Inria events

Parametric analysis of equilibria of chemical reaction networks

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:48:12 GMT

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For large scale systems arising from chemical reaction networks, already the parametric computation of equilibria and singularities in the positive orthant is a major challenge---but also of great importance for applications by understanding properties of the reaction network. We have implemented a newly developed algorithm by Dima Grigoriev, by which we could solve equilibria for most examples from BIOMOD database and also for the examples showing ``absolute concentration robustnest'' (Shinar and Feinberg, 2010).
As the existence of Hopf bifurcations points yield oscillations we build on previous work with M. El Kahoui and T. Sturm that yield reductions to quantifier elimination over the reals (and computations using REDLOG).
In recent joint work with H. Errami, W. Seiler, M. Eiswirth we could compute larger examples fully algorithmically using reaction coordinates.
On the systems side we have recently built PoCaB -- a platform to explore bio-chemical reaction networks by algebraic methods. It does not only provide the software framework for automated computations involving different systems, but also contains a database for the algebraic entities computed from the models of chemical reaction networks.

Differential Algebra methods for the analysis of chemical networks

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:42:41 GMT

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The differential algebra is an algebraic theory for polynomial differential equations, such as the ones arising from chemical reaction systems, by application to the mass-action law. In this talk, I will present it through some applications, illustrated by software demonstrations. The software, which is a MAPLE package, actually is just an interface for a stand-alone, open source, C library, developed in the computer algebra team of Lille.

Semantic data dissemination algorithms for opportunistic networks

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:27:50 GMT

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The main goal of Recognition project is to construct data dissemination algorithms in opportunistic networks based on human cognitive mechanisms that allow to sort and evaluate information before transmission. We have applied semantic memory models to construct our data dissemination algorithm and, as in human memory, we simulated forgetting and memorisation processes. Obtained constraints on the forgetting function parameters give as a possibility to maintain stability of the semantic network.
We have constructed two data exchange algorithms and determined the semantic network is scale-free and it could be described by the fitness model of Biaconi-Barabashi. We described the behavior of opportunistic networks with semantic data transfer filter by an epidemic model with heterogeneous transmission parameters.
We are currently running experiments on Flickr and Twitter datasets which will help us to estimate data transfer performance and filtering efficiency compared to previously used non-semantic algorithms.

Languages with Zero-Knowledge PCP's are in SZK

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:10:02 GMT

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Probabilistically Checkable Proofs (PCPs) allow a verifier to check the validity of a proof by querying very few random positions in the proof string. Zero Knowledge (ZK) Proofs allow a prover to convince a verifier of a statement without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement. We study for what class of languages it is possible to achieve both, namely to build ZK-PCPs, where additionally we require that the proof be generated efficiently. Such ZK-PCPs could potentially be useful for building UC-secure protocols in the tamper-proof token model.
We show that all languages with efficient statistical ZK-PCPs (i.e. where the ZK property holds against unbounded verifiers) must be in SZK (the class of languages with interactive statistical ZK proofs). We do this by reducing any ZK-PCP to an instance of the Conditional Entropy Approximation problem, which is known to be in SZK.
This implies in particular that such ZK-PCPs are unlikely to exist for NP-complete problems such as SAT.
This is joint work with Mohammad Mahmoody.

On the Fluid Limits of a Resource Sharing Algorithm with Logarithmic Weights

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 10:41:09 GMT

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The following class of resource allocation algorithms for communication networks is investigated: if a node of this network has x requests to transmit, then it receives a fraction of the capacity proportional to
log(x), the logarithm of its current load. A fluid scaling analysis of such a network is presented in a simple setting. It is shown that three different times scales play an important role in the evolution of such a
system. An interesting interaction of time scales phenomenon is exhibited. It is also shown that these algorithms with logarithmics weights have remarkable, unsual, fairness properties. A heavy traffic
limit theorem for the invariant distribution is proved.
Joint work with Amandine Veber (CMAP, Ecole Polytechnique)

Analysis of the Stochastic Variability of Protein Production of Prokaryotic Cells

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 10:30:03 GMT

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The protein production, also referred to as gene expression, is a fundamental process within prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and has been studied over decades by biologists. Experiments have given direct proof of the stochastic nature of the gene expression. As a consequence, the concentration of a given protein shows stochastic fluctuations, which may be costly given that the whole protein production process consumes 80% of the resources of a prokaryotic cell.
To analyze the fluctuations of the number of copies of a specific protein, a generalized version of some classical Markovian models of the late 70s is presented. These earlier models assumed an exponential distribution for the duration of the different steps of the production process. Nevertheless, it is well-known that some steps of the gene expression, such as the protein elongation, are not exponentially distributed, showing an almost deterministic duration. By using a new representation of the number of proteins in terms of marked Poisson point process, closed formulas for the fluctuations of the number of proteins are obtained in this general setting.
Our results show in particular that the exponential assumption may, surprisingly, underestimate significantly the variance of the number of proteins when some steps are not exponentially distributed with smaller fluctuations than an exponential random variable. This counter-intuitive result stresses the importance of the statistical assumptions in the protein production process.
Joint work with Vincent Fromion (INRA) and Philippe Robert (INRIA)

Numerical continuation methods for slow-fast dynamical systems - application to neuronal systems

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 16:38:50 GMT

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Numerical continuation refers to a family of numerical schemes of predictor-corrector type, which allow to compute solution branches of nonlinear equations depending on one or several parameters. In this talk, I will start by presenting the essentials of pseudo-arclength continuation in the context of parametrized families of differential equations. I will then explain the advantages of using it for equations with multiple time scales, in particular when computing invariant dynamical objects (slow manifolds) and special solutions (e.g. canard orbits, mixed-mode oscillations, bursting oscillations) by continuing families of well-posed boundary-value problems. I will illustrate this approach with examples of neuronal models, both models for single neurons and coupled systems.

Functional Encryption with Bounded Collusions via Multi-Party Computation

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 14:33:29 GMT

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We construct functional encryption schemes for polynomial-time computable functions secure against an a-priori bounded polynomial number of collusions. Our constructions require only semantically secure public-key encryption schemes and pseudorandom generators computable by small-depth circuits (known to be implied by most concrete intractability assumptions). For certain special cases such as predicate encryption schemes with public index, the construction requires only semantically secure encryption schemes.
Along the way, we show a "bootstrapping theorem" that builds a q-query functional encryption scheme for arbitrary functions starting from a q-query functional encryption scheme for bounded-degree functions. All our constructions rely heavily on techniques from secure multi-party computation and randomized encodings.
Our constructions are secure under a strong simulation-based definition of functional encryption.
Joint work with Sergey Gorbunov and Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Free Open Source Academia Conference 2012

Thu, 4 Oct 2012 16:07:07 GMT

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Inria and EuraTechnologies are happy to announce you the fOSSa 2012 Edition! fOSSa conference will take place on the 4,5, 6th December 2012 in Lille, France.

Thanks to the quality of the speakers & attendees, the open & pragmatic approach, more than 250 people came each year; more than 100 articles in the press & webzines talk positively about the conference content... fOSSa conference is playing a predominant role in the OSS arena year after year.

This year, the conference will address:

Education (Ivaylo Ganchez)
IRILL (Roberto Di Cosmo)
History of the Free Software/Open Source mouvement (Christophe Masutti & Alexis Kaufmann)
Movie: 'Revolution OS’ (open to a large public)
Digital Native Generation (Stephane Frenot & Stephane Grumbach
Openness: Open Arts and Open Hardware (Jérome Copin)
Licences: No lawers, No councels, only return on experience (Gabriele Ruffatti)
Communities (Stephane Ribas)

Each topic will end up with a debate, and workshops are scheduled.

Numerical continuation methods for slow-fast dynamical systems - application to neuronal systems

Tue, 2 Oct 2012 10:06:34 GMT

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Sound Optimisations in the C11/C++11 Memory Model and Applications to Compiler Testing

Tue, 2 Oct 2012 10:00:05 GMT

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Sometimes compilers introduce bugs: the generated code allows behaviours forbidden by the semantics of the source program. Most of the time these misbehaviours materialise as soon as the code is executed. However, in some subtle cases, the compiler generates perfect sequential code but breaks the memory model of the programming language: unexpected behaviours become observable only when the miscompiled function interacts with a concurrent context. We call
these concurrency compiler bugs. In this work we present cpptest, a tool for hunting concurrency compiler bugs in modern C and C++ compilers. First we prove correct a theory of sound optimisations in the C11/C++11 memory model, covering most of the optimisations we have observed testing real compilers (including eliminations, reorderings and a restricted class of introductions of memory accesses). Building on this theory, we show how concurrency compiler bugs can be
identified by comparing the memory trace of compiled code against a reference memory trace for the source code: this effectively reduces
the hard problem of hunting concurrency compilation bugs to differential testing of sequential code. The cpptest tool puts this idea at work: at the time of writing, preliminary testing of gcc and clang has already identified some mistaken write introduction performed by the loop invariant motion optimisation in gcc 4.7.

This is work in progress with Robin Morisset and Pankaj Pawan.

Web and automative

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 14:29:50 GMT

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W3C invites automotive manufacturers and service providers, wireless carriers, media service providers and advertisers, insurance companies, application and solution developers and others to participate in the W3C workshop on Web and Automotive, 14-15 Nov. 2012, Rome, Italy.

People today enjoy applications and services from multiple networked devices: notebook and desktop computers, smart phones, tablets, and Internet TVs. With our increasingly mobile lifestyles, it’s time to include the connected car in this mix. The Web is the ideal platform to offer a rich range of benefits and value-added services to drivers and passengers.

W3C’s Open Web Platform (OWP) is driving this and other industry transformations. The promise of the early information superhighway is being fulfilled. Whether tethering a driver’s smartphone or tablet to work with a car--or embedding technology into the car itself--there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. The Web can take you there.

Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to share their own perspectives, requirements, and ideas to ensure that emerging global technology standards meet the needs of the Web and Automotive industries.

We want to know more about your state-of-the-art approaches!

Share your knowledge of the topics or other areas of interest to you.
Offer your experiences in using Web-based automotive approaches.
Demonstrate prototypes of emerging technologies that could benefit from global Web standards.
Show research results or lessons learned to ensure others don’t reinvent the wheel.

Top five topics for the workshop:

Putting safety first
Relationship between the car and the mobile phone
Creating markets for automotive applications
Improving quality and reducing costs through Web technologies
Unique opportunities for the automotive user experience

Position papers are required to be eligible to participate in this workshop. Organizations or individuals wishing to attend must submit a position paper explaining their perspectives on a workshop topic of their choice no later than 12 October 2012. W3C membership is not required to participate. Participation is free and open to W3C members and non-members.

Learn more

Conference in memory of Rémi Sentis

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:42:23 GMT

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A conference in memory of Rémi Sentis.

Schedule

09h30-10h00 - Welcome and portrait of Rémi Sentis, par C. Bardos, F. Golse et R. Sentis,
10h00-10h30 - TBA, Guy Métivier
10h30-11h00 - Coffee break
11h00-11h30 - TBA, Josselin Garnier
11h30-12h00 - TBA, Benoît Perthame
12h00-14h00 - Lunch time
14h00-15h00 - Plenary session TBA, François Golse
15h00-15h30 - Coffee break
15h30-16h00 - TBA, Pierre-Henri Maire
16h00-16h30 - TBA, Stéphane Dellacherie
16h30-16h45 - Robert Dautray

From 16h45 - Social event

CCNx Community Meeting

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:41:13 GMT

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Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée research centre is welcoming the 2012 meeting of the CCNx project (Content-Centric Networking).

Project CCNx® exists to develop, promote, and evaluate a new approach to communication architecture called content-centric networking.

CCN is based on one fundamental architectural change: replacing named hosts with named content as the primary abstraction.

The technical program includes technical presentations, posters and demos.

Opening session on wednesday 12th (at 9:00 am) will be held by Van Jacobson (PARC) on Content Centric Networking Updates and Roadmap.

Van Jacobson Biography

One of the primary contributors to the technological foundations of today's Internet, Van Jacobson joined PARC in 2006 as a Research Fellow to lead its Content-Centric Networking (CCN) research program. Van's algorithms for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) helped solve the problem of congestion and are used in over 90% of Internet hosts today. Widely credited with enabling the Internet to expand in size and support increasing speed demands, Van helped the Internet survive a major traffic surge (1988-89) without collapsing. Van has co-written many network diagnostics tools (traceroute, pathchar, and tcpdump) that are widely used by the Internet research and development community. Besides authoring dozens of seminal, Internet-defining documents, he also helped lead the development of the Internet Multicast Backbone (MBone) and the popular Internet audio and video conferencing tools (vic, vat, wb) that laid the groundwork and defined the standards for current Internet VoIP and multimedia applications.

Prior to joining PARC, Van led networking efforts as Chief Scientist at Cisco Systems and later Packet Design Networks. He also led the groundbreaking Network Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its collaboration with the Computer Science Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Van's industry honors include the prestigious ACM SIGCOMM Award (2001) for outstanding lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks -- especially his contributions to protocol architecture and congestion control. In 2002, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) honored Van with the Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award for contributing "to the understanding of network congestion," and for developing congestion control mechanisms that enabled the "successful scaling of the Internet". Van was elected to the United States' National Academy of Engineering in 2004. He was inducted into the inaugural Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

TAG+11: The 11th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:31:23 GMT

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TAG+11 will feature talks and posters on a range of aspects of Tree Adjoining Grammar and related systems, including syntactic and semantic theory, mathematical properties, and computational and algorithmic studies of parsing, interpretation and generation, corpus-based research and grammar development, and psycholinguistic modeling.

