This global recognition highlights individuals whose research publications rank in the top 1% of citations by field and publication year on the Web of Science index.

France ranks 9th worldwide, with 1.8% of the 6,636 researchers listed, while the United States and China lead with 36.4% and 20.4%, respectively. Université Paris Cité tops the list of French institutions with 26 researchers featured, followed by Université Paris-Saclay (24), Sorbonne Université (10), and Aix-Marseille Université (8).

This recognition highlights her exceptional work in AI and machine learning. Schmid’s research, particularly in computer vision, continues to shape the future of artificial intelligence. Cordelia Schmid is a KIT alumna; she studied computer science at the former University of Karlsruhe from 1987 to 1992.

With the annually awarded Heinrich Hertz Guest Professorship, The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and KIT Freundeskreis und Fördergesellschaft e.V. honor prominent figures from academia, industry, government or the arts for their scientific and cultural achievements and contributions.

For more details, visit the full article here.

The Casper project seeks to revolutionize how optimization algorithms are certified, ensuring they provide dependable and accurate solutions across various industries. The research of Adrien Taylor focuses on developing new methods to guarantee the performance of these algorithms, a critical need in fields like logistics, finance, and engineering, where errors can result in significant costs and risks.

With this funding, Adrien Taylor will explore techniques that systematize the certification process, creating algorithms that consistently meet rigorous performance standards. These advancements promise to equip industries with reliable tools for improved decision-making, reducing uncertainties and enhancing efficiency.

Learn more about the Casper project and its potential impact on industry innovation here.

Justin Carpenter has received an ERC grant to support his research on autonomous robots. Today, robotic systems work very well in factories because they evolve in highly controlled environments in which robots are required to perform the same task over and over again. However, getting these robots to interact with humans or complex environments remains impossible. Justin Carpentier aims to help robots move around and interact with their environments without human help, enhancing robot autonomy globally. The grant will allow him to explore new algorithms and machine-learning methods, which will help robots become more agile and adaptable.

This research could impact many industrial and societal domains, from manufacturing to healthcare. Read more here.

Their achievement this year follows a record-breaking performance in 2023, where they won 16 gold medals, surpassing their previous record from 2021. This brings their total to an incredible 48 gold medals since their debut at the Olympiad in 2020!

Cazenave and Cohen-Solal have excelled in a variety of games, including Amazons, Hex, Breakthrough, and Canadian Draughts, thanks to their unique AI system. What sets their approach apart is the innovative Deep Reinforcement Learning system they developed, which diverges from standard methods like AlphaZero. Their system excels in search algorithms and the generation of training data, leading to unprecedented success across many different games.

Their record-breaking performance is a milestone that will be difficult to surpass, setting a new standard for future competitors.

Full results from the Computer Olympiad are available here.

On July 11 Stéphane Mallat, Pr[AI]rie chair, has been awarded the prestigious title of “Officier de la Légion d’honneur” (Officer of the French Legion of Honor). The announcement recognizes Mallat’s groundbreaking contributions to the fields of wavelet theory, signal processing, and machine learning.

The Légion d’honneur, established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, is the highest French order of merit, awarded for excellent civil or military conduct. Mallat’s promotion to Officier underscores his exceptional achievements and the impact of his research on modern science and technology.

We are proud to announce that Pr[AI]rie chair Cordelia Schmid won the European Inventor Award 2024 in the “Research” category for her pioneering work with computers and AI. Congratulations!

Watch her story.

Watch replay from the award ceremony.

Get to know other winners.

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The European Inventor Award pays tribute to inventors worldwide. It celebrates those who transform their ideas into technological progress, economic growth or improvements to our daily lives. Launched in 2006, the Award gives inventors the recognition they deserve and, like any good competition, it acts as an incentive for others.

Their paper was entitled “When Your Cousin Has the Right Connections: Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction for Related Data-Imbalanced Languages”.

Niyati was an engineer in the ALMANaCH projet-team at Inria Paris for 8 months from October 2022 to June 2023, co-supervised as part of an Inria-DFKI collaboration by Benoît and Rachel for ALMAnaCH and Cristina and Josef at the DFKI in Saarbrücken, Germany.

Congratulations!

CLARA will allow creating the “Center for Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing in System Brain Research” in the Czech Republic, teaming up with a French and a German partner.

For France, the project is led by Olivier Colliot, Pr[AI]rie Chair holder and CNRS Research Director at the Paris Brain Institute. Other partners include the International Neurodegenerative Disorders Research Center (INDRC), the Czech Technical University, the Technical University of Ostrava, St. Anne’s University Hospital (Czech Republic) and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (Germany). Other participants include Pr[AI]rie Chair holder Ninon Burgos and former Pr[AI]rie Chair holder Josef Sivic (now with Czech Technical University).

First contacts that led to this success were made during the Czech-French Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Prague on 12-13 September 2022.

“We are excited by this fundraising, opening a new phase of development for Descartes&Mauss. Our objectives in the coming months are to further develop our commercial footprint and our customer platform – with a big release in the coming weeks, stay tuned !” says Maurice N’diaye, Founder & CEO.

