Inria's research is essentially partnership based. New collaborative projects were established and long-standing partnerships were confirmed in 2014.
Academic partnerships. In 2014, Inria signed a series of agreements involving its newest centres in Lille and Bordeaux to define the terms of its scientific collaboration with universities and
Grandes Ecoles: framework agreements with
Université Lille 2, Université de Bordeaux
and the Institut d’Optique Graduate School.
On an international scale. In 2014 Inria formalized its cooperation initiatives with MITACS, the Canadian network of centres of excellence, and the Institute for Information Industry (III) in
Taiwan (focusing on the Internet of Things). Inria also opted to continue its scientific
collaboration on smart cities with the
CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the
Interest of Society, University of California).
The University of Barcelona joined the Inria-University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
joint laboratory,
which is now called JLESC: Joint Laboratory on Extreme Scale Computing.
The fourth
Berkeley-Inria-Stanford workshop,
Inria@siliconvalley,
was held in Paris.
LIAMA, the Franco-Chinese laboratory based in Beijing, was also
honoured in Paris as part of festivities marking the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between France and China. Meanwhile, Inria co-hosted the
Franco-Japanese
seminar on Big Data in Tokyo.
Inria is participating in the
ITER international research programme which is preparing for
large-scale nuclear fusion experiments in a giant tokamak at Cadarache. Its goals are to meet the planet's energy needs and produce 500 MW while only consuming 50 in a few minutes.
As for industry relations, Inria renewed its partnership agreement with
Microsoft
for four years, giving new resources to the Inria-Microsoft Research Joint Research Centre. It also teamed up with
Alstom to
create a joint lab dedicated to digital technology for the energy and mobility sectors. To optimise the impact of its economic research, Inria stepped up its
Inria-Industry
Meetings programme, especially on the topics of "telecommunications of the future" and "bioinformatics and digital tools for health products".
Some of these research-business
relationships have taken the form of joint labs between Inria and SMEs: 2014 saw the creation of the
SMILK
(with Viseo) and
ProofInUse (with AdaCore) joint labs, and the Inria Innovation Lab
Haptihand.
Local governments. Inria once again received support in 2014 from the Region
of Brittany, which signed a partnership agreement to develop research, training and innovation capabilities. Inria is involved in the innovation initiative spearheaded by
French
Tech and was proud to see the cities of Bordeaux, Grenoble, Lille and Rennes receive the group's label.
Social issues. Inria worked with the CNIL on protecting privacy on mobile devices and delivered the second
Mobilitics
analytical report. Finally, it took part in the European consortium
Dariah which aims to put
the digital sciences to work for the humanities.
By working with the Cap Digital competitiveness cluster to organise "Decode the Code" Day, Inria sought to
make digital education a major issue. As it has each year for the last decade, Inria hosted the
Olympiades
de Mathématiques.
Inria unveiled the results of the second edition of the survey conducted with the polling institute TNS-Sofres on "French Citizens and Digital".
And, finally, the Inria centre in Rennes hosted
one of the digital
works exhibited at the Festival Bouillants #06.