped a scene for actors like Regiomontanus or Copernicus. There is however little detailed historical analysis encompassing its development in its full breadth. ALFA addresses this issue by studying tables, instruments, mathematical and theoretical texts in a methodologically innovative way relying on approaches from the history of manuscript cultures, history of mathematics, and history of astronomy. ALFA integrates these approaches not only to benefit from different perspectives but also to build new questions from their interactions. For instance the analysis of mathematical practices in astral sciences manuscripts induces new ways to analyse the documents and to think about astronomical questions. Relying on these approaches the main objectives of ALFA are thus to: - Retrace the development of the corpus of Alfonsine texts from its origin in the second half of the 13th century to the end of the 15th century by following, on the manuscript level, the milieus fostering it; - Analyse the Alfonsine astronomers’ practices, their relations to mathematics, to the natural world, to proofs and justification, their intellectual context and audiences; - Build a meaningful narrative showing how astronomers in different milieus with diverse practices shaped, also from Arabic materials, an original scientific scene in Europe. ALFA will shed new light on the intellectual history of the late medieval period as a whole and produce a better understanding of its relations to related scientific periods in Europe and beyond. It will also produce methodological breakthroughs impacting the ways history of knowledge is practiced outside the field of ancient and medieval sciences. Efforts will be devoted to bring these results not only to the relevant scholarly communities but also to a wider audience as a resource in the public debates around science, knowledge and culture.

1 871 250 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

In this project, innovative techniques to reconstruct ancient economies are developed and new insights in the trade and processing of mineral raw materials are gained based on interdisciplinary archaeological and archaeometrical research. An innovative methodology for and a practical provenance database of the primary origin of natron glass from the Hellenistic-Roman world will be established. The project investigates both production and consumer sites of glass raw materials using both typo-chronological and archaeometrical (isotope geochemical) study of finished glass artefacts at consumer sites as well as mineralogical and chemical characterisation of raw glass and mineral resources at primary production sites. Suitable sand resources in the locations described by ancient authors will be identified through geological prospecting on the basis of literature review and field work. Sand and flux (natron) deposits will be mineralogically and geochemically characterised and compared to the results of the archaeological and geochemical investigations of the glass. Through integrated typo-chronological and archaeometrical analysis, the possible occurrence of primary production centres of raw glass outside the known locations in Syro-Palestine and Egypt, particularly in North-Africa, Italy, Spain and Gaul will be critically studied. In this way, historical, archaeological and archaeometrical data are combined, developing new interdisciplinary techniques for innovative archaeological interpretation of glass trade in the Hellenistic-Roman world.

954 960 €

Start date: 2009-11-01, End date: 2014-10-31

Infant is the most powerful learner: He learns in a few months to master language, complex social interactions, etc. Powerful statistical algorithms, simultaneously acting at the different levels of functional hierarchies have been proposed to explain learning. I propose here that two other elements are crucial. The first is the particular human cerebral architecture that constrains statistical computations. The second is the human’s ability to access a rich symbolic system. I have planned 6 work packages using the complementary information offered by non-invasive brain-imaging techniques (EEG, MRI and optical topography) to understand the neural bases of infant statistical computations and symbolic competence from 6 months of gestation up until the end of the first year of life. WP1 studies from which preterm age, statistical inferences can be demonstrated using hierarchical auditory oddball paradigms. WP2 investigates the consequences of a different pre-term environment (in-utero versus ex-utero) on the early statistical computations in the visual and auditory domains and their consequences on the ongoing brain activity along the first year of life. WP3 explores the neural bases of how infants infer word meaning and word category, and in particular the role of the left perisylvian areas and of their particular connectivity. WP4 questions infant symbolic competency. I propose several criteria (generalization, bidirectionality, use of algebraic rules and of logical operations) tested in successive experiments to clarify infant symbolic abilities during the first semester of life. WP5-6 are transversal to WP1-4: WP5 uses MRI to obtain accurate functional localization and maturational markers correlated with functional results. In WP6, we develop new tools to combine and analyse multimodal brain images. With this proposal, I hope to clarify the specificities of a neural functional architecture that are critical for human learning from the onset of cortical circuits.

2 554 924 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

The Bantu Expansion is not only the main linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It is also one of the most controversial issues in African History that still has political repercussions today. It has sparked debate across the disciplines and far beyond Africanist circles in an attempt to understand how the young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. This massive dispersal is commonly seen as the result of a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture, but many questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still open. They can only be answered through real interdisciplinary collaboration. This project will unite researchers with outstanding expertise in African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics to form a unique cross-disciplinary team that will shed new light on the first Bantu-speaking village communities south of the rainforest. Fieldwork is planned in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Angola that are terra incognita for archaeologists to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest villagers and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. Special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental data to get an idea of their subsistence, diet and habitat. Historical linguistics will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics and open new pathways in lexical reconstruction, especially regarding subsistence and land use of early Bantu speakers. Through interuniversity collaboration archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data and phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach to acquire a new holistic view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa.

1 997 500 €

Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31

The proposed project offers a new, pan-European intellectual history of the political imagination in the interwar period that places the demise of historicism and progressivism – and the emerging anti-teleological visions of time – at the center of some of its most innovative ethical, political and methodological pursuits. It argues that only a distinctively cross-disciplinary and European narrative can capture the full ramifications and legacies of a fundamental rupture in thought conventionally, yet inadequately confined to the German cultural space and termed “anti-historicism”. It innovates narratively by exploring politically and theoretically interlaced reinventions of temporality across and between different disciplines (theology, jurisprudence, classical studies, literary theory, linguistics, sociology, philosophy), as well as other creative fields. It experiments methodologically by reconstructing the dynamics of political thought prosopographically, through intellectual groupings at the forefront of the scholarly and political debates of the period. It challenges the sufficiency of the standard focus in interwar intellectual history on one or two, at most three (usually “Western” European) national contexts by following out the interactions of these groupings in France, Britain, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania – groupings whose members frequently moved across national contexts. What were the political languages encoded in the reinventions of time, and vice versa – how were political aims translated into and advanced through theoretical innovation? How did these differ in different national contexts, and why? What are the fragmented legacies of this rupture, disbursed in and through the philosophical, methodological and political dicta and dogmas that rooted themselves in post-1945 thought? This project provides the first comprehensive answer to these fundamental questions about the intellectual identity of Europe and its historicities.

1 425 000 €

Start date: 2018-06-01, End date: 2023-05-31

Autonomous programmable computing devices made of biological molecules hold the promise of interacting with the biological environment in future biological and medical applications. Our laboratory's long-term objective is to develop a 'Doctor in a cell': molecular-sized device that can roam the body, equipped with medical knowledge. It would diagnose a disease by analyzing the data available in its biochemical environment based on the encoded medical knowledge and treat it by releasing the appropriate drug molecule in situ. This kind of device might, in the future, be delivered to all cells in a specific tissue, organ or the whole organism, and cure or kill only those cells diagnosed with a disease. Our laboratory embarked on the attempt to design and build these molecular computing devices and lay the foundation for their future biomedical applications. Several important milestones have already been accomplished towards the realization of the Doctor in a cell vision. The subject of this proposal is a construction of autonomous biomolecular computers that could be delivered into a living cell, interact with endogenous biomolecules that are known to indicate diseases, logically analyze them, make a diagnostic decision and couple it to the production of an active biomolecule capable of influencing cell fate.

2 125 980 €

Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-10-31

Peptide building blocks serve as very attractive bio-inspired elements in nanotechnology owing to their controlled self-assembly, inherent biocompatibility, chemical versatility, biological recognition abilities and facile synthesis. We have demonstrated the ability of remarkably simple aromatic peptides to form well-ordered nanostructures of exceptional physical properties. By taking inspiration from the minimal recognition modules used by nature to mediate coordinated processes of self-assembly, we have developed building blocks that form well-ordered nanostructures. The compact design of the building blocks, and therefore, the unique structural organization, resulted in metallic-like Young's modulus, blue luminescence due to quantum confinement, and notable piezoelectric properties. The goal of this proposal is to develop two new fronts for bio-inspired building block repertoire along with co-assembly to provide new avenues for organic nanotechnology. This will combine our vast experience in the assembly of aromatic peptides together with additional structural modules from nature. The new entities will be developed by exploiting the design principles of small aromatic building blocks to arrive at the smallest possible module that form super helical assembly based on the coiled coil motifs and establishing peptide nucleic acids based systems to combine the worlds of peptide and DNA nanotechnologies. The proposed research will combine extensive design and synthesis effort to provide a very diverse collection of novel buildings blocks and determination of their self-assembly process, followed by broad chemical, physical, and biological characterization of the nanostructures. Furthermore, effort will be made to establish supramolecular co-polymer systems to extend the morphological control of the assembly process. The result of the project will be a large and defined collection of novel chemical entities that will help reshape the field of bioorganic nanotechnology.

