ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The main objective of this research project is to contribute at bridging the gap between the two main branches of financial theory, namely corporate finance and asset pricing. It is motivated by the conviction that these two aspects of financial activity should and can be analyzed within a unified framework. This research will borrow from these two approaches in order to construct theoretical models that allow one to analyze the design and issuance of financial securities, as well as the dynamics of their valuations. Unlike asset pricing, which takes as given the price of the fundamentals, the goal is to derive security price processes from a precise description of firm’s operations and internal frictions. Regarding the latter, and in line with traditional corporate finance theory, the analysis will emphasize the role of agency costs within the firm for the design of its securities. But the analysis will be pushed one step further by studying the impact of these agency costs on key financial variables such as stock and bond prices, leverage, book-to-market ratios, default risk, or the holding of liquidities by firms. One of the contributions of this research project is to show how these variables are interrelated when firms and investors agree upon optimal financial arrangements. The final objective is to derive a rich set of testable asset pricing implications that would eventually be brought to the data.

1 000 000 €

Start date: 2008-11-01, End date: 2014-10-31

The aim of this project is the realisation of efficient mid-infrared and THz optoelectronic emitters. This work is motivated by the fact that the spontaneous emission in this frequency range is characterized by an extremely long lifetime when compared to non-radiative processes, giving rise to devices with very low quantum efficiency. To this end we want to develop hybrid light-matter systems, already well known in quantum optics, within optoelectronics devices, that will be driven by electrical injection. With this project we want to extend the field of optoelectronics by introducing some of the concepts of quantum optic, particularly the light-matter strong coupling, into semiconductor devices. More precisely this project aims at the implementation of novel optoelectronic emitters operating in the strong coupling regime between an intersubband excitation of a two-dimensional electron gas and a microcavity photonic mode. The quasiparticles issued from this coupling are called intersubband polaritons. The major difficulties and challenges of this project, do not lay in the observation of these quantum effects, but in their exploitation for a specific function, in particular an efficient electrical to optical conversion. To obtain efficient quantum emitters in the THz frequency range we will follow two different approaches: - In the first case we will try to exploit the additional characteristic time of the system introduced by the light-matter interaction in the strong (or ultra-strong) coupling regime. - The second approach will exploit the fact that, under certain conditions, intersubband polaritons have a bosonic character; as a consequence they can undergo stimulated scattering, giving rise to polaritons lasers as it has been shown for excitonic polaritons.

1 761 000 €

Start date: 2010-05-01, End date: 2015-04-30

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

A major part of the physical and chemical processes occurring in the atmosphere involves the turbulent transport of tiny particles. Current studies and models use a formulation in terms of mean fields, where the strong variations in the dynamical and statistical properties of the particles are neglected and where the underlying fluctuations of the fluid flow velocity are oversimplified. Devising an accurate understanding of the influence of air turbulence and of the extreme fluctuations that it generates in the dispersed phase remains a challenging issue. This project aims at coordinating and integrating theoretical, numerical, experimental, and observational efforts to develop a new statistical understanding of the role of fluctuations in atmospheric transport processes. The proposed work will cover individual as well as collective behaviors and will provide a systematic and unified description of targeted specific processes involving suspended drops or particles: the dispersion of pollutants from a source, the growth by condensation and coagulation of droplets and ice crystals in clouds, the scavenging, settling and re-suspension of aerosols, and the radiative and climatic effects of particles. The proposed approach is based on the use of tools borrowed from statistical physics and field theory, and from the theory of large deviations and of random dynamical systems in order to design new observables that will be simultaneously tractable analytically in simplified models and of relevance for the quantitative handling of such physical mechanisms. One of the outcomes will be to provide a new framework for improving and refining the methods used in meteorology and atmospheric sciences and to answer the long-standing question of the effects of suspended particles onto climate.

1 200 000 €

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

One of the greatest recent achievement in Condensed matter physics is the discovery of a new class of materials, Topological Insulators (TI), whose bulk is insulating, while the edges conduct current in a quasi-ideal way. In particular, the 1D edges of 2DTI realize the Quantum Spin Hall state, where current is carried dissipationlessly by two counter-propagating ballistic edge states with a spin orientation locked to that of the propagation direction (a helical edge state). This opens many possibilities, ranging from dissipationless charge and spin transport at room temperature to new avenues for quantum computing. We propose to investigate charge and spin currents in a newly discovered class of TIs, Second Order Topological Insulators (SOTIs), i.e. 3D crystals with insulating bulk and surfaces, but perfectly conducting (topologically protected) 1D helical “hinge” states. Bismuth, despite its well-known semimetallic character, has recently been shown theoretically to belong to this class of materials, explaining our recent intriguing findings on nanowires. Our goal is to reveal, characterize and exploit the unique properties of SOTIs, in particular the high velocity, ballistic, and dissipationless hinge currents. We will probe crystalline bismuth samples with refined new experimental tools. The superconducting proximity effect will reveal the spatial distribution of conduction paths, and test the ballisticity of the hinge modes (that may coexist with non-topological surface modes). High frequency and tunnel spectroscopies of hybrid superconductor/Bi circuits will probe their topological nature, including the existence of Majorana modes. We will use high sensitivity magnetometers to detect the orbital magnetism of SOTI platelets, which should be dominated by topological edge currents. Lastly, we propose to detect the predicted equilibrium spin currents in 2DTIs and SOTIs via the generated electric field, using single electron transistors-based electrometers.

2 432 676 €

Start date: 2020-04-01, End date: 2025-03-31

"The ability to apply forces to single molecules and bio-polymers has fundamentally changed the way we can interact with and understand biological systems. Yet, for many cellular mechanisms, it is rather the torque that is the relevant physical parameter. Excitingly, novel single-molecule techniques that utilize this parameter are now poised to contribute to novel discoveries. Here, I will study the angular dynamical behavior and response to external torque of biological systems at the molecular and cellular levels using the new optical torque wrench that I recently developed. In a first research line, I will unravel the angular dynamics of the e.coli flagellar motor, a complex and powerful rotary nano-motor that rotates the flagellum in order to propel the bacterium forwards. I will quantitatively study different aspects of torque generation of the motor, aiming to connect evolutionary, dynamical, and structural principles. In a second research line, I will develop an in-vivo manipulation technique based on the transfer of optical torque and force onto novel nano-fabricated particles. This new scanning method will allow me to map physical properties such as the local viscosity inside living cells and the spatial organization and topography of internal membranes, thereby expanding the capabilities of existing techniques towards in-vivo and ultra-low force scanning imaging. This project is founded on a multidisciplinary approach in which fundamental optics, novel nanoparticle fabrication, and molecular and cellular biology are integrated. It has the potential to answer biophysical questions that have challenged the field for over two decades and to impact fields ranging from single-molecule biophysics to scanning-probe microscopy and nanorheology, provided ERC funding is granted."