Pr[AI]rie congratulates Descartes & Mauss for this new wave of investment and wishes you great success on this new journey!

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Estblished in 2020, the mission of Sonio is to improve maternal and children’s health. It offers AI solution for prenatal screening and diagnosis.

This is an exciting growth opportunity that will allow to enhance maternal care worldwide. Congratulations and best of luck for this new chapter!

More information.

The results have been announced by President at the Elysée Palace on 21 May.

About PR[AI]RIE-PSAI:

• The project is planned to be launched in September 2025 and it will build on the success of the PRAIRIE Institute, established in 2019.
• It aims to position France as a global leader in AI research, education, and innovation.
• It offers a comprehensive curriculum from undergraduate to doctoral studies, including innovative interdisciplinary programs.
• It focuses on cutting-edge research, increasing the number of AI-focused theses, and expanding into new disciplines, including Humanities and Arts.
• It promotes entrepreneurship with the goal of creating 50 new deep tech startups by 2030.

This is a major milestone fo AI Excellence in France!
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The prestigious Monte-Carlo Woman of the Year Awards recognise the achievements of remarkable women who have made a significant contribution to their communities in their respective fields. The award was created by journalist Cinzia Sgambati-Colman under the high patronage of Prince Albert II of Monaco.

This year’s 12th edition of the Monte-Carlo International Women of the Year award was dedicated to AI and Cybersecurity. Cordelia Schmid, Pr[AI)rie chair, a pioneer in computer vision, received from H.S.H. Princess Stéphanie of Monaco the prize for her entire career. It was presented at the Monaco Women Forum platform on March 22nd. Congratulations!

The other winners are Joint Research Council scientists studying Quantum Technologies (Isabella Cerutti and Petra Scudo) and Louisette Lévy-Soussan Azzoaglio, the president of “Action Innocence Monaco”.

Read more about the award here.

Photos: ©Rosanna Calo

Clément Royer, Pr[AI]rie chair, an associate professor of computer science at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL and a researcher in the MILES team at LAMSADE,  is one of the 5 winners of the call “International Emerging Actions 2023” in computer sciences from the CNRS. This is a call for international mobility and more specifically an initiative aimed at encouraging the exploration of new fields of research and partnerships on an international scale through short-term missions and the organization of working meetings around a shared scientific project. Clément Royer, was rewarded for his project BONUS- Blackbox Optimization with a Novel Use of Subspaces. The project, co-led by Lindon Roberts, lecturer at the University of Sydney, focuses in the use of randomness in algorithms without derivatives, particularly in the presence of constraints on the parameters, which corresponds to both theoretical challenges and practical considerations.

Congratulations on this outstanding achievement!

We are very pleased to announce that Gabriel Peyré, CNRS research director and professor at ENS, Pr[AI]rie chair, received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

Following his 2012 ERC Starting Grant and his 2017 ERC Consolidator Grant, it is therefore the third time the ERC rewards the quality of his project proposals. That’s a remarkable achievement in the research world. His project aims to combine optimal transport and deep learning to make a significant contribution to single-cell genomics.

Congratulations for this prestigious recognition!

The title of the lecture was “Apprendre les langues aux machines”. The replay is available on the College de France website.

Benoît Sagot’s current research focuses on language models, machine translation, the development of linguistic resources and computational linguistics, with a particular interest in French in all its variety and in less resourced languages.

Over 700 people attended these three days of conferences at Université Paris Dauphine – PSL. AI and its impact on law, health, finance, the media and business were discussed in a multi-disciplinary approach by some fifty speakers, including academic experts, institutions and players from the socio-economic sector.

 The Dauphine Digital Days ended with a prize-giving ceremony for the best scientific poster and an evening event.

Replay videos of the event can be found here.

Awarded annually, the Körber European Science Prize honours a distinguished scientist actively conducting research in the fields of either Life Sciences or Physical Sciences in Europe.

Cordelia Schmid is a pioneer in computer-aided image processing. She developed revolutionary new procedures that enable computers to understand image content. Thanks to her algorithms, AI can locate a motif or an object in a database of images within a fraction of a second.

The annual prize of the Institut de France is awarded to French nationals aged 45 or under, on the recommendation of the Académie des Sciences, to encourage the development of science in its most diverse forms.

Rayan Chikhi heads the “Algorithms for biological sequences” team at the Institut Pasteur. He is interested in computer science applied to DNA sequencing data. He recently contributed to the discovery of new species of RNA viruses, including previously unrecorded coronaviruses. He is coordinating a number of national and European research projects to develop new algorithms, particularly for analysing huge databases containing all of the Earth’s genetic diversity.

The video of the awards ceremony, which took place under the dome of the Institut de France on 17 October, is available here. Congratulations!

Every year, the L’Oréal-Unesco Young French Talent Award for Women in Science recognises 35 talented women scientists at PhD and post-doctoral levels, with the purpose to encourage more scientific vocations in the next generation and to combat gender inequalities in science.

Virginie Do is a former PhD student in computer science at META and the Laboratoire d’Analyse et de Modélisation de Systèmes pour l’Aide à la Décision (LAMSADE). This award recognizes her PhD research on Responsible AI.

Congratulations!