The article entitled « Petabase-scale sequence alignment catalyses viral discovery » by PR[AI]RIE chair Rayan Chikhi and a group of other researchers has been published in “Nature” and commented by “Science”. Both magazines are the world’s top academic journals and cover the full range of scientific disciplines. Papers are accepted from authors around the world and competition to publish is very intense!

The article presents a new cloud architecture for very large scale analysis of genomics data. The researchers mined petabytes of data with highly optimized DNA-to-protein alignment and discovered a new family of coronaviruses, as well as 10 times more viral species than previously known.

Congratulation on this success!

More in the following news:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/supercomputer-virus-study-disease-1.6345158

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/AMAZON-COM-INC-12864605/news/Amazon-com-Scientists-discover-nine-new-coronaviruses-in-11-days-using-AWS-37664212/

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-team-coronavirus-species.html

https://www.lesoleil.com/2022/02/01/un-projet-decouvre-neuf-nouveaux-coronavirus-et-decuple-le-nombre-de-virus-a-arn-a5b37071840f17711d7746167e0b7586

Big success of Karthik Bhargavan, PR[AI]RIE chair, who was awarded an ERC Proof of Concept Grant called Cryspen.

Cryptographic mechanisms are crucial to the security of our digital lives but their design and implementation remains notoriously difficult and error-prone. With the help of two ERC Grants, Karthikeyan Bhargavan and the Prosecco team at Inria have developed state-of-the-art formal verification techniques that can be applied to real-world cryptographic software.

In particular, they used these techniques to help design and analyze the TLS 1.3 protocol standard, as well to build the HACL* verified cryptographic library, code from which has been incorporated in mainstream software projects including Mozilla Firefox, the Linux Kernel, the Tezos  Blockchain, the WireGuard VPN, and the ElectionGuard voting system.

The goal of this new ERC Proof of Concept grant is to build upon these landmark research results and to commercialise the associated know-how through a new company called Cryspen. Cryspen will build a verified cryptographic software stack and an associated verification toolchain that is well-documented and easy to use for security developers. The company will offer consulting and support contracts for this stack as well as software contracts for developing new cryptographic applications, ranging from secure messaging system to privacy-preserving machine learning.

Cryspen is co-founded by Franziskus Kiefer (CEO), Karthikeyan Bhargavan, and Jonathan Protzenko. Contact for more information: info@cryspen.com.

Congratulations!

European ERC Starting Grant is a prestigious and highly selective grant awarded to young scientists (two to seven years after completing their PhD), which allows them to set up a research team around an original subject of major technological importance.

Umut Simsekli, PR[AI]RIE springboard researcher, will lead the ERC Dynasty project. His aim is to develop a mathematical theory to better understand the properties of deep-learning algorithms, one of the major challenges facing the AI community.

Congratulations!

Read more about the winner and his project here.

During this visit, Jean-Baptiste Masson, Principal investigator of the Decision and Bayesian Computation Laboratory (Pasteur – CNRS), AVATAR MEDICAL CSO and Co-founder, had the opportunity to showcase to Kamala Harris a demo of Diva- the technology behind AVATAR. He explained how this new imaging technology was facilitating the improvement of the diagnosis of some forms of cancer.

The Vice President was particularly impressed by the Diva technology and commented how this project resonated with her on account of her mother’s involvement in breast cancer research in partnership with a team at the Institut Pasteur back in the 1980s.

On this trip to France, Kamala Harris leveraged the opportunity to reiterate how international collaboration is useful to foster innovation. AVATAR MEDICAL is a good example of how technology allows us to go beyond borders in the fight against cancer.

Video

More info: https://www.pasteur.fr/en/home/research-journal/news/covid-19-kamala-harris-vice-president-united-states-salutes-institut-pasteur-s-response-tackling

The prize was created by Tilder, Challenges and France Digitale and aims at highlighting French feminine talents in artificial intelligence and creating a gallery of role models for women in AI. It is awarded to a woman engineer in AI, living in France, who is recognized for her achievements throughout her career, her ability to inspire others, and her implication in the artificial intelligence ecosystem.

For this first edition, jury members were unanimous in their decision to give the award to Chloé-Agathe Azencott. Congratulations!

Read more (in French):

1er Prix de la Jeune Ingénieure en Intelligence Artificielle – Tilder x Challenges x France Digitale

Le 1er Prix de la Jeune Ingénieure en IA est attribué à Chloé-Agathe Azencott

The event PR[AI]RIE Day was hosted by Université Paris Dauphine – PSL. Inspiring talks by top level researchers, including two Turing Award Laureates: Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and Silver Professor at NYU and Raj Reddy, University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as PR[AI]RIE industry partners, attracted almost 500 attendees. 

PR[AI]RIE Day offered a great opportunity to evaluate what has been achieved so far by the Institute but also to look into the future and possible new collaborations.

Below are a few snapshots from the day:

Opening of PR[AI]RIE Day

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Round table “The Challenges of AI: Big Data”

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Round table: “The Challenges of AI : Large Models”

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Round table “The Impact of AI on Society”

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Round table “AI and Health: Challenges and Opportunities”

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Future of AI

Video

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Round table “Robots : from Laboratory to Industry”

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Round table “AI: an Innovation Lever for All Fields?”

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Closing

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This highly successful event was followed by a scientific workshop which gathered over 200 participants.

Happy anniversary PR[AI]RIE!!!

Representatives of three 3IA institutes: 3IA Côte d’Azur, MIAI@Grenoble Alpes and PRAIRIE took part in the meeting. Looking forward to new scientific collaborations which will emerge from these interesting exchanges!