This year's special focus will be on formalisms based on synchronous tree rewriting, including theoretical aspects, applications to machine translation and syntax-semantics interface.

This edition of TAG+ is endorsed by EACL (the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics).

Research and Development of Ad-hoc- and Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental and Animal Behavioural Monitoring

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:18:15 GMT

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In the framework of the crossed seasons France - South Africa intiative to be held during 2012 and 2013, Inria and Stellenbosch university jointly propose workshops and tutorials dedicated to research and development of adhoc and wireless sensor networls for environmental and animal behabioural monitoring.

Africa in general and South Africa in particular, present large landscapes with low density population and low infrastructure, where resources and life forms have to be monitored, such as water, wildlife and stock animals. However, due to the large areas concerned, continuous monitoring by personal observation, is not efficient and practical.

To date relatively little is known about the ecology of smaller predators responsible for the bulk of human - wildlife conflict in Southern Africa. One of the greatest problems has been finding innovative ways to study these elusive animals in rugged and remote regions.The black-backed jackal is a specific cas in point.

This research aims to provide technological tools enabling multidisciplinary researchers, such as conservationists, agriculturalists, communal farmers, and socio-economists to present possible solutions to this problem, which results in huge losses nationally. Notwithstanding the broader ecological, economic and social benefits for South Africans, research into predator ecology is also important internationally.The type of research involved, also has wider application in the general advancement of communication technologies. It is from this perpective that Inria and Stellenbosch University are combining their skills to provide monitoring solutions based on sensor networks.

The second workshop will be held in Summer 2013 at Inria Lille-Nord Europe research center.

Reduction of biochemical networks with multiple time scales

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 10:26:26 GMT

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Biochemical networks are used in computational biology, to model mechanistic details of systems involved in cell signaling, metabolism, regulation of gene expression. Parametric and structural uncertainty, as well as combinatorial explosion are strong obstacles against analyzing the dynamics of large models of this type. Multi-scaleness is another property of these networks, that can be used to get past some of these obstacles. Network with many, well separated, time scales, can be reduced to simpler networks, in a way that does not depend on the exact values of the parameters, but on their order relations. I will show how tropical geometry can be used to unify various approaches to this problem, also provide examples from signaling and cell cycle regulation to illustrate these ideas.

Formal Experiments in Computational Biochemistry

Mon, 2 Jul 2012 11:39:01 GMT

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In this talk I will present my logic of formal experiments. The logic has two layers: temporal logic for classifying behaviour of a system and a contextual operator which classifies behaviour in a given context. The contextual operator is similar to the guarantee operator from spatial logic, allows the introduction of new species into the system, and nests within the temporal modalities to express complex behaviour.

The logic is supported by efficient model checking and tool support and is built into my interpreter for the continuous pi-calculus (cpi), a continuous state-space process algebra for biochemical systems. I will also give an overview of cpi and some of examples of the application of the logic to cpi processes.

Telescopers for Rational and Algebraic Functions via Residues

Mon, 2 Jul 2012 11:28:59 GMT

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We show that the problem of constructing telescopers for rational functions of m + 1 variables is equivalent to the problem of constructing telescopers for algebraic functions of m variables and we present a new algorithm to construct telescopers for algebraic functions of two variables. These considerations are based on analyzing the residues of the input. According to experiments, the resulting algorithm for rational functions of three variables is faster than known algorithms, at least in some examples of combinatorial interest. The algorithm for algebraic functions implies a new bound on the order of the telescopers. This is a joint work with Manuel Kauers (RISC) and Michael F. Singer (NCSU).

Optimal Trade Execution: Mean Variance or Mean Quadratic Variation?

Mon, 2 Jul 2012 11:14:34 GMT

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Algorithmic trade execution has become a standard technique for institutional market players in recent years, particularly in the equity market where electronic trading is most prevalent. A trade execution algorithm typically seeks to execute a trade decision optimally upon receiving inputs from a human trader.

A common form of optimality criterion seeks to strike a balance between minimizing pricing impact and minimizing timing risk. For example, in the case of selling a large number of shares, a fast liquidation will cause the share price to drop, whereas a slow liquidation will expose the seller to timing risk due to the stochastic nature of the share price.

We compare optimal liquidation policies in continuous time in the presence of trading impact using numerical solutions of Hamilton Jacobi Bellman (HJB) partial differential equations (PDE). In particular, we compare the time-consistent mean-quadratic-variation strategy (Almgren and Chriss) with the time-inconsistent (pre-commitment) mean-variance strategy. The Almgren and Chriss strategy should be viewed as the industry standard.

We show that the two different risk measures lead to very different strategies and liquidation profiles.

In terms of the mean variance efficient frontier, the original Almgren/Chriss strategy is significantly sub-optimal compared to the (pre-commitment) mean-variance strategy.

This is joint work with Stephen Tse, Health Windcliff and Shannon Kenn.

Human Activity and Vision Summer School

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 11:22:46 GMT

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The Human Activity and Vision Summer School (HAVSS) will address the broad domains of human activity modeling and human behavior recognition, with an emphasis on vision sensors as capturing modality. Courses will comprise both tutorials and presentations of state-of-the-art methods by active researchers in the field.

The goal of the courses will be to cover most of the whole human activity analysis chain, starting from the low level processing of videos and audio for detection and feature extraction, to medium level (tracking and behavior cue extraction) and higher level modeling and recognition using both supervised and unsupervised techniques. Applications of the different methods to action and activity recognition in different domains ranging from Activities of Daily Living to surveillance (individual behavior recognition, crowd monitoring) will be considered.

List of considered topics and methodologies:

low-level feature extraction (background subtraction, space-time interest points, tracklets)
object detection (human, body)
tracking (multi-object, multi-camera, audio-visual)
behavior cue extraction (body or head pose)
crowd monitoring
supervised behavior recognition (statistical and symbolic approaches)
(temporal data mining, probabilistic topic models -Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Dirichlet Processes,…)
active learning

Presentation of real uses cases, market needs, and current bottlenecks in the surveillance domain will also be addressed, with one half day devoted to presentations and panel discussions with professional and industrial presenters.

Streaming Cryptography

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:46:07 GMT

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Three years ago we introduced the concept of Streaming Cryptography; i.e. the possibility of computing cryptographic primitives using a device severely restricted in memory and in its ability to scan its external tape(s). Is it possible to do cryptography in such a setting, or the limitations of these devices rule-out such a possibility? For several, natural, black-box settings, and pretty-much all popular cryptographic assumptions used today we can show the impossibility of realizing cryptography in a streaming setting.

Recently we complemented the above results by devising a non-black-box technique, showing that Streaming Cryptography is possible if one uses two external streams, and in total 3 passes over them. Roughly speaking, instead of computing a function (e.g. multiplying integers) which is impossible in the streaming setting, we encrypt enough information from its computation (when we view this computation appropriately). Thus, we are able to make somewhat counter-intuitive statements, such as: computing the product of two numbers (and any of its permuted variants) is unconditionally impossible in a streaming fashion, however we are still able to base streaming cryptography on the hardness of factoring a composite integer.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical, non-black-box cryptographic construction (note that the vast majority of cryptographic constructions are black-box).

This is joint work with Guang Yang. Preliminary impossibility results appear in joint works with Josh Bronson, Ali Juma, and Guang Yang.

Recovering Disjointness from Concurrent Sharing

Thu, 7 Jun 2012 16:54:05 GMT

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Free admission at 14h.

Disjointness is an extraordinarily useful property when reasoning about concurrent programs. Threads that access mutually disjoint resources can be reasoned about locally, ignoring interleavings. This is the core insight behind Concurrent Separation Logic. However, concurrent modules often share resources internally, frustrating disjoint reasoning. In this talk, I will suggest that sharing is often irrelevant to the clients of these modules, and should be hidden. I will show how separation logic can be used to
hide irrelevant sharing and recover disjoint reasoning. I will motivate this with the example of a concurrent index, and show how some high-level sharing can be maintained, reaping the benefits of disjointness.

Ecole CEA EDF Inria - Systemic Risk and Quantitative Risk Management

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:05:35 GMT

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Objectives

Since the crisis of 2008, there has been a critical reorientation of research priorities in quantitative finance with emphasis on risk.

The recent crisis, and in particular the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and its consequences, has underlined a systemic risk due to the strong interdependencies of financial institutions. The failure of one of them can cause a cascade of failures, thus affecting the global stability of the system. Better understanding of these interlinkage phenomena becomes crucial.

The school aims at presenting the various approaches that have been developed to model this risk such as random graphs and mean field diffusion models. The tutorial and the lectures given by the academics will be complemented by a presentation of a practitioner in charge of counterparty risk.

On the other hand, the question of the quantification of the risk induced by a portfolio of financial instruments has motivated an intense research activity among practitioners and academics in the last ten years. The theory of risk measures has emerged as one of the seminal topics in quantitative finance. The second objective of the school is to give a pedagogical presentation of this theory.

Tutorials

Rama Cont, CNRS Université Paris 6
Marco Frittelli, Università degli Studi di Milano

Lectures

Michel De Lara (Ecole des Ponts ParisTech)
Nicole El Karoui (Université Paris 6)
Hans Föllmer (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Josselin Garnier (Université Paris 7)
Pierre Gaye (Société Générale)
Andreea Minca (Cornell University, USA)
Marie-Claire Quenez (Université Paris 7)
Luitgard Veraart (London School of Economics)

Program

Monday October 15

8:45 – 9:10 : Welcome ; coffee
9:15 – 10: 45 : Marco Frittelli: Risk measures and performance measures (1/3)
10:45 – 11:15 : Coffee break
11:15 – 12:45 : Nicole El Karoui

Lunch

14:15 – 15:45 : Marco Frittelli: Risk measures and performance measures (2/3)
15:45 – 16:15 : Coffee break
16:15 – 17:15 : Marie-Claire Quenez: Dynamic risk measures induced by BSDEs with jumps
17 :15 – 18:15 : Michel De Lara: Stochastic Viability for the Sustainable Management of Natural Resources

Tuesday October 16

9:00 – 10:30 : Marco Frittelli: Risk measures and performance measures (3/3)
10:30 – 11 : Coffee break
11 – 12:30 : Hans Föllmer: Risk measures for large systems: Spatial consistency, asymptotics, and phase transitions

Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 : Rama Cont: Modeling Systemic Risk (1/3)
15:30 – 16:00 : Coffee Break
16:00 – 17:00 : Josselin Garnier: Uncertainty quantification and systemic risk
17:00 – 18:00 : Luitgard Veraart: Failure and rescue in an interbank network

Wednesday October 17

9:00 – 10:30 : Rama Cont: Modeling Systemic Risk (2/3)
10:30 – 11:00 : Coffee break
11:00 – 12:00 : Pierre Gaye: Regulatory rules evolutions and internal models implementation

Lunch

13:30 – 15:00 : Rama Cont: Modeling Systemic Risk (3/3)
15:00 – 15:30 : Coffee break
15:30 – 16:30 : Andreea Minca: Controlled defaults in financial networks

W3C Advisory committee meeting

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:53:57 GMT

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Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée research centre is hosting the 2012 W3C Advisory committee meeting, bringing together representatives of the World Wide Web Consortium members.

During these two days, Inria research demonstrations will be presented :

SemanticWebImport, by Erwan Demairy (Wimmics team)
Claw (Cloud Audio Workstation), by Gabriel Cardoso (DREAM department)
Semantic and social networks for Business Intelligence, by Nicolas Delaforge (Wimmics team)
iSpace immersive experience / virtual reality, by Jean-Christophe Lombardo (DREAM department), in "Gouraud-Phong" immersive Space

Alan Turing's heritage

Mon, 7 May 2012 15:02:54 GMT

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The conference provides a viewpoint on Alan Turing's research work and its unique impact on mathematics, computing, computer science, informatics, morphogenesis, artificial intelligence, philosophy and the wider scientific world. It is organized by 'École Normale Supérieure de Lyon", in partnership with Inria, on the occasion of the Centenary of Alan Turing’s birth.

This Turing Centenary Conference will be held in Lyon on July 2-4, 2012. The whole conference will be composed of :

"Heritage of Turing’s works" on our society, lectures for a broad audience with invited researchers in computer science, philosophy and epistemology- In French - (July 2, 2012)
“Turing's heritage: Logic, Computation & Complexity”, an international conference - In English - (July 3, 2012)
“Complexity and finite models” : an international workshop - In English - (July 4, 2012)

Some invited speakers :

Leslie Valiant, Harvard University, USA
Giuseppe Longo, CNRS, ENS Paris
Gérard Berry, Inria, Académie des sciences
Jean-Michel Salanskis, professeur de philosophie à l’Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Jean Lassègue, CNRS, Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée (CREA) de l’Ecole polytechnique
Sophie Laplante, Professeur en Informatique à l’Université Paris-Sud 11
Gilles Dowek, Inria

Quantitative Logics on Structure Rewriting Systems

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:32:11 GMT

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Structure rewriting systems are infinite Kripke structures with metafinite relational structures assigned to each node. Transitions in the Kripke structure are used to model temporal changes, while the assigned finite structures model the state of the system at specific points in time. We will show how various systems can be modeled naturally in this way, and we will discuss which model-checking techniques can be applied in this setting. This leads to several decidability results for the quantitative mu-calculus on both purely discrete and hybrid structure rewriting systems.