3 003 125 €

Start date: 2016-06-01, End date: 2021-05-31

"During their first year of life, infants become attuned to the phonemes, words and phonological rules of their language, with little or no adult supervision. After 30 years of accumulated experimental results, we are still lacking an account for the puzzling fact that these 3 interdependent components of language are acquired not sequentially, but in parallel. Drawing tools from Machine Learning and Automatic Speech Recognition, we construct a model of this early process, test it on 2 large spontaneous speech databases (Japanese, French and Dutch) and test its predictions in infants using behavioral, EEGs and fNIRS techniques. 1. Coding. We study different ways of defining coding features for speech, from fine-grained to coarse grained, in view of the automatic discovery of a hierarchy of linguistic units. We compare this with a systematic study of the units of speech coding as they unfold in 6, 9 and 12 month old infants.. 2. Lexicon. Infants recognize some words before they know the phonemes of their language; we modify existing word segmentation algorithms so they can work on raw speech. We test the unique prediction that infants start with a large lexicon that’s quite different from the adult one. 3. Rules. Phonemes are produced as overlapping, coarticulated gestures. To untangle these context effects, we use a predictive model of coarticulation in auditory space and invert it. We test when and how infants perform reverse coarticulation. 4. Integration. The above subprojects provide only an initial bootstrapping into approximate phonemes, words, and contextual rules. We show how to iteratively integrate these approximate representations to derive better ones. The outcome will be numerically assessed on an adult directed and infant directed speech database, and compared to those of to state-of-the-art supervized phoneme recognizers. The predictions will be tested in infants learning artificial languages and in a longitudinal study."

2 194 557 €

Start date: 2012-11-01, End date: 2017-10-31

Subjectivity defines the subject who is perceiving, feeling, thinking, acting, and is essential to understand the conscious mind from the inside. However, subjectivity, or non-reflective first-person perspective, is not identified as a core concept in cognitive neuroscience and its neural basis remain largely unknown. BRAVIUS offers a unified framework to appraise both the concept and the neural mechanisms generating subjectivity. The hypothesis relies on two vital organs that generate their own rhythmic electrical activity, the stomach and the heart, and therefore constantly send information up to the neocortex, even in the absence of bodily change. Cortical responses to those visceral organs would define the organism as an entity at the neural level, and create a subject-centered referential from which first-person perspective can develop. In other words, the cardiac and gastric pacemakers could feed the brain with self-specifying inputs. BRAVIUS builds on previous theories and studies on visceral states but focuses on ascending information, from viscera to brain, and does not require visceral states to change nor to be consciously perceived. Experimentally, BRAVIUS measures the understudied neural response evoked by heartbeats and introduces a new measure, the electrogastrogram, to quantify the slow gastric pacemaker. BRAVIUS will test with magneto-encephalography (MEG) the role of neural responses to ascending visceral signals in generating subjectivity by cutting across domains of cognitive sciences and exploring diverse paradigms where subjectivity is engaged: perceptual consciousness, self-consciousness, emotions and decision making. BRAVIUS will further explore how cardiac and gastric ascending signals shape the temporal (MEG) and spatial (fMRI) organization of spontaneous brain activity. The project outcome is a detailed mechanistic neural account of the most private part of the human mind, and a unified concept of subjectivity across cognitive domains.

2 080 000 €

Start date: 2015-12-01, End date: 2020-11-30

For over half a millennium, the great medieval capital of Angkor lay at the heart of a vast empire stretching across much of mainland SE Asia. Recent research has revealed that the famous monuments of Angkor were merely the epicentre of an immense settlement complex, with highly elaborate engineering works designed to manage water and mitigate the uncertainty of monsoon rains. Compelling evidence is now emerging that other temple complexes of the medieval Khmer Empire may also have formed the urban cores of dispersed, low-density settlements with similar systems of hydraulic engineering. Using innovative airborne laser scanning (‘lidar’) technology, CALI will uncover, map and compare archaeological landscapes around all the major temple complexes of Cambodia, with a view to understanding what role these complex and vulnerable water management schemes played in the growth and decline of early civilisations in SE Asia. CALI will evaluate the hypothesis that the Khmer civilisation, in a bid to overcome the inherent constraints of a monsoon environment, became locked into rigid and inflexible traditions of urban development and large-scale hydraulic engineering that constrained their ability to adapt to rapidly-changing social, political and environmental circumstances. By integrating data and techniques from fast-developing archaeological sciences like remote sensing, palaeoclimatology and geoinformatics, this work will provide important insights into the reasons for the collapse of inland agrarian empires in the middle of the second millennium AD, a transition that marks the emergence of modern mainland SE Asia. The lidar data will provide a comprehensive and internally-consistent archive of urban form at a regional scale, and offer a unique experimental space for evaluating socio-ecological resilience, persistence and transformation over two thousand years of human history, with clear implications for our understanding of contemporary urbanism and of urban futures.

1 482 844 €

Start date: 2015-03-01, End date: 2020-02-29

Understanding how values of different options that lead to choice are represented in the brain is a basic scientific question with far reaching implications. I recently showed that by the mere-association of a cue and a button press we could influence preferences of snack food items up to two months following a single training session lasting less than an hour. This novel behavioural change manipulation cannot be explained by any of the current learning theories, as external reinforcement was not used in the process, nor was the context of the decision changed. Current choice theories focus on goal directed behaviours where the value of the outcome guides choice, versus habit-based behaviours where an action is repeated up to the point that the value of the outcome no longer guides choice. However, in this novel task training via the involvement of low-level visual, auditory and motor mechanisms influenced high-level choice behaviour. Thus, the far-reaching goal of this project is to study the mechanism, by which low-level sensory, perceptual and motor neural processes underlie value representation and change in the human brain even in the absence of external reinforcement. I will use behavioural, eye-gaze and functional MRI experiments to test how low-level features influence the neural representation of value. I will then test how they interact with the known striatal representation of reinforced behavioural change, which has been the main focus of research thus far. Finally, I will address the basic question of dynamic neural plasticity and if neural signatures during training predict long term success of sustained behavioural change. This research aims at a paradigmatic shift in the field of learning and decision-making, leading to the development of novel interventions with potential societal impact of helping those suffering from health-injuring behaviours such as addictions, eating or mood disorders, all in need of a long lasting behavioural change.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31

This project will analyse historical change in the Mediterranean over the long run. It challenges totalising narratives aiming to “europeanise” Mediterranean history as having led somewhat naturally to European domination in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of the one-sided view of institutional and territorial integration as a consequence of the mere diffusion of European institutional models and legal codifications linked to a supposed lex mercatoria rediviva or law merchant in force in all countries and at all times, the specific approach of this project consists in combining concrete local, regional and thematic approaches with a focus on trade as the most widely accepted interaction even in times of sharp conflict, and on commercial and maritime litigation as an indicator for the intensity and changing modes of intercultural exchange. In an actor-centred perspective, we will take into account a variety of individual and institutional actors involved in trade. Their interaction was based on a combination of shared customs, local usages and legal traditions. Addressing competing instances and drawing on different legal resources, they contributed to a reconfiguration of the legal and institutional landscape. These issues will be investigated through the comparative analysis of commercial litigation and conciliation concerning trade in Mediterranean port cities, with a focus on disputes involving litigants who were not subjects of the local authorities, or whose legal status was linked to their religious identity. The encounters of Muslim, Jewish, Armenian, Protestant merchants and sailors with different legal customs and judicial practices appear as the social sites of legal and cultural creativity. Through the prism of commercial litigation, we will thus achieve a more precise and deeper understanding of the practices of intercultural trade, in a context profoundly shaped by legal pluralism and multiple and overlapping spaces of jurisdiction.