The French Naval Academy is in charge of the education of the officers of the French Navy. While the main objective of the school is to train the cadets, Ecole navale also develops an important research activity oriented to the maritime and naval environments.

The purpose of the visit was to explore cooperation opportunities between PRAIRIE researchers and École Navale in the area of Artificial Intelligence.

In particular, it contains over 100,000 3D T1 brain MRIs. The paper describes an AI method that performs automatic quality control of medical images, which is a prerequisite for any subsequent analyses. This has a potentially very high impact. Indeed, clinical routine data warehouses, which contain data from millions of patients, have a huge potential for training AI models. Nevertheless, the quality of imaging data is heterogeneous and thus quality control is mandatory but is not feasible manually at such a large scale. The paper was published in Medical Image Analysis, the leading journal in AI for medical imaging: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1361841521002644. It is also freely available on HAL: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03154792v4.

This work was done as a collaboration between the ARAMIS project-team (CNRS, Inria, Inserm, Sorbonne University, Paris Brain Institute) and the EDS team of AP-HP. This work was also supported by the Abeona Foundation.

Quentin Cohen-Solal and Tristan Cazenave are winners in the following games: Surakarta, Hex 11, Hex 13, Hex 19, Havannah 8, Havannah 10, Othello, Amazons, Breakthrough, Canadian Draughts and Brazilian Draughts. They have entered many programs that use the same Deep Reinforcement Learning system. This system is original and stands out from Alpha Zero standard approaches in many ways, including the search algorithm and generation of training data. This is the first time that the same program wins so many gold medals! More details are explained in this paper accepted at the Workshop Reinforcence Learning in Games in AAAI this year.

Full results from the Computer Olympiad are available here.

Justine Cassell investigates the role that the ECA can play in children’s lives, as a virtual peer support for learning.

Invisible companions are closely related to a child’s environment, and most results from psychological studies agree that imaginary friends perform a positive function and promote children’s development.

“With imaginary friends, there is no scenario, the child’s imagination is not limited. This greatly helps them develop their creativity and build their ideal interlocutor, someone who is always there to listen to them. In my lab, we develop our virtual peers in such a way that it is difficult to gender them (boy or girl). We do this on purpose, so that the children can project onto themselves their own idea of who they want to talk to. So virtual peers play a bit of the role of a virtual friend.” says Justine Cassell.

Read more about this fascinating work here.

Recently the Council has published its first report on the topic. This work was led among others by Justine Cassell, PRAIRIE chair and a newly elected member of the French National Digital Council.

Justine Cassell says: “Digital tools are great for school education, where they complement traditional methods, and also for learning outside of school. What is often overlooked is that the very use of digital technology is a form of learning in itself, as it can enable peer-to-peer work. To benefit more, it is important to have a good digital culture and access to technologies that allow collective work. Thanks to this, we reduce the risk that the digital revolution will transform citizens into consumers of services, enslaved to technology.”

Read the press release and full report (in French).

The awardees appointed for the initial period of 3 years are:

• Rachel Bawden
• Laura Cantini
• Justin Carpentier
• Clément Royer
• Umut Simsekli
• Christian Lyngby Vestergaard

Congratulations and welcome onboard!

The new training program will help improve the skills of employees in the French automotive industry in the field of AI. They are strategic for the competitiveness of the French automotive industry and its technological independence.

The training offered by Université PSL will be mostly given by PRAIRIE chair holders, as well as by recognized professionals in the field. The 5-week program spread over 5 months will cover all the scientific and technical aspects of AI.

More information here (in French).

PRAIRIE Master’s fellowships are accepting applications for four attractive programs:

• MASH | PSL
• IASD | PSL
• Bioentrepreneur Program | Paris Descartes
• MVA | Paris Descartes (Health track)

The fellowships are available for M1 or M2 years and are awarded on academic criteria. Depending on the rules of each university, the fellowship amount can be maximum 1000€ per month.

Please find here the forms which need to be attached to your application dossier.

Discover Oupoco – the Poetry box, a new project which allows to generate sonnets from poems of French authors. Oupoco incorporates several thousand poems by 19th century poets, which were analyzed automatically by natural language analysis techniques. The project is coordinated by PRAIRIE chair, Thierry Poibeau.

Watch the presentation video and read more about the project here.

The silver medal is presented to researchers for the originality, quality, and importance of their work, which is recognised at national and international level. More information here.

Stéphanie Allassonnière is a Professor of Mathematics at the School of Medicine, University of Paris and associated Professor in the applied Mathematics department of Ecole Polytechnique. She also manages master programs and masterclasses in AI in healthcare. Stéphanie is also the co-founder of Sonio, an AI company developing a companion tool for gynecologists and sonographers to help detect rare fetal disorders.

In the interview she talks about her passions and research path. Don’t miss!

Justine Cassell, PRAIRIE chair, has been elected for a 2 year term. The French National Digital Council is composed of 17 members appointed by the Prime Minister and 4 parliamentarians appointed by the Presidents of the Senate and the National Assembly.

Formed in 2011, the French National Digital Council is an institution which is independent from the Government and whose mission is to formulate opinions on any question relative to the impact of digital technology on society and the economy.

The popular and impressive “automatic language processing” applications can generate so natural texts that they are often indistinguishable from human content. How do they work? What are the risks they may pose? Read the latest article (in French) in “The Conversation” by Thierry Poibeau, PRAIRIE chair.