1 500 000 €

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

"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

Topology provides mathematical tools to sort objects according to global properties regardless of local details, and manifests itself in various fields of physics. In solid-state physics, specific topological properties of the band structure, such as a band inversion, can for example robustly enforce the appearance of spin-polarized conducting states at the boundaries of the material, while its bulk remains insulating. The boundary states of these ‘topological insulators’ in fact provide a support system to encode information non-locally in ‘topological quantum bits’ robust to local perturbations. The emerging ‘topological quantum computation’ is as such an envisioned solution to decoherence problems in the realization of quantum computers. Despite immense theoretical and experimental efforts, the rise of these new materials has however been hampered by strong difficulties to observe robust and clear signatures of their predicted properties such as spin-polarization or perfect conductance. These challenges strongly motivate my proposal to study two-dimensional topological insulators, and in particular explore the unknown dynamics of their topological edge states in normal and superconducting regimes. First it is possible to capture information both on charge and spin dynamics, and more clearly highlight the basic properties of topological edge states. Second, the dynamics reveals the effects of Coulomb interactions, an unexplored aspect that may explain the fragility of topological edge states. Finally, it enables the manipulation and characterization of quantum states on short time scales, relevant to quantum information processing. This project relies on the powerful toolbox offered by radiofrequency and current-correlations techniques and promises to open a new field of dynamical explorations of topological materials.

1 499 940 €

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

We shall develop a microfluidic and microsystems toolbox allowing the construction and study of complex cellular assemblies (“tissue or organ mimics on chip”), in a highly controlled and parallelized way. This platform will allow the selection of specific cells from one or several populations, their deterministic positioning and/or connection relative to each other, yielding functional assemblies with a degree of complexity, determinism and physiological realism unavailable to current in vitro systems We shall in particular develop “semi-3D” architectures, reproducing the local 3D arrangement of tissues, but presenting at mesoscale a planar and periodic arrangement facilitating high resolution stimulation and recording. This will provide biologists and clinicians with new experimental models able to bridge the gap between current in vitro systems, in which cells can be observed in parallel at high resolution, but lack the highly ordered architecture present in living systems, and in vivo models, in which observation and stimulation means are more limited. This development will follow a functional approach, and gather competences and concepts from micr-nano-systems, surface science, hydrodynamics, soft matter and biology. We shall validate it on three specific applications, the sorting and study of circulating tumour cells for understanding metastases, the creation of “miniguts”, artificial intestinal tissue, for applications in developmental biology and cancerogenesis, and the in vitro construction of active and connected neuron arrays, for studying the molecular mechanisms of Alzheimer, and signal processing by neuron networks. This platform will also open new routes for drug testing, replacing animal models and reducing the health and economic risk of clinical tests, developmental biology , stem cells research. and regenerative medicine.

2 260 000 €

Start date: 2013-07-01, End date: 2018-06-30

CHROMOTOPE will offer the very first analysis of the changes that took place in attitudes to colour in the 19th century, and notably how the ‘chromatic turn’ of the 1850s mapped out new ways of thinking about colour in literature, art, science and technology throughout Europe. Britain’s industrial supremacy during this period is often perceived through the darkening filter of coal pollution, and yet the industrial revolution transformed colour thanks to a number of innovations like the invention in 1856 of the first aniline dye. Colour thus became a major signifier of the modern, generating new discourses on its production and perception. This Victorian ‘colour revolution’, which has never been approached from a cross-disciplinary perspective, came to prominence during the 1862 International Exhibition – a forgotten, and yet key, chromatic event which forced poets and artists like Ruskin, Morris and Burges to think anew about the materiality of colour. Rebelling against the bleakness of the industrial present, they invited their contemporaries to learn from the ‘sacred’ colours of the past – a ‘colour pedagogy’ which later shaped the European arts and crafts movement. Building on a pioneering methodology, CHROMOTOPE will bring together literature, visual culture, the history of sciences and techniques and the chemistry of pigments and dyes, with high-impact outcomes, including one major exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, a thorough pigment analysis of Burges’s Great Bookcase and the creation of an online database of 19th century texts on colour. This project will not only give invaluable insight into hitherto neglected aspects of 19th century European cultural history, it will also reveal the central role played by chromatic materiality in the intertwined artistic and literary practices of the period. This will in turn change the way the relationships between text and image, as well as the materiality of the text itself, may be envisaged in literary studies.

1 884 867 €

Start date: 2019-10-01, End date: 2024-09-30

We propose to develop a new scheme for detecting and manipulating exotic states formed by combinations of conductors with different dimensionalities and/or electronic orders. For that purpose, we will use tools of cavity quantum electrodynamics to study in a very controlled way the interaction of light and this exotic matter. Our experiments will be implemented with nanowires connected to normal, ferromagnetic or superconducting electrodes embedded in high finesse on-chip superconducting photonic cavities. The experimental technique proposed here will inaugurate a novel method for investigating the spectroscopy and the dynamics of tailored nano-systems. During the project, we will focus on three key experiments. We will demonstrate the strong coupling between a single spin and cavity photons, bringing spin quantum bits a step closer to scalability. We will probe coherence in Cooper pair splitters using lasing and sub-radiance. Finally, we will probe the non-local nature of Majorana bound states predicted to appear at the edges of topological superconductors via their interaction with cavity photons.

1 456 608 €

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

The application's unifying theme is cognition. Any decision reflects the information that comes to the decision-maker's awareness at the moment of making the decision. In turn, this information is the stochastic outcome of a sequence of more or less conscious choices and of awareness manipulation by third parties. The three parts of this application all are concerned with two factors of limited awareness (cognitive costs and motivated beliefs) and with the application of imperfect cognition to economics. The various projects can be subsumed into three themes, each with different subprojects: 1. Self-serving beliefs, laws, norms and taboos (expressive function of the law, taboos, dignity and contracts). 2. Cognition, markets, and contracts (mechanism design under costly cognition, directing attention in markets and politics). 3. Cognition and individual decision-making (foundations of some non-standard preferences). The methodology for this research will be that of formal economic modeling and welfare analysis, enriched with important insights from psychology and sociology. It will also include experimental (laboratory) investigations. The output will first take the form of a series of articles in economics journals, as well as, for the research described in Part 1, a book to disseminate the research to broader, multidisciplinary and non-specialized audiences.

