• Canada
• French National Research Agency (ANR) close
• OA Publications Mandate: No close

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.

Climate change has triggered fundamental modifications of marine biotopes in the Arctic Ocean (AO). The decrease in the extent of the ice pack during summer has led to a 20% increase in pan-Arctic primary production (PP) over the last decade. Phytoplankton blooms now occur earlier in several parts of the AO. In other parts, the structure of the phytoplankton community is shifting toward smaller species, typical of more oligotrophic conditions and some species found in warmer waters now migrate into the Arctic Ocean. Phytoplankton grow in the top tens of meters of both ice-free and ice-covered waters. The phytoplankton spring bloom (PSB) that develops at the ice-edge accounts for >50% of annual primary production in the AO, and is generally associated with both large energy transfer to higher trophic levels and export of carbon to the bottom. As well, the culture, health and economic capacity building of Northerners are closely associated with marine resources supported by the PSB. The Arctic PSB develops in the seasonally-covered ice zone (SIZ), the extent of which is expected to increase significantly during the next years, possibly over the whole AO as early as in 2030. How the PSB will actually evolve in this context is unknown. Will it span over the entire AO, and thereby make the AO ecosystems more productive? Will the ongoing modifications in physical properties of the AO rather limit the PSB and PP in general? How will biodiversity respond to and/or impact on those changes? To be able to answer these questions, it is necessary to understand in great detail and quantitatively the physical, chemical and biological processes involved in the preconditioning, development and decline of the PSB. Because this is a transient phenomenon occurring in a remote, complex and harsh environment, such a detailed understanding has not yet been achieved. The general objective of this research project is to understand the dynamics of the PSB and determine its role in the Arctic Ocean of tomorrow, including for human populations. More specifically, we want to 1) understand the key physical, chemical and biological processes that govern the PSB, 2) identify the key phytoplankton species involved in the PSB and model their growth under various environmental conditions, and 3) predict the fate of the PSB and related carbon transfer through the food web and toward the bottom sediments over the next decades. First, a PSB event will be monitored during 2015 in the Baffin Bay from its onset under melting sea ice in May to its conclusion within the seasonal ice zone in July. The distribution of relevant physical, chemical and biological properties will be described at various time and space scales using a fleet of profiling floats and gliders and an autonomous underwater vehicle, all equipped with a suite of physical and bio-optical sensors. Process studies will be conducted from an ice camp and then from a research icebreaker to document phytoplankton growth, nutrient assimilation and the transfer of carbon through the food web and toward the sediment. Second, key phytoplankton species will be isolated and grown in the laboratory under various conditions to model their response to environmental factors and to understand their succession during spring. Third, a coupled physical-biological model will be optimized for simulating the PSB in the Arctic Ocean and for predicting changes in phytoplankton communities and food web dynamics. In parallel, past and present trends in the intensity and spatial distribution of the PSB will be documented using a paleoceanography approach, and using remote sensing. Finally, interviews and bilateral discussion with local Inuit communities will enable the documentation of changing marine productivity from a social perspective and feed into a multi-scale integrated analysis of environment-human interactions.

