And also…

Although the world has been shaken up by artificial intelligence and the exploitation of personal data, the place of individuals and the control of their data have become central issues in the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the law for a digital Republic. Célia Zolynski, Professor of Private Law at the University of Versailles - Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), and Nicolas Anciaux, Petrus team research director at Inria Saclay - Île-de-France, seized the opportunity offered by the DATAIA Institute to enable a collaboration of computer scientists and lawyers to analyse the Personal Cloud architectures available today, and establish the responsibilities of each of them with the central objective of protecting the individual.

Inria is pleased to announce the launch of the scikit-learn initiative, a partnership with companies using scikit-learn. Its objectives are to support the development of this reference software: sustaining its high quality and adding new functionalities. Scikit-learn is a library in Python, an high-level programming language. It is dedicated to statistical learning (machine learning) and can be used as middleware, especially for prediction tasks.

Julie Josse, professor of statistics at the École polytechnique and researcher at the French Centre for Applied Mathematics (CNAM), and Gaël Varoquaux, Parietal team researcher at the Inria Saclay - Île-de-France centre, have decided to combine their expertise in order to tackle, together, the problems of missing data and to propose new decision support methods. The MissingBigData project has been selected by the DATAIA Institute as part of its first call for research projects. How did this collaboration come about? What are the challenges of their interdisciplinary research? Julie and Gaël present MissingBigData .

Every year, the Inria Saclay - Île-de-France centre supports the Mathematical Olympiads by participating in the organisation of the award ceremonies for the Créteil and Versailles regional education authorities. This mathematics competition aims to encourage the emergence of a new scientific culture and stimulate initiative and a taste for mathematics and research among Year 12 students (all streams combined).

Within the framework of the Human Brain Project [1], researchers from the Parietal team are actively taking part in the multidisciplinary collaborative project [2] entitled Individual Brain Charting, which consists in creating a precise macroscopic map of the cognitive functions of the human brain. The ultimate aim of the acquisition of functional MRI data during the performance of behavioural tasks is to develop a veritable functional brain atlas. On 12 June, the international scientific journal Scientific Data , by the Nature group, published an article on this major project.

As part of its 2018 call for projects, the DATAIA Convergence Institute has selected GDP-ERE and MissingBigData, two projects led respectively by the Petrus and Parietal teams from the Inria Saclay - Île-de-France centre, in collaboration with the university of Versailles Saint-Quentin in the Yvelines department and the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). The Vadore project, led by the members of the Inria team TAU for the CNRS and the graduate school ENSAE, has also been chosen, whilst the Aviz team's HistorIA project with Télécom ParisTech is on the point of selection subject to funding.

This year, the fiftieth edition of the Statistics Days is being held from Monday 28 May to Friday 1 June.The EDF Lab Paris-Saclay will host nearly 450 French and international scientists, present 16 lectures and 63 parallel sessions (including 18 special sessions), clocking up nearly 100 hours of statistics in five days!This year's edition, under the scientific leadership of Francis Bach, researcher in the Sierra team at Inria's Paris centre, is organised by Christian Derquenne, senior researcher at EDF R&D, and Pascal Massart, professor at the Université Paris-Sud.They tell us more about this event, dedicated entirely to statistics.

Michèle Sebag, co-leader of the TAU research project, was recently elected as a member of the French Academy of Technology, a French academic association founded on 12 December 2000, whose aim is to ‘enlighten society on the best use of its technologies’, and where she participates in a commission on the ethics of computer science. An expert since the 1990s on issues regarding artificial intelligence, the magazine L’Usine Nouvelle also recently named her one of the “pioneers” of artificial intelligence: those “specialists in machine learning and data [who are] advancing the performance of algorithms and launching them to conquer new territories” . We meet the researcher who has been dedicated to AI for nearly 30 years…

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.

A multidisciplinary team, with Tahar Amari and Aurelien Canou from the Centre de physique théorique (CNRS / École polytechnique), in collaboration with Jean-Jacques Aly from the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique, interprétation - modélisation (CNRS/CEA/ Paris Diderot), François Delyon from the Laboratoire de physique théorique de la matière condensée (CNRS/Sorbonne Université) and Frédéric Alauzet from the Centre de recherche Inria Saclay - Île-de-France, has just made a major scientific discovery: a single phenomenon could control all solar flares.

This Thursday, February 8, the scientific journal Nature devoted its front page to this scientific discovery.