1 910 400 €

Start date: 2010-04-01, End date: 2016-03-31

COMOSYEL aims at designing complex nanometric and molecular systems to process electronic or optical information from the macroscopic to the molecular scale. It proposes two specific, unconventional approaches to molecular electronics and plasmonics and the development of two multidisciplinary technical toolkits, one in bio-inspired chemistry and one in surface nanopatterning by liquid nanodispensing that will support the first two topics, and eventually become a part of the team's culture for future research developments. (1) Graphene-based nanoelectronics is an experimental implementation of mono-molecular electronics concept using graphene to bridge the macroscopic world to the molecular scale. This topic aims at encoding and processing electronic information in a single complex molecular system in order to achieve complex logic functions. (2) Self-assembled nanoplasmonics aims at developing a molecular plasmonics concept. Here, complex networks of sub-20nm crystalline metallic nanoparticle chains are produced and interfaced to convert photons to plasmons and ultimately confine, enhance and route light energy from a conventional light source to an arbitrary chromophore on a substrate. (3) Bio-inspired nanomaterials chemistry will be the main synthetic tool to produce new multifunctional nanostructured materials able to address and collect information from/to the macroscopic world to/from the single molecule level. Both morphogenesis and self-assembly will be explored to better control size and shape of nano-objects and the topology of higher-order architectures. (4) Liquid nanodispensing is a promising tool to interface nanosized/molecular sized systems with both lithographically produced host structures and individual molecular systems. A nanoscale liquid dispensing technique derived from AFM combines resolution and versatility and will be pushed to its extreme to master the deposition of nanoobjects onto a substrate or a precise modification of surfaces.

1 439 712 €

Start date: 2008-08-01, End date: 2013-12-31

"The application proposes to revisit the economics of cooperation and competition in industry vertical chains and develop new tools for industrial organization (IO). Modern IO theory treats firms as unitary, profit-maximizing entities, characterized by well-identified perimeters of activity, and clearly identified either as competitors or as complementors. Yet in practice: - Industry structures are increasingly complex: Firms distribute for example their activities among partners across the globe, and moved to multiple, interlocking relationships. - Firms competing for customers or suppliers are also cooperating in other dimensions, e.g., by setting-up common platforms, or by adopting joint common rules within which to compete. - Supplier -customer relations often involve transaction costs other than pure search costs: adoption costs, learning or shopping costs, or expensive strategies to protect sensitive information. Understanding the interplay between competition and cooperation is key to designing business strategies, but it has also implications for industry oversight: When should cooperation among competitors be limited or encouraged? Over which dimensions? This application proposes to cover three topics: 1. Allocation of tasks and the choice of partners. 2. Multilateral interlocking relations. 3. Cooperation and competition. 4. Transaction costs, buying patterns and business strategies While the project falls primarily in the field of applied theory, some of the developments require new tools and interaction with game theorists. Furthermore, empirical validation will require the use of structural econometric modelling (based in particular on consumer panel data) and laboratory experiments. The project has also an interdisciplinary flavour and will benefit from work of and interactions with legal scholars and marketing experts."

2 068 920 €

Start date: 2013-12-01, End date: 2018-11-30

"Materials with strong electronic Coulomb correlations present unique electronic properties such as exotic magnetism, charge or orbital order, or unconventional optical or transport properties, including superconductivity, thermoelectricity or metal-insulator transitions. The concerted behavior of the electrons in these ``correlated materials"" moreover leads to an extreme sensitivity to external stimuli such as changes in temperature, pressure, or external fields. This tuneability of even fundamental properties is both a harbinger for technological applications and a challenge to currently available theoretical methods: Indeed, these properties are the result of strong electron-electron interactions and subtle quantum correlations, and cannot be understood without a proper description of excited states. The aim of the present project is to elaborate, implement and test new approaches to investigate the spectral and optical properties of correlated materials ``from first principles"", that is, without adjustable parameters. I will build on the success of state-of-the-art dynamical mean field-based electronic structure techniques, but aim at developing them into truly first-principles methods, where a full treatment of the long-range Coulomb interactions replaces the current practice of purely local Hubbard interaction parameters. My target materials are among the most interesting for modern technologies, such as transition metal oxides (with potential applications ranging from oxide electronics to battery materials) and rare earth compounds used as environmentally-responsible pigments. Establishing first-principles techniques with truly predictive power for these classes of materials will bring us closer to the final goal of tailoring correlated materials with preassigned properties."

1 713 600 €

Start date: 2014-07-01, End date: 2019-06-30

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

"Frontier research in statistical mechanics and soft condensed matter focuses on systems of ever-increasing complexity. Among these are systems where microscopic dynamics are not controlled by thermal fluctuations, either because the sources of the fluctuations have not a thermal origin, or because “microscopic” sources of fluctuations are altogether absent. Practical applications comprise everyday products such as paints or foodstuff which are soft solids composed of dense suspensions of particles that are too large for thermal fluctuations to play any role. Non-Brownian “active” matter, obtained when particles internally produce motion, represents another growing field with applications in biophysics and soft matter. Because these systems all evolve far from equilibrium, there exists no general framework to tackle these problems theoretically from a fundamental perspective. I will develop a radically new approach to lay the foundations of a detailed theoretical understanding of the physics of a broad but coherent class of materials evolving far from equilibrium. To go beyond phenomenology, I will carry theoretical research to elucidate the physics of particle systems that are simultaneously Dense, Disordered, Driven and Dissipative—D4PARTICLES. By combining numerical analysis of model systems to fully microscopic statistical mechanics analysis, my overall aim is to discover the general principles governing the physics of athermal particle systems far from equilibrium and to reach a complete theoretical understanding and obtain predictive tools regarding the phase behavior, structure and dynamics of D4PARTICLES. Reaching a new level of theoretical understanding of a broad range of materials will impact fundamental research by opening up statistical physics to a whole new class of complex systems and should foster experimental activity towards design and quantitative characterization of large class of disordered solids and soft materials."