2 484 000 €

Start date: 2012-09-01, End date: 2018-06-30

With COVOPRIM I propose to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of one often overlooked component of speech and language: voice perception. Perceptual and neural mechanisms of voice perception will be compared between humans, macaques and marmosets –two highly vocal and extensively studied monkey species–to quantify cross-species differences and infer mechanisms potentially inherited from a common ancestor. Two key building blocks of vocal communication detailed in my past research in humans will be compared across species: (1) the sensitivity to conspecific vocalizations, and (2) the processing of speaker/caller identity. COVOPRIM is organized in three workpackages (WPs). WP1 will use large-scale behavioural testing based on ad-lib access of monkeys to automated test systems (following the highly successful model developed locally with baboons). Two main behavioural experiments will establish psychometric response functions for robust cross-species comparison. WP2 will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure cerebral activity during auditory stimulation in the three species. I will compare across brains the organization of what I hypothesize constitutes a “voice patch system” similar to the face patch system of visual cortex and broadly conserved in primates. I will also take advantage of the monkey models and use long-term, subject-specific enrichments of the auditory stimulation to probe the experience-dependence of neural coding in the voice patch system—an outstanding issue in human voice perception. WP3 will use fMRI-guided microstimulation in monkeys and transcranial magnetic stimulation in humans to establish the effective connectivity within the voice patch system and test the causal relation between voice patch neuronal activity and voice perception behaviour. COVOPRIM is expected to generate considerable advances in our understanding of the recent evolution in primates of the perceptual and neural mechanisms of voice perception.

2 900 000 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31

Several organisms have evolved specialized ice binding proteins (IBPs) that prevent their body fluids from freezing (antifreeze proteins, AFPs), inhibit recrystallization of ice in frozen tissues, or initiate freezing at moderate supercooling temperatures (ice nucleating proteins, INPs). These proteins have many potential applications in agriculture, food preservation, cryobiology, and biomedical science. The ubiquitous presence of IBPs in such organisms indicates the power of these molecules to enable survival under cold conditions. Despite this key role in nature, however, IBPs have been effectively exploited in only one cryopreservation application, namely, recrystallization inhibition in ice cream. Several terrestrial organisms, including insects, have developed very active forms of AFPs. These hyperactive AFPs (hypAFPs) have not been utilized significantly thus far in cryopreservation techniques. The gap between the obvious potential of IBPs and their actual applications stems from a lack of knowledge regarding the mechanisms by which IBPs interact with ice surfaces and how these proteins can assist in cryoprotection. I propose to investigate the mechanism by which IBPs inhibit ice crystallization and the use of such proteins for cryopreserving cells, tissues, and organisms. My group has a strong record in the study of the interactions between IBPs and ice using novel methods that we have developed, including fluorescence microscopy techniques combined with cooled microfluidic devices. We will investigate the interactions of AFPs with ice and the use of hypAFPs in cryopreservation procedures. This research will contribute to an understanding of the mechanisms by which IBPs act, and apply the acquired knowledge to cryopreservation. The successful implementation of IBPs in cryopreservation would revolutionize the field of cryobiology, with enormous implications for cryopreservation applications in general and the frozen and chilled food industry in particular.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2011-11-01, End date: 2016-10-31

This project aims to explore the effects of human settlement intensity on desert ecological community structure, focusing on the hitherto unstudied phenomenon of trophic cascades in antiquity. Its key research question is whether human-induced changes in arid land biodiversity can feedback to affect natural resources important for human subsistence, such as pasture and wood. The role of such feedback effects in ecological systems is increasingly acknowledged in recent years in the biological literature but has not been addressed in the study of human past. The research question will be approached using bioarchaeological methods applied to the uniquely-preserved material record from the middle and late Holocene settlement sequence (approximately 4,500 BCE to 700 CE) of the Dead Sea Ein Gedi Oasis, and to the contemporary palaeontological assemblages from caves located in the surrounding Judean Desert. The proposed research is expected to bridge between aspects of current thinking on ecosystem dynamics and the study of human past by exploring the role of trophic cascades as an invisible dimension of Anthropocene life in marginal environments. The study of the history of human impact on such environments is important to resource management planning across a rapidly expanding ecological frontier on Earth, as climate deterioration brings more people in contact with life-sustaining and sensitive arid land ecosystems.

1 499 563 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31

The desert is a paradox: it is at the same time arid and rich in resources, a margin and an interface. Far from being a no man’s land, it is a social space of linked solidarities. The “Desert Networks” project aims to explore the reticular organisation of such a zone by focusing on the southern part of the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Located between the Nile and the Red Sea, it has always been a tantalizing region for Egypt and beyond. Its ancient remains are admirably preserved and ancient sources about and from the region itself are numerous. Yet, the history of its occupation and appropriation remains a static and compartmentalized one. Therefore, the ambition of the project is to cross disciplinary borders and achieve an epistemological break by working for the first time in and on the Eastern desert as a dynamic object, both from a long-term perspective (mid-second millennium BC - late third century AD), and by analysing the patterns and functions of the different networks that linked its various nodes using the connectivity theory that reshaped scholarly paradigms for the Mediterranean in the 2000s. As the head of the French Eastern Desert mission, the PI will co-ordinate a multidisciplinary team. For the first time, the project will gather all the data unearthed in the region over 300 years, as well as the expected data from the excavations conducted by the project, in a database linked with a GIS. A collaborative and online open access map of the Eastern Desert will be created and will serve for the spatial analyses and rendering of the real, economic and social networks in the area. These networks evolved over time and through a shifting geography, as people experienced different perceptions of space. By assessing all these facets and confronting the archaeological material and written evidence, our final objective is to write a new history of the Eastern Desert from Pharaonic to Roman times, focusing on its networks and evaluating their meaning.

1 499 844 €

Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31

The goal of this research initiative is to construct large-scale computational modeling of how knowledge of the world emerges from the combination of innate mechanisms and visual experience. The ultimate goal is a ‘digital baby’ model which, through perception and interaction with the world, develops on its own representations of complex concepts that allow it to understand the world around it, in terms of objects, object categories, events, agents, actions, goals, social interactions, etc. A wealth of empirical research in the cognitive sciences have studied how natural concepts in these domains are acquired spontaneously and efficiently from perceptual experience, but a major open challenge is an understating of the processes and computations involved by rigorous testable models. To deal with this challenge we propose a novel methodology based on two components. The first, ‘computational Nativism’, is a computational theory of cognitively and biologically plausible innate structures , which guide the system along specific paths through its acquisition of knowledge, to continuously acquire meaningful concepts, which can be significant to the observer, but statistically inconspicuous in the sensory input. The second, ‘embedded interpretation’ is a new way of acquiring extended learning and interpretation processes. This is obtained by placing perceptual inference mechanisms within a broader perception-action loop, where the actions in the loop are not overt actions, but internal operation over internal representation. The results will provide new modeling and understanding of the age-old problem of how innate mechanisms and perception are combined in human cognition, and may lay foundation for a major research direction dealing with computational cognitive development.

1 647 175 €

Start date: 2011-06-01, End date: 2016-05-31

The present project aims to provide a naturalistic account of epistemic norms, and of the associated epistemic awareness in children and adults from different cultures. Epistemics norms (ENs) such as intelligibility, relevance, truth, coherence and consensus are dimensions on which mental contents can be evaluated for their contribution to knowledge acquisition. Although EN sensitivity is central in education, little is known about 1) how to systematically analyze and inventory ENs, nor about 2) How and to what extent, children and adults from different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds recognize them in making epistemic decisions. Specialists in philosophy of mind, developmental and adult congitive science, along with field anthropology, will apply their methods to address these questions in an interdisciplinary spirit. A common methodological guideline will be to study EN sensitivity as embedded in self-evaluative judgments, and to focus on cases of conflict between various ENs, such as consensus versus truth. This research should reveal how EN sensitivity develops in European and Japanese children, what role is to be assigned, in norm dominance, to emotional interaction, epistemic or social deference, and how EN sensitivity is transferred, in similar tasks and contexts, from self to others and reciprocally.

2 360 136 €

Start date: 2011-07-01, End date: 2016-12-31

DREAM, Drafting and Enacting the Revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean, seeks to write the history of the revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean since the independences. It aims to write a transnational history of often forgotten struggles, recall facts and original forms of resistance. We know very few about the revolts that occurred in this period, and even less about the memory that they left in the societies, the way these memories circulated. This rediscovery of revolutions in the shadows must be done through the collection of original material, specifically “poor archives” of the ordinary and the production of Archives – through a combination of classical interviews and innovative methods that involve researchers, archivists, artists and the actors themselves. The objective is to write a history that focuses on emotions and paths of revolts, telling us more about the link between all dimensions of human lives in these territories (religion, gender, social positions) and the articulation of these dimensions in the revolutionary projects. DREAM aims to write a history that doesn’t produce heroes or big figures, doesn’t discuss success or failure, but tries to understand the motivations and the potentialities that were at stake in different episodes and moments, during the uprisings and in between them. It aims to explore the historical signification and the concrete aspects of the call for dignity (Karama/sharaf) in a space that, after liberating itself from the colonial domination, was trapped into the illusion of a common faith (being it the Arab nation or the Islamic umma) and the concrete oppression of authoritarian regimes. This period needs urgently to be explored and history, with its modern tools and patterns, can embrace and trace the particular conditions in which Arab people lived for more than six decades, and specifically the frames of their dreams and projections.