Recent advances in dynamical systems analysis and applications

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:54:38 GMT

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This workshop, organised by the project-team Neuromathcomp, aims at bringing together researchers that will provide presentations of their recent studies in the field of dynamical systems. Applications in biological systems will be emphasized.

Workshop Berkeley-Inria-Stanford 2012

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:50:08 GMT

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The second workshop Berkeley-Inria-Stanford 2012 (BIS’12) is hosted by Inria, in Paris, on May 21-22, 2012. It is co-organized by UC Berkeley, Inria, and Stanford University, in partnership with CITRIS and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. BIS’12 is part of the joint research program Inria@SiliconValley.

The objectives of this workshop are two-fold: first, to present the current state of scientific collaborations and second to work on proposals for future ambitious joint projects.

Inria@SilliconValley

The aim of the program Inria@SiliconValley is to promote and develop scientific collaborations between Inria project-teams and American teams in these two universities, and affiliated research institutions in California. This program supports joint research projects through seed funding, fellowships and scholarships to faculty, postdocs and graduate students. This programme began in January 2011.

Organisers

University of Berkeley
The University of California was chartered in 1868 and its flagship campus — envisioned as a "City of Learning" — was established at Berkeley, on San Francisco Bay.

Inria
Public science and technology institution established in 1967, Inria is is the only public research body fully dedicated to computational sciences. Combining computer sciences with mathematics, Inria’s researchers strive to invent the digital technologies of the future.

Stanford University
Stanford University is recognized as one of the world's leading research and teaching institutions.

PARTNERS OF THE WORKSHOP BIS'12

Cap Digital
The French business cluster for digital contents and services, aims at promoting the Paris Region as one of the world leaders in digital contents, creative industries and services, from an industrial as well as a strategic point of view. Fostering R&D, helping companies to expand, networking our members and showcasing them throughout the world, are some of the activities we undertake to support the creativity and competitiveness of a sector that represents a € 3000 billion world market.

CITRIS
The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society creates information technology solutions for many of our most pressing social, environmental and healthcare problems.

Systematic
SYSTEMATIC PARIS-REGION competitiveness cluster brings together more than 600 key players in the Paris region working in the field of software-dominant systems and focusing on markets with a strong societal dimension.

French Ministery of Foreign Affairs
The first objective of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs is to develop the foreign and european relation of France.

Numerical analysis Summer school 2012

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:06:09 GMT

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Accommodation and courses take place in a castle depending of the CEA (French AlternativeEnergies and Atomic Energy Commission) at Cadarache, South of France, from Monday,June 25th till Friday, July 6th, 2012.
These courses can interest a public of industrial engineers as well as academics (in particular researchers from CEA, EDF and INRIA), confirmed or not, in particular the PhDand the post-doctorate students.

Abstract

This school will cover three approaches in stochastic optimization — stochastic programming, dynamic programming, variational methods — by emphasizing the modelling of dynamical control problems, as well as algorithmics aspects. Among the applications, we find the management of energy systems under uncertainty.

Main Courses

Stochastic optimization will be approached under three angles
corresponding to different ways to handle non-anticipativity constraints, and leading to different resolution methods. Each course lasts 9 hours and comprises six sessions of 1h30.
Computer practical works and “practical lectures” alternate with the theoretical courses and are organized in 3 (or 4) sessions of 2 hours each.

For further informations

Functional programming for parallel and concurrent applications

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:32:03 GMT

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Accommodation and courses take place in a castle depending of the CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) at Cadarache, South of France, from June 11 till June 22, 2012.

Objectives

The aim of the summer school is to give a thorough and application-oriented introduction to functional programming using the programming language Haskell. A special focus is on parallel and concurrent programming, highlighting the ways in which features such as strong typing and purity make it dramatically easier to write reliable parallel or concurrent code. The school is split into three different courses that highlight different aspects of functional programming. All courses consist of lectures and hands-on sessions where everyone can try out the language on several exercises.

Public

This school is a 2 weeks course for engineers, and for students and researchers. Participants should be familiar with programming (e.g. in C or Java), but the school will be self-contained and no preliminary knowledge of functional programing is required.

For further informations

Funlogic: Mixing logic and functional programming styles

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:45:35 GMT

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We have been designing a language in which programmers can use both the logic and functional styles.
1) In the functional style, programmers introduce variables and assign the variables values by describing a computation that evaluates to the answer desired.
2) In our language one can also introduce variables by describing what properties the variable's values should have using first order logic. The language implementation automatically searches for solutions. We call these existential declarations.
The language lets the programmer mix computation-based programs with search-based programs in a completely transparent manner. Existential variables are bound to conforming values by decision procedures (e.g SAT solvers, SMT solvers, the Simplex algorithm, and Narrowing). Funlogic embeds multiple external decision procedures using a common framework. Design
principles for embedding decision procedures are developed and illustrated for three different decision procedures from widely varying domains.

Cubicle: A Parallel SMT-based Model Checker for Parameterized Systems

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:42:28 GMT

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Cubicle is a new model checker for verifying safety properties of array-based systems, a syntactically restricted class of parametrized transition systems with states represented as arrays indexed by an arbitrary number of processes. Cache coherence protocols and mutual exclusion algorithms are typical examples of such systems. Cubicle implements a parallel symbolic
backward reachability procedure using Satisfiabilty Modulo Theories. Its SMT solver is a tightly integrated, lightweight and enhanced version of Alt-Ergo and its parallel implementation relies on the Functory library.

Pharo Open-Source smalltalk

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:15:40 GMT

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The Pharo core team organises a Pharo Conference hosted at Inria Lille Nord Europe research center.

Pharo is an open-source Smalltalk. The goals of the conference is to bring companies, developers and users together.
You are invited to propose a talk on :

your business with pharo
a technical presentation of a framework or solution you built with pharo
experience reports

Please contact stephane.ducasse@inria.fr and marcus.denker@inria.fr for possible presentations.

On anisotropic mesh generation for CFD

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:59:52 GMT

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Flows involved in aerospace, naval, train and automotive industries are composed of complex features and multi-scales phenomena: shocks waves, boundary layers, turbulence, etc. When dealing with complex geometries, all these features may be present in the flow field and interact. If each subject is studied on its own, an unified approach to generate the best discretization for each component of the flow is still a challenge. Indeed, many numerical examples have proved that the performance of a numerical scheme is bounded by the qualityand the features of the discretization. For instance, anisotropic meshes may be preferred to capture accurately shocks [1,2] while cartesian grids may be preferred at a turbulent regime to allow high-order capturing of vortices [4]. In the vicinity of bodies, quasi-structured grids are employed to capture the boundary layer in viscous simulations [3].
This talk will deal with the problematics of handling all the previous requirements for flows around complex geometries.

[1] M.J. Castro-Diaz, F. Hecht, B. Mohammadi and O. Pironneau, Anisotropic unstructured mesh adaptation for flow simulations, IJNMF, Vol.25, pp-475-491, 1997 [2] P. J. Frey and P.-L. George, Mesh generation. Application to finite elements. Herm_es Science, Paris, Oxford, 2000.
[3] R. Lohner, Applied CFD techniques, Wiley, New-York, 2001.[4] M. Wu and M.P. Martin, Direct numerical simulation of supersonic turbulent boundary layer over a compression ramp. AIAA Journal, 45:879{889, 2007.

1st International Conference on Systems and Computer Science

Mon, 5 Mar 2012 11:02:20 GMT

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The objective of the Conference is to provide a forum for exchange of ideas in research areas connecting Systems and Computer Science. High level contributions are awaited on various domains, ranging from theory over numerics to various applications.

Contributions at the crossroad of Systems and Computer Science fields will be considered with great interest. Industrial participants and junior researchers are particularly welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Networked and Hybrid Systems
Computer Control and Robotics
Embedded Systems Design
Grid computing
Large scale distributed systems
Symbolic Computation
Pervasive computing
Multi-agent systems
Discrete event systems
Signal and Image Processing
BioComputing
Brain-Computer Interface
Assistive Technology
Intelligent control and sensor networks
Change detection problems
Diagnosis and Fault tolerant control
Robust Control

A summary statement describing the motivation and relevance of the proposed session must be submitted by the authors through the EasyChair Conference Management System by selecting the category: “Invited session proposal”. Once your session is accepted, it will be inserted in the ICSCS 2012 website. You may then invite researchers to submit their work to your session. This will be done during the standard submission process. Already accepted invited sessions are:

User-centered design in assistive technologies
Smart navigation for powered wheelchairs
Modeling and control of renewable energy systems
Modeling and control of traffic issues

Visit of a delegation from the University of Athens

Sun, 4 Mar 2012 15:21:59 GMT

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Following the bilateral agreement between the University of Athens (NKUA: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) and Inria Sophia Antipolis - Mediterranée research center, a delegation of five professors of this university visited Inria on February 14 and 15 in order to develop various possible future collaborations.

The program included public and private sessions of which the presentations of:

SOME activities of the Department of Computer Science and Telecommunications of the University of Athens,
SOME Inria project-teams: Abs, Athena, Coprin, Galaad, Geometrica, Mascotte, Planete, Reves and Wimmics.

To conclude, both parts presented their respective Masters in Athens and Nice Sophia Antipolis (international tracks: BioComp and Ubinet).

To help in the setting up of a student exchange program and research collaborations, a visit of a few days to the University of Athens, of some Inria’s researchers is planned sometimes in May 2012.

Winter School: Algorithms in Structural Bio-Informatics

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:14:16 GMT

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The goal of this winter school is to present state-of-the-art concepts, algorithms and software tools meant to analyze and predict macro-molecular assemblies, with a focus on methodological developments and the corresponding software.

It aims at gathering 20 students from all over Europe during 5,5 days, at the master and phd level, and is organized as follows:

During the first afternoon, the students will introduce their research interests. Pairs of students will be formed, for the so-called projects to be undertaken during the practicals.
Each of the remaining five days will consist of a lecture (morning session), followed by a computer practical (afternoon). The practical will consist of applying concepts and tools learned during the lecture to macro-molecular structures related to the project.

8th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:59:32 GMT

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The 8th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT) will be held from December 10th to 13th in Nice, located at the wonderful Côte d’Azur in France.

CoNEXT 2012 will be a major forum for presentations and discussions of novel networking technologies that will shape the future of Internetworking. The conference is single track and features a high-quality technical program with significant opportunities for individual and small-group technical and social interactions among a diverse set of participants. The CoNEXT conferences focus on stimulating exchanges between various international research communities.

PICOF 2012

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:09:38 GMT

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The PICOF conference (Inverse Problems, Control and Shape Optimization) will take place at the Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau) In April 2-4, 2012. The conference is co-organized by the CMAP (Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées) and the MMSN Chair (Mathematical Modeling and Numerical Simulation).

What is PICOF ?

PICOF (Problèmes Inverses, Contrôle et Optimisation de Formes) is a bi-annual international scientific conference which assembles senior researchers and scientists as well as a number of young researchers dealing with mathematical and numerical problems in the fields of inverse problems, control and shape optimization. It aims to gather the community of researchers in academia and industry working in these three fields.

Random Oracles in a Quantum World

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:57:34 GMT

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The interest in post-quantum cryptography - classical systems that remain secure in the presence of a quantum adversary - has generated elegant proposals for new cryptosystems. Some of these systems are set in the random oracle model and are proven secure relative to adversaries that have classical access to the random oracle. We argue that to prove post-quantum security one needs to prove security in the quantum-accessible random oracle model where the adversary can query the random oracle with quantum states. We begin by separating the classical and quantum-accessible random oracle models by presenting a scheme that is secure when the adversary is given classical access to the random oracle, but is insecure when the adversary can make quantum oracle queries. We then set out to develop generic conditions under which a classical random oracle proof implies security in the quantum-accessible random oracle model. We introduce the concept of a history-free reduction which is a category of classical random oracle reductions that basically determine oracle answers independently of the history of previous queries, and we prove that such reductions imply security in the quantum model. We then show that certain post-quantum proposals, including ones based on lattices, can be proven secure using history-free reductions and are therefore post-quantum secure. We conclude with a rich set of open problems in this area. On the Distribution of Atkin and Elkies Primes

Hybrid Inverse Problems and Internal Functionals

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:47:55 GMT

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Several recent coupled-physics medical imaging modalities aim to combine a high-contrast, low-resolution, modality with a high-resolution, low-contrast, modality and ideally offer high-contrast, high-resolution, reconstructions. Mathematically, these modalities involve the reconstruction of constitutive parameters in partial differential equations from knowledge of internal functionals of the parameters and solutions to said equations. This recent field of research is often referred to as Hybrid Inverse Problems.