1 339 800 €

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

In France, the UK, Germany, the US, and Israel, a growing number of films and television series are set ‘behind the scenes’ of democratic regimes faced with terrorist threats. These works reveal a moral state of the world. They may be analysed as ‘mirrors’ of society, or as ideological tools. But they can also be understood as new resources for the education, creativity, and perfectibility of their audiences; as the emergence of a form of ‘soft power’ that can serve as a resource for public policies and democratic conversation. Because of their format (weekly/seasonal regularity, home viewing) and the participatory qualities of the Internet (tweeting, sharing, liking, chat forums), series allow for a new form of education by expressing complex issues through narrative and characters. As a result, TV series are increasingly recognised in current research. However, their aesthetic potential for visualising ethical issues and their capacity at enabling a democratic empowerment of viewers has not yet been analysed ; nor their power for confronting cultural and social upheavals underway, and developing a collective inquiry into democratic values and human security. DEMOSERIES brings together a team of scholars of moral philosophy, film studies, digital media and cultural data, sociology, law and political science, to explore a corpus of TV ‘security series’ from conception to reception. Doing so requires a particularist ethics based on attention to multi-faceted situations, paired with qualitative methods (interviews with security experts, showrunners, viewers; analyses of images, tropes, words; ethnography of reception) and quantitative methods (tweets and web analytics). By elucidating how these series are conceived by their creators and audiences, DEMOSERIES thus aims to understand if and how they might play a crucial role in building the awareness necessary for the safety of individuals and societies, and in creating shared and shareable values in the EU and beyond.

2 216 375 €

Start date: 2020-01-01, End date: 2024-12-31

Every year a brain stroke will impair approximately 2 million Europeans. Notwithstanding recent progress, many of these individuals will have persistent cognitive deficits, impacting their personality, degrading their quality of life and preventing their return to work. Early identification of anatomical predictors of brain recovery may significantly reduce the burden of these deficits on patients, their families and wider society, while also leading to the discovery of new targets for treatments. I have pioneered the development of imaging techniques that allow for the exploration of the relationship between brain disconnection and neuropsychological syndromes. With these tools, I aim to demonstrate that the structural organisation of the human brain's connections is the common denominator supporting functional specialisation and, when damaged, neuropsychological disorders. Building on my expertise, I plan to (1) establish an atlas mapping the function of white matter for the entire human brain, (2) fractionate the stroke population according to disconnection profiles, (3) predict neuropsychological symptoms based on disconnection profiles, and (4) characterise and manipulate the fine biology involved in the disconnection recovery.In so doing, this project will introduce a paradigm shift in the relationship between brain structure, function and behavioural/cognitive disorders. I will deliver a comprehensive biological model of the neurocircuitry that supports neuropsychological syndromes, which will gather the modular organisation of primary idiotypic functions with the integrative organisation of highly associative levels of functions. In the long term, this project will allow me to determine if measures of brain ‘connectivity’ can be translated into advanced standard procedures that provide for a more personalised medicine, that focuses upon rehabilitation and improving the prediction of symptom recovery, while providing new targets for pharmacological treatment.

1 999 201 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

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

"Income and wealth inequality has widened significantly in many developed countries during the past 40 years, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. In some countries, e.g. the US, income concentration is now higher than in the early decades of the 20th century. EU trends are less strong, but push in the same direction. Yet, despite these puzzling facts, we still know very little about the forces behind the long run evolution of income and wealth distribution. The central objective of this proposal is to better understand the rise in inequality, and more generally to develop a unified empirical and theoretical approach to the distribution and redistribution of income and wealth. First, I propose to construct a new ""World Wealth and Income Database"" (WWID) that will be made public through a dedicated website. Existing inequality data sets are insufficient, first because many countries are not well covered, and mostly because available series concentrate on income inequality and usually do not cover wealth inequality. This is unfortunate, because the theoretical forces at play are very different for income and wealth distributions. The WWID will remedy both deficiencies and allow for a better articulation between available data and theoretical models. Next, I will use this new database to test for the various mechanisms explaining the rise in inequality. In particular, I will explore the extent to which low growth and high returns to wealth naturally push towards higher wealth-income ratios as well as rising wealth concentration. In the near future this mechanism is likely to be particularly strong in low growth Europe (especially in countries with negative population growth). In the long run it can also operate at the level of the global distribution of wealth. I will also develop new theoretical models of optimal taxation of income and wealth. These models will be using a ""sufficient statistics"" approach and will be calibrated using WWID data."

2 489 576 €

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

Control of cell migration is crucial for many biological processes. Cells sense mechanical cues to guide their migration. As opposed to passive materials, living cells actively respond to the mechanical stimuli of their environment through the transduction of mechanical information into biochemical signaling events. These responses, particularly to rigidity, include differentiation, migration and alterations in cell-matrix and cell-cell adhesion and thus occur over a wide range of time and length scales. I propose to address the effect of substrate mechanical properties on cell migration using quantitative in vitro methods based on micro-fabrication and micro-mechanical techniques. My main objectives are to: 1/ Discover specific mechanisms that guide single cells toward stiffer substrates (a process known as durotaxis), investigate the range of stiffness-sensitive responses and determine the molecular mechanisms based on actin dynamics and cell adhesion assembly. 2/ Characterize the emergence of coordinated cell movements and thus how cells move in concert under external mechanical constraints. In addition to cell-substrate interactions, the role of cell-cell junctions is crucial in the transmission of mechanical signals over the cell population. By analyzing tissue dynamics at both mesoscopic and molecular scales, we hope to unravel how epithelial cell sheets mechanically integrate multiple adhesive cues to drive collective cell migration.3/ Elucidate the role of 3D mechanical environments in collective cell migration. In contrast to migration in 2D, cells in 3D must overcome the biophysical resistance of their surrounding milieu. Based on optical and innovative micro-fabrication techniques to modify the stiffness of 3D scaffolds, we will study its influence on cell migration modes and invasion. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to understand how cells integrate mechanical adhesive signals to adapt their internal organization and ensure tissue integrity

1 762 734 €

Start date: 2014-06-01, End date: 2019-05-31

This project studies dynamic mechanisms. By “dynamic mechanisms”, we mean policies to which a principal (e.g., a seller, an employer, or a regulator) can commit to induce the agents (e.g., buyers, employees, or regulated firms) to take the desired actions over time. Several components of the project are envisaged: - Competition in dynamic mechanisms. o I propose a competitive setting in which agents (e.g., buyers or workers) learn about the offers of different principals over time. Agents may receive more than one offer at a time, leading to direct competition between mechanisms. Received offers are agents’ private information, permitting strategic delay of acceptance (for instance, an agent may want to wait to evaluate new offers that received in the future). - Robust predictions for a rich class of stochastic processes. o We study optimal dynamic mechanisms for agents whose preferences evolve stochastically with time. We develop an approach to partially characterizing these mechanisms which (unlike virtually all of the existing literature) does not depend on ad-hoc restrictions on the stochastic process for preferences. - Efficient bilateral trade with budget balance: dynamic arrival of traders o I study bilateral trade with budget balance, when traders (i) arrive over time, and (ii) have preferences which evolve stochastically with time. The project aims at an impossibility result in this setting: contrary to the existing literature which does not account for dynamic arrivals, budget-balanced efficient trade is typically impossible, even for very patient traders. - Pre-event ticket sales and complementary investments o We provide a rationale for the early allocation of capacity to customers for events such as flights and concerts based on customers’ demand for pre-event complementary investments (such as booking a hotel or a babysitter). We examine efficient and profit-maximizing mechanisms.

