30.03.2022
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-22, has just announced the winners of several awards. The Outstanding Paper Award was given to a team featuring PR[AI]RIE Deputy Scientific Director Jamal Atif and PR[AI]RIE PhD student Virginie Do for a paper entitled “Online certification of preference-based fairness for personalized recommender systems”. Congratulations!
Read the full paper here.
18.02.2022
A groundbraking study on methane emissions, based on Kayrros data, has been published in a top-tier scientific journal “Science”, and attracted extensive media coverage and recognition from the French President Emmanuel Macron.
The study provides first statistical characterisation of methane ultra-emitters from oil and gas. It is based on Kayrros data which provides the most comprehensive measure to date of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Methane emissions from oil and gas production and transmission represent a significant contribution to climate change. These emissions comprise sporadic releases of large amounts of methane during maintenance operations or equipment failures not accounted for in current inventory estimates. The study shows a direct relationship between ultra-emitters monitored and measured from space and smaller methane leaks detected by local sensors and aircraft surveys.
The study contributor, Kayrros co-founder and scientific director is Alexandre d’Aspremont, PR[A]IRIE chair. Congratulations!
Read the article.
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
09.02.2022
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!
08.02.2022
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.
01.12.2021
As part of her trip to France for 4th Paris Peace Forum, Kamala Harris visited the Institut Pasteur on November 9, 2021. She met several scientists, including PRAIRIE chair Jean-Baptiste Masson, who is exploring the potential of new imaging technologies for facilitating and improving the diagnosis of some forms of cancer.
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.
18.11.2021
Chloé-Agathe Azencott was awarded the first Young AI Woman Engineer prize at the closing event of France is AI.
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):
10.11.2021
Last Tuesday 9th November PR[AI]RIE Institute founded by CNRS, Inria, Institut Pasteur, Université de Paris and Université PSL celebrated its 2nd anniversary!
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
El Mouhoub Mouhoud, Président de l’Université Paris Dauphine – PSL
Alain Fuchs, Président de l’Université PSL
Eric Brousseau, Professeur à l’Université Paris Dauphine – PSL
———
Round table “The Challenges of AI: Big Data”
Emmanuel Bacry, Directeur de recherche CNRS, directeur scientifique du Health Data Hub, chaire PR[AI]RIE
Vincent Bouatou, Deputy Director, Strategic Innovation, Public Security & Identity Division, Idemia
Nicolas Champetier, Senior Vice President in Advanced Engineering for Propulsion Systems, Stellantis
Simon Holmes, AI Project Director, Faurecia
———
Round table: “The Challenges of AI : Large Models”
Igor Carron, CEO, LightOn, Paris Machine Learning Applications Group Meetup co-founder
Kyunghyun Cho, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University, Senior Director of Frontier Research at Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED)
Douglas Eck, Senior Research Director, Google Research
Cordelia Schmid, Research Director at Inria, member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, PR[AI]RIE chair
———
Round table “The Impact of AI on Society”
Justine Cassell, Senior researcher at Inria, member of the CNNUM, PR[AI]RIE chair
Christoph Lütge, Professor at Technische Universität München (TUM), Director of the TUM Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence
Hervé Moulin, D.J. Robertson Chair in Economics at the University of Glasgow, Chaire Blaise Pascal de la Region Île-de-France
———
Round table “AI and Health: Challenges and Opportunities”
Francis Bach, Directeur de Recherche Inria, Membre de l’Académie des Sciences, chaire PR[AI]RIE
Leo Grady, CEO, Paige.AI
Dominique Le Guludec, Présidente du collège de la Haute Autorité de Santé
Clara Nordon, Directrice de La Fondation MSF
Arnaud Rosier, CEO et co-fondateur d’Implicity, rythmologue et docteur en informatique médicale
———
Future of AI
Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Facebook, Silver Professor at New York University (NYU), ACM Turing Award Laureate
Raj Reddy, University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and Moza Bint Nasser Chair in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, ACM Turing Award Laureate
———
Round table “Robots : from Laboratory to Industry”
Geoffrey Bouquot, CTO & VP Strategy du groupe Valeo
Emmanuel Chiva, Directeur de l’Agence de l’innovation de défense
Martial Hebert, Pr., Doyen de la School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Jean-Paul Laumond, Directeur de recherche CNRS, membre de l’académie des sciences, membre de l’académie des technologies, chaire PR[AI]RIE
Alice Memang, Co-fondatrice & Directrice d’exploitation de Delfox
———
Round table “AI: an Innovation Lever for All Fields?”
