The Islamic banking and financial industry is in full rise. Its growth rate is with two digits since more than one decade. It causes the curiosity of the authorities, of the professionals of the sector like those of the academics. Becoming aware of that, the University Robert Schuman decided to undertake research on this subject. Accordingly, it organized an international conference on January 11, 2008 with the collaboration of the Center of the Law of the Enterprise (CDE) and the team of the Center Company, Law and Religion in Europe (SDRE). This conference reinforced our will to continue research Islamic bank finance. This project, will be associated, in addition to the two centers previously mentioned, the Research Laboratory in Management and Economy (LARGE) and many academic and professional. Our research leaves one the principles pivot of Islamic finance, that of the prohibition of the interest (ribâ), i.e. neither to lend, nor to borrow funds with interest. Other prohibitions exist like that related to uncertainty expresses execution of a transaction (gharar) and the games of chance (to maysir). These transactions should not be the subject of a speculation. In addition to this base of prohibition, the ethics of Islamic finance deviates from any investment related of near or by far to the industry of alcohol, with porcine and bovine industry not halal, with the production of film leading to the forfeiture human being (pornography, films subversive with regard to the young public, etc), with the armament, as well as the companies of which the debt ratio to interest is higher than 30 or 33%. Moreover, the legal safety of the financial transactions Islamic is guaranteed by the following rule: any financing and any investment must be leaned with a tangible credit such as the goods movable or real, tangible or intangible. Acting of France, several fields of research will be studied of which heard saving and right in broad manner. On the ground economic, for example, the new approach, Islamic, will have to show its efficiency and its capacity to be adapted to an increasingly competing economic environment. The question arises thus of how knowing industry banking and financial Islamic will contribute to the economic development (creation of new jobs, innovations industrial, participation pronounced or not in such branch of industry, to rationalize the international exchanges, to dam up poverty, etc). Since the crises animate the markets, the companies, especially the French, must face the shortages of liquidities which result primarily in restrictive conditions of granting of credit by the banks. Indeed, the Islamic banks and financial institutions have of an abundant liquidity because of the absence of financial instruments and placements in adequacy with their ethics and an efficient legal framework which would make safe the transactions. On the legal level, the project aims at taking an explicit position on the compatibility of Islamic finance to the principles of secularity. The researchers of the SDRE will be brought to bring the legal and sociological solutions adapted. And those of the CDE will examine all the juridical and financial mechanisms related to Islamic finance, assisted by the LARGE and by all the other collaborators. The project also proposes to work out new economic theories and of search for solutions innovating for contributors and applicants of capital in accordance with the requirements of the national and Islamic laws.

The project is dedicated to the study of creative and receptive processes in music. It revolves around a close interaction among three complementary areas of high-level expertise: a) (ethno)musicological field studies; b) music perception and cognition and c) computational modelling. More precisely, the study will focus on oral/aural creativity in Mediterranean traditional cultures. The passing of the music industry into the digital era offers unforeseen opportunities for problems in analysis, management and control of musical content. The development of tools for systematic, detailed and automated analyses of musical corpora responds to a need that is both musicological and industrial. Efficient management of musical content requires taking into account perceptual and cognitive characteristics, as well as their cultural and anthropological roots. A detailed understanding of the vectors of creativity governing musical practice is also necessary. They can be observed and analysed in the traditional universe of oral tradition, where the act of creation is not as "fixed" as in written music. Further, all traditions naturally change and evolve, and are thus creative: by definition, current creative practice is always conceived on the basis of a received heritage, which stimulates invention, rather than inhibiting it. The methodological organisation of the project is based on an interactive dialogue between anthropological survey and psychological experimentation, on the one hand, and musical analysis and cognitive modelling, on the other. A computer implementation will exploit the potential offered by the modelling and, most importantly, will generate an advanced tool for musical analysis. This tool will be conceptual, experimental and practical at the same time and will allow for the exploitation of a diversity of musical genres and knowledge. Rich in musical, cultural, pedagogical and economical potential, it will reveal the creativity associated with any given musical gesture in a formalised and systematic way by discovering new elements that are brought to collective knowledge (improvisation style, formal typologies, melodic patterns, etc.). This approach will also bring to light phenomena of cultural intermixing and the interbreeding of musical languages, as much in "art" as in "popular" music. This achievement will create a path toward a potentially new form of transcultural creativity, by bringing about an original crossbreeding between art and science, or in other words between the "spirit of geometry" and the "spirit of refinement" (Blaise Pascal).