The main research objective is to document how inequalities in ageing – such as those between the rich and the poor and those between men and women – have changed across successive birth cohorts, and how public policies aiming to strengthen the fiscal sustainability ofwelfare systems have counteracted or accentuated these trends. This project will rely on data and reforms carried out in five countries encompassing North America, Western Europe and Scandinavia and carefully chosen to ensure a wide span of institutional arrangements in areas such as labour markets, social security and private pensions: Canada, France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. First, we will document recent trends in life-expectancy and healthy ageing inequality. Our overall objective is to bring about a more complete and multi-faceted picture of recent trends in ageing inequalities across countries from North America and Europe. For France and Sweden, we will use administrative data to combine information on income, occupation, residence and death records and construct detailed measures of mortality inequalities, and assess how these have changed across recent cohorts. We will then carry out a cross-country analysis of the income-mortality gradient using recent estimates for Canada, Germany, the UK, and the US. The objective is to exploit crosscountry differences to dig deeper into the factors which could explain variations in inequalities of life expectancy. Using survey data on health at older ages in Europe, and specific surveys for France and Sweden, we will estimate inequalities of healthy ageing by gender and socio-economic background. We will provide estimates of how inequalities of disability-free life-expectancy are changing over time. Using Canadian data, we will estimate how the use of long-term care varies by socio-demographic factors. Second, we go beyond describing trends in inequalities by looking at the effects that current policies have on redistributive trends. More precisely, we will analyse how pension reforms have contributed to reduce, or increase, these inequalities in ageing, using cases from France, Sweden and the UK. Combining estimates on the income-mortality gradient with careful estimation and simulation of the impact of pension systems, we will estimate redistributive patterns of public old-age provision, and analyse how pension reforms have altered this redistribution. We will distinguish between static analyses and analyses that do allow for behavioural responses, notably changes to retirement patterns. In particular, we will elicit how strategies to extend career length counteract or aggravate inequalities. In addition to public pension reforms, we will consider reforms to private pension provision in Sweden and in the UK, through estimating the distributional impact of auto-enrolment of most employees into workplace pensions (UK) and occupational pension schemes (Sweden). Third, we will study whether, and how, the looming increase in care needs generates additional inequalities for those giving care and for people in need of care. Recent research has highlighted how care needs, formal care take-up and informal care provision are largely influenced by socio-economic background. We will contribute to this body of research by analysing how reforms impact inequalities in care responsibilities in Canada and Germany. In addition, we will analyse how the gender gap in informal care – elderly care is overwhelmingly provided by women – is related to gender inequalities in the labour market and the system of pension provision using European data. Moreover, we will use data from Canada and Germany to estimate models of long-term care use explicitly considering inequalities in socioeconomic background. Finally, we will exploit reforms to the pension and long-term care systems in Germany to assess how likely they are to impact inequalities in informal care provision.

On coastal reefs (0-50 m depth), perhaps more than anywhere in the world, natural and human systems share a history of strong dependence that must be taken into account to maintain, on one side, the long-term human development and well-being, and, on the other side, biodiversity. This biodiversity translates directly into services. Reef fishes support the nutritional and economic needs of people in many poor countries while hosting the major part of marine life on Earth (25%). However world's reefs are severely over-fished or have degraded habitats. Avoiding or escaping this negative spiral and identifying the most vulnerable reef social-ecological systems on Earth are among the major issues that scientists and managers are facing today. The project aims to move beyond the typical over-simplified ‘human impacts’ storyline and focus on uncovering new solutions based on a prospective and integrated modelling approach of reef social-ecological systems at the global scale with three objectives: 1.Quantifying five key services provided by reef fishes: (i) biomass production providing livelihoods, (ii) nutrient cycling that affects productivity, (iii) regulation of the carbon cycle that affects CO2 concentration, (iv) cultural value that sustains well-being tourism activities and (v) nutritional value insuring food security. 2.Determine the conditions (socioeconomic and environmental) under which these ecosystem services are currently maintained or threatened. Based on a global database of fish surveys over more than 5,000 reefs that encompass wide gradients of environments, human influences (fishing impact), and habitats, we will estimate the boundaries or thresholds beyond which these ecosystem services may collapse. 3.Predict the potential futures of these services and social-ecological systems under various global change scenarios. Using multiple integrated scenarios (human demography, economic development and climate change) and predictive models we will simulate the dynamics of shallow reef ecosystems and their ability to deliver services during the next century.