Stéphanie Allassonnière, Pr. Université de Paris, Co-fondatrice de Sonio, chaire PR[AI]RIE
Jean-Michel Dalle, Directeur Général, Agoranov
Xavier Lazarus, Fondateur associé d’Elaia
Sophie Paturle-Guesnerot, Cofondatrice et Managing Partner de Demeter IM
Bernard-Louis Roques, Co-fondateur et Directeur Général, Truffle Capital
———
Closing
Jean-Luc Beylat, President Nokia Bell Labs France, représentant du club des mécènes de PRAIRIE
Jean Ponce, Directeur Scientifique de PR[AI]RIE
Isabelle Ryl, Directrice de PR[AI]RIE
——
This highly successful event was followed by a scientific workshop which gathered over 200 participants.
Happy anniversary PR[AI]RIE!!!
25.10.2021
The 1st meeting of the inter institutes working group on "IA for biomedical imaging" took place in Grenoble on 19 and 20 October.
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!
07.10.2021
On 4th and 5th October 2021 delegation from PRAIRIE made a visit to École Navale, the French Naval Academy located in Lanvéoc-Poulmic, near Brest.
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.
09.09.2021
Olivier Colliot and Ninon Burgos, PRAIRIE chairs, have published the first paper using medical imaging data from the clinical routine data warehouse of the Greater Paris Hospital (Entrepôt de données de santé, AP-HP). The data warehouse contains all medical images from patients hospitalized within the Greater Paris area hospitals of AP-HP.
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.
07.09.2021
Congratulations to Quentin Cohen-Solal (postdoc PRAIRIE) and Tristan Cazenave (supervisor, PRAIRIE chair) who have won 11 gold medals at the 24th Computer Olympiad!
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.
28.05.2021
Meet Justine Cassell, PRAIRIE chair, credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using both language and nonverbal behavior.
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.
27.05.2021
While the use of digital tools has greatly intensified in recent years, the unprecedented lockdowns of the past year have reinforced their omnipresence. The first theme addressed by the National Digital Council concerns the place of knowledge in the digital empowerment of citizens.
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).
17.05.2021
PRAIRIE is excited to welcome onboard 6 new “tremplins” - young springboards researchers with exceptional scientific potential in the field of artificial intelligence.
The awardees appointed for the initial period of 3 years are:
Congratulations and welcome onboard!
05.05.2021
Created in response to a call for projects of the SIA (Société des Ingénieurs de l'Automobile), the “IA Project Manager” training will be based on the research excellence of the PRAIRIE Institute, and the experience of Dauphine - PSL and Mines Paris - PSL in continuing education.
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).
23.04.2021
PRAIRIE Master’s fellowships are accepting applications for four attractive programs:
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.
22.04.2021
"If you can't come to Oupoco, Oupoco will come to you".
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.
Congratulations to Gabriel Peyré, PRAIRIE chair, who has been awarded the prestigious CNRS silver medal!
| 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. |
04.03.2021
"We should review the very abstract teachings that are taught at schools and show students that math and physics can be useful also to regulate traffic, pollution, ecology, endangered wildlife and help doctors in their diagnostics." Read an exclusive interview with Stéphanie Allassonnière, PRAIRIE chair, which appeared in "Computer Vision News".
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!