Despite the tremendous interest of the scientific community on photovoltaic solar cells based on hybrid perovskites, many physical phenomena are still not fully understood and subject of controversy, such as the role of electrode/perovskite contact quality. The HYPERSOL project intends to introduce new solutions to improve the interface quality of hybrid perovskites solar cells in order to pin the quasi Fermi levels at Ec and Ev so as to extend the open circuit voltage at the thermodynamic limit for a single junction. Because the Voc in such devices is currently between 1 and 1.1V, we can expect an increase of about 30% in the PCE compared to current devices. To this aim, new dopants and customized self-assembled monolayers will be synthesized and introduced into state-of-the-art devices. Advanced characterization techniques will be used to construct a physical model allowing a complete description of the physics of hybrid perovskites solar cells and their optimization.

Looting and trafficking of cultural heritage from conflict areas to the European markets stand for an increasing phenomenon with strong consequences in terms of security, economics, culture and society. Smugglers take advantage of disparate frameworks, providing the artefacts with a fake background in order to give them the appearance of legality, before proposing them to the market. Although the protagonists in the fight (law enforcement agencies, justice, structures devoted to cultural heritage, art market) can know each other, the potential for cooperation still remains underexploited: time, resources and space limitations, discrepancies between approaches, practices and work cultures. The gap which is noticeable at the national level gets broader at the European scale. Nevertheless, each of those professional bodies is keeping a part of the solution: resource inventory, knowledge of the artefacts, production areas and fraudulent cases, proof culture, rates and trends changing. A cooperation protocol as well as a Pan-European collaborative tool for control, able to cross investigation data, are strongly required. POLAR project (“POLice and ARchaeology against cultural heritage trafficking”) was born in 2016 through the National Council of Scientific Research “Attentats Recherche” special call for proposals. It aims to identify relevant structures and tools, facilitating dialogue between professional spheres (methodology sharing, legal frameworks, slowdown levers identification). It is composed of three phases: Understand, Act and Prevent. As POLAR implies to work at the European level, an international consortium is currently built in keeping with professional divisions such as LEAs/Justice/Cultural Heritage/Art Market. The Cultural Heritage team maps the “artefacts in peril” as presented on the ICOM Red Lists. A digital tool will be built in order to find occurrences on Internet and to compare the proposed background to the archaeological evidences. In so doing, the protocol will reinforce the expertise and detect possibly fraudulent cases. If needed and according to the recognitions, a warning notice could be transmitted to the authorities. The approach will offer guarantees to honest buyers and sellers, avoiding the potential misfortunes related to ancient transactions led without due diligence and facilitating the lasting recovery of misled-traceability works of art, bringing the proof of the ancient provenance. POLAR will lead to training and information actions in a complex and unknown field. The dissemination phase implies to explore restitution ways for saved artefacts. Those actions will help to know more about them and to raise public awareness. Outputs are expected in the field of security, economics, society and culture. POLAR manages a large quantity of data, opening up fieldworks and enable the expression of innovative methodologies in order to face a security challenge. This cooperation is brand new in its form and breadth. A consultation about frames, methods and strategy is required to tackle the European scale. The planned call for the proposal is SU-FCT03-2018 (republished in 2019-2020): Information and data stream management to fight against (cyber)crime and terrorism. The ANR MRSEI tool seems to be the appropriate launch pad in order to lead the preliminary discussions, reinforce the consortium and provide it with the dedicated working space. The project also meets the needs of the SU-TRANSFORMATIONS-09-2018 call, whose topic is « Social platform on endangered cultural heritage and on illicit trafficking of cultural goods ». For this one, the deadline for submission is 13 March 2018, without assurance of renewal, which imply a more tightened calendar.

This research intends to study the response of different organizations to the Covid-19 pandemic, comparing the period from March to May 2020 with the period beginning in October 2020. It will focus on three sets of organizations: 1) Government and central administrations, 2) regional and local institutions, 3) the (socio-)health sector. The interviews conducted will be organized around three thematic entries that will help us to better understand the relationships between the different actors and organizations: 1) protection and prevention measures (masks, lock-down, curfew, isolation and physical distancing) ; 2) the organization of tests and screening (availability and choice of tests, contact cases, applications); 3) the management of patients and populations at risk (in hospital, at home, respiratory equipment, treatments, transportation). This research aims to uncover and analyse the capacities of these organisations to transform themselves or not in a period of uncertainty, by favoring an approach centered on collective action (to analyse the forms of cooperation or conflict that arise during crisis management) and a cognitive approach (which looks at the way in which actors make sense of the crisis and legitimize their actions). By comparing two periods, we will seek to see whether the capacities for cooperation differ according to whether the situation is marked by a high degree of uncertainty, urgency and extraordinary functioning; or, on the contrary, a better knowledge of the risks, less time pressure and a return to ordinary functioning. The goal will be to produce, in addition to fundamental knowledge about organizations in crisis situations, an analysis shared with the actors involved in the management of the crisis in these different organizations, with a view to collective learning.

In a society where identity theft is a criminogenic phenomenon that threatens all sectors of activity, with considerable economic impact, people identification is of great importance. The objective of this project is to develop innovative secure printing solutions for visual authentication of physical ID documents to prevent their counterfeiting and forgery. SLICID aims at developing a competitive solution based on a combination of academic and industrial expertise. This solution is based on the elaboration of a specific wrinkled multilayer stack of inorganic materials inserted inside the ID document. The functionalities of this stack will be to provide highly contrasted and angle-controlled colors after laser processing. SLICID relies on different breakthroughs and innovations: (1) laser texturing of an inorganic multilayer on a PC sheet to get specific scattering patterns; (2) obtaining highly saturated colors, written by laser, from embedded metallic nanoparticles in an optical interference coating; (3) laser printing of multiplexed images to display different images independently in the different scattering directions; (4) elaboration of numerical tools to simulate the electromagnetic response of nonplanar disordered ensembles of nanoparticles in nonplanar layered environments. The proposed technology allows complete customization that will define a new level of security for ID documents. To reach this goal, SLICID gathers academics and companies with complementary expertise. It will benefit from the know-how and expertise of LabHC in color management, laser-matter interaction, plasmonics and image processing, of HID in card elaboration, laser processing and security documents, of Institut Fresnel in laser processing, multiphysical modeling and scattering measurements, of ILM in electromagnetic modeling and color rendering, and of IREIS in thin film deposition and simulations for optical applications.

The theoretical analysis of deep neural networks (DNN) is arguably among the most challenging research directions in machine learning right now, as it requires scientists to lay novel statistical learning foundations to explain their behavior in practice. In this proposal, we aim to explore the interplay between DNNs and game theory by considering the widely studied class of congestion games with the goal of relating them to both linear and non-linear DNNs and to the properties of their loss surface. Beyond retrieving the state-of-the-art results from the literature in a principally new way, we expect that our proposal will provide a very promising novel tool for analyzing DNNs and will allow solving concrete open problems related to 1) characterizing the DNNs optimization inefficiency depending on the algorithmic choices, such as their architecture, activation, and loss function used and 2) proposing new optimization strategies with strong convergence guarantees.