We assist today to an increase of the ageing population (in France and in Quebec, ? of the population will have more than 60 years in 2050) along with a risk of vulnerabilisation of elderly people. To cope with this demographic challenge, States have set up legal mechanisms of protection as well as socio-medical services. These mechanisms and services rest on social rights that need to be activated. The access to these rights is rendered difficult when the cognitive vulnerability of the elders weakens their capacity to exercise their rights and to put forward their interests. This creates a series of situations in which the respect of their fundamental rights is endangered, in spite of or because of the recourse to these legal mechanisms of protection. The increase in the recourse to these mechanisms poses various types of problems, the more so as their legal foundation is disputed today. The need assessment for protection rests on dubious criteria; the control of the decisions taken and of the actions conducted for the person by others remains scarce; the respect of the preferences of the person is difficult to realize. This poses the problem of the access to their rights by the persons with cognitive vulnerability. Project ACSEDROITS will assess whether the current legal tools and their social uses in France and in Quebec make it possible to solve or on the contrary contribute to worsen the difficulties of access to their rights by the elders with cognitive vulnerability. It will be articulated around two hypothesis: 1) the difficulties of access to the rights are reinforced by the lack of communication between social and civil rights, at the legal level (legislation, case law and doctrine), and at the level of social uses and legal conscientiousness that persons have of their rights; 2) a better respect of the rights of the vulnerable elders implies a new delimitation of the concept of legal capacity leaning towards a procedural comprehension of the decision-making processes leading to the opening of the protection regimes, the limitation of fundamental rights and the legal imposition of care and services. To test these hypothesis, the project will be based on an interdisciplinary scientific program implying an ethnographic approach of the difficulties met by the actors, a theoretical analysis of the anthropo-legal concept of capacity, and an analysis of comparative law.

This project investigates the question of the resilience of university instruction following the shock of physical and mental isolation into which trainers and learners were thrust during the COVID-19 pandemic. It constitutes a central issue insofar as everything suggests that digital interactions and hybrid teaching are here to stay. We defend the idea that the resilience of university environments, and of society, depends on a new balance between the inevitable use of digital tools and the place for sensitive experience and embodiment. The final goal is to empower teachers in higher education to face the new situations in various contexts. We seek to participate in the restoration of the synergy between the cognitive and the sensitive by: 1) Provide an overall picture of distance training practices implemented during the pandemic, in each of the partner institutions, in the disciplines concerned by the project; 2) Explore hybrid experiential support as a space for in-action dialogue between teachers, learners, and knowledge, with a view to reducing inequalities in learning; 3) Investigate the place of sensitive experience within a given context as a space for learning by taking into account embodied knowledge in a hybrid model; 4) Provide material for the renewal of training practices, toward greater equality and inclusion, in various modalities, including distance learning. Through a partnership between Canada, France and Switzerland, we anticipate the following results: 1) A better understanding of the role of sensitive experience, effect of context and embodiment in pedagogical relationships and learning; 2) Instructional schemes easier to adapt to differing modalities, in person and at a distance, and within different field realities; 3) The development of new knowledge in the research fields of sensitive experience and contextualization. Scientific writings from this project will be a source of inspiration for decision makers in charge of support university trainers.

Since the emergence of Cloud Computing and the associated Over-The-Top (OTT) value-added service providers more than a decade ago, the architecture of the communication infrastructure - namely the Internet and the (mobile) telecommunication infrastructure - keep improving with computing, caching and networking services becoming more coupled. OTTs are moving from being purely cloud-based to being more distributed and residing close to the edge, a concept known to be “Fog Computing”. Network operators and telecom vendors advertise the “Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)” capabilities they may offer within their 5G Radio-Access and Core Networks. Lately, the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) came into the play as well offering what is known as Smart Speakers (Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod and Google Home), which can also serve as IoT hubs with “Mist/Skin Computing” capabilities. While these have an important influence on the underlying network performances, such computing paradigms are still loosely coupled with each other and with the underlying communication and data storage infrastructures, e.g., even for the forthcoming 5G systems. It is expected that a tight coupling of computing platforms with the networking infrastructure will be required in post-5G networks, so that a large number of distributed and heterogeneous devices belonging to different stakeholders communicate and cooperate with each other in order to execute services or store data in exchange for a reward. This is what we call here the smart collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm. The objective of SCORING project is to develop and analyse this new paradigm by targeting the following research challenges, which are split into five different strata: - At the computing stratum: Proactive placement of computing services, while taking into account users mobility as well as per-computing-node battery status and computing load; - At the storage stratum: Proactive placement of stores and optimal caching of contents/functions, while taking into account the joint networking and computing constraints; - At the software stratum: Efficient management of micro-services in such a multi-tenant distributed realm, by exploiting the Information-Centric Networking principles to support both name and compute function resolution; - At the networking stratum: Enforcement of dynamic routing policies, using Software Defined Networking (SDN), to satisfy the distributed end-user computation requirements and their Quality of Experience (QoE); - At the resource management stratum: Design of new network-economic models to support service offering in an optimal way, while considering the multi-stakeholder feature of the collaborative computing, caching and networking paradigm proposed in this project. Smartness will be brought here by using adequate mathematical tools used in combination for the design of each of the five strata: machine learning (proactive placement problems), multi-objective optimization, graph theory and complex networks (information-centric design of content and micro-services caching) and game theory (network-economics model). Demonstration of the feasibility of the proposed strata on a realistic and integrated test-bed as well as on an integrated simulation platform (based on available open-source network-simulation toolkits), will be one of the main goals of the project. The test-bed will be built by exploiting different virtualization (VM/Containers) technologies to deploy compute and storage functions within a genuine networking architecture. Last but not least, all building blocks forming the realistic and integrated test-bed, on the one hand, and the integrated simulation platform, on the other hand, will be made available to the research community at the end of the project as open source software.

