Information societies technology

C7. Description of the participants

C7.1 ERCIM - European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics

Company profile - www.ercim.org
The European Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) is an EEIG. Through this unique structure, fifteen different research organisations in as many European countries are able to participate in joint projects, keeping the management simple and effective. The ECRIM members are (in alphabetical order) :

AARIT (Austria),CLRC (U.K), CRCIM (Czech Republic), CWI (The Netherlands), CNR (Italy), FORTH (Greece), GMD, (Germany), INRIA (France), NTNU (Norway), SARIT (Switzerland), SICS (Sweden), SRCIM (Slovakia), SZTAKI (Hungary), TCD (Ireland), VTT (Finland).

ERCIM has its central office located in France with expertise in all scientific matters having set up strong internal and external channels for solicitation and dissemination. ERCIM members are all research organisations, or national consortium of research organisations and universities, with strong activity in I.T. research.
Among other activities, the ERCIM Office is dedicated to the preparation, management and follow-up of the research contracts and projects arising form its fifteen member institutes. In addition to project co-ordination, the ERCIM Office has also a valuable competence in results dissemination as part of its assets rest with customised web design, set-up and assistance, and editorial board for the edition of the ERCIM News magazines, distributed over 8000 copies world-wide. This combined with the fifteen research institutes disseminated across Europe makes of ERCIM a key player in European I.T. research and a reliable foothold for the development of international cooperation.
Key persons
Jean-Eric Pin is a 48 years old director of research at CNRS, and Scientific Director of ERCIM EEIG. He currently heads a research team in the LIAFA (Laboratoire d'Informatique Algorithmique: Fondements et Applications) from University Paris 7. As a former director of the LIAFA, he is experienced in research management. He has also gathered knowledge in research transfer during the two years spent at the IT group Bull and with his activities as consultant for data compression for the French space agency CNES. He is well-versed in European programs such as ESPRIT and now IST. He first studied mathematics and then moved to computer science. In 1989, he received the IBM France Scientific Prize in Computer Science for his work in automata theory.
Bruno Le Dantec was born in 1963 in Rennes, France. He has a degree in law and finance. Since 1992 he is deputy manager of the EEIG-ERCIM. At the time, his main activities consist in:

- assistance/expertise for ERCIM partners for proposals to be submitted to the European Commission

- management of European contracts (IST, Esprit, Telematics, Inco-DC...)

- organisation of workshops in the IT domain

- administration of EEIG-ERCIM.
Peter Kunz was born in 1965 in Hornberg/Schw., Germany. He obtained a master of science degree (Dipl.-Ing. FH) at FHD Stuttgart in Germany. His skills are: design and production in the field of communication technologies, printed and electronic media. He gathered experience in a broadcasting company, in film and video production, and in the press. He is currently in charge of the printed and electronic publications of the EEIG-ERCIM.
Rémi Ronchaud was born in 1974 in Paris, France. He obtained his International Business MBA at Warwick University, England. He graduated in 1998 at E.S.S.E.C. (Ecole Superieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales)- Paris, France. He worked in 1999/2000 as a tariff analyst / Pricing - Revenue Management, at Air France in Paris, and in 1998/1999 he was the assistant to the Central Africa Manager for Air France in Libreville, Gabon. From 1997 to 1999 he was Financial Product Manager for IFF ( IBM France Financement) in La Defense, Paris, France.

Selected References

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  THETIS - A data management and data visualization system for supporting coastal zone management for the Mediterranean sea, Telematics programme.
  
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  DECAIR - Development of an Earth Observation Data Converter with Application to Air Quality Forecast, Environment and Climate programme.
  
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  ANFAS - Data Fusion for Flood Analysis and Decision Support, IST program.
  
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  TELEMAC - TELEMonitoring and Advanced teleControl of high yieldwastewater treatment plants
  

C7.2 INRIA – Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique

Company profile - www.inria.fr/

INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) is a French public-sector scientific and technological institute operating under the dual authority of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Industry. INRIA's missions are "to undertake basic and applied research, to design experimental systems, to ensure technology and knowledge transfer, to organize international scientific exchanges, to carry out scientific assessments, and to contribute to standardization". The research carried out at INRIA brings together experts from the fields of computer science and applied mathematics covering the following areas: Networks and Systems; Software Engineering and Symbolic Computing; Man-Machine Interaction; Image Processing, Data Management, Knowledge Systems; Simulation and Optimization of Complex Systems. INRIA gathers in its premises around 2 100 persons including 1 600 scientists, many of which belong to partner organizations (CNRS, industrial labs, universities) and are assigned to work in common "projects". On INRIA's budget, around 500 full-time equivalent R&D positions can be accounted for. A large number of INRIA senior researchers are involved in teaching and their PhD students (about 550) prepare their thesis within the different INRIA research projects (currently 74). Its budget is roughly 90 MEuro, 20% of which comes from research and development contracts, royalties and sales. Industrial relations are strategic for INRIA:
Industrial contracts and European Projects: Numerous industrial partners contract with the Institute for collaborative research. They are French or foreign companies, of all sizes. 400 such contracts are presently active. Roughly 40% of these contracts are European funded ones. Since 1984, 250 European Framework-Programme (FP) projects have been executed.
Technology companies: As the ultimate step in technology transfer, researchers are party to the setting up of companies in order to implement their technology on the market. Thirty seven spin-off companies have been

created since 1984. In 1999, INRIA has launched two subsidiaries to promote high-tech start-up companies: INRIA-TRANSFERT deals with early accompaniment of the future companies, whereas I-SOURCE GESTION provides for "seed-money".