1 941 050 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

"Electrochemically active bacteria enable a host of novel processes in bioproduction, bioenergy and bioremediation. Key to the success of these processes is effective adherence of the bacterial cells to an electrode surface and subsequent equally effective electron exchange with the electrode. While the cellular mechanisms for electron transfer are increasingly known, what drives bacterial adsorption and desorption to positively or negatively polarized electrodes is largely unknown. Particularly processes driven by cathodes tend to be slow, and suffer from limited microbial adherence and lack of growth of the microorganisms. ELECTROTALK aims at developing a mechanistic understanding of mobility towards and microbial adherence at surfaces, from single cell level to complete biofilm formation. Based on this knowledge, effectively catalyzed bio-electrodes will be developed for novel bioproduction processes. Such bioproduction processes, termed microbial electrosynthesis, are independent of arable land availability, promise high production densities and enable the capture of CO2 or more efficient resource-usage for a range of products. Understanding the nature of the microorganism-electrode interaction will create a window of opportunity to improve this process and achieve effective bioproduction. Moreover, as the electrical interaction directly relates to microbial activity electrodes may serve as a means to start up a conversation with the cells. To achieve our aims we will: (i) select and characterize biocatalysts both as pure cultures and microbial communities; (ii) investigate cell adherence and electron transfer in function of electrode topography and chemistry as well as under different operational conditions; (iii) develop an electrode-microorganism combination achieving effective electron transfer; and (iv) electrochemically construct biofilms with defined structure or stratification."

1 494 126 €

Start date: 2012-10-01, End date: 2017-09-30

Intractable conflicts are one of the gravest challenges to both humanity and science. These conflicts are initiated and perpetuated by people; therefore changing people's hearts and minds constitutes a huge step towards resolution. Research on emotions in conflicts has led to the realization that intergroup emotions are critical to conflict dynamics. This project’s intrinsic question is whether and how intergroup emotions can be regulated to alter attitudes and behavior towards peace. I offer an innovative path, using two strategies of emotion regulation. The first is Direct Emotion Regulation, where traditional, effective emotion regulation strategies can be used to change intergroup emotional experiences and subsequently political positions in conflict situations. The second, Indirect Emotion Regulation, serves to implicitly alter concrete cognitive appraisals, thus changing attitudes by changing discrete emotions. This is the first attempt ever to integrate psychological aggregated knowledge on emotion regulation with conflict resolution. I propose 16 studies, conducted in the context of the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Seven studies will focus on direct emotion regulation, reducing intergroup anger and hatred, while 9 studies will focus on indirect regulation, aspiring to reduce fear and despair. In both paths, correlational and in-lab experimental studies will be used to refine adequate strategies of down regulating destructive emotions, the results of which will be used to develop innovative, theory-driven education and media interventions that will be tested utilizing wide scale experience sampling methodology. This project aspires to bridge the gap between basic and applied science, creating a pioneering, interdisciplinary framework which contributes to existing knowledge on emotion regulation in conflict and implements ways to apply it in real-world circumstances.

1 499 344 €

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31

Given my current state of knowledge, and a desirable state of knowledge, how do I get from one to the other? It is possible in principle to reach the desirable state of knowledge, i.e., does it make sense at all to start trying to obtain the desirable state? If I know it is impossible to obtain, there is no use trying. But even if I know that it is possible in principle, is there a way to approach the desirable state in steps or phases, i.e., can I iteratively construct an epistemic protocol to achieve the desirable state? And can this be done with some or with full assurance that I am getting closer to the goal? Such problems become more complex if they involve more agents. The knowledge states of agents may be in terms of knowledge properties of other agents. Such assumed knowledge properties may be incorrect, or the agents may act at unpredictable or unknown moments, or with delayed or faulty communication channels, as typically in asynchronous systems. The focus of much research in dynamic epistemic logic, and more generally in epistemic and temporal modal logics, is analysis: given a well-specified input epistemic state, and some well-specified dynamic process, compute the output epistemic state. In this proposal we focus on synthesis: given a well-specified input epistemic state, and desirable output (typically less well specified), find the process transforming the input into the output. The process found is the epistemic protocol. We will be aided by recent advances in logics for propositional quantification. Areas of specific interest are protocols for secure communication, protocol languages, and agency. Our project goal is epistemic protocol synthesis for synchronous and asynchronous multi-agent systems, by way of using and developing dynamic epistemic logics.

951 400 €

Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2018-01-31

"Palaeolithic stone tool hafting has been considered important for decades, both in terms of technological and cognitive evolutions, but it has been hard to design methods that allow detailed insight into the appearance of hafting and its evolution through time. The main reason is that handles were manufactured from organic materials and these are only rarely preserved. The issue thus appears to largely escapes us, but as finds become more and more numerous, promising new techniques have also been developed, which allow a more detailed investigation of hafting. It has been demonstrated that a microscopic investigation of stone tools allows a distinction between tools that were used in the hand and those that were mounted in / on a handle, as well as an interpretation of the hafting arrangement. Knowing whether and how stone tools were hafted provides crucial data for improving our understanding of past human behaviour. It is invaluable for a better comprehension of technological evolutions, it provides insight into the organic tool component that is rarely preserved, and it allows understanding the complete life cycle of stone tools. The goal of this research project is to gain insights in the appearance, regional and chronological variability, and evolution of Palaeolithic stone tool hafting in Europe and the remaining Old World through a comprehensive functional investigation of key sites, which includes the analysis of wear traces and residues, bio/physico-chemical analyses, next to an elaborate experimental program. The proposed project starts from the conviction that many of the changes observed during the Palaeolithic can be understood based on functional data. Consequently, this research project will contribute significantly to our understanding of archaeological assemblages and their variability, and of past human behaviour and its evolution through time."

1 192 300 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31

"Philosophers divide the problem of consciousness into two parts: An “easy” part, which involves explaining how one can become aware of something in the sense of being able to make use of it in one's rational behavior. And a “hard” part, which involves explaining why certain types of brain activity should actually give rise to feels: for example the feel of ""red"" or of ""onion flavor"". The ""hard"" part is considered hard because there seems logically no way physical mechanisms in the brain could generate such experiences. The sensorimotor theory (O’Regan, 2011) has an answer to the ""hard"" problem. The idea is that feel is a way of interacting with the environment. The laws describing such interactions, called sensorimotor contingencies, determine the quality of how a feel is experienced. For example, they determine whether someone experiences a feel as being real or imagined, as being visual or tactile, and how a feel compares to other feels. The sensorimotor theory provides a unifying framework for an understanding of consciousness, but it needs a firmer conceptual and mathematical basis and additional scientific testing. To do this, a first, theoretical goal of the FEEL project is to provide a mathematical basis for the concept of sensorimotor contingency, and to clarify and consolidate its conceptual foundations. A second goal is to empirically test scientific implications of the theory in specific, promising areas: namely, color psychophysics, sensory substitution, child development and developmental robotics. The expected outcome is a fully-fledged theory of feel, from elementary feels like ""red"" to more abstract feels like the feel of sensory modalities, the notions of body and object. Applications are anticipated in color science, the design of sensory prostheses, improving the ""presence"" of virtual reality and gaming, and in understanding how infants and possibly robots come to have sensory experiences."

