And also…

On 19 December 2017, Inria and Fujitsu signed a partnership agreement for a joint research programme on artificial intelligence and big data. Frédéric Chazal, the DataShape Project Team Leader at the Inria Saclay Île-de-France research centre, has committed to a 30-month collaboration as part of the programme.

As part of La Science se Livre, an event aimed at promoting scientific culture, the Hauts-de-Seine department has given an award to two Inria researchers, Gilles Dowek and Serge Abiteboul, from the Deducteam (Saclay - Île-de-France Centre) and Valda (Paris centre) teams respectively, for their book entitled Le Temps des algorithmes .

Among the 18 new people elected to the French Académie des sciences are Éric Moulines, professor at École polytechnique and member of the XPOP project team, and Benoît Perthame, professor at UPMC (Pierre and Marie Curie University) and member of the MAMBA project team.

Designated a Convergence Institute within the framework of the Investments for the Future 3 programme (PIA), the DATAIA Institute brings together - on the Saclay plateau in the Paris area - multidisciplinary research skills in the data sciences and artificial intelligence to serve the human and social sciences.

Researchers from the Institut Pasteur and Inria, in collaboration with the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), Paris Diderot University and the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria, have published two articles in Nature Communications on the control by computer of cell processes; scientific advances made possible by the alliance between two disciplines that are today complementary - biology and the computer science.

The work "Computer Arithmetic and Formal Proofs - Verifying Floating-point Algorithms with the Coq System", co-written by Sylvie Boldo and Guillaume Melquiond (Toccata team - Inria) has just been published by Editions Iste .

This year, the European Commissionand the BDVA (Big Data Value Association) are joining forces in order to organise the "European Big Data Value Forum" (EBDVF) which will take place at the Palais des Congrès in Versailles from 21 to 23 November 2017. Inria is a partner and co-organiser of this European event dedicated to Big Data. This first edition will bring together industry professionals, researchers and political decision-makers to discuss the challenges and opportunities of the European data economy and innovation through data in Europe.

Meeting with Nozha Boujemaa, research director and director of the Institut DATAIA (Data Sciences, Intelligence and Society Institute), to find out more about this event and the challenges and issues of Big Data and artificial intelligence technologies in France and in Europe.

Meeting with Wendy Mackay, head of the Ex-Situ project team. This specialist in HCI presents her new project team to us, the evolution of its lines of research and the ambitious subjects it is working on today.

Winner of a 2015 ERC Starting Grant, for his projectSignal processing and Learning Applied to Brain data(SLAB), Alexandre Gramfort has been a member of the Parietal project team - a joint team with CEA-Saclay - since 1st April 2017. His project aims to provide a more accurate interpretation of the electrophysical signals of healthy or sick brains, in order to better understand how they function. A meeting with this young researcher, lecturer and graduate of the French engineering school Télécom ParisTech.

Cédric Villani has been tasked by the Prime Minister with examining France's strategy on artificial intelligence (AI) within Europe. He will submit his recommendations to the government in 2018. To bring this project to a successful conclusion, he is working with by Marc Schoenauer, research director and head of the TAU team at the Inria Saclay – Île-de-France research centre and one of the few French mathematicians recognised in this field. He is also president of AFIA, the French artificial intelligence association.