INRIA is a member of ERCIM EEIG, European Research Consortium for Computer Science and Mathematics. Outside Europe, INRIA also has a significant activity: it has created joint research laboratories (Russia and China), signed cooperation agreements (NSF, India, Brazil, etc.) and promotes intensive scientific exchanges.

ORION team

ORION is located at Sophia Antipolis; it is a multi-disciplinary team at the frontier of computer vision, knowledge-based systems, and software engineering. The research domain of ORION is cognitive vision: i.e. the study of intelligent vision systems with knowledge representation, learning and reasoning capabilities. Two main research axes are developed: image interpretation and program supervision and reuse. This objective is pursued by developing knowledge expression languages, as well as learning mechanisms and reasoning mechanisms. ORION focuses on the study of knowledge and on objects and scenarii to recognize for automatic image interpretation, knowledge on programs and on their use for automatic program supervision. The main application domain of ORION is computer vision, with special skills on complex natural object recognition such as zooplanctons, galaxies, foraminiferas or pollen grains.
ORION has been and is still involved in numerous industrial and international partnerships: - Eureka PROMETHEUS (project for improving road safety, in close collaboration with ten laboratories) -Esprit3 R&D PASSWORDS project (for advanced video surveillance applications) continued by Esprit 4 HPCN AVS-PV project (for prevention of vandalism in metro infrastructures) and IST 1.2 - ADVISOR project (for automatic analysis and annotation of visualsurveillance video in metrostations) - PICASSO integration action with the University Jaume I (Castellon, Spain) on validation and verification of autonomous knowledge-based systems

ORION was involved the last three years in the CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT european project ASTHMA (for Advanced System of Teledetection for Healthcare Monitoring of Asthma) working on pollen grain recognition.

Key persons

Monique Thonnat, INRIA Director of Research, is graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Physique in 1980. She received her Ph.D. in optics and signal processing from the University of St Jérome, Marseille, France in 1982 having prepared her thesis at the Laboratoire d'Astronomie Spatiale of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseille, France in 1981 and 1982. In 1983, she joined the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA) as a research scientist in the PASTIS group directed by Marc Berthod. Since october 1992, Dr Thonnat is the head of the ORION team, a group specialized in artificial intelligence and cognitive vision. Her research interests include image understanding, image processing and artificial intelligence. Her more recent research activities involve the conception of new technics for the reuse of program (or program supervision) and on image understanding techniques for the interpretation of video sequences. Monique Thonnat has supervised 11 PhD theses and is author or co-author of more than 70 scientific papers published in international journals or conferences
Sabine Moisan has been a Research Scientist at INRIA Sophia Antipolis since 1983. She is now working in the Orion team, which she has created with Monique Thonnat. She graduated as a Computer Science Engineer from ENSEEIHT (Ecole Nationale Supérieure en Electronique, Electrotechnique, Informatique et Hydraulique de Toulouse). She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981, from the University of Toulouse (France). Her research interests cover Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering, and especially knowledge-based system design and reasoning mechanism study. She has been involved in the development of two knowledge-based system generators: SMECI, a commercialized generator dedicated to engineering design and OCAPI, a dedicated generator for program supervision . She is now responsible of the program supervision research inside

the Orion team and of the LAMA software platform, for developing both engines and knowledge bases for Knowledge-Based Systems. This platform is composed of several configurable tools for experts and of an object-oriented framework for engine designers.

Alain Boucher graduated in computer engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada, in 1994. He received his PhD in computer science in 1999 from the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France. His thesis on multi-agent system for cell image segmentation was prepared in the TIMC laboratory and supervised by C. Garbay with a 1967 scolarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). He currently works at INRIA in the Orion team researching on pollen grain recognition. His research interests include computer vision, artificial intelligence and biomedical and environmental applications.

Selected References

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  Shan YU, Pierre SAINT-MARC, Monique THONNAT and Marc BERTHOD. "Feasibility study of automatic identification of planktic foraminifera by computer vision" Journal of foramineferal research, Vol. 26, No.2, pp. 113-123. April 1996
  
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  Shan YU, Monique THONNAT and Marc BERTHOD. "Automatic classification of planktonic foraminifera by a knowledge based system" 10th Conference on Artificial Intelligence for applications (CAIA'94). San Antonio, Texas, USA. March 1994
  
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  Monique THONNAT, Veronique CLEMENT and Jean-Christophe OSSOLA. "Automatic galaxy description" Astrophysical Letters and Communication. Vol. 31 No. 1-6 (1995) pp. 65-72
  
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  Pierre BONTON, Alain BOUCHER, Monique THONNAT, Regis TOMCZAK, Pablo J HIDALGO, Jordina BELMONTE and Carmen GALAN "Colour image in 2D and 3D microscopy for the automation of pollen rate measurement" Proc 8th ECS and Image Analysis, September 4-7, 2001, Bordeaux, France, in Image Anal Stereol 2001; 20 (Suppl 1): 527-532
  
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  Alain BOUCHER, Pablo J HIDALGO, Monique THONNAT, Jordina BELMONTE and Carmen GALAN, Pierre BONTON, and Regis TOMCZAK "Development of a semi-automatic system for pollen recognition" Aerobiologia, International Journal of Aerobiology, Kluwer academic publishers, (to be published).