This talk presents recent results of uniqueness, stability and explicit reconstructions for several hybrid inverse problems. We provide an explicit characterization of what can (and cannot) be reconstructed in coupled-physics imaging modalities such as Magnetic Resonance Elastography, Transient Elastography, Photo-Acoustic Tomography, and Ultrasound Modulation Tomography. Numerical simulations confirm the high-resolution, high-contrast, potential of these novel modalities.

Winter School: Hot Topics in Distributed Computing 2012

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:40:03 GMT

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The Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes Centre is organising the 5th Winter School on hot topics in distributed computing (HTDC).

This winter school will include a set of presentations by internationally renowned researchers on key topics: security, social networks, multi-core processor systems, dedicated languages, model checking, etc.

Speakers:

Babak Falsafi, EPFL
Maurice Herlihy, Brown University
Liuba Shrira, Brandeis University
Renata Teixeira, CNRS
Paulo Verissimon University of Lisboa
Paul Francis, Max Planck Institute of California, San Diego

Statlearn'12 : "Challenging problems in Statistical Learning"

Mon, 6 Feb 2012 17:42:04 GMT

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The workshop on "Challenging problems in Statistical Learning" will be held in Lille on April 5-6, 2012. This workshop aims to summarize the new and future problems in statistical learning and to give a good idea of what already exists for dealing with these problems.

Program

Thursday April 5, 2012

Session 1: Statistical learning and vizualization.09:30. Luca Scrucca (Università degli Studi di Perugia)
10:30. Coffee break
11:00. Amaury Lendasse (Aalto University, School of Science and Technology)
12:00. Petra Isenberg (INRIA Saclay, team Aviz)
Session 2: Statistical learning in high dimension.14:30. Arthur Gretton (University College London)
15:30. Coffee break
16:00. Sophie Dabo-Niang (University Charles De Gaulle , Lille 3)
17:00. Camille Brunet (University Paris 10)

Friday April 6, 2012

Session 3: Statistical learning and structured data.08:30. Brendan Murphy (University College Dublin)
09:30. Coffee break
10:00. Mohamed Nadif (Université Paris 5)
11:00. Pierre Latouche (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Session 4: New and future problems in statistical learning.13:30. Pascal Massart (University Paris Sud)
14:30. Coffee break
15:00. Jérôme Saracco (University Bordeaux 1)
16:00. Gilles Blanchard (University Potsdam)

Theory of Randomized Search Heuristics

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 16:09:09 GMT

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The 6th workshop on Theory of Randomized Search Heuristics is going to be held on May 2 and May 3, 2012. The conference venue of Polytech'Lille is located in Villeneuve d'Ascq.

Scope of the ThRaSH Workshop Series

Randomized search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization, or simulated annealing are successfully used in various applications, both in combinatorial and numerical optimization. In contrast to problem-specific randomized algorithms, they are designed to be general black-box optimizers.

Given such a scenario, proving that such algorithms satisfy certain performance guarantees remains a hard and widely open problem. Gaining a theoretical understanding of randomized search heuristics is therefore an important task. Since these search heuristics are first and foremost optimization algorithms with stochastic elements, there is a clear potential in applying techniques developed in other research areas such as probability theory or "classical" optimization (such as problem-specific algorithms and numerical optimization) to analyze randomized search heuristics.

Aim of the ThRaSH Workshop Series

The aim of this workshop series is to stimulate interactions between people already working on these problems and those with a general background in natural computation or randomized algorithms or both. The primary focus lies on discussing recent ideas and detecting challenging topics for future work, rather than on the presention of final results.

Inria Lille - Nord Europe research center is sponsoring the ThRaSH'2012 workshop.

Optimized Schwarz waveform relaxation for heterogeneous problems

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:45:25 GMT

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A 14h, Entrée libre

We present domain decomposition strategies with as final objective the solving, on parallel platforms, of heterogeneous advection-diffusion-reaction equation modeling ocean-atmosphere coupling or radionuclide flow transport in the underground, in the context of nuclear waste repositories. For such problems with high variability in the coefficients we consider numerical methods that allow for the use of nonconforming space-time grids, so as to match the local space and time scales, while at the same time simplifying the parallel generation and adaptation of meshes. Numerical results illustrate the method on examples inspired from ocean-atmosphere coupling and from nuclear waste disposal simulations.

On the Distribution of Atkin and Elkies Primes

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:40:33 GMT

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Given an elliptic curve E over a finite field F$_q$ of q elements, we say that an odd prime l not dividing q is an Elkies prime for E if t$_E^2$ - 4q is a square modulo l, where t$_E$ = q+1 - #E(F$_q$) and #E(F$_q$) is the number of F$_q$-rational points on E; otherwise l is called an Atkin prime.

We show that there are asymptotically the same number of Atkin and Elkies primes l < L on average over all curves E over F$_q$, provided that L >= (log q)$^\varepsilon$ for any fixed $\varepsilon$>0 and a sufficiently large q. We use this result to design and analyse a fast algorithm to generate random elliptic curves with #E(F$_p$) prime, where p varies uniformly over primes in a given interval [x,2x].

Joint work with Andrew Sutherland

3D surface regularization using a model-based approach

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:10:18 GMT

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Soutenance de thèse de Thibault Luginbuhl.

In this thesis we present a system to generate 3D photo-realistic avatars automatically using a laser scanner. First, we turn the point cloud provided by the scanner into a suitable representation, that is a closed mesh. Our approach is based on a generic model of the human body that is fitted to the data using computer graphics techniques for mesh edition. Then, we add texture information to the 3D geometry using pictures taken during the acquisition. This problem is solved by optimizing the choice of a camera for each triangle of the mesh and treating the continuity problem at the seams. Finally, we show direct application of our system relying on the common parametrization provided by the generic model : use of the avatars in a virtual try-on application, modifying the haircut of the reconstructed model and animation transfer.

Jury :

Bernard Durand - UHA (Rapporteur)
Anne Verroust-Blondet - INRIA Rocquencourt (Rapporteur)
Philippe Guerlain - UHA (Co-rapporteur)
Luc Van Gool - ETH Zürich
Patrick Horain - Telecom SudParis
Jean-Luc Lamotte - Paris 6
Jean-Michel Delouard - 3DOuest
André Gagalowicz -INRIA (Directeur)

MAP Spring School

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:48:59 GMT

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Inria research centre Sophia Antipolis - Mediterranee organises the next MAP Spring School on Formalization of Mathematics. The aim of this school is to give mathematicians and mathematically inclined researchers the keys to the Coq system and the Mathematical Components library.

A growing population of mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers use computers to construct and verify proofs of mathematical results. Among the various approaches to this activity, a fruitful one relies on interactive theorem proving. When following this approach, researchers have to use the formal language of a theorem prover to encode their mathematical knowledge and the proofs they want to scrutinize. The mathematical knowledge often contains two parts: a static part describing structures and a dynamic part describing algorithms. Then proofs are made in a style that is inspired from usual mathematical practice but often differs enough that it requires some training. A key ingredient for the mathematical practicionner is the amount of mathematical knowledge that is already available in the system's library.

The Coq system is an interactive theorem prover based on Type Theory. It was recently used to study the proofs of advanced mathematical results. In particular, it was used to provide a mechanically verified proof of the four-colour theorem and it is now being used in a long term effort, called Mathematical Components to verify results in group theory, with a specific focus on the odd order theorem, also known as the Feit-Thompson theorem. These two examples rely on a structured library that covers various aspects of finite set theory, group theory, arithmetic, and algebra.

The aim of this school is to give mathematicians and mathematically inclined researchers the keys to the Coq system and the Mathematical Components library. The topics covered are:

Formal proof techniques
Structuration of libraries
Encoding of common mathematical structures
Formal description of algorithms

An overview of advanced projects:

The odd order theorem
Constructive algebraic topology
Kepler's conjecture,
Computational analysis,
Fondational investigations.

The school's contents will be organized as a balanced schedule between lectures and laboratory sessions where participants will be invited to work on their own computer and try their hands on a progressive collection of exercices.

First Class Datatypes and their Ornaments

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:32:56 GMT

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As Epigram 2 continues its slow crawl into existence, it is acquiring a treatment of datatypes with first class descriptions (inhabiting a datatype with a description). This treatment offers us some new opportunities to compute the structure of data: we can compute the structure of indexed datatypes from their index values; we can characterise what it is to construct one datatype as a "fancy version" of an old one. By making the structure of datatypes a matter of systematic definition rather than artful declaration, we acquire a variety of useful, if mundane, programs and theorems for free. I'll argue for a direction of travel in which data are not seen as inherently and
inferably typed, but rather checkable at a multitude of types. Hopefully, the multitude is not a mob, but a regiment.

Domain Decomposition Methods: Schwarz, Schur, Waveform Relaxation and the Parareal Algorithm

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:34:28 GMT

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At 2pm, free entrance

Domain decomposition methods have been developed in various contexts, and with very different goals in mind. I will start my presentation with the historical inventions of the Schwarz method, the Schur methods and Waveform Relaxation. I will then show for a simple model problem how all these domain decomposition methods function, give precise results for the model problem, and also explain the most general convergence results available currently for these methods. I will conclude with the parareal algorithm and interesting recent variants.

International Spring School on Formalization of Mathematics

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:20:58 GMT

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Formal proof techniques
Structuration of libraries
Encoding of common mathematical structures
Formal description of algorithms

An overview of advanced projects:

The odd order theorem
Constructive algebraic topology
Kepler's conjecture,
Computational analysis,
Fondational investigations.

15th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:54:01 GMT

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Inria (French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics) is organising MICCAI 2012, the 15^th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention. MICCAI attracts annually world leading scientists, engineers and clinicians from a wide range of disciplines associated with medical imaging and computer assisted surgery.

General topics of the conference include medical image computing, computer-assisted intervention, guidance systems and robotics, visualization and virtual reality, computer-aided diagnosis, bioscience and biology applications, specific imaging systems, and new imaging applications. The conference series includes three days of oral presentations and poster sessions.

The quality and importance of posters are considered to be on a part with oral platform presentations. All oral and poster papers are published in the MICCAI Conference Proceedings, which is having an increasing impact on the field. The conference series includes workshops and seminars just before and/or after the conference. These associated workshops and seminars focus in detail on current status and advances in the topics of MICCAI.

Max Dauchet : Leslie Valiant and the 2010 Turing Award

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:35:26 GMT

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A secondary and higher-education qualified teaching professional in mathematics, with a PhD in both computer science and mathematics, Max Dauchet is a professor emeritus at the Université de Lille 1. In 1982 he founded and managed for 9 years the Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille. He directed the INRIA Lille - Nord Europe research centre from its creation through May 2011. He is a specialist mainly in tree automata.

The Turing Award is widely considered the Nobel Prize in computing and computational sciences. The 46 Turing Awards already granted are a reflection of our science today. The most recent winner is Leslie Valiant, rewarded mainly for introducing the concept of PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) learning, considered by some as being equivalent to a learning device for the Turing computability machine. Our presentation will consist of a commented representation of the conference given on 4 June 2011 by Leslie Valiant after receiving his award. This conference, entitled “The Extent and the Limitations of Mechanistic Explanations of Nature” presents the Darwinian process of evolution by mutation and selection as a learning process.

Registration is free but compulsory

Monolix Day 2011

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:18:14 GMT

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To celebrate the release of version 4 of the Monolix Software, Inria and Lixoft invite you to the third Monolix Day.

Monolix is a software dedicated to the study of non linear mixed effects models for population analysis in pre-clinical and clinical trials.
During the Monolix Day, you will be given the opportunity to discover the latest version of the Monolix Software, meet the Monolix team and get an overview of the new challenges that the Monolix team intends to address in a near future.

Programming and scheduling parallel computations on multicore systems

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:21:28 GMT

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At 10h30 am

Free entrance

While multicore computers have become mainstream, multicore programming remains full of pitfalls. Using P cores to speed up one's program by a factor close enough to P turns out to be far trickier than it sounds. Beyond the immediate difficulty of parallelizing existing algorithms, one faces the problem of amortizing the costs of task creation, the challenge of dealing with dynamic load balancing, the hazards of concurrent programming and the headaches associated with weak memory models. However, by using the right programming language abstractions together with a well-designed scheduler, multicore programming can become all of a sudden much more accessible.
In this talk, I will present multicore programming techniques that I have developed recently together with Umut Acar and Mike Rainey at the Max Planck Institute. In particular, I will discuss the following:
*) High-level language constructs for describing parallelism; these constructs include spawn/sync constructs like in Cilk, but also more general constructs allowing one to build arbitrary computation DAGs and to help the scheduler execute them efficiently.
*) An efficient synchronization-free variant of the work-stealing scheduler; our scheduler can be implemented without any atomic operation (on x86), thereby avoiding weak memory model issues and offering a lot of flexibility.
*) A general approach to controlling granularity, and thereby avoiding the creation of too many small tasks; this approach relies both on user-provided asymptotic complexity functions and on lightweight runtime profiling.

Conference in the memory of Philippe Flajolet

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:48:17 GMT

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Philippe Flajolet suddenly passed away from cancer on March 22, 2011. He was 62 and full of scientific projects.