2 498 340 €

Start date: 2013-06-01, End date: 2018-05-31

Biological imaging is essential for revealing the inner workings of living systems. Among the numerous imaging modalities, light microscopy has revolutionized biological research. In addition to advances in optics and detectors, imaging has benefited from the development of molecular tools to observe biomolecules in action. Although the last decade’s breakthroughs in imaging have led to new discoveries in biology, there are still extraordinary opportunities for basic and clinical research in further advancing imaging capabilities. This project proposes to develop new classes of probes to advance biological imaging and allow the study of biological processes in all their complexity. First, I propose to push the boundaries of multiplexing and super-resolution imaging in living cells developing a new class of fluorogenic probes that act as genetically encoded fluorescence on/off switches. Highly multiplexed images will be built up over sequential activation of orthogonal fluorescence on/off switches, while continuous switching will allow implementing innovative dynamic super-resolution techniques in living cells. Then, I will develop dynamic fluorescence on/off switches enabling to reveal the dynamics of intracellular processes, focusing in particular on the visualization of interaction dynamics in real-time, and the dynamic detection of endogenous molecules (e.g. proteins, nucleic acids) in living cells. The final part will be dedicated to the development of probes acting as molecular integrator switches to identify active cell circuits in whole tissues or organisms through permanent labeling of transiently activated cells. Overall, this project will enable to push back the frontiers of biological imaging providing innovative tools to interrogate quantitatively and comprehensively living systems at the molecular, cellular and network levels.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2017-05-01, End date: 2022-04-30

The role of children's behavior and temperament is increasingly acknowledged in family research. Gene-environment Correlation (rGE) processes may account for some child effects, as parents react to children s behavior which is in part genetically influenced (evocative rGE). In addition, passive rGE, in which parenting and children s behavior are correlated through overlapping genetic influences on family members behavior may account in part for the parenting-child behavior relationships. The proposed project will be the first one to directly address these issues with DNA information on family members and quality observational data on parent and child behaviors, following children through early development. Two separate longitudinal studies will investigate the paths from children s genes to their behavior, to the way parents react and modify their parenting towards the child, affecting child development: Study 1 will follow first-time parents from pregnancy through children s early childhood, decoupling parent effect and child effects. Study 2 will follow dizygotic twins and their parents through middle childhood, capitalizing on genetic differences between twins reared by the same parents. We will test the hypothesis that parents' characteristics, such as parenting style and parental attitudes, are associated with children's genetic tendencies. Both parenting and child behaviors will be monitored consecutively, to investigate the co-development of parents and children in an evocative rGE process. Child and parent candidate genes relevant to social behavior, notably those from the dompaminergic and serotonergic systems, will be linked to parents behaviors. Pilot results show children s genes predict parenting, and an important task for the study will be to identify mediators of this effect, such as children s temperament. We will lay the ground for further research into the complexity of gene-environment correlations as children and parents co-develop.

1 443 687 €

Start date: 2010-01-01, End date: 2015-12-31

The aim of GESHAEM is to investigate economy, fiscality and territorial management in the most important agricultural region of Egypt, the Fayyum, in the first century of the Greek domination (3rd century BCE). For this purpose, a large corpus of administrative and fiscal papyri discovered in Egyptian mummies will be studied: the unpublished Greek and Egyptian papyri of the Jouguet collection of the Sorbonne. Coming from bilingual archives, these documents will change our view of the early Ptolemaic kingdom in the third century BCE. The history of this Hellenistic kingdom has long been described as the history of a Greek kingdom. Recently, however, the native Egyptian contribution in the building of this kingdom has come to the fore: the Ptolemaic administration was in large part made up of people of Egyptian origin who spoke and wrote both Greek and Egyptian, continuing a millennia-old administrative tradition adapted to the new regime. The Jouguet papyri open new perspectives because, unlike most demotic documents of the Graeco-Roman period, these were not written inside temples but for the civil government. Like the Greek ones they are concerned with the agricultural administration of the Fayyum region. The Jouguet texts were written on second-hand papyrus reused to make mummy casing called cartonnage. Most of these decorated mummy cartonnages were destroyed immediately after their discovery at the beginning of the 20th century, but around twenty remain in part of the Jouguet collection that has not yet been inventoried. The extraction of new papyri from the remaining cartonnages will be achieved without destroying the objects themselves, which will be restored and, for the first time, studied in their own right. Thus GESHAEM intends to bring new data both for historians working on the ancient economy and fiscality, as well as for art historians.

1 498 368 €

Start date: 2018-02-01, End date: 2023-01-31

The production of raw glass up until the early medieval period was restricted to few primary glassmaking centres in the Levant and Egypt producing glasses with distinct chemical fingerprints that were then shipped all over the Mediterranean. The study of glass thus provides a unique perspective on long-distance communications and shifts in economy, trade and cultural interactions. This project explores the production, trade and consumption of glass as a major economic activity in the medieval Mediterranean. The chronological parameters are the 4th to 12th centuries CE, covering a period of significant diversification and technological innovations in glass production. The project addresses three broad gaps in our understanding of these developments: Byzantine glassmaking; the spread of Islamic plant ash glass; and the role of the Iberian peninsula. GlassRoutes will push the frontiers of glass research by integrating chemical, archaeological and documentary data about these three key players in the medieval glass economy. By comparing the material and artistic aspects of glass assemblages from selected Mediterranean sites it will identify patterns in the manufacture, trade and usage of glass. The aim of GlassRoutes is to establish the socio-cultural and geopolitical dimensions of glass. What types of primary (raw) glass are found at different sites? How do they compare in terms of secondary use (types of artefacts)? What are the reasons for the differential use of glass and its colours? Research will examine the provenance of the material in relation to its use for selected artefacts to reveal the economic and cultural mechanisms underlying the culture-specific use of glass. This project is unique in its interdisciplinary approach; it combines archaeological, historical and analytical data as well as statistic tools to characterise the dynamic relationship between supply and consumption and its implications for artistic practices and technological innovation.

1 982 401 €

Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2020-09-30

The scientific research project submitted to the ERC intends to examine the creation of the French political science lexicon from a linguistic point of view. Most of the Political science vocabulary that the French language uses today comes from the translations from Latin and Greek into French during the 14th and 15th centuries. Historians and philosophers have noticed that the 14th century is an essential period for neologisms in the political science field. But no scientific research has been yet conducted to prove it, especially because of the lack of modern editions of the texts. The scientific project submitted to the ERC can be developed in three parts during the next 5 academic years: 1/ an edition of a major political science masterpiece in Middle French from the 14th century that has never been published before (years 1 to 5) : The City of God written by Augustine and translated by Raoul de Presles. The modern edition of the first translation of the City of God will allow researchers to have an easy access to primary sources in order to lead new research in linguistics, history, political sciences, and more generally in Humanities. 2/ a publication of a scientific monograph on the French political science lexicon (year 4). Indeed, such a scientific monograph will give a panoramic overview of the French Political Science Lexicon and will allow researchers to better understand the history of French concepts in Humanities. 3/ a publication of a Dictionary of Political Science (year 5). Finally, a dictionary in historical political science will facilitate our knowledge of the evolution of words in that particular field, from the Middle Ages to the 21st century.

600 945 €

Start date: 2008-10-01, End date: 2013-09-30

Historians have good reasons to be highly suspicious of the “rational choice” methodologies that hold sway in economics, political science or sociology and that find a new lease on life today with the rise of the cognitive sciences. On the other hand, researchers using these methodologies show usually very little interest in history. The result is that we know very little about the historical development of “rational choice” as a way to define rationality in action, while this intellectual paradigm has become pervasive and reshaped the way we do science and the way we think about politics. This project will follow the problem of decision-making through the 20th century and weave into a single historical narrative its different disciplinary formulations. It starts with a puzzle: while the “decisionist” critiques of legality of the 1920s associated the decision with an anti-rationalist vision of politics, this notion gradually morphed into the epitome of “rational choice” after 1945. How did this transformation occur? The project will reconstruct this shift from a paradigm in which Law was the instrument that would make political decisions rational, to another in which the power of rationalization was vested in Science. It asks how the post-1945 efforts at specifying conditions of rationality for political decisions changed the meaning of “rationality.” It connects these developments to the interdisciplinary set of “decision sciences” that emerged in the 1950s around issues of strategic and political behavior and spawned our contemporary instruments of “conflict-resolution” or automated models of decision-making. The project suggests that “rationality” in political decision-making is not a transcendental norm, but a historically contingent benchmark dependent on its technical instrumentations. Democratizing political decision-making, then, means opening these models and instruments of rationalization to scholarly debate and public scrutiny.

628 004 €

Start date: 2011-12-01, End date: 2016-11-30

This project offers the first comprehensive study of medieval connections between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East in both Christian and Islamic contexts. It pursues the hypothesis that mobility and exchange along trade and pilgrimage routes, on both sides of and across the Red Sea, were not only vectors for the spread of Islam but also factors of African Christianities’ resiliency and reconfiguration at the same time. Medieval connections of Ethiopian and Nubian Christianities with other Eastern Christian churches have longer been studied than has been the spread of Islam across the Red Sea or along the Nile valley which remains poorly known. These parallel connections within Christen- and Islamdom across the same area have never been studied jointly, nor have been Christian-Muslim relations on such a scale. The project ultimately aims to reconnect the Horn of Africa to the global history of the area by connecting disjoint fields of research. It has the following objectives: • Providing a comprehensive survey of connections between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East (places, items, contexts) supported by a database and a geographic information system. • Analyzing human mobility in the area within three critical configurations: pilgrimages (both Christian and Muslim), slave trade and slavery, metropolization (with the case study of Cairo). • Exploring cultural transfer and dissemination in the area within and between Christen- and Islamdom through the circulation of books, models and narratives. • Evidencing regional connections and Christian-Muslim relations through archaeological survey at a very localised level: Nägaš (Ethiopia), a Muslim holy place in Christian environment related to the first exile (hijra) of Muḥammad’s companions. This project is groundbreaking in rallying around the PI historians working on the area’s various realms in their several written languages, in both Christian and Islamic contexts, from the Arab conquest until the Ottoman one.

