Among the thousands of extrasolar planets discovered, Earth-like objects focus our attention to seek new habitable worlds. Eleven Earth-sized planets have already been discovered in the Habitable Zone (HZ) of their host-star, including three in the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system. Deciphering their atmospheres is the challenge of the next decade in exoplanetary science, stressing out urgent needs in fundamental data for these objects. My aim is to investigate how the atmospheric organic reservoir forms and evolves in the frame of humid exoplanetary atmospheres in Habitable Zone. I will also quantify the impact of theses processes on the climate and on the potential for prebiotic chemistry on these planets. I propose to consider the role of organic aerosols as prebio-signature: those are nanoparticles chemically produced in the atmosphere. I will address the capacity of exo-Earths atmospheres to produce organic aerosols in various oxidative conditions, and their further physical and chemical interactions with atmospheric water. To tackle these questions, I will combine experiments and models to discover the reactivity that occurs in atmospheres within an extensive range of oxidation conditions. I will experimentally determine the physical properties of the aerosols, and then model their radiative impact and their propensity to generate clouds in the atmosphere. I will also experimentally identify the prebiotic molecules composing the aerosols that dissolve into clouds. This transfer from the dry organic reservoir towards liquid water is indeed critical for the emergence of life. The ERC-AdG Oxyplanets project will contribute to interpret and suggest observations for the future NASA-JWST and ESA-ARIEL space missions. Furthermore, it will reinforce our knowledge of the habitability of Earth-like exo-worlds, potentially reappraising the conditions for life to appear on the early-Earth.

The main objective of the PREFER project is to open the scientific debate on existential risk to empirical enquiry. The PREFER team will identify how lay ethics (the ethics of ordinary people) manifest themselves in non-Western communities faced with extreme threat. Local terminal risks due to the collapse of regional ecosystems will serve as proxies for existential risks. Thus, this pioneering project will obtain, for the first time, empirical evidence on how ordinary humans evaluate and cope with real-life terminal situations. Existential risks concern humanity as a whole: it is essential to add to the variety and number of voices heard in scientific deliberations. A broader discourse on existential risk will contribute to better governance and decision-making around existential risks. The PREFER team will conduct field work in two diverse geographical areas whose inhabitants are experiencing the collapse of life-sustaining ecosystems: the Arctic and the Mekong Delta. Three communities in each area will serve as case studies. Preparatory fieldwork has revealed that members are aware of the terminal threat and have expressed fears that they are facing the end of the life they know. Community transdisciplinary research (the co-production of knowledge with and for local communities) will be accompanied by ethnographic work. Data will be collected in the form of narratives which will be analyzed as sources of information on how local communities appraise the multiple dimensions of local terminal risk, including descriptions, the meanings drawn from these and involvement in impact mitigation actions. These results will then be applied to existential risks, all the while analyzing the appositeness of the PREFER proxy-based approach. Finally, although the main focus is on widening the discourse on existential risks, PREFER will also contribute to the urgent empirical analysis of terminality in the face of collapsing regional ecosystems.

The representation of soil carbon in models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) remains significantly underdeveloped, leading to uncertainty concerning some models predicting soils as carbon sinks and others as sources of carbon dioxide. The development of microbe-explicit models is a very promising avenue for avoiding such inconsistencies and obtaining more accurate soil organic carbon (SOC) predictions. However, these models still suffer from uncertain parameterization due to the lack of data and the high variability in microbial responses at the ecosystem scale. These issues are especially true in carbon-rich northern high-latitude soils that are most vulnerable to large SOC loss with global change. The variability in microbial response at the ecosystem scale is rooted in intricate microscale eco-evolutionary adaptive processes, namely evolution, dispersal, and filtering of community diversity. The diversity in microbiomes, resulting from past selection, influences present adaptive capacity and is referred to as the contingency effect. The GAMEchange project will harness a recent surge of novel microbial genomic data in order to parameterize a new generation of biogeochemical model that accounts for the effect of microbial adaptation on SOC, including contingency effects. GAMEchange will couple the genome-parameterized microscale microbial model with a vegetation land model using a novel emulation approach. This novel coupled model will allow us to compare the 2100 SOC predictions with and without microbial adaptation. This project will produce the first coupled soil microbe-land model parameterized with genomic data, laying the foundation for more realistic microbial models for IPCC climate projections.

The OPTI-6G project develops a Photonic near IR Cell Free 5G Network, which does not suffer from interference because of the propagation characteristics of EM waves in this part of the spectrum and provides universal broadband coverage within buildings from pervasively located OWC access points. The benefits of applying cell free near IR networks in buildings are (1) multi-connectivity can be configured with cell free network thereby improving link quality and reliability; (2) there is no longer the need for building owners to subdivide their non-public mobile building network into cellular areas; (3) building owners no longer need to request permission from MNOs to use their licensed spectrum since the system operates at the optical unlicensed bands; (4) interference between inside and outside access is managed by an AI Based Distributed Scheduler; (5) position and orientation of end user equipment can be measured very accurately. It provides solutions to two main barriers to develop this challenge: (i) Brings together a select multi-disciplinary team of research institutions and industries in a collaborative project to develop and demonstrate this vision, who otherwise would not have assembled to achieve this goal; (ii) Develops a proof of concept demonstrator in OLEDCOMM and RUNEL; (ii) Performs experiments to measure position and orientation of end user equipment at UVSQ and UBRU. The starting point is (1) state-of-the-art cell free 5G RAN solution and very high accuracy sub cm accuracy localisation measurement system developed by RUNEL; (2) the state of the art VCSEL infrared source and high-speed PIN photodiodes receivers and that supports 1 Gbps data rates up to 5 m over a field of emission of 25° developed by OLEDCOMM. The project brings together these technologies to produce an easy installation and operation, License Free broadband Network for indoor buildings. The outcome will be low-cost commercially attractive broadband cellular access within buildings

The key element to ensure efficient use of HPC infrastructures is to optimize the performance and efficiency of the applications. The Centre of Excellence on Performance Optimization and Productivity (POP CoE, www.pop-coe.eu) was initiated in October 2015 with the fundamental purpose of assisting a broad community of HPC application developers and users in both science and industry domains helping them to understand the performance-related issues of their applications and thus improve their efficiency and productivity. This fundamental purpose is reached by externally and objectively auditing the performance of the codes to all interested users, by providing not only qualitative but also quantitative analysis through the use of POP tools and methodology. The current proposal, Performance Optimization and Productivity 3 (POP3), is articulated in 3 main pillars: services, users, and co-design. POP services mainly focus on performance assessments with the goal to evaluate code performance and scaling, identifying the main sources of inefficiency and providing some insight and recommendation about how to improve it. POP3 also provides second level services that have been extended and include proof of concepts, energy efficiency and advisory studies. Although POP3 will continue targeting all scales and types of users, with this proposal we will focus our efforts on larger scales, assessing the execution on the EuroHPC sites of some of the European flagship HPC applications for other CoEs. However, POP3 will still provide services to prescribers and SMEs to promote an efficient usage of the computing resources. The co-design will be covered in two dimensions. Internally in POP3 we will co-design the tools and methodology to be able to analyse the applications on the selected platform at the selected scale. Externally, POP3 will identify best practices and kernels that will be offered to other European projects as well as the wide audience of parallel applications.