The history of Ancien Régime institutions has been ingrained with a century-long metanarrative of the construction of the modern State, which still impedes our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of its development. Despite an illusory resemblance in vocabulary, categories of the State and civil society that are natural to us were undoubtedly alien to contemporaries three centuries ago. Furthermore, our cognitive representations of what constitutes a political territory remain bounded by geographical projections that were only progressively defined over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How, then, can we better understand the dynamic relationships of power that presided over and fostered the constitution of the modern State without relying on these inherited categories? To overcome these hurdles, we propose an innovative knowledge representation system of the dynamics of Ancien Régime institutions through the application of ontologies to historical data: the Ontology-based Ancien Régime Data Infrastructure (ObARDI). We will construct this infrastructure in four steps. First, we will assemble an extensive database of the local institutional, economic, and social environment of each of the former communes of 17th and 18th-century France—a layout that will serve as an interoperable matrix for Ancien Régime history. Second, we will integrate this data into a fully-structured information system through encompassing formal ontologies that will manage the geography of base territorial units, describe underlying source material and content, and provide source criticism tools to reinvent the historian’s laboratory. Third, we will render our infrastructure compliant with FAIR data management principles in a Linked Open Data perspective: it will be interoperable and accessible through an ergonomic web platform, which will constitute a tool in fostering the use of the digital humanities across various public. Finally, the resulting environment will enable us to create innovative cartographic tools to represent Ancien Régime territories as an evolving set of layered institutions which boundaries were structured by the relationships of power in their midst.

Scientific communities produce a valuable amount of data as a direct or side product of their research, which can be potentially explored in many different applications. However, making data open and accessible requires considerable efforts in order to guarantee the data quality and compliance to the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability). The aim of Semantics4FAIR is to facilitate the tasks of finding and accessing scientific data that results from both research and production by a scientific community, in order to support the development of new usages by other scientific communities. The originality of the proposed approach is twofold: (i) a human factor method to capture user’s needs and vocabularies; and (ii) a semantic approach takes up the findability challenge. We plan to build and reuse several ontologies to account for the various points of view on the data and the relations between these views: one ontology will account for the data producers’ view, and the users’ vocabulary refers to a different ontology. These ontologies will be then used to describe the data, its provenance and usages, and will be the basis for the development of services querying and consuming data. This work will rely on the collaboration of a computer science lab (IRIT) and a human-factor institute (MSH-T) with scientific communities that want to make their datasets FAIR, and scientific communities that want to reuse this data for their own research projects. We propose to test the approach thanks to a joint work with the atmospheric scientific community (OMP and CNRM) as meteorology data providers, and the Palynologist community (GET) and meteorology data exploitation (MeteoFrance) services as two data user communities.

Heterogeneous profiles in Autism Spectrum (AS) have often been reported. One way to account for this heterogeneity is to distinguish AS individuals with and without speech onset delay (AS-SOD and AS-NoSOD). In fact, certain studies show superior abilities in visual tasks for AS-SOD individuals. In the VISUAL project we aim to show that AS-SOD individuals are visual thinkers, and therefore possess a visual cognitive style. This visual cognitive style will involve: higher voluntary mental imagery capacities such as higher ability to generate, maintain, inspect, and manipulate mental images; higher reports of involuntary mental imagery (synaesthesia, intrusive images); as well as a visual preference during learning, measured with eye tracking techniques. Moreover, we hypothesize that this visual cognitive style will have repercussions in the development of certain psychopathological comorbidities and will impact the daily life of these individuals. We will use interviews, questionnaires, and experimental tasks to implement the project. We will compare performance of AS-SOD participants, AS-NoSOD participants and control participants. Results from the VISUAL project will significantly contribute to the general comprehension of AS and the heterogeneity observed in this condition. Furthermore, by studying extensively mental imagery in two subgroups of AS participants, results will highlight existence of different cognitive profiles and also different psychopathological comorbidities in these two groups. This might have considerable impact in the development of functional evaluation tools for a specific intervention in these individuals. This study will be the first to evaluate the phenomenon of intrusive images in AS and its impact in daily life. By connecting the cognitive and psychopathological dimensions of visual thinking, results will clearly contribute to the prevention of certain psychopathological disorders (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder) in AS but also to the development of adapted Intervention.

