The National Digital Council publishes its first report
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.”
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:
Automotive industry and AI: launch of a new training program
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 PSLwill 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.
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
Poetry and AI
"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.
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
Women in Computer Vision: interview with Stéphanie Allassonnière
"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!
11.02.2021
Justine Cassell nominated to the French National Digital Council
On 11 February the French National Digital Council (Conseil national du numérique) announced the list of its new members.
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.
05.02.2021
When AI speaks out
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.
03.02.2021
COFUND “Artificial Intelligence for the Sciences” : Call for PhD projects now open!
Artificial Intelligence for the Sciences (AI4theSciences) is a doctoral program run by Université PSL, within which 26 PhD contracts at the interfaces of artificial intelligence or big data processing are offered.
The students will not only receive a training specific to each PhD project, but they will also take common courses and participate in numerous events. They will all be trained in AI and Machine Learning techniques, in writing articles for science popularization, in Open Science, in cross-disciplinary skills, etc.
The deadline for applications is 26 February. Students admitted will start their PhD work at the beginning of the 2021 academic year.
AI4theSciences is supported and cofunded by the Horizon 2020-Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-COFUND European program.
26.01.2021
Humboldt Research Award for Jérôme Lang
Congratulations to Jérôme Lang , PRAIRIE Chair, who has been granted the Humboldt Research Award!
Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards to internationally leading researchers from abroad, whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or findings have had a lasting effect on their discipline beyond their immediate research area and who are expected to continue producing outstanding research in the future.
As this award comes with funding to spend some time in research departments in Germany, Jérôme Lang will work at the Universität Düsseldorf and Technische Universität Berlin.
21.01.2021
5 gold medals at the Computer Olympiads!
Quentin Cohen-Solal (postdoc PRAIRIE since February 2020) and Tristan Cazenave (supervisor, PRAIRIE chair) won 5 gold medals at the Computer Olympiads in the following games: Othello 10x10, Breakthrough, Surakarta, Amazons, and Clobber.
The programs competing for each of these games use the same zero knowledge reinforcement learning algorithms (fundamentally different from the Alpha Zero algorithms), created by Quentin Cohen-Solal and then improved during the PRAIRIE postdoc. This is the first time that the same algorithms have made it possible to win 5 gold medals at the Computer Olympiads.
18.01.2021
Missed the AI4Health Winter School?
Along with 3IA Côte d’Azur et MIAI Grenoble, PRAIRIE has been the co-organiser of the 1st edition of AI4Health Winter School, which covered the latest advances in the field of data science applied to health.
The presentations from the event are available here.
The AI4Health Winter School gathered more than 450 participants from 30 countries, representing a variety of profiles (60% of students, 20% academics and 20% of private sector professionals).
The General Chair of the event was Emmanuel Bacry, PRAIRIE Chair. Stéphanie Allassonnière, PRAIRIE Chair and Deputy Director, represented PRAIRIE at the opening ceremony.
04.12.2020
The Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture for Cordelia Schmid
The Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture, supported by Microsoft Research, is the premier European award for outstanding achievement in computer science.
Dr Cordelia Schmid was awarded the Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture for her work in computer vision and her fundamental contributions to the representation of images and videos for visual recognition. Congratulations!
Young researcher Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for Stanley Durrleman
Stanley Durrleman, co-leader of the “ARAMIS – Algorithms, Models and Methods for Images and Signals of the Human Brain” team at the Paris Brain Institute, received the Inria Young researcher prize from the French Academy of Sciences for his work.
This €20,000 prize rewards the work of Stanley Durrleman and his team on the development of statistical learning methods and the design of predictive models of the evolution of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. He has developed algorithms capable of predicting the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in patients over the next four years. This tool could play a key role in evaluating the effectiveness of therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases.
Congratulations!