1 321 625 €

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

This project offers a theoretical and empirical investigation of matching markets. Matching is, broadly speaking, the study of complementarities, which explains the formation of coalitions. Matching models are found in many applied fields within Economics: Labour Economics, Family Economics, Consumer theory of differentiated goods (hedonic models), Trade, etc. Desirable properties of these coalitions, such as stability, lead to testable implications of the surplus that individuals generate in a match, allowing for structural estimation of matching models. The goal of this proposal is to expand the frontiers of the theory of matching to design a very general and highly flexible model of matching that will lend itself to estimation and thus lead to empirical findings in various fields of Economics. Based on promising work initiated by the PI, this proposal seeks to bridge the gap between the theory and the empirics of matching markets that was traditionally observed in this literature. Particular focus will be given to situations where stable outcomes may not exist (such as unipartite, or one-to-many matching models), frictions, taxes. In these cases, a thorough investigation is carried on what solution concept should be used, and what are the testable implications. Applications will be given to various empirical issues or policy relevant questions such as: - The nature of the complementarities between senior and junior employees within teams, - The role played by the marriage market in the problem of rural depletion in China, - The impact of CEO risk aversion on assignment to firms, and on the CEO compensation package, - The pricing of attributes of French wines.

1 119 000 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2018-09-30

It is a paradoxical situation that with Japan being the third modern economy and Japanese, the main Japonic language, being the 10th in the world in terms of native speakers and the most widely studied Asian language, the Japonic language family still lacks an etymological dictionary. The present research project will rectify this situation. The benefits of an etymological dictionary of Japonic are obvious: not only it will be of a great use to the specialists working on pre-modern Japan and Ryukyuan islands in various disciplines; it will have its impact on modern studies, especially on linguistic identities in East Asia. And offer a new reading of regional linguistic identities The Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic languages has never been compiled, and the time for the realization of such a project is ripe, as it would have been impossible to carry on 30 or 40 years ago, since many important resources available now did not yet exist then such as numerous dictionaries and descriptions of dialects and historical stages of the language development. The same is true regarding the editions of many textual sources and compilation of their indexes. One very important difference with the previous era is also the fact that nowadays many sources are available electronically, which greatly facilitates the search and management of information. This project is highly innovative because it provides a presentation in context based on the extensive use of the IT technology, as compared to the previous research on Japonic etymology which was essentially word-list-oriented. In contrast with the current practice, where only word entries with their translations were provided (and often without any reference to the source), thanks to internet link to database, and cross-referenced entries, the electronic etymological dictionary will present the words in their textual historical and cultural context.

2 470 200 €

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

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

During the last three decades, Islam has gained visibility in European public spheres through new religious symbols, but as well as new public figures, men and women, pious and secular who carry Islam in European public life. Islamic entry in the public sphere, and the claims for religious visibility provoke a series of debates on gender equality, freedom of expression and cultural (civilisational) differences in European publics. EUROPUBLICISLAM sets itself the intellectual research agenda of bringing together different fields of knowledge and analysis of the transformative forces that appear in the contemporary meeting of Islam and Europe. It proposes to develop an innovative understanding of the sporadic and at times violent ways in which Islam intervenes in the making of the European public sphere. EUROPUBLICISLAM engages with the European scholarly agenda on migration, the construction of a European public sphere, and Islam. It aims at shifting the contemporary theorization of Islam in Europe away from the integration and security paradigms, and towards a new theory of dynamics of interaction and mutual change. A new research field is marked out in combining and transforming the contemporary theorizations of European public sphere and European Islam. EUROPUBLICISLAM proposes to study religious symbols, artistic cultural productions and public figures affecting the everyday politics of cultural discord. It aims to re-conceptualize the place of Islam in the making of a European public sphere. An innovative methodology is proposed to study the constellations , the assemblages that bring together cultural differences in proximity and in confrontation across national public spheres, following a transnational dynamics. EUROPUBLICISLAM will thus contribute to the production of innovative research on the making and imaging a European public sphere where transformative cultural and aesthetic mixes and thus political pluralism are taking place.

1 414 645 €

Start date: 2008-12-01, End date: 2013-03-31

"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

The general theme of this research is to introduce the notion of large-scale economic networks into the mainstream of economics, in particular in macroeconomics and international trade. Economic agents often do not have access to all the relevant information they may need: whom they know, whom they interact with represents a small fraction of all possible interactions. I model this limited set of interactions as a network: agents are nodes, and they only interact with other agents they have formed a link with. What is the shape of this network of linkages between agents, and how does it evolve? More importantly, what are the aggregate implications of the shape of this network? These are the broad questions I will address in this research. I will consider six specific applications of this unifying idea in various fields: international trade, IO, macroeconomics and growth. In international trade, we have only a very crude understanding of the frictions that prevent most firms from exporting. I propose to model trade frictions as a dynamic network: at a point in time, a given exporter only has information about a limited set of potential customers in a few foreign countries; over time, this exporter discovers new export opportunities, and its network of customers evolves dynamically. I offer theoretical and empirical tools to understand and analyze the properties of this network, and show how it shapes aggregate trade patterns. In IO and macroeconomics, most plants only have few suppliers. I will model the input-output linkages between plants as a dynamic network; I offer theoretical and empirical tools to analyze this network, and show how it shapes the propagation of plant level shocks to generate aggregate fluctuations. Human capital accumulation is key to economic growth and development, with workers learning from each other. I will model these growth-enhancing interactions as a dynamic network; I will show how the properties of this network shape long run growth.

