MIGRASYL (“Migration & asylum challenges in the Euro-Mediterranean and Africa”) focuses on the study of Mediterranean third countries as a field of experimentation on the issue of migration and as a bridging link between Southern Europe and the Sahel. Mediterranean migration has become a major concern for academic researchers, European policy makers and public opinion. Since 2011, major political upheavals on the Southern shore of the Mediterranean have brought about a crisis situation with new long-term socio-economic and legal consequences at a Euro-Mediterranean level. These changes require the renewal of the paradigms and frameworks of thought. The Mediterranean is a particularly relevant laboratory for the development of new migratory configurations. It is at the crossroads of the South-North migration route and also those of South-South, East-West. It is composed of neighbouring countries that are especially affected by migration because of their geographical location at the "forefront" of arrivals of migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East. MIGRASYL’s ambition is to promote the third countries’ migration policy domain that it is in urgent need of investigation. This area is a crucial empirical field for analyzing the complex interrelation concerning push factors and policies managing migration, asylum and refugees in the EuroMed. In the long term, MIGRASYL aims to build a unique multi-partner digital platform, gathering national migration observatories. With this international project, and over a 18 months period (November 2017 – April 2019), MIGRASYL will constitute a network of Euro-Mediterranean and sub-Saharan partners (France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Austria, Turkey, Mauritania, Senegal, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, Malta) thanks to workshops dedicated to the challenges of international migrations and to the evolution of asylum law in this geographical area. These workshops and the MIGRASYL consortium meeting will aim at organizing and structuring an international H2020 project which will be submitted to the European Commission in 2018 or 2019, in the framework of the Societal Challenge “Europe in a changing world – Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies”, « 1. Call on Migration and the refugee crisis ». The MIGRASYL researchers will conduct fieldwork on 3 geographical areas: Southern Europe, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, which are all impacted by important migratory flows and by the hosting of asylum seekers. MIGRASYL ambitions to gather partner institutions in the field of socio-anthropology, political sciences, law, history, demography and geography. This core partnership will be complemented by a network of associations, NGOs and Euro-Mediterranean civil society players. MIGRASYL’s outcomes will include empirical knowledge on social assistance schemes of host and transit countries, based on interviews and statistical data. Policy-makers will benefit from an analysis of the coherence and effectiveness of European policies on migration, compared with the development of migration policies in third countries. MIGRASYL will highlight good practices of institutions active in the defense of migrants and migration governance, at local, regional, national and international level, in order to combat irregular migration. It will also provide an analysis on the unexplored link between migration and sustainable development policies, particularly for Africa.

Industrial processes involving chemical reactions are typically controlled by macroscopic parameters, such as temperature or pressure, which usually results in a huge waste of energy and the massive production of unwanted by-products leading to energy consumption and pollution. To overcome these problems, ChemiQ aims at developing « tomorrow's chemistry » with a much higher level of control and selectivity. The ChemiQ consortium will describe and control the chemical reactivity at a microscopic level via the systematic use of quantum phenomena such as quantum coherence induced by laser. The use of coherent wave-packet can be seen as a paradigm shift in chemistry with extensions to biology. This 48-months project unifies relevant state-of-the-art competences in theory and experiment, at the interface between physics and chemistry, creating a new community on the long term to make the European Union the leader in this new chemistry. The project gathers the cutting-edge theoretical developments in the emerging field of molecular quantum dynamics (Multi-Layer approach of the Multi-configuration Time-Dependent Hartree (MCTDH) method, light dressed molecules approaches) with state-of-the-art lab-technology. In particular, the conjunction of the most recent experimental techniques will open the possibility to control the motion of electrons and nuclei, molecular vibrations and rotations, each of them on its natural time scale. It will thus be possible « to operate on » molecular systems controlling all the different aspects of the system like in a sort of « chemical surgery » by a « photonic scalpel ». We target several experimental breakthroughs including coherent control of excited state dynamics in biological chromophores, the control of all the aspects of an elementary process of high industrial interest, the CH activation of methane on nickel surfaces, and experiments with ultra-violet (sub)-femtopulses, opening the door to the field of « attochemistry ».