In this conference, we wish to pay homage to the man as well as the multi-faceted mathematician and computer-scientist. *We think that this conference will also help more people understand his rich and varied work, through talks aimed at a large audience.
The first afternoon will be devoted to testimonies and official talks. The next two days will be dedicated to scientific talks. These talks are intended to people who want to learn about Philippe Flajolet’s work, and will be given mostly by co-authors of Philippe. In 30 minutes, they will give a pedagogical introduction to his work, identify his main ideas and contributions and possibly show their evolution. Most of the talks will form a basis for an introduction to the corresponding chapter in Philippe Flajolet's collected works, to be edited soon.

For organizational reasons, please register very soon.

Domain Decomposition Methods: Schwarz, Schur, Waveform Relaxation and the Parareal Algorithm

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:20:08 GMT

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At 2pm, free entrance

The Fixed-mesh ALE method for fluid-structure interaction problems

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:06:35 GMT

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At 2pm, free entrance

The Fixed-Mesh ALE approach is a method to approximate multiphysics problems in moving domains using always a given grid for the spatial discretization. Our main concern is to properly account for the advection of information as the domain boundary evolves. To achieve this, we use an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian framework, the distinctive feature being that at each time step results are projected onto a fixed, background mesh, that is where the problem is actually solved. Some examples of applications of the Fixed-Mesh ALE method to fluid-structure interaction, free surface flows and solid mechanics problems will be presented. The imposition of Dirichlet boundary conditions is a key issue in fixed-grid methods. A way to weakly prescribe Dirichlet boundary conditions in embedded grids will be presented. The key feature of the method is that no large penalty parameter is needed and that it is symmetric for symmetric problems.

International conference “Chance at the heart of the cell”

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:13:01 GMT

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The conference “Chance at the heart of the cell” on stochastic gene expression from an experimental, theoretical and philosophical perspective will be held in Lyon on November 21, 22 and 23, 2011.

The emergence of stochastic gene expression therefore raises important questions about its implications not only for biological theories but also about its epistemological status. This conference brought together experimental and theoretical biologists, modelers, epistemologists and philosophers to bring a new theoretical and epistemological dimension for research in this multidisciplinary field and create a unique opportunity for interaction between participants.

The following topics will be addressed by specialists:

Philosophy:

Overview of determinism and probabilism
What is chance?
Objective and subjective probability
Determinism in biology (from an historical and philosophical perspective)
The example of physics (probability and indeterminism in statistical and quantum physics)
Sociological and epistemological obstacles to probabilism in Biology

Biology:

Overview of stochastic gene expression
What are the causes of stochastic expression (diffusion of molecules, chromatin effects, etc.)
Does stochastic gene expression contradict the genetic programming theory?
The role of stochastic gene expression in cell differentiation and embryo development
The modelization of stochastic gene expression and stochastic cell differentiation
The role of stochastic gene expression in cancer

This meeting will be followed by an “Atelier d’approfondissement des questions ouvertes” (in french only), that will be organized on the 23 of September

Erol Gelenbe's seminars

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:23:31 GMT

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These seminars give the opportunity to researchers and PhD students to present their work in the field of telecommunication networks.

At Inria Sophia Antipolis centre, this research is leaded by three projects:

MASCOTTE, for the development of methods and tools, with particular emphasis on the design of the telecommunication networks, circuit-switched networks and mobile networks (graph theory, parallel algorithms....)
MAESTRO, for the modelling and performance evaluation of networks (queueing theory, Markov chains....)
PLANETE, for the design, implementation and evaluation of Internet protocols and applications.

Each week, a member of one of these three projects or an invited speaker gives a presentation of one hour, with a particular emphasis on the general problem considered and on the technics used. These seminars are intended for a large and non-specialist audience.

On october, the invited speaker is Erol Gelenbe, Professor in the Dennis Gabor Chair, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College London. He will present two seminars :

25th of october (2pm): Self Aware Networks and QoS

We will present results from an ongoing experimental research project which focuses on ways in which a packet network can pursue goals that satisfy its users needs, based on self-observation and adaptation by the network itself. The technique uses our ideas from the Cognitive Packet Network patent with smart packets that are routed to search the best available paths according to user specified QoS criteria. The method has been applied to conventional QoS metrics such as delay, loss and jitter as well as to other criteria such as energy consumption and security.

27th of october (2pm): Networked Auctions

Auctions have become a common technique for economic exchanges in the Internet, and this talk will outline a theory of auctions where buyers and sellers compete collectively, resulting in the emergence of equilibrium economic outcomes. The underlying mathematics is derived from queueing theory and the analysis we present results in product form equilibrium solutions.

About the Speaker

Erol's current research addresses self-organised communications, as well as broader issues of the theory of networked systems including chemistry, bioinformatics, economics and physics, and his recent papers appear in the Physical Review, as well as in ACM and IEEE journals. Born in Turkey, Erol founded the performance evaluation research activities at Inria and in French Universities, and his work has had world wide impact. As a result he was the first computer scientist to receive the Prix France Telecom in 1996, he was elected to the Academy of Sciences of Hungary and Turkey, he received the ACM SIGMETRICS Life-Time Achievement Award and is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE. A member of Academie des Technologies, he received honoris causa doctorates from the Universities of Liege, Roma II, and Bogazi i (Istanbul), and Italy awarded him the Commander of Merit and Grand Officer Medals.

"Philippe Flajolet and Analytic Combinatorics"

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:11:59 GMT

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From 14 till 16 December 2011 Inria co-organizes a conference dedicated to the work and to the memory of Philippe Flajolet, died suddenly on March 22nd, 2011. In this conference, we wish to pay homage to the man as well as the multi-faceted mathematician and computer-scientist.This conference will also help more people understand his rich and varied work, through talks aimed at a large audience.

The first afternoon will be devoted to testimonies and official talks.

The next two days will be dedicated to scientific talks. These talks are intended to people who want to learn about Philippe Flajolet’s work, and will be given mostly by co-authors of Philippe. In 30 minutes, they will give a pedagogical introduction to his work, identify his main ideas and contributions and possibly show their evolution. Most of the talks will form a basis for an introduction to the corresponding chapter in Philippe Flajolet's collected works, to be edited soon.

Recovering Disjointness from Concurrent Sharing

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:28:04 GMT

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Inria - Rocquencourt, amphithéâtre Alan Turing, bâtiment 1.

Entrée libre à 10 h 30

Disjointness is an extraordinarily useful property when reasoning about concurrent programs. Threads that access mutually disjoint resources can be reasoned about locally, ignoring interleavings. This is the core insight behind Concurrent Separation Logic. However, concurrent modules often share resources internally, frustrating disjoint reasoning. In this talk, I will suggest that sharing is often irrelevant to the clients of these modules, and should be hidden. I will show how separation logic can be used to hide
irrelevant sharing and recover disjoint reasoning. I will motivate this with the example of a concurrent index, and show how some high-level sharing can be maintained, while still reaping the benefits of disjointness.

Cayley-type identities: new combinatorial proofs and applications to non-perturbative quantum field theories

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:24:18 GMT

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Entrée libre, à 14h00.

The classic Cayley identity states that det D (det X)^s = s(s+1)...(s+n-1) (det X)^(s-1), where X=(x_{ij}) is an n-by-n matrix of indeterminates and D=(d/d x_{ij}) is the corresponding matrix of partial derivatives. We will give new, simple proofs of this identity, purely combinatorial, using Grassmann algebra (= exterior algebra) and Grassmann-Berezin integration. We will state some generalizations, both old and new, and sketch how the simplified proof approach suggests them. These identities are special cases of Bernstein-Sato identities, a tool for solving the problem of finding the analytic continuation of a certain distribution-valued analytic function of s on the right complex half-plane. This problem arises also in the rigorous treatment of a problem in theoretical physics: how to describe a quantum field theory with variables valued on the s-dimensional sphere. We will give a flavour of how and why the solution of this problem would be relevant in this field. (This talk is based on joint work with Sergio Caracciolo and Alan D. Sokal, arXiv:1105.6270 plus other unpublished material.)

Cayley-type identities: new combinatorial proofs and applications to non-perturbative quantum field theories

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:17:52 GMT

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Entrée libre, à 14h00.

Data Management in the Cloud

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 14:46:08 GMT

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In this talk, we analyse the design choices that allowed modern scalable data management systems to achieve orders of magnitude higher levels of scalability compared to traditional databases.

With this understanding, we highlight some design principles for data management systèmes that can be used to augment existing databases with new cloud features such as scalability, elasticity and autonomy.

5th Seminar on High Performance Numerical Computing

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 17:04:16 GMT

Program

10h-11h - A Parametric Approach to Steer the Auto-Tuning of Tools in the DOE ACTS Collection, L. A. Drummond – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The Advanced Computational Software (ACTS) Collection is a set of computational high-performance tools and libraries developed primarily at DOE laboratories. ACTS tools have substantially accelerated the development of high-end computer simulation codes. The collection provides a wide range of scalable numerical algorithms, auto-tuning tools for automatic optimizations of libraries and tools that support the development of parallel codes and their execution. The diversity of the emerging hardware now poses a great challenge for the scalability of the tools. While new programing languages and paradigms are being devised, we look at exploiting a parametric approach to auto-tune ACTS tools and the applications that used them.
Here, we present the ACTS Collection parametric approach to produce highly tuned libraries and scientific applications. A subset of these parameters steer the optimization of the ACTS tools by using a software dependency graph. This graph in turn combines techniques to auto-tune the numerical kernels. The second subset of the parameters is geared for improving the behavior of the numerical kernels in the ACTS tools. These are arguments that are passed by the application to the numerical functionalities in ACTS at run-time. This talk will introduce the ACTS tools functionalities, the ACTS parametric approach auto-tune their installations with some examples and performance results.

11h-11h40 - Co-Array Fortran programming applied to seismic imaging, France Boillod-Cerneux – LIFL/CNRS
† The work is sponsored by TOTAL), with project advisors: Henri Calandra, Terrence Liao** and Saber Feki. (**primary TOTAL contact: terrence.liao@total.com) and with the most recent result provided by Debjyoti Majumder, Unversity of Houston, and Terrence Liao, TOTAL.
Co-Array Fortran (CAF) is an extension to Fortran language (incorporated in Fortran 2008 Language Standared) for SPMD programming model which allows parallelism. CAF language is part of the PGAS programming model to handle one-sided communication. Its concept is based on the following assumption: ‘A single program is replicated a fixed number of times, each replication having its own set of data objects. Each replication of the program is called an image.’
Since 2009, TOTAL has established collaboration with Prof. Barbara Chapman’s Team at University of Houston, to develop a version of CAF compiler based on OpenUH, an Open64 family of compilers.
The objective of this work is to evaluate the performance of CAF codes using UHCAF compiler vs MPI codes using Intel compiler, on the based code from seismic imaging application for the Oil & Gas exploration.
We concluded that CAF offers more readability and understanding syntax than MPI, regarding the communication operation. Moreover, CAF is better adapted for domain decomposition.
We also studied, based on benchmark communication, the performances of UHCAF compared to MPI for non contiguous data structure, and observed that CAF with GASNet as runtime library offers compatible or even better performance than MPI on non contiguous data structure. In this talk, we will present first the CAF syntax and its concepts. We will then introduce UHCAF operations, and the advantages of CAF regarding the programming ability. We will focus on the UHCAF and Intel MPI performances comparisons for non contiguous data, by using a communication Benchmark. As a conclusion, the performance results obtained from finite difference kernels applied to Isotropic/Tilted Transversely Isotropic media Benchmark, implemented with CAF and MPI are presented.

10h40-12h – Discussions, news and future events

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Mathematical models for the cardiovascular system: analysis, numerical simulation, applications

Tue, 4 Oct 2011 13:23:21 GMT

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The role of mathematics in understanding and simulating fluid dynamics and biochemical processes in the physiological and pathological functioning of the human cardiovascular system is becoming more and more crucial.

These phenomena are indeed correlated with the origin of some major cardiovascular pathologies, and influence the efficacy of the treatments to heal the arteries from their diseases.
Mathematical models allow the description of the complex fluid-structure interaction which govern the
artery wall deformation under the pressure pulse. Moreover, appropriate reduction strategies can be devised to allow for an effective description of the interaction between large, 3D components, and small 1D branches of the circulatory system, as well as the transfer of drugs and chemicals between the arterial lumen and the vessel wall.
This presentation will address some of these issues and a few representative applications.

Cayley-type identities: new combinatorial proofs and applications to non-perturbative quantum field theories

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:58:43 GMT

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Entrée libre, à 14h00.

Sur le nombre d'intervalles dans les treillis de Tamari

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:56:55 GMT

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Entrée libre, à 10h30.

L'ensemble des arbres binaires de taille n (ou mots de Dyck à n pas montants) peut être muni d'une structure de treillis dite de Tamari, dont la relation de couverture correspond à une operation de rotation sur les arbres. Une jolie formule due à Chapoton assure que le nombre d'intervalles dans le treillis est \frac{2}{n(n+1)}{4n+1 \choose n-1}. Nous donnons différentes méthodes pour montrer cette formule et en proposons une généralisation à un certain treillis dit m-Tamari qui opère sur les mots de Dyck dont les pas montants ont hauteur m (le cas m=1 correspond au treillis de Tamari classique) et dont nous montrons que le nombre d'intervalles est \frac{m+1}{n(mn+1)}{(m+1)^2 n+m \choose n-1}.