More information: https://institutducerveau-icm.org/en/actualite/stanley-durrleman-inria-academy-sciences/
23.10.2020
Inria / ENPC / CIIRC CTU researchers win the 6D pose estimation challenge at ECCV 2020
The work “CosyPose: Consistent multi-view multi-object 6D pose estimation” co-authored by Yann Labbé (Inria), Justin Carpentier (Inria), Mathieu Aubry (ENPC), and Josef Sivic (Czech Technical University and former Prairie chair holder) has won 5 awards at the 6D object pose estimation challenge at ECCV 2020.
6D object pose estimation is one of the key problems in enabling autonomous systems equipped with visual sensors to accurately estimate the positions of objects in the environment in order to grasp and manipulate them. Think, for example, of an assistant robot at home, that can automatically fill-in a dish-washer or a manufacturing robot manipulating objects on the production line. The CosyPose approach estimates the 6D pose of multiple known objects in a scene captured by one or more input images with unknown camera viewpoints. The main innovation is a marriage of powerful deep neural networks trained from a combination of synthetic and real images together with multi-view geometric constraints.
CosyPose: 6D object pose estimation optimizing multi-view COnSistencY. Given a set of RGB images depicting a scene with known objects taken from unknown viewpoints (top), our method accurately reconstructs the scene (bottom) recovering all objects in the scene, their 6D pose and the camera viewpoints. The award. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks, doubling the performance of existing methods on the most complex datasets that were beyond the capabilities of previous systems. The method won 5 awards including “The Overall Best Method” in the 6D object pose estimation challenge at ECCV 2020, outperforming other competitors by a significant margin in multiple categories and reaching the performance of methods that use further information from costly depth sensors (which are also sensitive to illumination) while only using non-expensive RGB sensors. The results of the challenge are available as slides and as an overview paper.
Support from the Jean Zay computing cluster. Training the 6D object pose estimation models requires a significant compute on multiple GPUs. Developing the method and winning the challenge would have not been possible without the generous support from the French National Jean Zay computing cluster.
ECCV 2020. The 6D object pose estimation challenge was held in conjunction with the European Conference on Computer Vision, (ECCV) 2020. ECCV is one of the top three computer vision conferences (together with CVPR and ICCV) and is listed among the top 100 most cited journals and conferences over all areas of science by Google Scholar.
28.09.2020
Two PhD awards for Gül Varol!
Gül Varol, co-advised by Ivan Laptev and Cordelia Schmid received the ELLIS PhD Award and AFRIF 2019 PhD award for her thesis "Learning Human Body and Human Action Representations from Visual Data".
The thesis of Gül Varol covers a wide range of challenging and important problems in human analysis within computer vision. In particular, it defined the state of the art in action recognition from videos with the use of long-term temporal convolutions, and it contributed a synthetic data generation framework for advancing human body shape analysis. The scientific outcomes of the thesis have been followed up and extended by numerous groups. This has been supported by open sourcing of code and datasets.
Congratulations!
More information: https://ellis.eu/news/ellis-phd-award-2020
24.09.2020
A look at recent advances in automatic translation
What has boosted machine translation in recent years?
An ELLIS unit (European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems https://ellis.eu/) has just been created in Paris.
Its goal is to actively participate in the coordination of actions around artificial intelligence in the Paris region, in interaction with other members of the ELLIS network.
Le Prix de thèse Gilles Kahn, patronné par l’Académie des Sciences et décerné par la SIF, récompense chaque année depuis 1998 une excellente thèse en informatique.
L’objectif de ce prix est de dynamiser et de motiver de jeunes chercheurs en les récompensant, et de faire connaître à l’ensemble de la communauté informatique d’excellents travaux de recherche.
Dossier de candidature
Peut candidater tout étudiant ou étudiante ayant soutenu son doctorat d’informatique dans une école ou université française entre le 1er septembre 2019 et le 31 août 2020. Toute candidature devra être explicitement soutenue par le(s) directrice(s) ou directeur(s) de thèse, qui ne peuvent en aucun cas soutenir deux candidats ou candidates.
