And also…

A team of scientists at Inria Saclay¹ led by Demian Wassermann, the Athena team² at Inria Sophia Antipolis and Stanford University³, led by Vinod Menon, Lang Chen and Daniel A. Abrams, have discovered that the so-called visual word form area (VWFA), a sub-region in an area of the brain associated with written language and perhaps also visuospatial attention, may be involved not only in the circuits of the brain responsible for reading and language but indeed those involved in attention. The research on this “VWFA duality”, which is published in Nature Communications, could shed more light on the possible physiological reasons behind disorders such as hyperactivity and dyslexia.

You might find it surprising for a 17-year-old to decide to spend two days on an intensive course in maths and IT during the school holidays. And yet, that is exactly what twenty female secondary school pupils chose to do, motivated by a shared passion for problem solving. Because, as everyone knows, what could be more fun than maths and IT? 

The new Paris-Saclay University has just been created by decree. It will enter into force on 1 January 2020. In the meantime, a maximum period of four months begins, during which a provisional administration will organize the elections of the board of directors and set up the governance institutions.

On October 25, Inria and the CEA launched the Fit Your Tech constest to detect and support future technology startups leaders. Open to scientific students and/or entrepreneurs, Fit Your Tech is a new access to research in digital Deeptech - data science, AI and IoT - as well as to the entrepreneurial support networks of the two Paris-Saclay institutions.

Paris Police Prefecture have undertaken ambitious reforms to their system for handling emergency calls made to 17, 18 or 112, both within the capital and its inner suburbs.

As part of this, they sought expert advice from Inria and the École Polytechnique for the project consolidation phase and subsequently to demonstrate the benefits.

Catuscia Palamidessi, head of the COMETE team at the Inria Saclay - Île-de-France research center, has been awarded an ERC (European Research Council ) Advanced Grant at the end of March for her "HYPATIA - Privacy and Utility Allied" project. Her goal: to optimize the security and usefulness of personal digital data.

When we hear the term“blockchain”, we automatically think of bitcoin or other virtual currencies, but the use of blockchains is not limited to these transactions. As a joint contribution to this promising innovation, Capgemini and École Polytechnique are to set up the chair“Blockchain & B2B Platforms”.The goal is to improve the IT technology on which these blockchains are based, to assess the corresponding economic transformations and to prepare future applications. Daniel Augot, Inria research director, will be one of the scheme’s coordinators, alongside the CNRS researcher Julien Prat.

For its 11th edition, the International School of Rewriting is set to return to France.

From 1st to 6th July 2019, Inria and MINES ParisTech will be giving students and researchers the chance to learn how to use the basic tools of this computational model and to discover its wide range of possible uses.

On Friday 5th April, the Inria Saclay - Île-de-France research centre welcomed the visit of Ms Florence Parly, Minister of the Armed Forces, as she unveiled the ministry's strategy in relation to artificial intelligence. Bruno Sportisse, CEO and managing director of Inria, Jean-Yves Berthou, director of the centre, and Bertrand Thirion, interim director of the Institut de Convergences DATAIA, introduced them to examples of the latest technology developed by partner members of the institute.

Emmanuel Baccelli and Alexandre Abadie, members of the Inria team Infine will be giving a demonstration of the RIOT operating system at SIDO (Salon de l’internet des objets) on 10th and 11th April 2019. This open source operating system designed for the internet of things (IoT), which boasts an ever-growing community of users, saw the launch of its first commercial applications last year.