On 29 March 2018, on the occasion of the AI for Humanity summit, the French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled France’s artificial intelligence strategy. He notably announced the setting up of an ”emblematic network of four or five dedicated institutes”.
The first such institute will be the PRAIRIE (PaRis Artificial Intelligence Research Institute), whose objective is to become an international reference in the field of artificial intelligence. Among founding members there are three academic institutions: Inria, CNRS and PSL University, together with Amazon, Criteo, Facebook, Faurecia, Google, Microsoft, NAVER LABS, Nokia Bell Labs, PSA Group, SUEZ and Valeo.
At an international level, PRAIRIE Institute will draw on a network of partnerships with centres of AI excellence worldwide to promote collaboration and leverage its impact. It is a major success that the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) at Czech Technical University in Prague will be one of the partners. Apart from CIIRC other institutions participating in collaboration include Center for Data Science at NYU, the Artificial intelligence laboratory of UC Berkeley (BAIR), the Robotics institute at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, MILA in Montréal, the Max Planck institute in Tübingen and the Turing Institute in London.
The CIIRC already collaborates with Inria, one of the founding members of PRAIRIE, on the IMPACT (Intelligent Machine Perception) project lead by Dr. Josef Šivic. The IMPACT project brings together researchers from both Inria and CIIRC to advance knowledge in computer vision, machine learning and robotics.
The partners in PRAIRIE Institute are pursuing three goals:
- to make a significant contribution to progress in fundamental knowledge in artificial intelligence (AI) freely distributed among the international scientific community;
- to participate in solving concrete problems with a major application-oriented impact;
- to contribute to education in the field of artificial intelligence.
The five-year objective is to bring together AI scientific and industrial leaders and make the PRAIRIE Institute a world leader in AI.
The Institute will be inaugurated in the spring of 2018.
Source: Inria