1 169 400 €

Start date: 2013-12-01, End date: 2018-11-30

Turbulence in natural flows is an outstanding challenge with key implications for the energetics of planets, stars, oceans, and the Earth’s climate system. Such natural flows interact with waves, radiation or a combination thereof: surface waves and solar radiation on oceans and lakes, bulk waves and radiation inside the rapidly rotating and electrically conducting solar interior, etc. Standard simplified models often discard waves, radiation, or both, with dramatic consequences for the energy budget of natural flows: geostrophic models neglect waves, and Rayleigh-Bénard thermal convection considers heat diffusively injected through a solid boundary, in strong contrast with radiative heating. The purpose of the present multidisciplinary project is to develop a consistent and coupled description of natural flows interacting with waves and radiation, to properly assess their energy budget: • Because resolving surface waves in global ocean models will remain out-of-reach for decades, I will derive and investigate reduced equations describing their two-way coupling to the ocean currents, with timely implications for the upwelling of nutrients, the strength of the global ocean circulation and ultimately CO2 sequestration and the climate system. • Building on my recent advances in the field of rotating and magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, I will derive a set of reduced equations to simulate such turbulent flows in the vicinity of the transition where bulk 3D waves appear on a 2D turbulent flow. This approach will allow me to reach unprecedented parameter regimes, orders of magnitude beyond state-of-the-art 3D direct numerical simulations (DNS). • Finally, I will combine state-of-the-art DNS with a versatile experimental platform to determine the structure, kinetic energy and heat transport of turbulent radiative convection in various geometries. I will extrapolate the resulting scaling-laws to the ocean circulation, the mixing in lakes and the solar tachocline.

1 499 094 €

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

Understanding the flows in planetary cores from their formation to their current dynamics is a tremendous interdisciplinary challenge. Beyond the challenge in fundamental fluid dynamics to understand these extraordinary flows involving turbulence, rotation and buoyancy at typical scales well beyond our day-to-day experience, a global knowledge of the involved processes is fundamental to a better understanding of the initial state of planets, of their thermal and orbital evolution, and of magnetic field generation, all key ingredients for habitability. The purpose of the present project is to go beyond the state-of-the-art in tackling three barriers at the current frontier of knowledge. It combines groundbreaking laboratory experiments, complementary pioneering numerical simulations, and fruitful collaborations with leaders in various fields of planetary sciences. Improving on the latest advances in the field, I will address the fluid dynamics of iron fragmentation during the later stages of planetary accretion, in order to produce innovative, dynamically reliable models of planet formation. Considering the latest published data for Earth, I will investigate the flows driven in a stratified layer at the top of a liquid core and their influence on the global convective dynamics and related dynamo. Finally, building upon the recent emergence of alternative models for core dynamics, I will quantitatively examine the non-linear saturation and turbulent state of the flows driven by libration, as well as the shape and intensity of the corresponding dynamo. In the context of an international competition, the originality of my work comes from its multi-method and interdisciplinary character, building upon my successful past researches. Beyond scientific advances, this high-risk/high-gain project will benefit to a larger community through the dissemination of experimental and numerical improvements, and allow promoting science through an original outreach program.

1 992 602 €

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

How long does it take a random walker to reach a given target? This quantity, known as a first-passage time (FPT), has been the subject of a growing number of theoretical studies over the past decade. The importance of FPTs originates from the crucial role played by properties related to first encounters in various real situations, including transport in disordered media, diffusion limited reactions, or more generally target search processes. First-passage times in confinement, their optimization and their relationship to biophysical experiments are at the heart of this project. The following two issues will be investigated. 1) We will determine key first-passage observables of general scale-invariant random walks in confinement, which up to now have remained inaccessible: FPT distribution in the presence of several targets and/or several searchers, statistical properties of the explored territory, FPT distribution of a non-Markovian random walker. Beyond their theoretical interest, these developments will allow us to address in close connection with single-molecule experiments the importance of transport and spatial organization for gene transcription kinetics and stochastic gene expression. 2) We will address the question of the optimization of the search time. We have recently introduced a new type of search strategies, the intermittent strategies, which minimize the search time under general conditions. Here, the objectives are: (i) to determine new first-passage observables of these intermittent processes (eg the full FPT distribution) to allow the comparison of optimal strategies to experimental situations; (ii) to understand the physical mechanisms underlying real intermittent pathways and assess their optimality at the molecular (homologous recombination kinetics), cellular (search for infection markers by dendritic cells) and macroscopic scales (individual search behavior of ants); (iii) to use intermittent strategies to design efficient searches.

1 242 800 €

Start date: 2011-10-01, End date: 2017-09-30

Oxide compounds are usually highly ionic, with metal and oxygen ions carrying large positive and negative point charges. When inversion symmetry is broken as in ferroelectrics or at surfaces or interfaces, oxides can thus harbour large electric fields. This unleashes a quantum phenomenon known as the Rashba spin-orbit coupling that allows the generation of spin currents from charge currents and vice versa without ferromagnets, circumventing their drawbacks to perform these tasks. In the FRESCO project, we will combine the advantages of Rashba-driven spin-orbitronics phenomena with the ultralow switching energy of ferroelectrics. Building upon our demonstrations of giant spin-charge conversion at polar oxide interfaces and of non-volatile electoresistance in ferroelectric tunnel junctions, we will aim at a non-volatile electrical control of interconverted spin and charge currents in materials systems combining Rashba spin-orbit coupling with ferroelectricity. Guided by first-principles calculations, we will design and explore several families of atomically engineered polar heterostructures combining oxides and transition metal compounds. We will assess their spin-charge interconversion efficiency, its controllability by electric fields and its connection with the energy dependent spin Berry curvature. We will harness this controllability in spin-based non-volatile logic architectures operating through ferroelectricity-controlled spin-charge conversion. Building upon this, we will propose and explore several classes of devices including light-activated sources of spin currents based on photoferroelectricity, reconfigurable non-volatile logic gates, and tuneable THz sources and modulators. FRESCO will pioneer a new approach to generate spin currents and manipulate the static (or dynamic) magnetic states by electric fields beyond conventional magnetoelectricity, but retaining its advantageous low operating power, with a view towards attojoule electronics.

2 977 038 €

Start date: 2020-02-01, End date: 2025-01-31

FUTUREPOL seeks to open up a new field of historical and political enquiry around the history of future governance. As an object of governance, the future is notoriously rebellious: difficult to define, defying notions of objectivity and truth. Nevertheless, a crucial feature of modern societies is their belief in the knowability and governability of the future, the belief that through the means of scientific rationality and political power, the future can be controlled. FUTUREPOL aims to study shifting ideas of the knowability and governability of the future, in order to illuminate the process in which the future is transformed from its nebulous and uncertain state into an object of governance. Moreover, it intends an historical analysis of how this process varies over time in the post war period. The project thus asks two central research questions: How does the future become an object of governance? And how is this process different today, than earlier in the post war period? FUTUREPOL will address four problems: First, it will study the origins of futurology and its birth in transnational networks of futurists in the immediate post war period. Second, it intends to study the way that futurists’ ideas were translated into policy and gave rise to public institutions devoted to the future in many countries in Europe and beyond. Third, it will situate these problems in a global field where concerns with national futures are confronted to concerns with the survival of the world system as a whole, and fourth, it aims to study the evolution of the means of future governance over time, and proposes that such an historical analysis of future governance can permit us to historicize central forms of modern governance such as the governance of risk, foresight or scenarios, and thus help us understand the way that contemporary societies engage with the future.

