Equations of waves and flows are used extensively in physics and biology, to describe phenomena ranging from the flow past an airfoil, to the collective motion of cells and to the motion of water surface. A major issue is to explain how the propagation through space and the concentration to various scales can emerge from these mathematical models. Fundamental progress have been made since the beginning of the millenium around the role played by specific solutions that either propagate or shrink while keeping the same shape, such as solitary waves for example. These specific solutions are the key to understand the global dynamics. The goal of this project is to push forward the current knowledge on their stability, their emergence over time, and the dynamics they are responsible in several equations. The FloWAS project will study seemingly unrelated models, whose solutions in fact display remarkably close behaviours. First, we aim at describing how a thin layer of fluid can detach off a boundary and be ejected away in a stream. This is a key phenomenon to understand the drag exerted on moving objects. For this we will study singular solutions of the unsteady Prandtl system of fluid mechanics. Second, we will study concentration phenomena arising in the movement of bacteria. For that we will consider nonlinear structures appearing in the Keller-Segel system: how they can collapse, and how they can interact. Third, we will consider how, from initially disordered wave packets, order appears over time and traveling waves emerge. This study will be made on the critical wave equation. Applications to weak wave turbulence will be pursued. Describing all these phenomena lies at the frontier of current research, and we expect applications to a wide range of models.

Do only foolish people drown and only compulsive gamblers suffer flood losses? Conventional wisdom is based on flawed underlying assumptions and the EU vision of a disaster- and climate-resilient society cannot be achieved by relying on “behaviour-blind” assessments and policy. Whilst the behaviour of individuals, businesses and public services before, during and after a crisis has a significant impact on damages, recovery and resilience, current assessments fail to include such critical factors because they are hardly understood. Floods and weather hazards are affecting 2bn people and exposure is expected to grow due to climate change. Despite trillions of public funds invested, current flood reduction and planning policies are failing to reduce risks and losses of lives. This is due to a mismatch between the rising application of risk, vulnerability and resilience assessments and the understanding of their empirical validity. The overreaching goal of this proposal is to move from “behaviour-blind” to “behaviour-aware” assessments, indicators and policies to save lives and public money. Lifting the current barriers to predicting and simulating risk perception and behaviour will create forefront knowledge and open new horizons. Social and technological changes have widened the gaps in our knowledge making new empirical research essential to refine or replace existing theories. This project will provide four demonstrators representative of the European and Mediterranean context, graded in size, wealth and exposure to reach general considerations: Paris, Barcelona, Bucharest and Algiers. It is aiming at cross-validation on floods and transferability to other emergencies (technological disasters, epidemics, terrorism, etc). It will launch a new line of research by providing “behaviour-aware” participatory assessments and indicators, spatially-explicit interactive short- and long-term simulation tools enabling decision-makers to refine their strategies and policies.

In the past years, quantum non-equilibrium emerged as a new principal research arena, promising to assist the current development of new quantum technologies and to shine a new light on disparate fields of theoretical and experimental physics, from black holes to condensed matter and statistical physics. As quantum dynamics represents a major challenge for modern computational methods, relevant developments have come from devising new generalised and extended forms of classical hydrodynamic theory to effectively describe its macroscopic features. This effort is nowadays constituting an essential part of contemporary theoretical physics, contributing to a deeper understanding of dynamical phenomena and providing new directions in different experimental areas. This proposal focuses on the interplay between classical non-linear dynamics and quantum evolution, promising to a) unveil a new deep comprehension of how the non-equilibrium dynamics in many-body quantum systems can dissipate or either recover quantum information and how effective non-linear classical behaviour emerges, b) release new efficient theoretical tools to access quantum many-body quantum systems which are strongly interacting and in non-equilibrium settings beyond linear response, far away from known regimes of low-energy, low-temperatures or weak interactions. The outcomes will provide new reliable and much needed theoretical methods as well as a new dictionary to catalogue and relate different non-equilibrium phenomena in quantum and classical physics and deepen our understanding of out-of-equilibrium matter.

The EUTOPIA Science and Innovation Fellowships program is an ambitious initiative to train young research leaders. This strategic program is launched by the EUTOPIA Alliance, a network of six universities that has recently been awarded an Erasmus+ ‘European Universities’ pilot project. It brings together Université Paris Seine, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Goeteborgs Universitet, Univerza v Ljubljani and University of Warwick, who have joined forces to provide fellows with an innovation-driven world-class research eco-system. The program focuses on 5 interdisciplinary Key Research Areas: 1- Materials engineering; 2- Data & Intelligence; 3- Health; 4- Sustainability; 5- Welfare & Inclusion. The program offers 76 two-years post-doctoral fellowships over five years and aims to promote the research potential and career perspective of outstanding, innovative young researchers. Fellows are offered full freedom to pursue their research project whilst benefiting from expert academic supervision, state-of-the art research infrastructure and being part of an interdisciplinary research community. The program offers career mentoring; and promotes transferable skills, innovation and entrepreneurship awareness and secondment with partners. While letting fellows choose their hosting university, the program will create a transnational community of researchers through joint initiatives such as yearly symposia, a strong network, etc. International mobility, both among EUTOPIA members and towards international academic institutions will be encouraged. Université Paris Seine will manage the program on behalf of the EUTOPIA Alliance. The program will rest on a unified governance, a joint, high standard, selection procedure, and resource sharing. In addition, more than 45 companies, local authorities and non-profit organizations who are ready to train or host some researchers on secondments already support the program.

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to provide efficient and sustainable transportation. However, road safety of autonomous driving remains a critical challenge, the lack of which hinders their widespread adoption and integration into the transportation system. It is thus pressing to evolve vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications to provide reliable and secure communications for CAVs to exchange critical information for cooperative decision-making, ensuring the road safety. This project sets an ambitious goal of designing smart and proactive traffic steering across multiple radio access technologies (multi-RAT) in the environment of CAVs. The technical approach is threefold. First, to ensure the reliability of communications, this project unleashes the full potential of massive sensing that involves the collection of vast amounts of data from sensors deployed on vehicles and roadside infrastructure, and then leverage the cooperation perception of environment for situational awareness and ahead-of-time decision-making in V2X. Second, it develops a security and privacy preservation mechanism to protect the integrity and privacy of the highly dynamic vehicular network as well as defending the widely used machine learning process. Finally, relying on the 5G testbed, Open RAN (O-RAN) solution, and other V2X facilities provided by some partners, the final step is to implement and evaluate the performance of developed solutions, which closes the gap between theory and practice. The planned secondments provide partners the opportunity to test their solutions on the infrastructure possessed by other partners.