A joint Franco-Quebec collaboration for the consolidation and development of research projects on the theme of death in a context of migration. This international collaboration aims to examine different themes relating to death in the context of migration, including material, legal, institutional, associative, familial, moral and emotional dimensions. This implies understanding death as an integral part of the migration experience, both as a reality and as a potentiality with multiple effects. The challenge of this program is twofold, because it necessitates bringing together two questions which have rarely been addressed together in the scientific literature, while at the same time drawing on a heterogeneous multidisciplinary corpus. At the present time, no such network exists in Canada or internationally. This grant will enable the consolidation and development of an inter-university network by supporting the conditions for collaboration and research between researchers, students and professionals from diverse milieu and countries. The themes of death and migration will be examined from a multifaceted perspective drawing on several disciplines, fields of practice and cultural universes. The program itself will be structured around two axes: 1) the development of joint research projects based on qualitative and comparative methods, narratives and case-studies as means of advancing knowledge in the field of death and migration; 2) the sharing and transfer of scientific knowledge.

This project addresses the point 4.2 of the call for proposal, dedicated to electrochemical capacitors (ECs) so called supercapacitors or ultracapacitors. This point mentions that : « A major effort of research must focus on improving the energy density, including implementation of new organic electrolytes to increase the electrochemical window and security. Asymmetric or hybrid systems are other avenues to explore.”.Our goal is to double the energy density of nowadays symmetrical carbon ECs, i.e from 5 to 10 Wh/kg or 7 to 15 Wh/L. Unlike most of todays research efforts which aim at replacing carbon by other materials (oxides, nitrides, etc...), thus leading to drastic changes in fabrication process, we propose to keep the carbon electrode and simply add electroactive molecules that will be anchored at the surface of carbon, thus adding a faradic component to the double layer capacitance of carbon. This concept is not new since it has been developed for more than 5 years by the partners of this consortium as well as by other teams. However, most of the work has been done in aqueous based electrolytes. The Technology Readiness Level (TRL) is at stage 2 (Invention begins, practical applications can be invented, applications are speculative). Our goal is to apply the current knowledge to the development of devices in organic based electrolytes, and to push TRL level to stage 4 (Basic technological components are integrated to establish that they will work together), being able at the end of the project to give prototype cells to companies for initiating stage 5 of TRL (Component validation in relevant environment). Subsequently the present project is dedicated to technological developments. We want to improve the energy density of carbon-based devices in organic electrolyte by two fold. This will be achieved by keeping the same cell voltage (or slightly increasing it), almost the same double layer capacitance (EDLC) of carbon electrodes but providing an extra Faradaic capacity (and not capacitance since it is purely Faradaic) to both carbon electrodes by functionalizing the surface of carbon with judiciously chosen electroactive molecules. This concept has been successfully applied to aqueous based electrolyte using quinone based functionalized carbons. The choice of the electroactive molecules (multi-electron processes are preferred to single electron process, low molecular weight is needed, adequate active electrochemical window…), the choice of the carbon (large surface area, adequate porosity not too much affected by molecular grafting on the surface, etc…), the interaction between the molecules and carbon powder (high grafting yield, etc..) and finally the behavior of modified carbon electrodes in different organic (or ionic liquid) based electrolytes are the key points that control the final performance of the modified carbon electrodes. These requirements correspond to the 5 tasks of the project. Doubling the energy density must be achieved while keeping high power capability and long term cycling efficiency which are the bottlenecks of the proposed technology. For this purpose, a consortium gathering 4 academic laboratories (including a Canadian partner) has been set up. The 4 labs have been working together for more than 12 years with more than 30 common papers and communications and already 5 common PhD and post-docs. The consortium will take benefit from the belonging of the French labs to the French Network on Energy Storage (RS2E - http://www.energie-rs2e.com/fr) to get access to prototyping facilities to lead the concept to 1000F cells.