The focus of the ANR proposal is to launch a network joining European and non-European teams working on local development in the highlands, in order to submit a proposal to RISE (Research and Innovation Staff Exchange) Marie Curie Program/H2020 early 2017. The objectives of the RISE proposal will be (i) share and debate the diverse initiatives and innovations of local development in the highlands, (ii) develop specific capacity building focused on different types of stakeholders and local people, (iii) participate in policymaking through relevant suggestions, monitoring and assessment of actions and (iv) strengthen a recognized European competence on the local development in the highlands. The partnership for the ANR proposal, and consequently for the RISE proposal, is based four countries of European Union (Austria, France, Portugal and United Kingdom), two other European countries (Norway and Switzerland) and non-European countries in Mediterranean (Morocco and Lebanon), the Americas (Argentina, Canada, Equator, Peru, the United States) and Eastern Asia (China and Vietnam). Research question is adaptation process and resilience of high mountain societies to global change, especially initiatives and innovations focused on local development. Several initiatives of local development in the highlands were implemented in the countries of the European Union, although the concepts have sometimes been built in other areas, as for example natural parks, reserves of biodiversity, reserves of biosphere, “regional” parks, winter and summer slow tourism, many small agribusiness factories for cheeses, liquors, fruits, etc. Diverse reasons justified these implementations in the European Union, especially the specific policies made at national and European level, which strongly incentivized and supported these initiatives, in order to reduce the disadvantages of these regions, mainly due to their weak access and their long distance to decisions centers. Indeed, focused on the sustainable development, the specific national and European policies significantly impacted local development in European highlands, compared with non-European highlands where economic issues and national interest usually lead their development, especially in developing countries. Moreover, the supportive context for local development initiatives lead to new initiatives and also innovations focused on the improvement of these initiatives and the building of new initiatives, including in policymaking. In other words, based on the European Union experience, the implementation of local development could lead to new steps of local development. It is a research hypothesis to be verified in European Union and tested in the other zones. A priori, for the method of the RISE proposal, we suggest using the concept of co-viability, which includes both viability and its regulation, to analyze resilience factors at different scales, representations and local knowledge, access to resources and policymaking in global change context. This point has to be debate with the partner in the next months. In terms of activity to be developed in 2016 in order to build the RISE proposal, firstly there are five visits to each of the European partners in order to better share the common objectives of the RISE proposal, select the local development initiatives for the compare analysis and draft a concept note of the RISE proposal. Secondly, a workshop joining the leaders of European partners with 3-4 leaders of non-European teams will allow to better define the contents of the proposal and to draft a first version.

Background Different countries have launched national reporting programs on hospitals based on quality and safety measurements. Beyond technical definitions, a key-issue is to ensure that an effective improvement is ensured due to the implementation of these measurements. However, the hypothesis that an indicator spontaneously induces such an improvement is not so clear. During the implementation phase can be considered a relation between the indicator, the hospital‘s organisation of work, and the actors who composed it. On this relation depends the real use of the indicator, and consequently its impact in terms of improvement. This project addresses this issue of the use of quality and safety measurements. Objectives The objectives are twofold: 1. Analysis of the indicator as a pertinent assessment system for improving quality 2. Analysis of the indicators‘ roles. The objective is to understand how the relation between quality and safety measurements, sensemaking given by professionals, and the organisation of work generates different roles. Methods The field of analysis is based on a French national program of indicators, Compaqh, which tests 43 indicators on a hospital panel (n= 44 à 100, depending on the topic). The methodology is qualitative, comprehensive, and comparative with a Canadian initiative. The research team is composed of representatives of two disciplinary fields: management science and psychology of work. The duration of the research is three years. Two types of seminars are considered: empirical (follow-up of the data collection process) and contributory (data analysis). Expected Results This project can produce a new knowledge on the relation between quality and safety measurements, sensemaking and organisation of work. It can also help to understand how measurements can construct an adequate representation of the organisation of work. Based on the results, operational recommendations could be developed in order to: - Identify quality and safety topics that can be assessed through measurement - Consider appropriate actions of quality improvement - Optimise the design of Quality and Safety indicators as well as the implantation phase

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.