1 859 656 €

Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31

Humans carry out actions either in response to environmental demands, or independently of external input in order to achieve their goals. The first type of action may be referred to as stimulus-based or reactive, the latter kind may be referred to as intention-based or voluntary. Voluntary actions are an important component of our interaction with the environment and our social lives. Yet, research on human action has only relatively recently begun to try to understand the control of voluntary actions, focusing instead on action that is performed in response to a stimulus in the environment. The proposed project will pursue this attempt to elucidate the functional and neurophysiological underpinnings of voluntary actions along several axes (e.g., neural and functional mechanisms of voluntary action control, functional differences between voluntary and stimulus-based action control, mechanisms of action-effect learning). The project will approach these issues with the help of techniques coming from psychophysics (e.g., signal detection theory) and neurophysiology (EEG, fMRI), separately, and also in combination. Its aim is to shed light on yet unexplored issues in research on voluntary action control, such as its cortical mechanisms and time course, and to provide new methods for further sophisticated investigation.

1 466 160 €

Start date: 2011-03-01, End date: 2017-02-28

The problem of biological identity (what counts as one individual organism, and what makes each individual organism “the same” though it constantly changes through time?) has a long history both in philosophy and in science. Recent data coming from immunology, microbiology and developmental biology may revolutionize our conception of the construction of biological identity through time, by showing that this construction depends crucially on environmental factors and, most importantly, on a constant dialogue with symbiotic microorganisms integrated into the organism. IDEM, a fundamentally interdisciplinary project at the interface between philosophy and biology, aims at: i) determining to what extent it is adequate to see this shift as an ongoing “microbial revolution” in today’s biology; ii) understanding the exact processes by which developmental processes in organisms depend on microbial symbionts; iii) asking whether the role of the immune system (usually seen as a system that rejects genetically foreign elements from the body) in the maintenance of the organism needs to be reevaluated; iv) how traditional conceptions of biological individuality will be modified by this revolution. If funded, this project will provide a new understanding of the way living things are continuously constructed through time and interact with their biotic environment.

1 454 250 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

The project examines edited and unedited Arabic legal documents from a new comparative perspective. Documents, immediate manifestations of legal practice, were instruments to assure subjective rights of persons for whom the copy had been issued. Most studies on early Islamic legal practice however focus on literary sources (notarial manuals, responsae, juridical treaties) and neglect documents mainly for two reasons: 1) cursive handwriting and technical language render their deciphering difficult; 2) the existing collections come from various provenances which hindered until now a synthetic analysis. This project inverses the focus with a new historical perspective: Thanks to its innovative full text database (CALD) that analyses documents by functional components and sequence-patterns, the project reveals relevant variations in structure and juridical clauses among many documents, in great detail and from multiple aspects. Even if existing studies on specimens from various regions establish a general conformity of these documents with Islamic law, the PI s analysis of the 14th-century Jerusalem corpus illustrated, for the first time, how private notarisation (of legal transactions) and court documents (with judicial elements) were used complementary to apply the complex rules of Islamic procedural law. The CALD-database facilitates comparing and deciphering legal documents. The research group will use this methodology with three under-examined corpuses from al-Andalus, Egypt and Palestine from the 13th to the 15th century, and compare these to other edited documents from Central Asia, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Muslim Spain (8th-15th centuries). This approach aims to a) develop a sophisticated typology of legal documents and their components, b) compare various notarial practices as expression of applied Islamic law, guaranteed by judicial institutions, which leads to c) pre-modern Islamic law as a uniform reference system within multi-faceted legal systems.

1 023 021 €

Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31

The project presents an economic history and socio-cultural reconstruction of Japan in the age of the great depression; it is an attempt to demonstrate the depression's 'total' or multicontextual implications by outlining different but complimentary views of what was defined as the depression's core problems (and their possible solutions) within different social classes and within different strands of thought. Seen in historical perspective, it covers the period from the 'ShMwa financial crisis' (1927) until the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War (1937). The project consists out of three components: First, it addresses the macro-economic ideas in vogue at the time. It specifically concentrates on the personalities and roles of finance ministers Inoue Junnosuke • –K© and especially Takahashi Korekiyo ØK/ ('Japan's Keynes'), who has widely been credited for smoothening the role of the global depression on the Japanese economy. The second part of the project rests with the origins of depression in Japan's official and semi-official colonies in 1927 and the role the latter played in fueling the later crisis on the Japanese mainland. The project investigates the role of speculation, and inquires to which degree the effects of depression were 'imported' from the subsidiary economies of Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, and Manchuria. Third, as this project has a strong focus on the role economic realities were identified ('semantics'), it also develops a cultural history of the age of depression. The project identifies the rise of a new vocabulary and discourse in an era obsessed with the idea of an economic and moral dead end (ikizumari).

549 442 €

Start date: 2009-10-01, End date: 2014-09-30

Scholars have studied the history of the relationship between Rome and the Jewish people in Antiquity from many angles; however, they have focused mainly on the political and military confrontation between the two. Recently, scholarship has turned to a new research agenda less focused on conflict: the examination of the Romanness of the Jews who lived in the Roman empire, and, in particular, that of the Palestinian Rabbis. While this new trend is both welcome and necessary in order to balance previous approaches, it still leaves an essential question unanswered, perhaps the great impensé of the encounter between Jews and Romans. Beyond Roman concrete political decisions concerning Jews, and the Jews’ adoption of Roman cultural features such as baths, how did Roman imperialism affect the ways Judaism – both rabbinic and non-rabbinic – defined itself? This project shall answer this question by analyzing an overlooked dimension of the problem. It will examine how Roman imperialism challenged Judaism both religiously and politically because of the rivalry – from the Jewish perspective – between Jewish and Roman universalisms and “messianic” ideals. This analysis shall make it possible to assess how the Jewish encounter with Rome contributed to shaping Judaism itself, in particular regarding sensitive issues such as the integration of non-Jews in Jewish society, the Jews’ conception of Jewish Law as a national and/or universal law, and Israel’s role in the establishment of a just universal political order. Moreover, in order to better comprehend the specificity of the Jewish responses to Rome, this study shall compare them to those of the Greeks and other peoples dominated by Rome, as well as to those of the Christians until the beginning of the fourth century CE. Finally, it shall try to assess the impact of the Christianization of the empire on the changes within Judaism that began with its encounter with “pagan” Rome.

1 433 123 €

Start date: 2014-09-01, End date: 2019-08-31

The magnificent Kongo kingdom, which arose in the Atlantic Coast region of Equatorial Africa, is a famous emblem of Africa’s past. It is an important cultural landmark for Africans and the African Diaspora. Thanks to its early introduction to literacy and involvement in the Trans- Atlantic trade, the history of this part of sub-Saharan Africa from 1500 onwards is better known than most other parts. Nevertheless, very little is known about the origins and earlier history of the kingdom. Hence, this grant application proposes an interdisciplinary approach to this question. Archaeology and historical linguistics, two key disciplines for early history reconstruction in Africa, will play the most prominent role in this approach. Paradoxically, if the wider region of the Kongo kingdom is one of the best documented areas of Central Africa from a historical and ethnographic point of view, it is virtually unknown archaeologically. The proposed research team will therefore undertake pioneer excavations in several capital sites of the old kingdom. Similarly, no comprehensive historical study has covered the languages of the Kongo and closely affiliated kingdoms. Nonetheless, the earliest documents with Bantu data, going back to the early 16th century, originate from this region. The proposed research team will therefore undertake a historical-comparative study of the Kikongo dialect cluster and surrounding language groups, such as Kimbundu, Teke and Punu-Shira, systematically comparing current-day data with data from the old documents. Special attention will be given to cultural vocabulary related to politics, religion, social organization, trade and crafts, which in conjunction with the archaeological discoveries, will shed new light on th

1 400 760 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2016-12-31

The eighteenth and nineteenth century history of the central Sahara and Sahel has primarily been written using European or jihadist Arabic sources. This has led to an overwhelming emphasis on religion, politics, and geography as core themes that shaped social and cultural dynamics in this region. By focusing on sources in African languages—until now largely forgotten by historians—the project LANGARCHIV aims to enrich and expand this narrative. Hausa and Kanuri material collected by Germanophone, British, and French scholars for linguistic study between 1772 and 1913 in West and North Africa, England, and Brazil cries out for collaboration between historians, linguists, and anthropologists. This rich body of primary sources remains under-studied, having been rejected as colonial even though the majority were collected before colonial occupation. A general reconsideration of this material will enable a major shift in our understanding, toward a ‘history from below’ that will make it possible to explore the history of Sahelian societies through the stories that Sahelians told about themselves. Serving as linguae francae, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Hausa and Kanuri were spoken from Tripoli to Kano and Bahia, and today Hausa remains the most widely spoken language in West Africa, with 50 million speakers scattered over more than 6 countries LANGARCHIV will be the first project to explore materials in African languages as sources for African history. Combining an epistemological analysis of European scientific interest in African languages with the will to write a social history that overcomes the jihadist bias, the project aims to bring about a paradigmatic shift in the history of the central Sahara and Sahel. It will achieve this goal by revealing a rich body of primary sources and by developing an innovative analytical framework for using documents generated by early students of African languages and cultures as historical sources.