23rd International Meeting on Probabilistic, Combinatorial and Asymptotic Methods for the Analysis of Algorithms

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:27:52 GMT

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The 23rd International Meeting on Probabilistic, Combinatorial and Asymptotic Methods for the Analysis of Algorithms, or simply AofA 2012, is the third joint meeting of two conferences, Mathematics and Computer Science (MathInfo) and Analysis of Algorithms (AofA). It is the 18th meeting in the AofA series---five separate MathInfo meetings were held, for a total of 23. Its main purpose is to exchange ideas and foster collaboration around the themes of analytic, combinatorial and probabilistic methods, randomized algorithms, and theoretical aspects of trees, graphs, networks, strings and other mathematical structures.

January 15, 2012: Submission deadline.

February 15, 2012: Reports are due.

March 1, 2012: Decisions on the final program. Notification of authors.

April 1, 2012: Final versions of accepted papers.

The meeting is dedicated to the memory of Philippe Flajolet.

Formal verification and control of piecewise affine systems with applications to gene networks

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:53:27 GMT

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Entrée libre.

Horaire : 10 h

Discrete-time piecewise affine systems (PWA) are a particular class of hybrid systems that evolve along different affine dynamics in different polyhedral regions of the continuous state space. Such models are very popular because they can approximate nonlinear systems with arbitrary accuracy and because of the existence of algorithms for the identification of such systems from experimental data. In this talk, I will show how the particular structure of PWA systems can be exploited to develop computationally efficient algorithms for their verification and for synthesis of parameters and control strategies. I will show how such tools can be used for analysis and synthesis of synthetic gene
networks.

A Somewhat Historic View of Lightweight Cryptography

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:47:11 GMT

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Séminaire organisé par l'équipe-projet CASCADE.

A 10h30, entrée libre.

Lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as block ciphers, stream ciphers, and hash functions that fit constrained environments are continuously being devised. As more and more lightweight primitives are suggested, more and more of them are found to fail in providing their security goals, as cryptanalytic results such as meet in the middle attacks are developed. In the talk, we shall discuss recent advances in the development of these primitives, as well as the recent advances in breaking them, and the implications of these advances on the field of design and cryptanalysis of lightweight encryption schemes.

Free Open Source Academia Conference 2011

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:58:10 GMT

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The third edition of fOSSa (Free Open Source Software for Academia) will be held in Lyon on October 26, 27 and 28, 2011.

fOSSa conference is a joint effort of passionate people who believe in the openness as the way to create new meanings & tangible results with respect, trust, transparency & open collaboration.

fOSSa is the right place:

to discover new open source projects, trends and challenges
to network and meet OSS leaders
to grab OSS best practices and experiences
to explore open source connections with human beings!

At fOSSa people discuss in an open-minded context about:

what tech people are actually doing and innovating
which are the upcoming issues & challenges in the open development context
how open activities, collaboration and knowledge sharing is beneficial to academia, education & industry.

fOSSa 2011 program includes talks about Education, Online Community Management, New Innovating Development & Contribution Paradigm, Openness and OSS trends.
Moreover, a special easy-to-go live demo session is scheduled: any OSS fan can present its project.

fOSSa 2011, sponsored by HP Open Source Division and Live Projects, is co-organized by Inria, IRILL, INSA de Lyon (CITI Lab) and Engineering Group.

fOSSa days are open to everyone, with free registration but with places being limited. We are waiting for you: registration are open!

2010 Science Festival

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:19:59 GMT

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Come and discover, first-hand, the innovations of the future in the field of computational sciences and engage in debate on this world where scientific and technical knowledge is increasingly playing a major economic and societal role!

A partner of Sophia Antipolis's Weekend of Sciences, the Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée research centre offers demonstrations and exchanges with scientists during various events:

18 to 22 October: For the third consecutive year, Inria researchers will organise several workshops, activities and lectures with young people throughout the week in several secondary schools in the Alpes-Maritimes area.

Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 October: Participation in the "Weekend of Sciences at Sophia Antipolis" with several events on the programme:
- From web2 to home automation: how does open-source software resulting from theoretical computer science offer
  new prospects to citizens?
- Shamash: algae in biofuel: how to enable computer sciences
  to contribute to more sustainable development
- OpenVibe demo: Human-Computer Interface: from cerebral activity to computerised control.
- An artificial left hand: when mathematical equations are embodied in a robotic system
- Using the RAM game, you will be able to strengthen or enrich your computer science knowledge while having fun.

20 to 30 October: Exhibition at the Valbonne Sophia Antipolis media centre: "Computer science from A to Z": Discover an overview of computer science research in the form of an alphabet book! Each illustrated letter refers to a word from the computer science vocabulary chosen by the researchers to discuss their fields of research. A short text explains the research topic, the issues and the applications.

Seminar: “Social networks: from structures to policy”

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:23:57 GMT

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This seminar is intended to review social networks from an inter-disciplinary point of view, so as to gain a better appreciation of the range of issues raised by this domain in methodological, scientific and policy terms. What is the real structure of these networks? How does such knowledge affect sociology? What are its policy consequences? What kind of world is emerging as a result of this digital frenzy?

Social networks are a major subject for sociologists. As early as in 1934, J.-L. Moreno studied networks of friends within a group of girls who ran away from school in order to improve understanding as to why they had done so, and considered a form of socio-metrics similar to the ‘social atoms’ of physics. This type of study has blossomed since the 1990s thanks to the huge amount of data available on social systems.

Guest speakers at the “Social networks: from structures to policy” seminar are global leading lights in their respective fields, which together cover various disciplines such as sociology, information technology, anthropology, philosophy, physics and mathematics, etc.: Bruno Latour, David Stark, Alain Barrat, Vincent Blondel, Gianluca Manzo, Pierre Mercklé

Innovations and feedback in Model - Driven Engineering

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:11:39 GMT

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The IN'Tech technology watch club, led by Inria and the association Grenoble Isère Logiciel (GRILOG), is organising a half-day of forums between researchers and industrial operators on the techniques and innovations in engineering of model-based software developments and their applications in an Eclipse environment.

Talks

Advances and tools for model-based software development, Didier Vojtisek, Research Engineer at Inria, Rennes
A tool supporting an agile management loop of an SOA platform, Alain Boulze and Adrian Mos - Research Engineers at Inria, Grenoble
Use of MDA in Eclipse for document engineering, Thierry Jacquin, Research Engineer, Xerox Research Centre Europe
OpenArchitectureWare and model transformation, Yannick Lizzi, Software Architect - Itemis France

Presentation and demonstrations of technological solutions:

OpenArchitectureWare, MDE tools in Eclipse
Itemis

Kermeta, language and environment for meta-modelling
Inria Triskell project-team

Application in document engineering - Xeproc Designer - Xerox Document Structure' research group

Galaxy platform
Tuvalu/galaxy team, Inria

Green IT, Green by IT, and Sustainable Development

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:01:26 GMT

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The IN'Tech technology watch club, led by Inria and the association Grenoble Isère Logiciel (GRILOG), is organising a half-day of forums between researchers and industrial operators on "Green IT", technologies and computer services integrating energy and environmental constraints into their design, operation or applications.

Welcome from 1:30 p.m.

Opening

2:00 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.
By Philippe Broun, Inria, and James Crowley, Grenoble INP/GRILOG

Introduction

2:15 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
By Laurent Lefèvre RESO project-team/Inria and Anne-Céline Lamballe, Technology Transfer and Innovation department - Inria

Plenary sessions

2:45 p.m. ICT - unprecedented waste
Jez Wain, system architect, Group Bull

The presentation sets out the current state of data centres and indicates the sources of the main inefficiencies. It looks at potential improvements and discusses the difficulties of measuring the efficiency of a computer room.

3:15 p.m. Green Data Center
Frédéric Dulac, EOLAS

3:45 p.m. Introductions of demonstrations, forums and exchanges

Demonstrations

4:00 p.m. Discovery of demonstrations, forums and exchanges

Green IT (Frédéric Bordage, www.greenit.fr)With more than 30,000 professionals visiting each month, GreenIT.fr is the site of reference for Green IT and sustainable ICT in France. The contributors of GreenIT.fr are all specialists in the field who share their thoughts and discoveries with the other members of the community. Our objective is to accelerate the dissemination of knowledge on the subject to help companies and individuals to reduce the environmental footprint of information and communication technologies.
Eco-ICT and responsible office automation (Laurent Alliod, DotRiver)DotRiver will show you how to work in good conditions with workstations that are more than five years old in order to prolong the useful life of PCs and thus avoid computer waste. The eco-innovative solution developed by DotRiver with open source software facilitates remote work and reinforces data security without putting a complex architecture into place. DotRiver is the only computer manufacturer to be supported by Ademe (French Agency for the Environment and Energy Control).
Energy efficiency for large scale Distributed Systems (A.C. Orgerie and M. Dias de Assuncao Inria project-team RESO)Distributed systems (grids, clouds) represent a significant, ever-growing fraction of global electricity consumption. This demonstration presents a software infrastructure that integrates energy-saving policies to regulate and control this consumption on an experimental platform of 150 nodes with continuously measured electricity consumption. Energy-saving policies are based on the extinction of unused nodes, aggregation and prediction of use. The software environment that we have developed also allows us to see the real-time impact of decisions made by our resource manager on electricity consumption.

Plenary talks

5:00 p.m. HOMES project
Didier Pellegrin, Schneider Electric

HOMES (Habitat and optimised building for control of energy and services) defines new architectures for the control and distribution of energy in buildings, integrating innovative technologies for sensors, control and power in order to market products and solutions necessary for better energy efficiency and permit the development of new services. The implementation of this active control requires multiple innovations: new technologies (for example, for sensors, energy stand-alone systems) as well as a system approach for the various functions of the building, an approach in which software holds an important place.

5:30 p.m. Impacts of computer science: resources, energy, waste; what do life cycle analyses tell us?
Françoise Berthoud (ECOINFO/CNRS)

The energy consumed in the usage phase of information and communication technologies is only one of the many aspects of the overall impact of the electronics industry throughout the life cycle of such equipment. I will highlight some life cycle analysis results and show why an environmental approach should not be limited to reducing the energy consumed in the usage phase.

Closing of the seminar

6:00 p.m. - 6:15 p.m.
By Philippe Broun

Virtualization and cloud computing: programme

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:28:53 GMT

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The IN'Tech technology watch club is organising a half-day of forums between researchers and industrial operators on industrial technologies and experience in virtualisation of computing resources, for services and hosting of applications but also for computing infrastructures and resources.

Introduction and opening

2:00 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.
By Philippe Broun, Inria, and James Crowley, Grenoble INP

Plenary talks

2:15 p.m. Virtualisation and cloud computing: an introduction to the subject
Frédéric Desprez, Inria Senior Research Scientist

2:30 p.m. Virtualisation of networks and Cloud Networking
Pascale Vicat-Blanc, Inria - RESO project-team

3:00 p.m. XtreemOS
Christine Morin, IRISA

Virtualisation and cloud computing demonstrations

3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.: presentation and discovery of applications and services

HP supercomputer (3 Teraflops) with access service for member companies of GRILOG (Jean-Marie Davesnes, Oxalya)
A client case: elasticity for optimisation (Guillaume Plessis, IGTechnology)
Combined virtualisation of network and computing infrastructures (Philippe Martinez and Romaric Guillier, LYaTiss)
SysFera-DS: high-performance, transparent middleware for Cluster/Grids/Clouds and beyond (David Loureiro and Eddy Caron, SysFera)
Virtualisation service on Cloud (Christophe Baillon and Samuel Maftoul)
UShareSoft (Thomas Debru, Catherine Nuel)
A Web App Store framework solution for mobile operator netbooks integrating a 3G card. (Lionel Fiat, CloudSeas)

Plenary talks

5:00 p.m. IBM and the Enterprise Clouds approach
F. Briant, IBM

5:30 p.m. Cloud computing for a telecommunications operator
Thierry Coupaye, Orange Labs and Alex Rigaldo, Orange Business Services

Closing of the seminar

6:00 p.m. - 6:15 p.m.
by Philippe Broun

3D images: acquisition, synthesis and visualisation

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:14:59 GMT

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The IN'Tech technology watch club is hosting a day of forums between researchers and industrial operators on the topic of "3D images: acquisition, synthesis and visualisation", on Thursday, 14 October 2010, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., at the Inria centre in Montbonnot.

Welcome: 8:30 a.m. - 9:00 a.m.

Introduction to the day

9:00 a.m.
By P.J. Crepin, ORA Cluster, and Philippe Broun, Inria

Plenary sessions

9:20 a.m. - Three-dimensional visual perception in humans
Pascal Mamassian, Psychology of perception lab, Paris
The perception of space and three-dimensional (3D) shapes in humans is based on the use of multiple indices present in retinal images. The binocular disparity index is undoubtedly the best known and one of the most reliable, but other indices pertaining to movement or shadows complement this binocular index, especially for greater depths. This talk will present some fundamental properties of 3D perception from various indices as well as recent results on the binocular index and interactions between these indices.
10:00 a.m. - 3DLive project: shooting for 3D images
Patrick Defay, Thalès Angénieux

3DLive is a collaborative project bringing together industrial (Orange Labs, Thales Angénieux, Technicolor, Binocle, AMP, Grass Valley) and academic (Inria, Institut Telecom) partners and aims to control the recording, processing and transmission of live cultural or sporting events in stereoscopic 3D. Each of the partners represents the best in know-how covering a part of this process and contributes its capacities in operational terms or in research and development.
The presentation will address the recording aspect, for which cameras, objectives, camera rigs, and real-time 3D staging and correction software must be specially developed for the transmission of an event in stereoscopic 3D.