Objectives The objective of this proposal is the organization of a multidisciplinary network to finalize a proposal to the H2020 Call Science with and for Society - SWAFS-01-2018-2019. The submitted proposal, called ESMEA, focuses on an embodied teaching method with a “Human Orrery” (a tool that allows learners to enact planetary movements within the Solar System). Through the attractiveness of astronomy for both boys and girls and the innovative potential of enaction, the Human Orrery allows learners to build the knowledge base for SwafS and to enhance their scientific awareness and well-being as citizens. Our current and foreseen network covers different part of Europe, while strong links are expected with third countries, such as Lebanon, Vietnam, Uruguay and USA. This will allow a gender and cross-cultural study of those topics. This network and its diversity of expertise also makes the dissemination of pedagogical sequences using the Human Orrery a Measurable and Achievable goal through national network of schools and science centres and links with stakeholders. Attention will be given to set Realistic and Time-Bound objectives. Constructing and using a Human Orrery An Orrery is a mechanical device illustrating the circular orbits of the planets. On a human Orrery, the orbits of planets and comets are drawn at a human scale allowing movements in the Solar System to be enacted by the learners. The implementation of Human Orrery, as learning experience, involves topics from mathematics and science and illustrates an example of a STEM approach of learning about concepts perceived as abstracts by students and teachers. Astronomy provides a highly motivating context for learners to develop observational skills, discover methods of scientific inquiry, and explore some of the fundamental laws of physics and concepts of mathematics in both an attractive and meaningful way. In the course of the project, a selection of schools (or science centres) in each of the involved countries are going to build their own Human Orrery. Those will then be used as starting hubs to disseminate this new teaching-learning method through local training and demonstration inside and outside schools. In the meantime, we shall inquire about the creation of a “teaching kit”. Theoretical background and methods Our ambition is to serve the co-emergence of a coherent theoretical approach of enaction in mathematics and science education, overcoming the risks of the actual theoretical fragmentation between disciplines, which undermines the strengths and scope of their results. Indeed, the use of a Human Orrery in education is based on the assumption that bodily perceptions help the learning of abstract concepts. Cognitive science theory of enaction as well as science and mathematics education research provide theoretical foundations and empirical results to this claim, by showing the role of gestures, signs, as well as that of artefacts, in learning processes, leading to consider “multimodal learning”. At the heart of research is the question of how learners’ conceptions are transformed to increasingly approximate conceptions shared by scientists. Networking expertise in science and mathematics education will be used to design learning sequences that account for known conceptual obstacles to this transformation. We will refer to the Activity Theory as developed currently in mathematics education to study those sequences. In a broader perspective, our approach intends to make the learning process more engaged and meaningful and to promote an equity among scientific, literary and artistic disciplines. Those topics are related to the notions of gender on one side and of awareness and motivation on the other side. We will examine the relationship between learning environments and students’ creative performances, as well as its correlations with motivation

A right to obtain an explanation of the decision reached by a machine learning (ML) model is now an EU regulation. Different stakeholders (e.g. patients, clinicians, developers, auditors, etc.) may have different background knowledge, competencies and goals, thus requiring different kinds of explanations. Fortunately, there is a growing armoury of ways of interpreting ML models and explaining their decisions. Let us use the phrase ‘explanation strategy’ to refer collectively to interpretable models, methods for visualisation, and algorithms for explaining the predictions of models that have been built by Machine Learning (ML). As these explanation strategies mature, practitioners will gain experience that helps them know which strategies to use in different circumstances. Whilst there are existing libraries that provide interfaces to a limited number of explanation strategies, these efforts remain disconnected and provide no easy route to reusability at scale. Our aim goes well beyond the development of a library. We aim to transform the ML explanation landscape through an open platform that can assist a spectrum of users (knowledge engineers, domain experts, novice users) in the selection and application of appropriate explanation strategies. We hypothesise that episodes of explanation strategy experience can be captured and reused in similar future task settings. The iSee Project will show how end-users of AI can capture, share and re-use their explanation experiences with other users who have similar explanation needs. Our idea is to create a unifying platform, underpinned by case-based reasoning (CBR), in which successful experiences of applying an explanation strategy to an ML task can be captured as cases and retained in a case base for future reuse. Our cases will encode knowledge about the decisions made by a user and the effectiveness of the strategy, so that our CBR system can recommend how best to explain ML predictions to other users in similar circumstances. We recognise that explanation strategies can be foundational, of the kind found in the research literature, and these can seed the case base. However, user needs are often multi-faceted. We will show how new cases that capture composite strategies can be composed from foundational ones, by extending the CBR technique of constructive reuse. Our proposal describes how we will develop an ontology for describing a library of explanation strategies; develop metrics to evaluate their acceptability and suitability and use these in a case representation that we will develop to capture experiences of using explanation strategies. Cases record the objective and subjective experience of different users of different ML explanation strategies, so that they can be shared and re-used. We include a number of high-impact use cases, where we work with real-world users to co-design the representations and algorithms described above, and to evaluate and validate our approach. These use cases will also seed the case base. Additionally, the iSee project fosters explanation strategy evaluation; promotes experiment reproducibility; exhibits international collaboration; is driven by co-creation of representations and evaluation criteria with our use case partners; meets the best research standards in terms of open access to software and published results; and may ultimately provide a route to much-needed policies, procedures and technologies for certifying compliance with ML regulations and guidelines.

The AMPlify project aims at preventing and treating mucosal infections, and situations of conflict between the host and its microbiota, by developing a disruptive technology based on immuno-stimulatory molecules that selectively boost the expression of inducible antimicrobial peptides (AMP) of the innate immune system, naturally produced at mucosal surfaces. To face the problem of antibiotic resistance, this high-potential technology may be relevant both in situations of endemic infections in the developing world, and infectious or inflammatory pathologies in industrialized countries. Our objective is to establish the proof-of-concept that among a series of hit molecules identified by screening of new marine compounds, for their capacity to induce expression of AMP genes, a small subgroup may qualify to lead molecules that can then be pushed into the late phases of the R&D pipeline, with the perspective of a phase I clinical trial. To achieve this transition, our project will focus on the human intestinal mucosa as target. Screening specifications for a molecule to qualify as a hit require that they induce strong expression of AMP genes, without triggering expression of pro-inflammatory genes, which could be deleterious for the mucosa. The novelty of this technology resides in looking for molecules that act as inducers of host AMP gene expression, by targeting (epi)genetic regulatory functions, reducing the risk of resistance in bacteria. Our project ranges from the understanding of (epi)genetic mechanisms regulating AMP gene expression, to the identification of new natural molecules inducing their expression, the optimization of molecules by medicinal chemistry, their characterization and evaluation of their protective efficacy in pre-clinical validation models. Ultimately, we expect to select molecules as future drug candidates, and to provide better understanding of the homeostasis of mucosal defenses, in line with the concept of (epi)genetic pharmacology.