1 302 949 €

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

In Europe and all over the world, genocide and mass violence have been a structural feature of the 20th century. This project aims at questioning the social legacy of mass violence by studying how different societies have coped with the first consequence of mass destruction: the mass production of cadavers. What status and what value have indeed been given to corpses? What political, social or religious uses have been made of dead bodies in occupied Europe, Soviet Union, Serbia, Spain but also Rwanda, Argentina or Cambodia, both during and after the massacres? Bringing together perspectives of social anthropology, history and law, and raising the three main issues of destruction, identification and reconciliation, our project will enlighten how various social and cultural treatments of dead bodies simultaneously challenge common representations, legal practices and moral. Project outputs will therefore open and strengthen the field of genocide studies by providing proper intellectual and theoretical tools for a better understanding of mass violence’s aftermaths in today societies.

1 197 367 €

Start date: 2012-02-01, End date: 2016-01-31

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

Amorphous systems form a large fraction of the solid materials that surround us, from polymer glasses to mineral or metallic glasses, from toothpaste (a colloidal paste) to granular materials. Still, a theoretical framework for describing the mechanical properties of such materials, comparable to the dislocation theory that describes crystalline systems, is still missing. Our understanding of prominent experimental feature such as the heterogeneous character of deformation, or the temperature and rate dependence of the mechanical response, is very limited. These materials indeed combine several difficulties. In contrast to liquids or crystals, they are intrinsically out of equilibrium, and their microstructure presents a large statistical distribution of mechanically distinct local environments. The importance of the notion of heterogeneity in the mechanical behaviour of amorphous systems is being increasingly recognized, still there is no numerical or theoretical model that incorporates this microscopic feature into a macroscopic description of deformation and flow. The aim of the proposed research program is to build such models, within a multiscale approach seeking inspiration from dislocation dynamics, from the statistical physics of glasses and from the physics of dynamical critical phenomena. The proposed approach is based on a combination of intensive numerical simulations at the atomic scale and at a coarse grained scale, which will necessitate the development of efficient numerical schemes. The statistical analysis will allow us to understand the universal and non universal features of material behaviour in terms of the interactions between the atomic constituents, and to establish the validity and importance of new concepts such as mechanical activation or dynamical heterogeneities.

1 763 858 €

Start date: 2012-07-01, End date: 2017-06-30

While amorphous solids constitute most of the solid matter found in Nature, their understanding is much poorer than for crystalline solids, at the point that most solid state textbooks are entirely focused on crystals. The reason underlying this uncomfortable situation is that amorphous solids display all kind of anomalies with respect to a simple description in terms of phonon excitations around a perfect lattice. In particular, they display an excess of low-frequency vibrational modes, their thermodynamic and transport coefficients behave differently from crystals, they respond non-linearly to arbitrarily small strains, and have highly cooperative dynamics. Traditionally, each of these aspects has been studied independently of the others, by almost distinct communities, and in terms of microscopic elements that are specific to a given material. The objective of this proposal is to take a different approach and seek a universal explanation of all the anomalies of amorphous solids, in terms of criticality associated with a new phase transition between two distinct glass phases. This goal is both ambitious and reachable. It is reachable because such a phase transition has just been theoretically predicted to exist on rigorous grounds, in an abstract limit of infinite spatial dimensions; its existence allows one to compute the critical exponents of jamming, in strikingly good agreement with numerical simulations; and the transition has been observed numerically in a realistic model of glass. It is ambitious because it requires to firmly establish the universal nature of the transition, and connect it to the experimentally observed anomalies through concrete analytical and numerical calculations, which will open the way to a direct experimental test. Both tasks require solving a number of difficult conceptual and technical problems. But, if successful, this project could lead to a revolution in our understanding of amorphous solid matter.

1 362 125 €

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

"This project aims at a socio-historical study of the transition between the two regimes of knowledge and action, which have characterized the government of health after World War II: the regime of international public health, dominating during the first decades of the postwar era, which was centered on eradication policies, nation-states and international UN organizations; the present regime of global health, which emerged in the 1980s and is centered on risk management and chronic diseases, market-driven regulations, and private-public alliances. The project seeks to understand this transition in terms of globalization processes, looking at the making of knowledge, the production and commercialization of health goods, the implementation of public health programs, and routine medical work. It will focus on four fields of investigations: tuberculosis, mental health, traditional medicine and medical genetics in order to understand how categories, standardized treatment regimens, industrial products, management tools or specific specialties have become elements in the global government of health. The project associates historical and anthropological investigations of practices in both international and local sites with strong interests in: a) the changing roles of WHO; b) the developments taking place in non-Western countries, India in the first place. The expected benefits of this research strategy are: a) to take into account social worlds including laboratories, hospitals, enterprises, public health institutions and international organizations; b) to approach the global as something translated in and emerging from local practices and local knowledge; c) to explore different levels of circulations beyond the classical question of North-South transfers; d) to deepen our understanding of the transition from the political and economical order of the Cold War into a neo-liberal and multi-centric age of uncertainty."

2 307 432 €

Start date: 2014-08-01, End date: 2019-07-31

Microcavity polaritons are half-light, half-matter composite bosons, which are formed in monolithic semiconductor microcavities of the proper design. Recently, Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons has been reported, that constitutes a new class of quantum fluid out of equilibrium. Unlike cold atoms, superfluid Helium or superconductors, polaritons are in a driven-dissipative situation, and their mass amounts only to a negligible fraction of an electrons’. This unusual situation has already revealed very interesting phenomena. Moreover, every observables of the polariton fluid, including momentum, energy spectrum and coherence properties are directly accessed via optical spectroscopy experiments. In this project, we will fabricate and investigate new wide band-gap semiconductor nanostructures both capable of taking unprecedented control over the polariton environment, and capable of sustaining very hot and very dense quantum degenerate polariton fluids. Various confinement configurations - two, one and zero-dimensional -will be realized as well as advanced nanostructures based on traps and tunnel barriers. In these peculiar situations, the quantum degenerate polariton fluid will display a new and rich phenomenology. Hence, many premieres will be achieved like room temperature 1D quantum degeneracy, 1D quasi-condensate in solid-state systems, Josephson oscillations of polariton superfluids, and the fascinating Tonks-Girardeau state where strongly interacting bosons are expected to behave like fermions.