Break

10:30 a.m. - 10:50 a.m.

Plenary sessions

10:50 a.m. - Stereoscopic video correction and adaptation to the display device
Frédéric Devernay, Inria
A stereoscopic film shot with a standard pair of cameras generally presents geometric imperfections that could produce visual fatigue for viewers. We will examine various factors of visual fatigue and will propose solutions making it possible to correct videos through digital processing in order to make them more acceptable. The analysis of the geometry of the filming system and display device shows that a stereoscopic video is necessarily produced for a given display device (for example, a 3D television screen), and the display of the same film on another device (for example, a cinema screen) risks producing significant geometric distortions and causing visual fatigue. We therefore also propose treatments to adapt the stereoscopic video to the display device in order to avoid visual fatigue while maintaining the proportions in terms of scene depth.

11:30 a.m. - Moov'3D project: A miniaturised system for 3D applications
Anne Guerin, GIPSA Lab, Grenoble

The "Moov3D" project is a three-year project of the "Minalogic" competitiveness cluster grouping together industrial partners – ST-Ericsson (project sponsor), MicroOLED, VisioGloble and Pointcube – and academic partners – CEA-LETI-Lab ITUS, CNRS-GIPSA-lab. This project raises the issue of introducing stereoscopic 3D to mobile phones and intends to resolve the related technological barriers in order to provide a development platform to application developers. Thus, the project strives to create a development platform with all of the hardware and software functions required to record, process and view 3D on telephones or other mobile equipment. This platform will be used to efficiently develop applications using stereoscopic 3D, such as the recording and viewing of stereoscopic photo/video content, and virtual reality and augmented reality applications. The objective is for this platform to be a benchmark because of its processing power (up to high definition), its connectivity to the various existing 3D viewing systems (lounge screen or stereoscopic glasses for mobile applications), and its level in terms of image quality by integrating as far as possible the characteristic elements of our visual perception.

12:00 p.m. - 3D vision, stereoscopy and immersive human-computer interfaces
Aléxis Nédélec, ENIB

After an introduction on the perceptive factors of 3D reconstruction by the visual system, this presentation will set out the principles of stereoscopic vision, their implementation in stereoscopic display systems, the fields of application for stereovision, as well as a taxonomy of existing 3D display systems.

Lunch - Explore stands and session posters

12:40 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.

4D View Solutions (Richard Broadbridge, co-founder and chairman of 4D Views - www.4dviews.com) 4D Views, innovation in 3D scene digitisation 4D Views provides multi-camera video acquisition solutions, making it possible to digitise a real, dynamic scene in three dimensions in real time. The 3D scans produced by this solution contain colour information about the digitised scene as well as its geometric information. This representation thus permits the real-time observation of the scene in new viewing angles, other than those provided by the cameras filming it. 4D Views sells its solutions to public and private research organisations abroad and offers 3D capture services to the film world.

Visioglobe (Mr Cédric Manzoni, Mr Hector Briceño) VisioStreet, 3D interactive city navigation on mobile phones In a world where smartphones are becoming omnipresent and users need to remain connected, we offer VisioStreet®, an application that allows the user to navigate within a city in 3D.
The application can be used by local city residents, tourists or business people, to find friends, restaurants, and much more.
The technology can be used in both outdoor and indoor settings, and real-time advertising and social networks are directly integrated into the visual data.

Binocle (Mr Sergi Pujades) Stereoscopic camera: 3D rig The conference will focus on the presentation of Binocle filming tools: the Brigger III (3D rig) and the DisparityTagger. The first is a versatile motorised unit which precisely and effectively controls the position of cameras. This relative position will determine the 3D effect. The second tool controls and corrects stereoscopic flows in real time. The DisparityTagger incorporates algorithms resulting from a technology transfer by Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes.
These tools are currently used in filming: in cinema, for example on the French feature film "Behind the Walls", or in BroadCast, for example on the Six Nations Rugby matches.
BINOCLE develops and offers to cinema professionals the most innovative production and post-production tools, dedicated to 3D staging. A production company specialising in the shooting and treatment of stereoscopic images, Binocle 3D relies on strong expertise in the field of cinematographic shooting and digital technologies.

Thales Angégnieux (Mr Patrick Defay) Application of 3D observation to the field of infrared imaging Thales Angénieux is the internationally recognised manufacturer of high-tech optical and optronic systems, specialising in the design and manufacture of zooms for cinema and television, for surveillance and security as well as in night-vision goggles. Today, Thales Angénieux is the European leader in night vision, mastering the technologies of light intensification and infrared. The innovation capacity of Thales Angénieux now makes it a major player in the development of 3D.

POSTER 1
A waveguide for 3D
Adrian Travis, Microsoft Corporation

POSTER 2
Estimation of depth through sharpness analysis
Jérôme Dias(1), Gergely Papp(1), Stéphane Gétin(1), David Alleysson(2); (1) CEA, LETI, MINATEC (2) LPNC, Université de Grenoble

Exchanges and work groups

2:15 p.m.

Break

3:00 p.m.

Closing of the seminar

5:00 p.m.

Summary of the day in plenary
Conclusion: ORA cluster and Grilog

Open Source and innovation: Open Source as a development methodology - programme

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:02:38 GMT

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The IN'Tech technology watch club, led by Inria and the association Grenoble Isère Logiciel (GRILOG), is organising a half-day of forums between researchers and industrial operators on development methodologies and experiments based on open source, on Tuesday, 12 January 2010 from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., at the Inria centre in Montbonnot.

Introduction and opening

2:00 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.
By Philippe Broun, Inria, and James Crowley, Grenoble INP

Plenary talks

2:15 p.m. Open source: a proven process for production of innovation in software
François Letellier, Independent consultant

2:45 p.m. Inria and Open Source Software
Presentation of the computer science innovation and research centre on open source software
Patrick Moreau, Inria

3:15 p.m. From proprietary to Open Source: experience in development of directory products at Sun.
Ludovic Poitou, Sun Microsystems

Demonstrations

3:45 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.: Presentation and demonstrations of tools for developing open-source software and applications based on free components

Marcos Serrano - IIHM team - LIG
OpenInterface is an open-source framework developed by the OpenInterface European consortium, FP6-35182. The framework is downloadable at: www.oi-project.org
The OpenInterface framework is made of an underlying platform, namely OpenInterface platform, and the OpenInterface Interaction Development Environment (OIDE). The OIDE is a component-based system built on top of a run-time kernel, the OpenInterface platform. The platform is able to handle distributed heterogeneous components based on different technologies (Java, C++, Matlab, Python, .NET). The OIDE allows the designer to define a multimodal interaction by assembling components.
The demonstration will showcase a selection of components from the OIDE component repository, both developed "in-house" (e.g., cubtile-based gesture, accelerometer-based gesture, two-handed interaction) and also accessible via proxies to other component sets (e.g., Phidgets, ARToolkit). Our components include device drivers, interaction techniques, multimodal fusion facilities, development services and developer-defined combinations. The OI components and interaction techniques are downloadable at http://dolak.dcs.gla.ac.uk:8080/OIRepository/ (OI repository).
Loris Bouzonnet - PhD student at Université de Grenoble (SARDES project-team, Inria Grenoble Rhone Alpes Research Centre) & (JEM team, Bull S.A.S.)
Java EE cluster administration with JASMINe.
François Aubriot - DotRiver
Nicolas Guerin - Xerox Codendi
Ludovic Poitou - Sun

Plenary speeches

4:45 p.m. Use of open-source "forges" in an industrial context.
Nicolas Guerin, Xerox
Thierry Jacquin, Xerox

5:15 p.m. Feedback on collaborative development tools inspired by open source
Laurent Charles, STMicroelectronics

Closing of the seminar

5:45 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
By Philippe Broun

Text mining in biology

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:32:23 GMT

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The Bioinformatics PPF is organising a science day exploring text mining applications in biology. The programme will include data extraction in genomics, inference of genetic interactions and much more.

The day will be held in the amphitheatre in the IRI-IRCICA building, from 9.45am to 5pm.

Mikaela Keller, a member of the Inria Mostrare project team and of the University Lille 3, will present the automated vocabulary discovery for geo-parsing online epidemic intelligence.

Abstract

Automated vocabulary discovery for geo-parsing online epidemic intelligence

Automated surveillance of the Internet provides a timely and sensitive method for alerting on global emerging infectious disease threats. HealthMap is part of a new generation of online systems designed to monitor and visualize, on a real-time basis, disease outbreak alerts as reported by online news media and public health sources. HealthMap is of specific interest for national and international public health organizations and international travelers. A particular task that makes such a surveillance useful is the automated discovery of the geographic references contained in the retrieved outbreak alerts. This task is sometimes referred to as "geo-parsing". A typical approach to geo-parsing would demand an expensive training corpus of alerts manually tagged by a human. Given that human readers perform this kind of task by using both their lexical and contextual knowledge, we developed an approach which relies on a relatively small expert-built gazetteer, thus limiting the need of human input, but focuses on learning the context in which geographic references appear. We show in a set of experiments, that this approach exhibits a substantial capacity to discover geographic locations outside of its initial lexicon.

Participation is free but registration is required.

Découvrir le programme complet

Open Data and Cloud Computing Conference-debates

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:28:04 GMT

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On Wednesday 4 October, between 2.30pm and 4.30pm at EuraTechnologies, the Ubiquitous Computing Cluster, in collaboration with the Inria Lille - Nord Europe research centre, invites you to the conference-debate on Open Data and Cloud Computing. .

Open Data is a major trend in the 2010s. It involves making data collected and managed by public bodies available to citizens, journalists, researchers and companies.

Cloud Computing, meanwhile, seems for some time now to have become the new model for providing IT power. It refers to the use of memory and computing capacities of computers and servers around the world, linked by a network, such as the internet. This gives users of the cloud considerable and adaptable IT power.

The presentations will provide the latest picture of this movement in France and around the world and will cover the economic, legal and technological aspects of the trend.

The conference is free but registration is compulsory.

Focus on speakers

François Bancilhon spent part of his career as an academic researcher in France (Inria, University of Paris XI) and in the United States (MCC), then as an entrepreneur, in France and the United States. He was co-founder of O2 Technologies, Arioso, Xylème, Ucopia and Data Publica. He ran O2 Technologies, Arioso and Mandrakesoft/Mandriva.

He is currently executive director of ISM (Initiative Services Mobiles) and CEO of Data Publica.

Didier Renard set up Tasker two years ago, after 20 years with IBM, COMPAQ, PPR and Crédit Agricole. Convinced that cloud computing is vital to innovation and the agility necessary for any company that wants to develop at the dawn of this new millennium, Tasker’s mission is to be a broker in IT energy, a role which incorporates consultancy advice to IT directors and CEOs as regards transforming and industrializing IT systems.

Modelling and analysis of complex systems for communications, health and sustainable development

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:24:26 GMT

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The Indo-French Center for the Promotion of Advanced Research (IFCPAR) organized a seminar on “Innovative Technology in IT” on September 26-28, 2011 in Bangalore.

The Indo-French Center for the Promotion of Advanced Research (IFCPAR) is a bilateral instrument of cooperation in science and technology between India and France. It is supported by the Department of Science and Technology in India and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in France. The Indo-French Centre hosts a programme of collaborative research in thrust areas of science and technology between scientists in France and scientists in India. Since its creation in 1987, IFCPAR has established a strong foundation for bilateral cooperation in science and technology.

The Indo-French Centre is exploring the possibility of connecting the Bangalore IT Sector to the System@tic Cluster in Paris for development of collaborative projects between the two clusters

Inria is actively participating in the meeting. Michel Cosnard, Inria CEO, and Hélène Kirchner, head of the Department of International Relations will take this opportunity to present the institute to the ICT community in Bangalore.
Two Inria senior researchers will make scientific presentations: Frédéric Cazals (ABS Team) on “Geometric and Topological Modelling in Structural Biology and Biophysics”, and Hussein Yahia (Geostat team) on "Multiscale methods in the analysis of heartbeat data. Application to Atrial Fibrilation” and “Non-linear signal processing for Earth Observation. A case study for a physical approach to complex signals”.

Forum on Tactile and Gestural Interaction

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:50:53 GMT

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The goal of this event is to bring together researchers, professionals, artists and anyone else who is interested to reflect on tactile and gestural interaction and the relationships between art, science and technology (ArtLab).

These meetings follow on from the Forum on Tactile and Gestural Interaction held at EuraTechnologies in 2010. This year, they will be held in Tourcoing, at the Le Fresnoy national studio for contemporary arts and the premises of Plaine Images.

A selection of works of art combining artistic creativity with technological innovation will be exhibited in the Plaine Images studio. These works will tie in with FITG, echoing the demonstrations performed by laboratories and businesses on tactile and gestural interfaces.