1 497 168 €

Start date: 2018-03-01, End date: 2023-02-28

Adult speakers of a language know several tens of thousands of words. Unless they suffer from some neurological disorders, those words can be readily used on a daily basis. This is done by retrieving lexical information from long term memory, and selecting its most relevant aspects. Cognitive models of word selection distinguish stages of processing concerned with semantic, lexical, and form properties of the words. Contrastive hypothesis have been considered to describe how appropriate lexical items are uniquely identified among all known words. Various sections of temporal cortex are known to play a prominent role in lexico-semantic processing, whereas frontal cortex is known to act as a controller of memory retrieval. More specifically, posterior left lateral and medial areas are capable to detect and resolve conflict among candidate words in cases where uncertainty arises. Despite detailed accounts, current descriptions of lexical information processes are rather static. Discussions of cognitive processing models have often been framed on structural, rather than dynamical, arguments. In addition, a vast majority of studies characterizing lexical information processing are based on low temporal resolution brain imaging techniques. The main objective of this project is to go beyond these descriptions by characterizing the spatio-temporal dynamics of word selection processes. The evidence will come from electro-encephalographic (EEG) and magneto-encephalographic (MEG) recordings of brain activity elicited in well-defined cognitive tasks. Innovative temporal pre-processes should allow discriminating brain activity from articulation artefacts. The evidence will also come from intra-cranial event related potentials, recorded in patients suffering from pharmaco-resistant forms of frontal and temporal lobe epilepsy. These data have high spatial and temporal resolution, and will provide strong constrains on lexical information processing models. A description of the dynamic interactions between brain regions during word selection will change the way we think about this basic behaviour. Besides this intrinsic interest, word selection provides a very natural way to connect relatively simple decision processes (e.g. those engaged in basic visuo-motor tasks) with more integrative processes involved in information retrieval from long term memory. Better understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of lexical information processes will also be highly valuable for improving pre-surgical evaluation procedures in pharmaco-resistant epilepsy.

1 251 345 €

Start date: 2011-04-01, End date: 2016-03-31

"The project aims to validate a set of 10 provocative claims. 1) Humans can recognize visual and auditory stimuli that they have not experienced for decades. 2) Recognition is possible without ever reactivating the memory trace in the intervening period. 3) During memorization, sensory memory strength increases roughly linearly with the number of exposures. 4) A few tens of presentations can be enough to form a memory that can last a lifetime. 5) Attention-related oscillatory brain activity helps store memories efficiently. 6) Storing such very long-term memories involves the creation of highly selective ""Grandmother Cells"" that only fire if the original training stimulus is experienced again. 7) The neocortex contains large numbers of totally silent cells (""Neocortical Dark Matter"") that constitute the long-term memory store. 8) Grandmother Cells can be produced using simple spiking neural network models including Spike-Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP) and competitive inhibitory lateral connections. 9) This selectivity only requires binary synaptic weights that are either ""on"" or ""off"", greatly simplifying the problem of maintaining the memory over long periods. 10) Artificial systems using memristor-like devices can implement the same principles, allowing the development of powerful new processing architectures that could replace conventional computing hardware. We will test these claims with a highly interdisciplinary approach involving psychology, neuroscience, computational modeling and hardware development. Novel experimental paradigms will study the formation and maintenance of very long term sensory memories. They will be combined with imaging techniques including fMRI imaging, EEG recording, and intracerebral recording from epileptic patients. In parallel, computer simulations using networks of spiking neurons with Spike-Time Dependent Plasticity will model the experimental results, and develop bio-inspired hardware that mimics the brains memory systems."

2 499 480 €

Start date: 2013-05-01, End date: 2018-04-30

Writing the history of ancient religions usually starts with the gods, considered as personifications linked by kinship or affinity. Yet this oversimplified approach overlooks the fact that gods are multifaceted powers, not individuals. MAP proposes to exploit the epithets attributed to the gods as the most efficient indicator of their multiple powers and modes of action, as well as their connection to places where humans interact with them. Epithets identify the god(s) invoked and thus enhance the effectiveness of ritual communication. With the great number of combinations produced by epithets, their entire repertoire results in a highly complex system of divine networks. The volume and complexity of the data is beyond the limits of what traditional methods can handle. Today, thanks to Big Data and Social Network technologies, which deal with large related groups, we can map the divine and understand how human societies modified these ensembles of names and epithets to meet their needs. MAP intends, for the first time, to compile all attestations of divine epithets in context to enable large-scale analyses. It adopts a comparative approach to two areas: the Greek world and the Western Semitic world during the first millennium BC. Methodologically, MAP innovates by linking the systematic compiling of epithets with Social Network Analysis in order to map the groups, links and polarities of the networks that divine epithets reveal, and interprets them in the light of historical dynamics. Understanding the interface between systems and contexts is one of the major gains of MAP. Religion is explored as an area of social experimentation between norms and inventiveness. MAP also revisits the relationship between religious thought and practice, and between polytheistic and monotheistic systems, questioning the relevance of these categories. The results promise considerable advances in our understanding of ancient religions.

2 432 062 €

Start date: 2017-10-01, End date: 2022-09-30

The global demand for dairy products is expected to surge by 36% over the next decade in a manner that is progressively insatiable by existing technologies. The dairy industry relies on bovine reproduction, yet cow fertility is declining and the exact causes are not fully understood. It is clear, however, that the quality of bovine oocytes is decreasing. In mammals, the ovarian reserve of oocytes stored within quiescent primordial follicles is non-renewable. Oocyte develop and mature within distinctive follicular microenvironments under tightly regulated molecular and physical conditions. Similarly, preimplantation embryo development is supported within a specialized microenvironment that is surrounded by the zona pellucida and insulated from external soluble and mechanical inputs. Characterizing and understanding these environments and how they affect reproductive processes is a key toward improving assisted reproductive technologies in bovine species. Our premise is that molecular characterization of endocrine and paracrine signalling pathways must be complemented with understanding the mechanical regulation of reproductive biology. This premise is supported by recent finding showing that physical stresses and the mechanical compliance of the extracellular surroundings serve as potent regulators of cell fates in regeneration processes, development, and disease. I propose to employ a biophysical and computational toolbox to study the mechanobiology of reproduction with application to bovine embryo-based technologies. By mimicking the mechanical properties of the ovarian cortical niche, which I will characterize using freshly derived ovaries, I will design an in vitro system for supporting follicle growth. Mechanical profiling of the entire developmental course from oocyte maturation to preimplantation embryogenesis will generate mechanistic insights into the physical regulation of reproductive processes.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2016-06-01, End date: 2021-05-31

Humans can monitor their own mental lives and build representations that contain knowledge about themselves. This capacity to introspect and report one’s own mental states, or in other words “knowing how much one knows”, is termed metacognition. Although metacognition is crucial to behave adequately in a complex environment, metacognitive judgments are often suboptimal. Specifically for neurological and psychiatric diseases, metacognitive failures are highly prevalent, with severe consequences in terms of quality of life. This project proposes a new hypothesis to explain the determining factors of metacognitive failures: namely, that metacognition does not operate in a vacuum but relies on the monitoring of signals from the body, and more specifically, on motor signals involved during action execution. We suggest several experiments to test the motor hypothesis for self-monitoring, and propose a new remediation procedure to resolve metacognitive failures resulting from deficient action monitoring. We will start by assessing the contribution of motor signals to metacognition by identifying the behavioral and neural correlates for detecting self-committed vs. observed errors (WP1), and by using virtual reality and robotics to probe metacognition in a vacuum, operating in the complete absence of voluntary actions (WP2). Finally, we will use these results to develop and evaluate a method to train metacognition in healthy volunteers and individuals with schizophrenia in a bottom-up manner, using online feedback based on motor signals (WP3). This new metacognitive remediation procedure will be performed both in a clinical context and on mobile devices. The goal of this ambitious project is therefore twofold, theoretical in shedding new light on a cognitive process central to our most profound mental states, and clinical in establishing a new remediation method to tackle a major health and societal issue.