1 488 307 €

Start date: 2010-11-01, End date: 2015-10-31

Accounting for firms' heterogeneity in trade patterns is probably one of the key innovations of international trade that occurred during the last decade. The impact of initial papers such as Melitz (2003) and Bernard and Jensen (1999) is so large in the field that it is considered to have introduced a new paradigm. Apart from providing a convincing framework for a set of empirical facts, the main motivation of this literature was that there are new gains to be expected from trade liberalization. Those come from a selection process, raising aggregate productivity through the reallocation of output among heterogeneous firms. It initially seemed that the information requirements for trade policy evaluations had become much more demanding, in particular requiring detailed micro data. However, the recent work of Arkolakis et al. (2011) suggests that two aggregate ``sufficient statistics'' may be all that is needed to compute the welfare changes associated with trade liberalization. More, they show that those statistics are the same when evaluating welfare changes in representative firm models. The project has three parts. The first one starts by showing that the sufficient statistics approach relies crucially on a specific distributional assumption on heterogeneity, the Pareto distribution. When distributed non-Pareto, heterogeneity does matter, i.e. aggregate statistics are not sufficient to evaluate welfare changes and predict trade patterns. The second part of the project specifies which type of firm-level heterogeneity matters. It shows how to identify which sectors are characterized by ``productivity sorting'' and in which ones ``quality sorting'' is more relevant. Extending the analysis to multiple product firms, the third part shows that heterogeneity inside the firm also matters for welfare changes following trade shocks. It considers how the change in the product mix of the firm following trade liberalization alters the measured productivity of the firm.

1 119 040 €

Start date: 2012-11-01, End date: 2018-07-31

Thermophoresis denotes the motion of dissolved species in fluids created by temperature gradients. In water, the origin of thermophoresis is multiple, complex and still a matter of active research activities for solutes such as proteins, DNA or colloids. Thermophoresis at small scales (sub-100 µm) aroused a strong interest this last decade because it makes the process faster and because of the development of important applications in life sciences, e.g. in bioanalytics. However, reducing the spatial scale makes quantitative and non-invasive measurements of temperature and molecular concentration more challenging. In the HiPhore project, using gold nanoparticles under illumination as nanosources of heat, I wish to achieve major breakthroughs in the field of microscale thermophoresis in liquids (MTL): (i) We will develop new microscopy tools and pioneer their use in the context of MTL: we will implement the possibility to shape arbitrarily complex microscale temperature profiles and to quantitatively image in parallel the resulting fields of temperature and molecular concentration using label-free advanced optical tools. (ii) Thanks to these tools, we will study the enigmatic origin of protein thermophoresis with a new glance. We will also explore a new regime, that I coin super-thermophoresis, consisting in thermophoresis in superheated liquid water up to 200°C. We have shown that such a metastable state can be achieved at ambient pressure using gold nanoparticles under illumination at their plasmonic resonance. (iii) Based on this gain of knowledge and know-how, we will develop two new applications of MTL. The first one consists in studying the thermal stability of proteins by thermophoresis with a label-free approach. The second one consists in using a superthermophoretic trap to enable for the first time the culture and the real-time observation of hyperthermophilic microorganisms (living up to 113°C) in vivo at ambient pressure under optical microscopy means.

1 922 973 €

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

HisTochText addresses written Buddhist culture of the northern Silk Road in an innovative and path-breaking way, by going beyond the frontier of disciplines which have been cultivated separately: philology, digital humanities and in-depth analysis of materials, edition of Tocharian texts and comparative Buddhist literature, Sanskrit poetics and narratology, texts and social contexts. The flourishing Buddhist culture of the northern Silk Road during the 1st millennium CE in the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang (NW China) is known by archaeological findings, artifacts and manuscripts in various languages. Since Buddhism was introduced from India, Sanskrit was the dominant religious language. By contrast, Tocharian belongs to the few local languages that are known to us thanks to Buddhist written culture. The two closely related Tocharian languages (Tocharian A and Tocharian B) were deciphered in 1908 on the basis of manuscripts discovered at the beginning of the past century in Buddhist sites of this region, together with Sanskrit manuscripts. The collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France issued from the Pelliot expedition is a major collection of Tocharian manuscripts, counting around 2,000 fragments, second only to the Berlin collection, but in comparison hardly investigated, despite its containing numerous unique masterpieces and the broadest cross-section of manuscript and document styles and types. Only one fourth has been edited, mostly in a provisional manner, without translation nor commentary. Many texts of the Pelliot collection, literary and non-literary, are of the utmost importance because they have no match in any other collection of Tocharian manuscripts, nor in Buddhist corpora in other languages. As most Pelliot manuscripts in Sanskrit and in Tocharian were found in Buddhist sites of the Kucha region, the comprehensive edition and analysis of the texts will provide precious information about an important centre of Central Asian Buddhism.

1 833 103 €

Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30

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

My project is to write a new history of the Almohad Empire (1130-1269). This local dynasty of Berber origins ruled simultaneously over South and North of the Western Mediterranean. For the first time in history, the whole Maghreb was united under an indigenous authority. This unique historical period witnessed very important process, the political and religious separation from the East through Mahdism , and the nearly successful transfer of Islamic prophetic authority from the Arabic core to Western lands. In order to understand the exercise of power in the largest Western Muslim medieval Empire ever, I intend to use the important but largely ignored letters of the Almohad Chancery. There survive 300 documents, some of them too hastily published, which need a new scholarly edition and a usable translation. While it is well known that the Medieval Islamic world lacks in preserved archives, the review of those Letters of victory, defeat, information, advice, allegiance or reproaches will provide historians with materials that should allow a rejuvenation of the history of North African medieval land. Indeed the prevailing master narratives of the History of the medieval Maghreb is based on narrative sources. They have been systematically used as the foundation for a positivistic history. Understanding this development requires tackling the contemporary non-narrative documentary record. Yet the technical difficulties presented by the highly literary and poetic language of the chancery documents have largely barred their use by historians. This project is a methodical attempt to address this critical problem. The project will have four stages:1) taking stock of the unedited administrative documents from North Africa between the 11th and the 13thC. 2) editing of the entire corpus 3) translation of all these documents 4) presentation of a synthetic historical, linguistic and religious analysis through scholarly publications and a dedicated website

1 272 620 €

Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2016-09-30