Programme:

2 days of lectures by the best experts in the field;

an industrial showroom showcasing all the know-how of businesses in multitouch and gesture-detection environments;

an exhibition of specially designed original art;

the band Ez3kiel

For further information or to register, click here

This event is supported by the Nord - Pas de Calais region and the Lille Métropole Metropolitan District.

Efficient Probabilistic Approximations of Biopathways Dynamics

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:41:43 GMT

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Entrée libre.

Horaire : 10 h

Systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are often used to model bio-chemical networks. Such systems are very difficult to nalyze. To address this, we constructed a method for approximating the dynamics of an ODEs system as a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN).Subsequently, pathway properties can be analyzed through Bayesian inference techniques instead of resorting to ODE simulations. We shall explain the basic features of our technique, present a realistic case study and discuss an efficient GPUs based implementation of our method.

Control and Optimization of Low Reynolds number swimming

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:38:21 GMT

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Inria Paris - Rocquencourt, amphithéâtre Alan Turing, bâtiment 1.

A 15h, entrée libre.

This presentation considers a class of problems arising in the study of self-propelling of solids in a viscous fluid. The main application we have in mind consists in using control theoretical techniques to understand self-propelled motion of a solid (fishes, swimming robots, submarines, micro-organisms) in a viscous fluid. These problems, in which the solid is propelling by changing its shape, raise important theoretical and computational challenges. We focus on the low Reynolds number case, appearing in the study of locomotion of microscopic aquatic organisms (like spermatozoids) or of micro and nano swimming robots. Since the fluid is modeled by the elliptic Stokes system, in which the time appears only as a parameter in the coupling equations with the fluid, the coupled model is, in principle, quite simple: we have a system of nonlinear ODE’s on a finite dimensional manifold. However, an important difficulty has to be solved from the first stage of the problem, which consists in obtaining the wellposedness of the system. Indeed, in order to apply Cauchy-Lipschitz type theorems, it is essential to prove that the solution of the exterior Stokes problem depends smooth enough on the shape of the interface. The next question which is studied is the controllability of the system, which is investigated by combining perturbation results with the classical Chow’s theorem. We end up with time optimal control problems, which are studied from both theoretical and numerical view points.

Recovering Disjointness from Concurrent Sharing

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:33:58 GMT

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Free admission at 14h.

Recovering Disjointness from Concurrent Sharing

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:27:40 GMT

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Inria - Rocquencourt, amphithéâtre Alan Turing, bâtiment 1.

Entrée libre à 10 h 30

Disjointness is an extraordinarily useful property when reasoning about concurrent programs. Threads that access mutually disjoint resources can be reasoned about locally, ignoring interleavings. This is the core insight behind Concurrent Separation Logic. However, concurrent modules often share resources internally, frustrating disjoint reasoning. In this talk, I will suggest that sharing is often irrelevant to the clients of these modules, and should be hidden. I will show how separation logic can be used to hide
irrelevant sharing and recover disjoint reasoning. I will motivate this with the example of a concurrent index, and show how some high-level sharing can be maintained, while still reaping the benefits of disjointness.

Last rehearsal before the post-Moore era

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:27:27 GMT

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The rapid evolution in the silicium technology which has ruled the IT industry in recent decades, in accordance with Moore’s Law, is reaching its end.

The problem of scarcity is set to emerge within a decade or two from now. What changes will this mean to IT research? How can more computations be achieved on a fixed energy budget and a fixed transistor budget?

Marc Snir – Michael Faiman’s and Saburo Muroga’s professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and associate director of Extreme Scale Computing at the NCSA – will take you to the heart of his thinking.

This talk will address the premises of this change and outline the resulting research issues.

The talk starts at 2:00 pm and ends at 3:30 p.m.

Research Innovation Creativity Days

Wed, 7 Sep 2011 16:30:53 GMT

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Master’s students from the University of Lille1 will be finding out all about research on 11 and 12 October.

In the context of an introduction to "Research and Innovation", Master’s students from the University of Lille1 will discover the world of research over two special days.

The programme:

Discussions with researchers, research-lecturers, research engineers and industrial partners,
Demonstrations by partner laboratories and the Inria technology showroom,
Workshops and debates,
Screening of research films, etc.

This additional training is aimed at all students studying for a Master's in Computer Science or MIAGE Master’s, particularly students seeking to develop a state of mind in which creativity, curiosity, discipline, communication and teamwork are the principal qualities.

Workshop PAL 2011 : Workshop Health & Well-being

Tue, 6 Sep 2011 15:53:09 GMT

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Maintaining the dignity and autonomy of the elderly is at stake, therefore opening research perspectives of interest for Inria Project Teams (IPT). In order to promote this theme and to coordinate the involved activity researches amongst Inria institute, a Large Scale Initiative Action gathers nine projects team from Nancy, Grenoble, Sophia Antipolis and Rennes in one cross-entity named PAL (Personally Assisted Living)

On the 19th of September 2011 a workshop will take place at Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée, to present this LSI Action and the researches pursued. This meeting is aiming at sharing experiences and achievement with people outside from Inria but all the same involved and interested in this theme of Autonomy of the elderly and their maintaining at home.

This workshop will be part of the 8th Int. Conf. on Computer Vision Systems ICVS hold on 20 - 22 September 2011. see ICVS

9th International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology

Thu, 1 Sep 2011 10:31:47 GMT

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The 9th International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology (CMSB 2011) is organized by Inria at Institut Henri Poincaré, 11 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 75005 Paris, France, on September 21-23, 2011.
The HiBi workshop on High-Performance Computational Biology is merged in CMSB. The HiBi track is composed of the High Performance computing session plus a few papers in other sessions.

Mathematical modelling of adult GnRH neurons in the mouse brain

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:43:43 GMT

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Entrée libre, 14h30.

Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons are cells in the hypothalamus that produce GnRH, one of the major hormones that controls fertility and reproduction. However, despite their importance, little is known about the mechanisms by which GnRH is produced. GnRH neurons exhibit complicated membrane potential dynamics, in the form of electrical bursting, and this bursting is closely coupled to the dynamics of intracellular calcium (Ca2+) in ways that are not yet well understood.
A mathematical model has been constructed to help understand the mechanisms underlying the observed behaviours of GnRH neurons, and how electrical bursting synchronizes with transients in the cytosolic Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i). Simulations show that the model is consistent with all the crucial experimental data. Most importantly, the mathematical model predicted the existence of particular [Ca2+]i-activated potassium (K+) channel (sIAHP−UCL), which was then confirmed experimentally. In contrast to the apamin-sensitive [Ca2+]i-activated K+ channels (sIAHP−SK), which control both the structure of firing within bursts and the interburst intervals, sIAHP−UCL solely determines the interburst dynamics.

European Research Network on System Identification

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:01:37 GMT

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Modelling of dynamical systems is fundamental in almost all disciplines of science and engineering, ranging from life science to plant-wide process control. Engineering uses models for the design and analysis of complex technical systems. System identification concerns the construction, estimation and validation of mathematical models of dynamical physical or engineering phenomena from experimental data.

European Research Network System Identification (ERNSI) was launched in 1992 by the European Commission as a SCIENCE project.

Inria partner of Grenoble Innovation Fair 2011

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:21:36 GMT

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Inria, partner of Grenoble Innovation Fair, presents its latest technological innovations and platforms in the fields of healthcare, transportation, services and applications for mobile devices, high performance computing and augmented or virtual reality.

Discover Inria innovations on dedicated booths :

P-Locus : Analysis of structures and tissues in brain MRIs
Pedestrian Indoor Navigation using a smartphone
RecVis : Face detection and identification
HiKoB : Large scale wireless sensing

To boost technological advances in the domain of digital sciences, Inria develops with its partners experimentation platforms and expertise centres, open to industrial and academic collaborations.
On the Inria booth at GIF 2011 will be presented :

SensLab : a platform for testing large-scale sensor networks
Grimage : advanced infrastructure for research in augmented and virtual reality
Initiative Services Mobiles : expertise centre for development of applications and services on mobile devices
High Performance Computing : skill centre and ressources for simulation and High Performance Computing technologies

GIF11- GRENOBLE INNOVATION FAIR

On 20 and 21 October 2011 tomorrow’s leading companies will gather in Grenoble, France, to present more than 150 innovative technologies.

For its third edition Grenoble Innovation Fair is broadening its scope to cover more new or emerging innovations in Europe, welcoming 150 start-ups and laboratories in an exhibition space dedicated to networking with industry and technology demonstrations.
This international event, the only one of its kind in France, is being staged by three Grenoble organizations which have pooled their resources to bring together for two days new ventures with high-growth potential, research laboratories, industrial firms and innovative SMEs.

The fair is expecting more than 1,500 participants, eager to extend their innovation networks, identify opportunities for new partnerships and discover unsuspected sources of innovation.

Bicliques in Block Cipher Cryptanalysis: New Results on AES

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:54:18 GMT

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Séminaire organisé par l'équipe-projet CASCADE.

A 10h30, entrée libre.

Since Rijndael was chosen as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), improving upon 7-round attacks on the 128-bit key variant or upon 8-round attacks on the 256-bit key variant is considered to be one of the most difficult challenges in the cryptanalysis of block ciphers for more than a decade.

We present a novel technique of block cipher cryptanalysis using so-called bicliques. This allows us to obtain for the first time results on a higher number of rounds, yet the advantage over brute-force search may become small.
In contrast to most shortcut attacks settings on AES versions, we do not need any related-keys. Our approach is practically verified to a large extent, yet its full implementation needs prohibitively large computational resources and hence does not threaten the practical use of AES in any way.

This is joint work with Dmitry Khovratovich.

Rethinking IDEA

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:52:30 GMT

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Séminaire organisé par l'équipe-projet CASCADE.

A 10h30, entrée libre.

IDEA is a 64-bit block cipher with 128-bit keys introduced by Lai and Massey in 1991. IDEA is one of the most widely used block ciphers, due to its inclusion in several cryptographic packages, such as PGP. Since its introduction in 1991, IDEA has withstood extensive cryptanalytic efforts, but no attack was found on the full (8.5-round)
variant of the cipher.

In this talk, we will discuss the various attacks on IDEA: The early differential and linear attempts, impossible differential attacks, the Demirci-Selcuk-Ture attack, and some of the newer attacks which are based on the Biryukov-Demirci relation.

Finally, we shall introduce a new and simple attack on 6-round IDEA which uses 20 known plaintexts and has a time complexity of 2^112.
This attack is currently the best known attack on IDEA (in the single-key model).

GPU day: Grid5000 training

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:20:47 GMT

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In the context of Grid'5000, a GPU training day is planned on Tuesday 28 June 2011. The objective of the day is to present the Grid'5000 platform and to provide practical training concerning use of the GPUs.

A new GPU cluster has been integrated into the Lille Grid'5000 node since 5 April 2011. Users now have a new way to access computing resources within Grid'5000. The programme for the day includes a presentation of the platform, feedback and practical exercises.

All interested people are invited to participate in this day. View the programme

Registration is free but required

For logistics purposes and in order to accommodate you in the most favourable conditions, please confirm your participation to the-van.luong@Inria.fr by indicating:

Whether you will bring your laptop
Whether you already have a grid'5000 account

This project is the result of a partnership between the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, Lille 1 University, the CNRS and LIFL.

Modelling and verifying algorithms in Coq: an introduction

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:01:03 GMT

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This school is a 5 days course for engineers, and for students and researchers. Participants should be familiar with programming (e.g. in C or Java), but no knowledge of a proof assistant or of a functional language is required. Participants are invited to bring their own laptop to profit of the afternoon exercise sessions.

Objectives:

The Coq system provides a functional programming language and a reasoning framework based on higher order logic to perform proofs on the programs. The expressive power of the language is such that advanced notions of mathematics (such as the graph theory in the four color theorem) or programs of high complexity (such as a compiler for a significant kernel of the C Programming language) can be described formally. In this school, we address the basic programming techniques and approaches to prove properties of the programs. The covered notions involve structural recursive programming, list and integer handling, proof by induction, in the key definition of data-types, pattern matching constructs and case-based reasoning, and inductive properties.

Programme:

Classes will begin on Monday 7 June at 10:00 am, and will end on Friday 11 June at 4:00 pm.
Monday	Elements of typed functional programming: programming without side-ffects, pattern matching, anonymous functions, simple types, higher order functions, recursive functions.
Tuesday	Construction and proof of logical formulas, quantifiers and connectives, equality, predicates on numbers and lists. Goal-directed proofs.
Wednesday	Verification of simple logical formulas on programs. Proofs by induction. Data-types and associated reasoning principles.
Thursday	Inductive predicates and introduction to dependent types. Functions and pattern matching in presence of dependent types.
Friday	Case studies.

As the number of participants is limited, a pre-registration is mandatory. In the pre-registration you are encouraged to briefly explain why you should and wish to attend the summer school. Based on this, all applications will be reviewed with due regard to find a fair distribution of the 30 places among all qualified applicants. Applicants from industry are strongly encouraged to apply.

To pre-register, please fill in this form before September 15. All applicants will receive notice by September 20. Every person who is admitted to attend the summer school must then register before October 1.

Registration fees:

Inria members: free
Students: 100 euros
Academy: 300 euros
Full rate: 600 euros

These include attendance to the school and lunches for days 1-5.