The AgeHear project is firmly based on the perspective of access to speech comprehension for the elderly suffering of Age-related hearing loss in a dual framework of both basic and clinical research. Hearing loss is a growing challenge in our modern society, and has a significant socio-economic impact, particularly with regard to the ageing population. Age-related hearing loss (ARHL or presbycusis) is present in about two thirds of the elderly, causing serious communication difficulties and leading to social isolation and depression. This difficulty in communicating is worsened by a cognitive decline related to the listening effort which depletes the person's cognitive resources. These demographic and clinical issues are at the heart of AgeHear project, which focuses on understanding the mechanisms of rehabilitation of presbycusis subjects with hearing aids (HAs). Thanks to technological advances, hearing aids enable the elderly to have access to oral communication and to return to an enriched social life. From a fundamental point of view, based on a multidisciplinary approach combining psychophysics, neuropsychology and brain imaging, AgeHear will seek to understand the mechanisms of brain plasticity involved in the rehabilitation of speech in the noise of the presbycusis subject and the links with a reduction in cognitive effort. From a clinical point of view, AgeHear will make it possible to use this experimental and theoretical understanding to support and guide the implementation of rehabilitation strategies. The central theme of AgeHear thus concerns the mechanisms of spatial hearing and neurocognitive compensation and their impact on the recovery of speech comprehension by hearing aids. The originality of AgeHear is both technological and theoretical. Conceptually, AgeHear proposes to study the mechanisms of spatial hearing restoration in a natural ecological context including dynamic and multisensory components. The impact and strategies supporting the rehabilitation of speech understanding in noise will be evaluated using a 3D virtual system (HTC ViveTM) allowing the patient to be immersed in a controlled vivid visuo-auditory environment. At the heart of AgeHear is the strong hypothesis that the success of rehabilitation of the presbycusis subject depends on his potential of brain plasticity. Based on a longitudinal approach, we will search for neural markers through PET scan brain imaging which would be predictive of the level of recovery by HAs and could consequently guide individual rehabilitation strategies. PET imaging will also allow us to determine whether spatial hearing and speech in noise comprehension share the same cognitive resources. This aspect will be reinforced by analyzing the links between hearing loss and its recovery with deficits in executive functions. Thus, AgeHear is a definitely a multidisciplinary and translational project that brings together two laboratories with expertise in brain imaging and psychophysics of deafness associated with an ENT service in addition to the participation of an industrial partner specialized in hearing aids. This consortium will enable a complementary approach, from psychophysics to clinical neurosciences, with a single common objective of a better understanding of the mechanisms of rehabilitation of presbycusis in its perceptive and cognitive aspects in order to optimize the rehabilitation of the elderly, thus promoting their social reintegration.

Since September 11, 2001, “radicalization” has become a category and major topic of public and scientific debate in the Anglo-Saxon world. The same applies to France, particularly since the January and September 2015 attacks. But as soon as we turn our attention towards political and geographical areas less concerned by radical Islamism, the very term “radicalization” does not seem to fit anymore. Hence we will consider extreme violence in other contexts and with other political and religious features. Violence, in all its shapes and outcomes, has always been a major field of social science research. This, however, does not apply to exiting violence, even more if we give this notion a wider meaning that goes beyond the simple ending, definite or temporary, of a process of violence and includes collective (e.g. State related) as well as individual (e.g. the healing of psychological traumas) dimensions. Just as violent radicalism must not be reduced to jihadism, exiting violence is not limited to the process of “de-radicalization”. As part of the platform Violence and exiting violence, the Observatory of radicalization and the Observatory of exiting violence are collaborating since 2015 to understand radicalization not simply as self-inflicted deterioration, but rather as a process involving numerous factors and configurations external to the radicalized subject. In a dynamic, multidimensional and transversal approach, this project seeks to compare experiences of extreme violence and of exiting violence located in different geographical areas, in order to put forward an understanding of contemporary developments by combining multidisciplinary approaches (political sociology, anthropology, law, diplomacy) and by avoiding “methodological nationalism” and the usual theoretical and geographical compartmentalization. The team will work in an effort to converge issues, fields and tasks determined beforehand. Various fields (Latin America with the guerillas and cartels; Africa with the militias, civil wars and genocides, Europe with terror attacks, jihadist radicalization but also the Basque independence movement; the Middle East with Daesh) will be compared according to the identified thematic approaches and a common methodology (individual interviews, participants’ observations, analysis of official reports, video and social media analysis, etc.), leading to a deeper understanding of the patterns of and reasons for radical and violent mobilization. This multi-level typology will range from the individual to the global level without under- or overestimating the protagonists’ national and local peculiarities, and will be complemented by cross-cutting research on other armed conflicts. This comparative perspective and original methodology across geographical contexts, analytical levels and stakeholders is intended to bring forward useful insight for policy makers, researchers and experts. Four cross-cutting issues have been identified: 1/ From subjective experience to collective commitment 2/ From radicalization to violent action 3/ How to exit violence (or avoid it right from the start) ? 4/ Kinship and social networks