1 389 500 €

Start date: 2019-03-01, End date: 2024-02-29

The purpose of this project is to write a long-term regional history of medicine in the Middle East and North Africa from a transnational and multi-layered perspective. A regional approach will enable tracing both global influences and local specificities, while a long-term perspective (1830-1960) will allow tracing continuity and change from the late Ottoman Middle East through the colonial to the post-colonial periods. Combining archival and published sources in Arabic, French, English, Hebrew, English, German and Ottoman Turkish, it will offer a unique perspective into the formation of the modern Middle East. Research for this project will revolve around five main cores: First, the global context: global vectors of disease transmission, alongside the transmission of medical knowledge and expertise. Second, the international aspect: how international conventions and international bodies affected the region and were affected by it. Third, the regional flow of both health challenges and proposed solutions, the regional spread of epidemics and the formation of regional epistemic communities. Fourth, the colonial aspect, noting both inter- and intra-colonial influences, and the encounter between colonial bodies of knowledge and locally produced ones. Fifth, the role played by doctors in various national projects: the nahda, namely the Arabic literary revival from the mid-nineteenth century onwards; the Zionist project; Egyptian and Syrian interwar nationalism and, later, Arab nationalism. This project will portray an intersection between the corporal, the social, the cultural and the technological and trace these interconnections across time and space. Health, medicine and hygiene will be a prism through which to explore large processes, such as colonization and decolonization, national identity and state-building. The scientific development of medicine and the globalization of health-risks and medical knowledge in this period make medicine an ideal case study.

1 867 181 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

"When is ""now""? What mental representations and neural computations mediate the construction of our perceived present? If seeing starts through the retinal transduction of photons, there is no dedicated sensory receptor for the transduction of time per se; as such, time perception offers a particularly challenging problem to our understanding of human cognition. Indeed, time is a prime example of perceptual construct shaped by the anatomical and dynamical constraints of the nervous system. To clarify the principles and the mental operations underlying time perception, this research proposal focuses on a novel theoretical framework for the understanding of how the human mind affords the temporal experience of ""now"". The empirical work proposed here narrows down the problem to three specific questions which are addressed using psychophysical measures combined with sophisticated brain imaging methods that have excellent temporal resolution, namely magneto- and electro-encephalography (thereafter referred to as MEEG). (i) The first empirical question asks whether our perceptual present reflects the objective present, future or the objective past. Said differently, is the perceived present slightly off with respect to the objective reality? And if so, does it reflect predictive and/or postdictive brain mechanisms? (ii) The second question focuses on the representation of time in the brain. All senses provide latent means to encode temporal information and brain dynamics are likely to convey the raw material for time perception in an amodal form (i.e. independent of sensory modality). The passage from neural dynamics to perceptual abstraction of time is not trivial considering, for instance, the inherent asynchronies of neural processing times. This experiment tests the perception of duration within and across sensory modalities to systematically derive the perceptual resolution afforded by our sense of time. (iii) The third question focuses on tracking the construction of ""now"" by using an illusion resulting from the transformation of veridical temporal properties of events into an explicit temporal construct. An ambitious challenge in this experiment will be to develop a brain classifying/decoding technique using MEEG signals to track the evolution from the veridical encoding of temporal properties to the construction of the illusory percept of time. The goal of this research proposal is to provide a novel approach to the study of time perception. Extension of this work will pave the way to a better understanding of what distinguishes temporal processing impairments from explicit time perception impairments in clinical disorders."

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2011-03-01, End date: 2017-02-28

MMS-II pursues the hypothesis that the Mamluk sultanate was a cultural product constructed in the interaction between state formation and historiography. MMS-II follows up from the ERC-project MMS' focus on the social production of power networks in the Syro-Egyptian sultanate between the 1410s and 1460s, but it does so by directing the themes of political history and Arabic historiography towards entirely new, unexplored horizons. Current understanding of the late medieval Middle East continues to rely heavily on the rich Arabic historiographical production of the period. However, the particular nature, impact and value of this highly politicized historiography remains hugely underexplored and underestimated. MMS-II aims to remedy this, by arguing with and beyond instead of against or outside of this historiography’s subjectivities. It wants to understand its texts as products of particular socio-cultural practices and, at the same time, as a particular type of actors in such practices. Analytically, state formation will be prioritised as one extremely relevant patterned set of effects of such practices. Heuristically, the project will focus on practices related to claims of historical truth and order, asking how Arabic historiographical texts written between the 1410s and the 1460s related to the regularly changing social orders that were produced around the different sultans of these decades. My main hypothesis is that of these texts' active participation in the construction of a particular social memory of one longstanding sultanate of military slaves (‘Mamlukisation’). MMS-II has three specific objectives: the creation of a reference tool for Arabic historiographical texts from the period 1410-1470; the in-depth study of particular sets of these texts; the analysis of political vocabularies in these texts. By thus exploring the inter-subjective re/production of Arabic historiography MMS-II will generate a welcome cultural turn in late medieval Islamic history.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31

This project seeks to study the Mongol Empire in its full Eurasian context. It combines a world history perspective with close reading in a huge array of primary sources in various languages (mainly Persian, Arabic and Chinese) and different historiographical traditions, and classifies the acquired information into a sophisticated prosopographical database, which records the individuals acting under Mongol rule in the 13th and 14th centuries. On the basis of this unique corpus, the project maps and analyzes mobility patterns, and the far-reaching effects that this mobility generated. More specifically, it aims: (a) to analyze modes of migrations in Mongol Eurasia: why, how, when and into where people- along with their ideas and artefacts - moved across Eurasia, portraying the full spectrum of such populations movements from the coerced to the voluntary. (b) to shed light on the economic and cultural exchange that this mobility engendered, with a stress on the religious, scientific and commercial networks both within and beyond the empire’s frontiers. (c) to reconstruct the new elite of the empire by scrutinizing the personnel of key Mongolian institutions, such as the guard, the judicial and postal systems, the diplomatic corps, and the local administration. These issues will be studied comparatively, in the period of the united Mongol empire (1206-1260) and across its four successor khanates that centred at China, Iran, Central Asia and Russia. The result will be a quantum leap forward in our understanding of the Mongol empire and its impact on world history, and a major contribution to the theoretical study of pre-modern migrations, cross-cultural contacts, nomad-sedentary relations and comparative study of empires. Moreover, the re-conceptualization of the economic and cultural exchange in Mongol Eurasia will lead to a broader and more nuanced understanding of the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern era.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31

The tsetse fly (Glossina spp.) salivary gland is the final micro-environment where the Trypanosoma brucei parasites adhere and undergo a complex re-programming cycle resulting in an end stage that is re-programmed to continue its life cycle in a new mammalian host. The molecular parasite-vector communications that orchestrate this trypanosome development in tsetse fly salivary glands remain unknown mainly due to the limited availability of experimental tools for functional research. We hypothesize that an innovative paratransgenic approach using the Sodalis glossinidius endosymbiont to deliver Nanobodies that target the trypanosome-tsetse fly crosstalk will open a new avenue to unravel the molecular determinants of this specific parasite-vector association. In this project I will develop an innovative Sodalis-based internal delivery system for Nanobodies to target the tsetse fly – trypanosome interplay and, as final outcome, will generate a trypanosome-resistant tsetse fly. In addition, I will explore the completely ‘unknown’ of the molecular nature of trypanosome adherence to the salivary gland epithelium. This will be addressed by a challenging proteomic-based approach on the tsetse salivary gland - trypanosome membrane complex and by the newly developed paratransgenic approach using the S. glossinidius endosymbiont as an internal delivery system for salivary gland epithelium-targeting Nanobodies. The application of this innovative concept of using pathogen-targeting Nanobodies delivered by insect symbiotic bacteria could be extended to other vector-pathogen systems such as Anopheles gambiae – Plasmodium falciparum and Aedes aegypti – dengue virus.

1 444 370 €

Start date: 2011-11-01, End date: 2016-10-31